This Week in Tech 523

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech! Wow. I don't know what happened here. We have a great panel. Christina Warren, Dylan Tweney, Jason Snell, and all of a sudden John C. Dvorak shows up and it turns out all he wants to talk about is the new Google alphabet. That's not all we'll talk about. We got Tinder, we've got all sorts of stuff. You stay here. This Week in Tech a long one, is next.

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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 523, recorded Sunday, August 16, 2015.

Screwball Ventures

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It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news with some of the best journalists in the business, and they're all here this week and I'm happy about it! Dylan Tweney is here from Venture Beat, founder of Tweney media.

Dylan Tweney: Thank you, yes that is true.

Leo: What is Tweney Media?

Dylan: Right now, it's just a fancy name for me.

Leo: Meet Leo Media and Jason Media and Christina Media.

Dylan: Exactly.

Leo: You haven't left your day job?

Dylan: No. I haven't left my day job. I'm still a columnist at Venture Beat and I'm still doing an occasional podcast for Venture Beat, but otherwise I'm out on my own.

Leo: Exciting. Congratulations! That's fantastic. This is the age of the freelancer. There's no better time. Jason Snell is here.

Jason Snell: I'm being haunted by my past.

Leo: Jason has also gone the freelancing route. It's odd, because it looks like it couldn't be. John C. Dvorak is standing behind you right now.

Jason: I've had nightmares like this.

Leo: Could you come back next week? That's when we thought you would be here. Give me my lens. Come on and have a seat. We didn't expect you. Actually we were worried. We thought you thought you were supposed to be here this week.

John C. Dvorak: I did.

Leo: You can be here this week and next week if you want. You can be here as many weeks as you want. How do you feel about sitting over here?

John: I don't like it.

Jason: Everything you say might be right from over there.

Leo: We were talking about next week. We had arranged a show for you with your favorite people. White old men.

John: Do you want this? You're the white old man.

Leo: I didn't expect you this week. Welcome. It's hot. Is it hot out there?

John: No.

Leo: John C. Dvorak from No Agenda Show.

John: Is there a computer somewhere?

Leo: Yeah, we'll get you a computer. Finally, last but certainly not least, from Mashable, Christina Warren is also here. Unfortunately...

Christina Warren: Hello!

Leo: You've been slid out under the edge. Have some pineapple tarts if you like. I brought them just for you.

John: No you didn't. You didn't expect me to be here apparently.

Leo: But how is it that I have pineapple tarts?

John: I don't like pineapple tarts, so they wouldn't be for me. Do you want to try one?

Leo: Wow. It's great. Nice to see you.

John: Good to be here on the wrong day.

Leo: We have a vast studio. It's larger than usual because it's air conditioned inside. They're thrilled. There was an audible gasp when he walked in the room. Those are unusual. Let's get the show underway, then we can all enjoy pineapple tarts. Where is this from? This must be some sort of...

John: Benghazi. It says something else.

Leo: Let's talk about the big story of the week. There's several. I think the big story of the week; we're going to get John an Apple computer and a San Pellegrino water...

John: This is a better seat. I've been screwed this whole time.

Leo: That's the stealth seat normally. I think it's like big bear, baby bear, mama bear, and papa bear.

John: I did say on Twitter that I was going to be on today. Nobody called and said you got the wrong week. You guys monitor this stuff.

Leo: Well, I'm sorry. I apologize. People are thrilled right now.

John: I will say this. The traffic is outrageously crappy.

Leo: It has been a lot lately. Summertime, I think they call it.

John: They're all flocking to San Rafelle.

Leo: This is good. I don't know where they come from. They're buttery. There's no pineapple in them.

Jason: I already tried one. They're vaguely pineapple-y.

Leo: Let me introduce you. Dylan Tweney, have you met?

John: I think I've met Dylan like 4 years ago, something like that.

Leo: Were you at PC magazine, Dylan?

Dylan: I was at PC Mag in 2006, 2007.

Leo: That's probably where you crossed paths.

Dylan: He was also a columnist for PC computing.

Leo: Oh my god, yes. You were in the back of the book in the PC computing days.

Jason: And Mac User. When I started Mac User, John was in the back of our book.

Leo: They called him the anti-editor.

John: The idea was to pay me to be mean.

Leo: Best job he's ever had.

Dylan: You wrote one of my favorite columns ever while you were at PC computing. I remember this distinctly because I remember it being on the wall as it was laid out. You were saying this Internet thing is never going anywhere.

Leo: Poor John.

Dylan: I think you were talking about Internet e-mail.

John: I was using e-mail. I never would have said. The thing in PC computing, I may have said that cable modems at the time were going nowhere. The problem that I have is I've said stuff that's 40 years old...

Leo: A long time ago you said the mouse was never going to go anywhere.

John: I never said that. That's a lie.

Leo: OK. I'm not accusing you. It's the thing that gets brought up a lot.

John: It's because some joker added a bunch of fandangles to the quote and that got passed around. What I actually said wasn't a positive thing, but what I said was that there's no evidence to show people want these things. Then somebody added and I wouldn't buy any newfangled device and everybody passed that around as though I had said it because it was so funny and in fact I never had said it.

Jason: I think you read about technology for 30 years. There's no way that you won't have something people can point to and say that was really wrong.

John: I did a column for PC computer that was my favorite on why the caps lock key should be eliminated.

Leo: We had planned... I agree with you on that. That's the first thing I do on any new computer is disable caps lock.

John: How can you write a whole column about one crummy idea? It didn't do any good.

Leo: Look at this. Phillip Elmer Dewitt at Fortune Magazine is writing in January 2009 and he says how critics reviewed the Mac when it came out in 1984 and he said he has your comment. Originally in the comment he had all this extra crap...

John: I called him up about this, by the way. I sent him e-mail. I said this is bull crap, I never said this. He did this.

Leo: It's not clear at this point whoever wrote them. He apologized for the error. Retractions never get as much attention...

John: That newfangled quote... if you see the word newfangled in the quote, I never said that. It's a word I don't think I've ever written.

Leo: I could see you writing newfangled.

John: Yes. I think it's a stupid word.

Leo: What does Fangled mean?

John: I don't know, but newfangled is obviously a new version.

Dylan: Way better than old fangled.

Leo: I want to know where that phrase comes from. Let me Google fangled.

John: They would associate it with me as some sort of insult.

Leo: Actually there is a word newfangled. Fangled means foppish based on a misinterpretation of newfangled as fashionable. If we go back to the Mutiny of the Elsinore, written by Jack London, your friend, Mr. Pike refused to "monkey" with the "fangled forceps" in the medicine chest. I don't think it's clear what fangled means in that context.

John: No.

Leo: Could be damaged, could be bent. Could be foppish.

John: Hard to use.

Leo: Could be a lot of things. We've got John set up, or maybe we don't.

John: No, I just wondered why we defaulted to Deviant Art. Actually Deviant Art isn't porno, it's just wild art.

Christina: There's some porno. It's usually anime or manga style. Let's make no mistake. There's definitely porno on Deviant Art.

Leo: I don't know where we got into this conversation from. The big story of the week, ladies and gentlemen, and we've discussed it on earlier shows because it happened on Monday. We need to talk about it a little bit, is this strange new plan from Google to rebrand itself as Alphabet.

John: This is why you brought me on.

Leo: I was on the air doing IOS today and my first reaction was there may be some financial reasons. Some deep, CFO mojo going on here, but otherwise, I don't see an advantage. If there's not a tax advantage, why not just do a re-org. Isn't this a re-org under a different name. John C. Dvorak, what do you think?

John: I think you should leave me till last.

Leo: What do you think, Christina?

Christina: I think that there are a number of reasons to do it. When it first was announced I assumed it was a joke and the more I thought about it the more I thought this makes sense. It's a very Sergei thing to do down to not checking to see if anyone else had a trademark for the name. I think that Google obviously started out as search and its become an advertising company and most of their Internet services are in that regard. Is they get into other areas, especially research areas, it makes sense from a public facing perspective to say we want these types of businesses to live side-by-side but not necessarily completely connected. We can have our research division and Google X and our healthcare stuff. We can have our ISP business. All that living separately from our core services. Google search and all that stuff. It makes sense when you look at the fact that as Google is trying to make these bigger and bigger moon shots, they're trying to do more things and simply being under the Google umbrella limits them a little bit because people assume what's the benefit for Google on this. How is this going to impact mobile or search or advertising? Maybe they want to do things that are in other areas that aren't necessarily aided by the core competencies, that go to other areas like self-driving cars, some of the medical research they're doing. It helps in that regard from a public perception issue, they can have one big company that's solving a bunch of different problems and my cynical take when I first heard the news was that there has to be some sort of regulatory reason for why they want to do this. I don't think it necessarily gets them out of any hot water with the EU or any other countries that are filing privacy lawsuits or trying to get them to do different things, but I do think that it makes it a lot easier to say if you have an ISP like Google Fiber is, and you also have this mobile business and the fact that they capture so much of your browsing data and other information about your advertising there is a little bit of a uncomfortability around the fact that all those things are under the same company if they're technically two separate companies that just have a data sharing agreement, or maybe don't have a data sharing agreement. It might be easier for regulators to say you can have an ISP and a search engine and a mail service and a video service and run the biggest ad network in the world, but because these things aren't necessarily living under the same corporate name they have to have their own data sharing agreements within one another. It's going to be easier to handle from a regulatory perspective.

Leo: Dylan, do you agree?

Dylan: Not really. At the end of the day, it's the same bag of stuff; it just has a different name. I think that it's not going to ultimately change the way that the EU looks at things.

Leo: this does not fool them.

Dylan: The people it matters most to are Larry and Sergei and Sundar and Tony. It's most important for them because it sets up a succession pattern and gives them a little bit more clarity internally in how they operate with each other, but it's the same stock, it's the same assets. Nothing fundamental has changed in this.

Leo: Could you have done this to re-org. You don't need to spin off a new company.

Jason: I think it's a good idea. I worked at IDG for many years that was founded by a guy who ended up being a billionaire, Pat McGovern, and the way that he ran that business was it was a holding company with a whole bunch of independent companies inside it. Depending on how much Larry and Sergei want to be involved, this could be a good move in the sense that it gives everybody clarity in that you say, Sundar this is what your goal is, you're in charge of that, we'll talk to you, we're basically your board of directors, but we will talk to you and you make these decisions under our observation, and Tony Fidel, you do that with NEST. If they manage it so that Tony Fidel will make decisions that are not feeding just into what Google wants, I think that's good. That all comes down to how Larry and Sergei want to manage or micro-manage. If the goal here is to separate the part of Google that makes a lot of money, it is this machine that generates money based on advertising on the web and YouTube advertising and stuff like that and separate that from the investment parts of what Larry and Sergei do, then I think that's good from a Clarity standpoint. Google isn't making self-driving cars, that's Larry and Sergei. When they started the company, everything they did was Google, now what they're saying is we do lots of stuff, it doesn't all need to be under the Google brand name. I think that's good, and I think Dylan is exactly right. It's good for somebody like Tony Fidel to be able to put distance between himself and Google and say look, when you're working with NES, yes we're owned by Larry and Sergei, but we're not moving in lock step with what Google is doing.

Leo: Larry's letter explaining this says "we're going to hold the purse strings." We're going to fund all this stuff, but we're going to let these companies run this autonomously. It strikes me that there's actually some negatives, not some benefits. I don't see any benefits.

John: Let me tell you---

Leo: Hold on. I'm not giving you a change.

John: You got something to say?

Leo: Yes. But I don't want to know what you think until I say it, and then I want to know what you think. I don't want anybody to say John saved you or you changed your mind because of John.

John: Does anybody know that I do that?

Leo: You do. And I know it, and I'm grateful. I think there are some potential negatives because they are now going to be reporting returns from some of these companies that will never show returns like Calico the longetivity company. That's always been hidden in the Google results. I think there's some significant negatives to this. I think what really is happening is this is a lot of hand waving over Larry Page stepping down. Imagine a different announcement. Larry Page has decided to step down as CEO of Google, become chairman of the board, we're going to have a new CEO, Sundar Pichai... what would the stock market's reaction have been to that?

Jason: Larry thought about that. Sundar is only interested in this part, and I'm only interested in this other thing. I think that's what it is.

Leo: For ages, nobody cares. It's Sergei's hobby. That's what I think is happening. Larry Page is saying I don't want to have meetings about search any more. I would like to enjoy my life. I'm a multi multi billionaire. Keep sending me money, and I'm going to take time off and let Sundar be CEO. He realized... the story has been in the works for some time. I think Larry said I'm going to step down, I don't want the stock market to punish us. Here's what we’re going to do. In fact, the stock market loves this, by the way, because they'll get more information. They loved it. It's actually really remarkable hand waving to distract from what would have been a negative, which is Larry Page not running Google any more.

Jason: I think it reflects a reality though. This is sort of the truth of it. There's this core Google business that makes huge amounts of money and on the side they've been investing in a lot of stuff, buying up other companies and creating this crazy idea companies to do the longevity research and the self-driving cars.

Leo: Absolutely being more honest about what they're doing. But that's not necessarily something you want to do in a business where you have a lot of money losers. For all we know Nest uses money like crazy. This could be a real negative. By the way, I think Sundar Pichai is a great choice. He'll be a great CEO. The market would be wrong to punish Google stock for Larry stepping down and Sundar taking over, because I think Larry is boring.

John: Larry isn't that boring.

Leo: Now John C. Dvorak will explain it all.

John: The two guys are pre-occupied with Warren Buffet to the point that they're obsessed.

Leo: This is like Berkshire Hathaway, but it isn't is it?

John: It's exactly like Berkshire Hathaway and the reason is it's very simple. They know, exactly what you said, that all these little companies like Nest... and if you go back to what Silicon Valley is all about, Core competencies, those two guys don't know how to run a thermostat company just that simple. The Berkshire Hathaway model, which is exactly what this is going to become, every one of these companies is separate, they're going to have their own CEOs, they said that. They're going to report separately. One of the kickers to this whole thing is when somebody sent me a note about this; this is going to ruin all the little companies that they're starting because we could freely exchange executives, which is what they could do now. If you go with having divisions. Let's have a division, let's have a NEST division, have some department guy run the thing and they have some problems, they have some economic issues, and they say let's get Bill, he's the superstar, bring him in for a couple of weeks and he'll straighten things out, they can't do that any more. Now these companies stand-alone and the big fear of Google is the reflection in the wall. They know it can happen to them, and they don't want to become Yahoo. That's the way Yahoo was run. They run these companies, they run them as divisions, they go broke, broke one after the other. Google has looked in the mirror and said we're not going to become Yahoo. We love the Warren Buffet model; we're going to become Berkshire Hathaway. That's the way the market took a big jump. That's what's going on. It's a Berkshire Hathaway model right to the core. At some point, they're going to spin off Android and Chrome and Google will be separate. They're going to be Google, Android, Chrome, all its own companies. You can also sell them or keep them or do what Warren does, which is keep them for long term.

Leo: Michael Kuzimono says that comparison to Berkshire Hathaway is silly, John. He says Berkshire Hathaway under Warren Buffet invests in existing undervalued companies precisely the opposite of Alphabet's VC style focus on risky new ventures. It isn't a Berkshire Hathaway in the way it's run.

John: So Nest is a company that Google started? I don't think so.

Leo: Many of these are.

John: That's ending. It's all going for Berkshire Hathaway. This guy is an east coaster.

Leo: He's MIT. What does he know?

Dylan: I don't know if I buy the Berkshire Hathaway argument. Yes, it's a conglomerate in the way that Berkshire Hathaway is..

John: You bought that much.

Dylan: Maybe Wall Street likes it because Berkshire Hathaway has done really well. But we had tons of conglomerates in the 60s and 70s and it turns out that's not in most cases.

John: I would stop you there because most of the conglomerates, especially in the late 60s, and they use this term which is Synergy. You buy a company and merge with them.

Leo: But the history has not been kind to those.

John: That's right. They saw the writing on the wall. Synergy doesn't work. You can't just buy these companies and bring them in and make them divisions because it never works. That old model is not the Berkshire Hathaway model. He says these companies are stand-alone. There's no synergy, there's no executives switching spots. It's all stand-alone companies. It's more of a trust--the old fashioned trust of the 30s and 40s than it is of the Synergies from the 60s and 70s. You've got the wrong era.

Leo: Another guy says this is actually an interesting play because some of these really speculative companies like the self-driving car companies have crossed the risk point. They've gone through the investment mode, the risk mode, and they're now poised to become another Google. He says there are already 2 or 3 possible Google portfolios on the table. That would actually be to your point. This is a great way to organize a structure like this.

John: When they talk about transparency, that's what they talk about. You can't be fooling around with all these companies under the same umbrella and switching roles. Now the company sinks or swims. NEST makes money or it doesn't, you can shutter them, you can sell them off to somebody else, you can do whatever you want. That's what the transparency thing was all about when they talk about it.

Jason: That's what I like about this. When they started this they were just guys making a search engine, right? And this is the moment where they realize that we have so much money and we own so many different things and they're not connected. In the long run should this just be one company that is all mashed together? This is them saying no. We need to align this and split these businesses off and let them be their own things. It's a really grown up approach to it. This is the rest of life for Larry and Sergei and their investments is to not have them be one company. I think that makes sense.

John: The one drawback I see in the whole thing is that Warren Buffet is a great investor. He did learn the hard way over the years in his early days. He didn't do that well. He's a value investor. That doesn't mean that's the only model you can have. I don't know whether these guys... maybe as a team. The two of them worked so well over the years. Maybe as a team they can be a virtual Warren Buffet. That remains to be seen.

Leo: They've shown the ability to hire great people and great minds. But what's also been happening lately is those great minds have been moving on. They've been leaving. This may have something to do with keeping people...

John: That guy was going to go, and now he's a CEO. Now you have all these little companies and you can put CEOs in these spots.

Leo: Stops the brain drain. We're not a business show, and fortunately we have some smart business analysts. What does this mean though for the consumer.

Christina: Nothing.

Leo: They say Alphabet is never going to be a consumer brand, you're never going to hear about Alphabet.

Jason: What it might mean for the consumer is some of the companies that are run by Google, like I said aren't necessarily going to have to do what Google wants. Is NEST going to make a decision that integrates with Apple's home marketing stuff or something that if they were under the thumb of Google they wouldn't do, but as an independent entity they're like sure, whatever is right for your business. We could see stuff like that. That's two levels away.

Leo: The thing that bothers me is that it feels like they cherry picked. They did not spin off Android, they did not spin off YouTube...

John: That's because that CEO character that you like...

Leo: Sundar Pichai.

John: He was the head of Android. I think that's to come.

Christina: But YouTube is the weird one, because YouTube already has its own CEO which is within Google. Susan Wojicicki is the CEO of YouTube. If anything could stand on its own... Android and Chrome are the same in that they've been with Google services, but YouTube could absolutely be its own business and might benefit from being its own business.

Leo: Google would benefit. Part of the investigation comes from Google favoring its own properties.

John: You don't think that's going to change, do you?

Leo: That's the point. If YouTube could be spun off, that takes some of the heat off of that.

Christina: Regardless, it's weird to have a CEO under a CEO under a CEO.

Leo: That's how it's been, hasn't it?

Jason: My feeling is this is about advertising, that they are not as high about the future of text link ads on the web, and they are high on YouTube as the advertising platform and they want to stick their ad business together.

Christina: YouTube's ad business has been Google's ad business since the beginning. You get on the phone with ad people on YouTube and you're talking to Google. I'm just saying it's weird that there's been this other layer of reporting where I think she reports directly to Larry rather than to Sundar, but she's technically within another organization that has its own CEO within this greater parent organization. That's just weird to me that they're saying most of these companies will be split off as different entities and have their own structure, but it doesn't negate the fact that you can still technically have a company within these other companies that also has its own CEO. It's weird.

John: I'm sure that will be resolved.

Leo: John's article in PCmag.com. I intentionally didn't read it so that I...

John: You never read my columns.

Leo: I could write your columns because I know the words you use like Screwball ventures. That's a John phrase.

John: Did I say Screwball ventures? I would say something like that. That's how I know I wouldn't say "Newfangled."

Leo: This is great. That's just the beginning. There's lots more to talk about. Samsung has some new devices. We have a great panel, a big panel, but I'm thrilled to have you all including Christina Warren from Mashable. Nice to have you here. John C. Dvorak from the No Agenda Show. Is that how I should identify you?

John: You might as well.

Leo: Might as well. That's your thing. By the way, congratulations to Adam, podcaster hall of fame. He very kindly mentioned me. He didn't say that numnuts Laporte.

John: No he didn't. I talked him out of it.

Leo: Thank him for me and congratulate him for me. Jason Snell also here from sixcolors.com.

Jason: We won one of those awards.

Leo: Rightly show. I have a big heavy statue too, it's nice. Dylan Tweney who was here from Fast Company and Tweney media. Right?

Dylan: Venture Beat.

Leo: Forget that other guy. I'm confused. Our show to you today brought to you by My doorbell. Not confused by that, I love it. Any time anybody comes to my front door my phone rings now, which is awesome. I have the ring video doorbell. When somebody rings my bell at home no matter where I am, even when I'm here at work, I can see it, and I can even respond to them. I installed this myself and I'm not the most handy of people, but I just love that I was able to take off our old doorbell. We have a wire doorbell. There were two wires coming out of the frame there and I was able to wire that up. The ring doorbell comes with all the wiring you need so it makes it very easy, including the drill bits, the screws, even a level. But if you don't have wiring for a doorbell you can use it too, because it has a battery that will last for a year built into it. What you get with the Ring video doorbell is a great wide-angle camera that talks to your Smartphone, Android, or IOS, and rings it when the doorbell rings, whether you're at home or on the road, anywhere on the Internet. You can respond, you can talk, there's a speaker there. You can hear what they're saying. It's a great way to keep an eye on what's going on. Looks like somebody from Anonymous is visiting the house today. That's a little scary. This is on my... what the heck is going on there? These videos are stored on servers and I can go back and look. One of the nice features of this is for home security. Turns out 95% of burglaries occur during the day, and the burglar always rings your doorbell first to see if you're home. I have a clear picture of a creepy guy with a sword who is about to enter my house. He rode up on a Segway. That's just Michael and his friend. That's the fun of it. You have a motion detector as well so it's not when somebody rings the doorbell. When somebody goes by my door I can see it and I've got these recordings online. I love it. ring.com/twit. It's normally 200 dollars, you get ten bucks off if you use our TWiT offer code right now. Ring.com/twit. Easy to install, as I said I'm not a handy man, but I was able to do it very quickly. Time Magazine named it one of their top ten gadgets of 2014. I tried them all. This one is the best; it has night vision so it works at night. It has motion detection, so even if somebody doesn't ring the doorbell, you'll see them. It allows you to talk and listen to somebody at your door, whether you're at home or out of the house through the Internet. Nice HD camera too, so you can really see what's going on. I love it. It's very convenient. ring.com/twit, give it a try today. There are a number of these products, I've tried them all. This is easily the best one out there.

Jason Howell: We bought the Chime. I received that in the mail five days ago. That's the other part of the doorbell, so if you want a doorbell.

Leo: So we had a chime.

Jason: Yeah. I got the Doorbell, so it would just ring on my phone, now we have the Chime plugged in the living room. That's connected to wifi as well. It's cool.

Leo: We had a chime. The problem was I never heard the chime. People ring the doorbell and I couldn't hear it. So now it's a holy ruckus when somebody rings the doorbell. I will never miss a delivery again. ring.com/twit. So they have a ring chime?

Jason: It's called ring chime and you plug it into a power outlet and it connects to your wifi.

Leo: This is phone crazy this month. Lots of new phones, OnePlus One a couple weeks ago announced the One Plus Two, the successor to the OnePlus One. This week they announced it was going to be delayed because the type c connector is wonky, which is a little disappointing. I don't know if that's Type C in general or their implementation.

Christina: At least some of them are working.

Leo: How do you like them? Have you played with it?

Christina: Yeah. I've played with it. It's nice. It feels good in the hand. It has this metalish side, this very interesting textured back, it's a high end phone made by a Chinese company. Walway and ZTE have some good phones. It's a really nice high-end phone, especially for its price. It's got all the things you would want. They've got all this attention to detail, but they only sold a million and a half of the last phone, so Blackberry sold more phones than these guys. For them to be more than just a minor player and a blip, which is what they are now, they're going to have to get the manufacturing system down, they're going to have to be able to put these things out in massive quantities and ship them, and they' re going to have to be able to do better testing so the stuff like this USB type C thing isn't a problem, because this isn't the thing you would usually catch if you were running more tests and more test runs on stuff.

Leo: John, you were using, I don't know if you're still using a Moto G, right?

John: No. I never used a Moto G.

Leo: You were using some Cheesy phone.

John: I've always used Cheesy phones.

Leo: This is the new Moto G. I'm blown away. 200-dollar phone out the door, unlocked. He's going to change it to Russian. It runs Android nicely. Moto also has the new Moto X, it will be called the Pure edition. We don't know when that's going to be out.

John: This is a nice phone.

Leo: For the price of a Moto G, it's amazing. Great battery life. That's one thing I worry about with all these phones. They're improving the screens with faster processors, but they're not able to increase the battery life, so the New Galaxy Note 4 from Samsung, slight increase in battery, but I'm worried it's just going to have 8 hours of battery life. How is that OnePlus Two? The OnePlus One was 20 hours.

Christina: From what little we've had to play with it, it's fine. Again, it doesn't have the super high resolution screen which is nice because that means the back is better. It seems solid. It's got a big battery in it. They've shoved a large battery in it. I don't know about you guys. I think the only way we're going to get battery life to go to the next level is we're going to have to go nuclear.

Leo: Yeah. A little power station in the back of the phone. You just took my phone apart. Now this is something that OnePlus is doing as well. You can take the back off, but you can't take the battery out, unfortunately. You can customize it. You could unscrew it.

John: Can you get the battery out if you have to get it out?

Leo: I think you could. I tore apart the One Plus, and once you took the screws out--there were 19 screws you could take the battery out. This is cosmetic. This may be the last phone available, you can put an SD card in it. No one else is doing that, right?

Christina: Right, because Google doesn't like it because it makes it hard for the operating system to know if you've got a card installed or not.

Leo: It's a security issue too. Android 5 restricts what somebody can do. If a program creates a folder no one else could look at that folder.

Christina: It was funny because the very first Moto G didn't have a card slot and neither did the moto X. Those were released under Google. As soon as Lenovo bought them, the first thing they did...

Leo: It's like giving your phone to a monkey.

Jason: It's more dangerous. The monkey will just throw it. This guy will take it apart.

Leo: One cool thing though. The Moto G uses a regular Micro Sim, not a nano sim, like Apple does. Of course I hadn't cut down my sim. But T mobile now, when you get a sim, it comes in three sizes on one sim card. You just save the frame and make it whatever size you need down the road.

John: Sorry. Didn't mean to do that.

Leo: I expected John to have other phones on the way. This is one of the frustrations of this particular time of the year. I got to buy-- Lisa says you have to buy this so we can review them. I've spent thousands of dollars. Note five, I've got that on order. That will be out in the next week or so. That looks pretty.

Christina: They copied Apple. It looks beautiful.

Leo: Did you go to the event?

Christina: I did.

Leo: How was that?

Christina: It was fine. It was funny because they made this deal about how it was going to be very exclusive and intimate and it was going to be hard to get into.

Leo: That's depressing.

Christina: It kind of was, because when they've done it before at Radio City there were throngs of people. Lance Eulenoff who I work with showed up at 8 AM for something that started at noon. I did not do that. I got there at ten because I'm not dumb. I knew I would be fine.

John: So you're saying that Lance is dumb?

Christina: I am.

Leo: Your boss is dumb.

Christina: He was dumb to get there at 8 AM. Even he was annoyed because he was sitting there for three hours before the event started. They had the even which was really quick. Both phones look great. The S 6 Edge Plus and the Note 5 looks fantastic.

Leo: They feel like the same phone with a few exceptions. Both 5.7 inch screens, the Edge is bent, of course. The Note 5 has a multi pressure surface. In every other respect they seem like the same phone.

Christina: The Note 5 is a little larger. They're about the same surface area. It's interesting because they made a big deal by pointing out that it has a bigger screen than the iPhone 6 Plus, but it takes up a smaller amount of space. It's very slight.

Leo: iPhone 6 Plus is 5.5 inches, this is 5.7. Narrower bezzles mean...

Christina: Exactly. 4 gigs of ram on both of them. The cameras look really nice. They've got this new mode called live broadcast which lets you broadcast to YouTube.

Leo: It lets you broadcast to YouTube live. Only SamSung does this right now, right? I think that this is something YouTube is going to extend to other companies eventually.

Christina: What's smart about it is they have it built into the camera app. You open up the camera app. It's not as easy as having an easy to access button. It is in the built-in camera app.

Leo: It's like Meerkat or periscope, but unlike those it preserves it on YouTube afterwards.

Christina: Right. YouTube is going to better for that sort of thing. Presumably it has a bigger audience. Not having to open up a third party app is a way that could bring it to the masses a lot easier.

Leo: Did they intimate that this is some exclusive deal that they've made with YouTube?

Christina: They didn't make it clear that it was exclusive in any way, but it was certainly something they were touting as their own. YouTube has already been doing this live video stuff for a while, this is just a smarter implementation. I would be surprised if I didn't see similar things from other manufacturers in the future. I think this is one of those things where Samsung is trying to show the power of their ecosystem. Hey why should you get us versus one of those other brands? Well, we can offer these types of experiences including this live YouTube functionality built into the camera.

Leo: I had a weird device from HTC. Remember that periscopey thing called a Ree? That let you stream directly to YouTube live.

Jason: Anybody can do it if you've got the right software. It's clever of Samsung to build it into their camera.

Leo: It's not that they have some sort of special arrangement.

Jason: No. You can do that. A lot of people do that to live stream games as an alternative to Twitch.

Leo: YouTube loves that. They've created a Let's Play Portal now, and they're really pushing that.

Jason: All the live stuff gets automatically archived to YouTube, which is great. You need to do the work to write the software that puts the video in the right formats and does all of that. Good for Samsung for doing that.

Leo: I would use that. Instead of periskoping or Meerkatting, I would YouTube to my personal channel. If I weren't on the air all the freaking time, anyway. I want to retire! We think this will be a success? Has not Samsung had a lot of trouble with the S6? Has it sold well?

Christina: I think they had a problem with their yields is what it was. I think they thought that the 6 would sell better than it did and the Edge was going to be the one people didn't want. At least on the streets of New York I see the Edge all the time. I don't see the six as much.

Leo: I love the Edge. It's pretty.

Christina: Exactly. The Edge no longer aesthetically has a use, but it doesn't have to.

Leo: It's coming back.

John: Sorry. It wasn't my fault.

Christina: The Edge is a little gimmicky, but it's beautiful.

Leo: There's three things that made me stop using the Edge. One is that the Edge is live. You have to hold it with pincher fingers or you accidentally do stuff on the edge. That screen goes all the way around. It's a little frustrating. Where did you find that? Did you download something new? Just questioning. Thank god I've got more phones coming. Would you like that phone?

John: Yes, I'd love it.

Leo: After you screw it up, you can have it. Oh my god. the other things I didn't like about it was the battery life was execrable. It's got the problem that other Samsung phones have got of weird hesitations. Android doesn't have it. This doesn't have it. This is a much slower processor, much less going on. Samsung has this duel processor. I think there's some weird hand off going on with the S6. Maybe it's the NSA saying hold on a second let me write that down what you just said.

Dylan: I think it's the crowd. HTC does the same thing. You can't get a phone from them without the crazy contact manager/management apps that you don't want.

Leo: Have you guys experienced that with these Samsung devices, this weird hesitation. You feel like it should be super snappy responsive.

Dylan: HTC yeah. I haven't seen it on Samsung.

Christina: Especially once you've used up a couple week's... the Touch was for Samsung's case having those skins on top is a bad thing, which is one of the many reasons Google is trying to get people to move away from the Skins, security being number one. It hinders performance. It's problematic for a bunch of reasons, but you also understand why the companies want it, because for instance with Samsung, that's why they're able to have that built into the camera. You could argue they could build their own camera app and not have their own ridiculous skin, but they need something that shows we're differentiated. Use our product, don't use someone else's.

Dylan: One thing I will say about Samsung and their Note, is they really have nailed the Note factor. A lot of Tech people, myself included, thought that it was ridiculous when it first came out, when Samsung came out with what seemed like at the time a gigantic phone with a stylus. Who is going to carry this around? You'll look like a dork. Its funny. You'll see a lot of people carrying it around. Often it's tiny women with a giant phone and they'll usually have it in a folder or something like that. They take notes with it, they play games with it, I see them in the train all the time.

Leo: You know why? They have purses. If I had a thing that I slung over my arm that I could carry big phones in that would be much more appealing.

Christina: It's true, except if we talk about a Clutch. This is my problem. It's fine with my regular purse, right? My Clutch doesn't fit. For me, if I'm going out--a clutch is smaller bag where you can fit a credit card, a lipstick, and a small phone, so it doesn't fit my clutch.

Leo: I fell in love with the note right away and started carrying it. I've had all the Notes since the original Note. I bought the new Note 5. I'm just worried about the Samsung cruft. To their credit, Samsung is updating for stage fright. I've been pushed out updates on the Edge on my Note 4. The zimperium and look out apps both say those phones are OK. Moto G is not. Is that vocal fry? This is exactly why Android is so dangerous. People go onto the playstore and they download things like this. Hundreds of buttons and sounds. It's probably written by some Russian hacker and it purports to play sound effects. What it's really doing is infecting the phone with malware aplenty.

John: Just the way it goes.

Leo: John also brought this. This is cool. I'll trade you. This is a PC with an HDMI port on the end. This is an intel stick.

Christina: Is that the compute stick?

Leo: Yeah. Did you buy this?

John: It's a little underpowered for a lot of things. There's only ten watts total that you can ever use.

Leo: It has a USB port for power?

John: It has a power supply that's ten watts. The USB doesn't provide that much. It will boot with a USB. If you put a little stand alone hard disc or something it kills it. I use it for--I hooked my entire podcast rig up to it and it worked fine.

Leo: You do No Agenda show on that?

John: I was going to. I put this LSD card in and apparently the overhead of maintaining...

Leo: Just that much! Is it running Windows 10?

John: Yes. Windows 10. $150. It's a winner.

Leo: That's impressive.

John: I'm impressed it works at all.

Dylan: You can't add storage to it.

John: You plug the USB port into a hub and you plug a powered hard disc, one of the big monsters that has its own power supply and it's fine. It'll work fine. Just the ones that rely on USB power.

Leo: Given that HDMI TVs are so cheap, this is interesting. You can bring this into a hotel and use it.

John: There's room to put Word and Microsoft office in here. 64 megs of built in memory.

Dylan: So you're walking into a hotel room with this thing in your pocket, but you have to have a keyboard and a mouse and your power external harddrive in your bag.

John: If you want to say something like that, yes. It's dumb.

Dylan: It sounds kind of like a laptop in a bunch of different pieces.

John: It's just kind of cool.

Leo: Smart of Intel.

John: I've been playing with the new Nucks.

Leo: I think the nucks are compelling. Those are hockey puck sized computers.

John: They work. They have 65 watts of power so they can power stuff. The No Agenda Show is run off a Nuck.

Leo: Running on a Nuck.

John: I've got a nice big screen and audio that runs fine.

Leo: Samsung also announced that they will have Loot pay. That was a crazy little startup that was emulating touch to pay by sending electrical signals to swipe machines as if you were swiping a card. I guess they were going to build that into these new galaxy phones. It's a little late. If something has NFC, you're good enough. Most stores will have touch to pay soon.

Christina: The cut off to have to do chip and pen stuff is October unless you want to be fined. It's a little late, but you can imagine there will be a lot of places that will be still on c machines or won't have stuff rolled out. But it will also work with NFC presuming, depending... I'm with you. I had the exact same reaction you had. This is a little late, guys. What's the point of this. It's cool they can tokenize the MST stuff, but I'm not a big fan of anything that's encouraging people to use magnetic sensors.

Leo: What's funny is currency. Wall Mart attempt to circumvent credit card companies to collect information about you on their own. They signed up a lot of merchants. CVS famously pulled their touch terminals out when Apple Pay came out because they thought they weren't allowed to use Apple Pay. CVS has announced that they are bringing back Apple Pay.

Jason: I think Rite Aid is too now. The currency alliance is crumbling.

Leo: This is ridiculous. As I understand it, it isn't touch or swipe, it's QR codes.

Jason: In exchange for that inconvenience, they get more of your data. Why would you not want to do it?

Christina: You get the loyalty card right there. It's idiotic. Everyone wants QR codes because they've been so successful.

Jason: That story that you were citing, Leo, said it won't launch until next year. I think it may be at the point where it won't ever launch.

Leo: The whole thing is falling apart. Here's the weirdest part about the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus and the Note 5. This is a case.

Christina: It's not like the Type O. This is something that fits on the top and uses the screen to go over where the keyboard presses.

Leo: In effect it's typing for you?

Christina: Yes. It's a terrible experience. I spent a few minutes with it at the event, and I was laughing my butt of because it was so terrible.

Leo: You can flip it so it's out of the way.

Christina: Right, which is cool, and I get that. I understand the benefits of not wanting to have a Bluetooth device, but if you're going to do this, the Type O was clever in that it was a Bluetooth keyboard so acting independently from sitting on top...

Dylan: It was unfortunate that it imitated the Blackberry a bit too much.

John: Wasn't what that was for? For these Blackberry addicts that...

Christina: That's exactly who it was for, but they didn't bother to license from Blackberry, so they got sued.

Leo: By the way, this is going to be 80 bucks.

John: Too high.

Leo: Not only does it not work, it costs too much.

Jason: They need something like this for the iPhone too. It's the same thing. You slide over and you lose screen space, but it'll push and it'll be your little fingers for you.

Leo: Raymond Wong says the Samsung Galaxy and Note 5 keyboard cover is awful. Get a Blackberry classic if you want a real keyboard. At least you can still buy a Blackberry. So you played with it, not impressed.

Christina: I was standing next to Ray when he made that Vine and we were both laughing our butts off. Terrible.

Leo: Do you think Samsung has a future in the phone business?

Christina: Yeah.

Leo: They should spin it out to Alphabet. HTC is gone, right?

Christina: HTC’s gone.

Leo: We can assume that—well you know what’s going to keep HTC alive is that they have the best virtual reality headset, the Vive, and they’re working with Steam, which is the best PC gaming company. So that might keep them alive.

Christina: That might keep them alive, but yea-

Leo: But the M9 just didn’t sell at all. It was terrible.

Christina: No. I mean they laid off 15% of their staff. They are dead.

Leo: So Microsoft has written off its 7.6 billion dollar purchase of Nokia. So that’s gone.

John: That was a good idea.

Leo: It seems like Apple is—you would think that over time, Apple would face competition and people would rise up. It feels like Apple just owns this. Like it’s done. In fact, Android’s market share in the U.S. has for the first time in some time slipped.

Christina: Yes. Since 2011 it’s the lowest percentage, lowest number of users since 2011. And it’s interesting. I think that what happened was, we were talking earlier. You know, Dylan was mentioning of how good of a job Samsung has done with the Note. And I do think they deserve credit for inventing the phablet market. And a lot of people made fun of it, myself included. And I still do think that phablets are too big for me but I won’t disagree that it’s become kind of the standardized size for a lot of people. But even though Samsung kind of invented that category, by simply releasing the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus I think Apple kind of gave a ton of people what they were looking for which was they missed the iPhone but they wanted a bigger screen. And it’s really hard to compete with that when you’re in the market like the U.S. which at this point is basically saturated. So it’s not like you’ve got a lot of people that are buying a smartphone for the first time. Almost everybody is buying a replacement phone. And so you’re either going to remember your positive experiences you might have had with an iPhone or kind of the klutzy experiences you might have has with Android. And if Apple’s going to offer you something with a bigger screen and if carrier subsidies are going away and they’re all going to cost the same anyway, why wouldn’t you buy an iPhone.

Leo: That’s the other news, by the way. Verizon will follow in T-Mobile’s steps and eliminate the subsidy. I imagine AT&T and Sprint can’t be far behind.

Jason: Yea, AT&T is already phasing it out basically. Replacing it with a payment plan.

Leo: Ok, so—go ahead.

Dylan: The one thing I was going to say, I think Android may be at its lowest numbers in years but it still has the vast majority of the market.

Leo: Global. Global.

Christina: In the world. Globally, yes.

Leo: Globally.

Dylan: Globally.

Leo: But that’s cheap you know that’s—

Dylan: But even in the U.S. I think it still has more than 50%. I could be wrong.

Christina: It is, it’s like 53 versus 46 or something. But they’ve fallen. It’s the lowest it’s been since 2011. And that’s my problem.

Dylan: This is the problem I think. Is that Android phones are much cheaper, right? So unless you, if you don’t have a lot of money, you’re going to buy an Android phone. But the problem is they get to that by having very narrow margins, right? So Apple’s making all these profits. All these other companies are making cheaper phones but they’re not profitable. So it’s really hard to sustain a business for more than a few years if you’re not making any money.

Leo: How about this? This is a company that was founded by Tom Moss and Mike Chan, the guy who designed the HTC One, Scott Croyle, funded by Google Ventures. It’s called Nextbit. Come September 1st, they’re going to have a 3 or 4 hundred dollar Android smartphone that will get better over time. Oooh!!

Christina: First of all—

Jason: Never buy a technology product when they promise you features later.

Christina: Exactly.

Dylan: I agree with that.

John: Remember the upgradable PCs? None of this stuff ever works. By the way, you still ignoring this $200 guy right here.

Leo: Huh?

John: What’s wrong with just this? $200.

Leo: I’ve been very happy and you know I get all day battery life. It’s got 40% when I go to bed. And I use it heavily. And so—

Jason: That’s the greatest threat to Samsung I think. Because I was going to say that Samsung’s going to be ok because they make really good high-end phones, and if you don’t want an iPhone, you want an Android phone, the Samsung phones are pretty good.

Leo: They’re beautiful.

Jason: And last year they’ve really turned over their industrial design. They are beautiful. They are solid competitors to the hardware that Apple comes out with. The danger is that somebody’s going to look at those Samsung phones and look at a phone like this and be like, “Why would I spend more money? This is great.” And then where’s Samsung?

Leo: I agree. And the Moto X is going to be less expensive too. A few hundred, three hundred bucks? Four hundred bucks?

Christina: Right. And that’s before we even talk about the fact that some of these Chinese manufacturers are actually going to be—

Leo: Xiaomi. WoWway.

Christina: If they can get into the United States, if Xiaomi can get into the U.S., that’s a problem. Because they’re these high quality premium products. I mean even though—

Leo: You know what that tells me? We’ve been overpaying for phones for the last four years. And I wonder if there’s pressure on Apple who’s charging, I mean my last iPhone 6 Plus was almost $1,000 bucks. That’s outrageous. I mean admittedly I loaded it up with memory but it’s still outrageous that you would—

Christina: Well it’s outrageous but it’s also fashion.

Leo: It doesn’t cost them that much to make.

John: She’s right, it’s fashion.

Christina: It’s fashion. And so there’s a certain percentage that you will pay more for a brand then you will for just a specs. I mean and that’s just the nature of the game. If you’re seen as a premium high end product which is how Apple has always marketed themselves, then I think you can get away with charging more. The problem is, is if you are a company like Samsung and you’re having plastic phones, which is what they had before the most recent revisions, going up against metal phones that are specked, have screens and cost half as much. Then it’s a problem because you don’t have the cache of an Apple where somebody could say, “Well, yea, I spent a thousand dollars on it. But it’s an iPhone.”

Leo: You know what else is cool about this Moto G? You can go underwater and take video with it.

John: How often have you needed to do that?

Leo: Well, if you’re in a pool and you want to get underwater videos, it’s waterproof for—

John: Completely waterproof?

Leo: It says up to 3 meters for half an hour. It’s IPE 7.

John: Huh. Let’s dump it in some water out of the kitchen.

Leo: No.

John: Yea, that’s what I thought.

Leo: I should have never said that.

Christina: Moto G actually works really well in water.

Leo: It’s supposed to work really well.

Christina: It does.

Leo: You have to start the video before you go underwater.

John: Why?

Leo: Because the touch screen stops working I guess when it’s wet. But, I mean it starts again after you get it out of the water. It doesn’t, it’s not a permanent thing. Anyway, I’m intrigued by this Nextbit. It feels like because the cell companies in the U.S. are not going to subsidize, people are going to be aware of what they’re actually paying for phones. Yea, maybe that won’t hurt iPhone, but it’s going to hurt everybody else. So everybody’s going to start making phones, selling phones, for a lot closer to what they actually cost.

Dylan: That’s a really good point. Because people, up until now people don’t even pay attention to what they cost.

Leo: They’re all $200.

Dylan: $200 down, no contract, right? Yea.

Leo: I wonder if it will hurt Apple too, though. I mean fashion is a small market.

Christina: I mean it might.

John: It’s a big market actually. It’s huge.

Christina: It’s bigger than you would think. I don’t know. What’s—I guess what vexes me is that so many of these companies, as Dylan was saying, they have no margins. And so they’re selling these at these low, low costs. And they’re not making any money. And one of the reasons they can get away with doing that now is that the Chinese government is willing to throw a bunch of money at these Chinese owned firms, right?

Leo: Like the One Plus and the support is so bad because they can’t afford to have good support.

Christina: Exactly. And so my question is, what happens if China decides to stop doing that? Or things kind of go awry and what does that do to the price? You said before we’ve been overpaying for our phones the last four years. I don’t think we’ve been overpaying. I think one of the reasons the price has gone to the point where they are now, no one is making any money. If anything people are losing money on these devices. But they’ve been able to get away with it because they’re getting money from other places. Whether it’s the government or investors or something else. But if that dries up then what happens?

Leo: CADman in our chatroom says that usability is important and Apple still has it. I don’t feel that way but maybe that’s just me.

John: You hate Apple.

Leo: No, I don’t hate Apple. You notice how many Macs I have around?

John: You like the Mac.

Leo: I love the Mac. I feel like the iPhone is a little behind on usability. I think it’s suffered a little bit from not keeping up with the times.

Christina: You think Android is better?

Leo: Yea.

Jason: Oh, here we go. We already had this conversation. He thinks it’s objectively better.

Leo: I have this all the time. I think it’s objectively better.

Jason: Right.

Leo: Well you want me to really piss everybody off? I also think the Apple Watch is an utter flop.

John: Where is your Apple Watch? You used to wear it.

Dylan: No argument from me on that.

Leo: I feel like smartwatches in general are a category—I thought Apple might, as they had in the past, figure out how to make the watch work as a wearable. And I think no, they didn’t. In fact, Apple Watch is more finicky and twiddley and annoying than Android.

John: Who in the audience has an Apple Watch? One, two. Heil Apple!

Leo: Three people. And then of course Jason Snell does.

Jason: I’m over here just flopping around.

Leo: Well, I completely acknowledge that there are people who love it and want it and will have it. But I feel like that’s not going to be a big audience. Because they’re not that useful. And they’re annoying. They make you stand up every hour. At exactly—

Christina: That I love.

Leo: You love it that at 50, no matter what you’re doing, you could be running, at 50 minutes to the hour it says, “Stand up. Ha, ha, ha.” It’s moronic.

Christina: I love it. I love—

John: So what else do you like about the watch?

Leo: There are some good things and I think that Watch OS 2.0 is still an unknown quantity. It might make a difference. But I have to say, expecting as I was some real innovation from Apple on this watch, I am not seeing it.

John: I remember you actually predicting your opinion.

Leo: Well I could predict my opinion.

John: You predicted your opinion. Before the watch came out you never thought it was going to be a big winner. You had nothing but doubts.

Leo: That’s not true. I was, as I am today, saying, we’ll see. Watch OS maybe will fix this. But I was hopeful that Apple would solve this conundrum of how do you make something usable that is that small? I think that’s the real conundrum. And I don’t think that Force Touch does it. I think that the knob doesn’t. Do you really like that, Jason?

Jason: I really do. Yea, I do, it works for me. But it doesn’t have to work for everybody. I think that’s the point. I think a lot of the problems that you’re having with the Apple Watch are –

Leo: It’s not the iPhone.

Jason: -- expecting it to be something it’s never going to be. It’s an iPhone accessory. It’s going to appeal to certain people. That appeal may expand over time, but if you were looking for another iPhone then yea, it’s not going to be that.

Leo: It’s not going to be that level of success.

Jason: No. But I like it. And my wife wants one and she was totally skeptical.

Leo: Does she want one?

Jason: Well, she, you know, she keeps her phone in her purse. And when she’s at work and I send her a text, she’s a librarian, and if she’s out in the stacks, she can’t get a notification because she doesn’t have her phone with her.

Leo: Chris wears one, one of our interns, says that even though he doesn’t have his phone with him, he’s been getting messages because of the Wi-Fi capability. Which is kind of cool.

John: Yep. Heil Apple.

Leo: All heil Apple. And that’s the salute, right?

John: It is the salute.

Jason: It’s a hydra sort of thing.

Leo: Apple. All right, we’ll talk a little bit about Apple because of course the rumor is strong in this one, that September 9th will be the day. We know, it’s always the first week of September. It’s not much of a guess. What will they release? We’ll talk about that.

John: What?

Leo: I don’t know. We’re going to take a break. All right, a little time off for good behavior, John. He hasn’t played a sound effect in a whole 5 minutes.

John: You mean one of these?

Leo: Yea, no, stop. I will give you that. I am going to give you this phone.

John: After you’re sick of it.

Leo: No, now. Because I’m getting a new phone soon. Any minute now. And I got like 8 new phones on the way.

John: Here they come.

Leo: And I don’t want—but you will love this phone. I thought you, what did you have? I thought you had a Moto G for the longest time.

John: No, I’m still using the Galaxy Nexus.

Leo: Oh my God.

Christina: Oh my God.

John: Wait. Check this thing out.

Leo: Oh my God.

John: It hasn’t got a scratch on it. I mean this thing is 10 years old.

Leo: He literally has the Galaxy, what is that, the Nexus?

John: The Nexus.

Leo: That’s the one phone Samsung made for Google.

John: This is the—

Leo: What Android? Is it up to 5.1.1?

John: It’s still in the 4s. But, that’s beside the point. Who cares? This phone has never gotten a scratch. It’s never broken and it’s got a good sound. And it’s got a high resolution screen, pretty much the same as the Apple 6. What am I supposed to do? Buy new phones every five years?

Leo: No, why should you?

John: But I will move to that one.

Leo: It bugs the hell out of me that I have to buy all these phones.

John: Uh huh.

Leo: All right. Let’s take a break. Dylan Tweney is also here. Great to have you, Dylan. From beautiful San Mateo, California, where it is burning up. He is a VentureBeat columnist and founder of Tweney Media. Jason Snell of Six Colors, the incomparable. Nice to have you. Apple Watch fan.

Jason: Owner and user.

Leo: Owner and fan. You like it.

Jason: I do like it.

Leo: You like it. You don’t have Rene Ritchie’s problem of like—he has like 100 bands now.

Jason: He has some serious buying problems.

Leo: He has a buying problem.

Jason: No I got one.

Leo: One’s enough.

Jason: And I do have another band for it. I have the fancy leather band for it.

Leo: They are inexpensive. Oh, you do?

Jason: I do.

Leo: Nice.

Jason: Just the one though.

Leo: Because Christina just bought the fancy pink band.

Christina: I did. I’m so excited. I’m so excited.

Leo: Why are you excited about that band? Because you paid about $250 for about $5 worth of plastic.

Christina: Happily. Happily.

Leo: Why?

Christina: I do not care. Fashion.

Leo: Fashion.

Christina: Fashion.

Leo: I guess this is what I don’t understand. Because I am not, as you can tell, a fashion forward kind of guy. I don’t understand fashion. You wanted the pink. I thought you got the pink. You wanted the pink.

Christina: No, I wanted the pink originally and I changed my order so I could get my watch before the middle of June. So in order to get the watch the 1st week of May I got just the regular black classic buckle. So the regular black pleather band. And then I’ve been using, this summer I’ve been using the sport band. The while sport band and I really like that. And finally on Friday, finally, finally, finally, after like months of waiting, the modern buckles are available to order and it should be shipping to me between August 25th and September 2nd. I am so excited.

Leo: $250. That doesn’t bother you?

Christina: Yep. Not in the slightest.

Leo: Not at all.

Christina: I didn’t even blink. No. It is what it is.

Leo: I’ve been buying those cheap, like $35 knock offs. Which fit fine and work fine.

Christina: Yea, no. Which I think are fine. And if I could find a good looking one that had like a—it’s the magnetic clasp that I really like. And I will probably end up buying a bunch of the cheap ones. And I will have no problem doing that.

Leo: The classic buckle is not a buckle? It’s a magnetic clasp?

Christina: The modern buckle is a clasp.

Leo: Modern buckle?

Christina: Modern buckle is like this great magnetic clasp thing. It’s really, really pretty.

Jason: Classic buckle is the one you’re thinking of.

Leo: Classic buckle is a buckle. Modern buckle is a buckle in name only.

Christina: Yes. It’s a leather clasp that connects to the ends. It’s great.

Jason: In the future, all buckles will be clasps.

Leo: Our show today brought to you by Carbonite On-Line Backup. We had a call today on the radio show. Made me sad. Somebody lost all his data. I can’t remember what happened. It was not good. Oh I know, he had a RAID array. He had what we called a scary RAID array, RAID Zero array. It was strike for speed and of course one of the drives crashed and all his data crashed. Carbonite. If you are in business especially, if you are in business especially, you’ve got to go to Carbonite. They make data backup for the hands on business owner hands free. Automatic cloud backup, it’s secure, it’s encrypted on the way and encrypted in place at Carbonite. Round the clock protection. At work, oh and home too. In fact you see they’ve got some deals on the personal plans right now. If use the offer code TWIT you’ll get two bonus months free when you sign up. Carbonite. More than a million and half people now, including 70,000 businesses, trust Carbonite for round the clock protection of business files, databases, documents. You know a lot of those people have started using Carbonite at home too. I do. Both home and work. Keep track of my photos and my music and all of that stuff. Carbonite.com. Get 2 bonus months free when you use the offer code TWIT. For those people moving to Windows 10, painless when they have Carbonite because they don’t have to worry about their data. They just – or getting a new computer, same thing. You just log onto your Carbonite account, there’s all your stuff. Carbonite.com. Use the offer code TWIT, 2 months free with purchase. You got to back it up to get it back. So do it right with Carbonite. Everybody has left. Show the panel. Dylan, it’s you and me. Everybody…

Dylan: What did I miss, Leo?

Leo: I don’t know. They all disappeared. They literally all got up to go.

Dylan: I had to go get some ice water.

Leo: You know this would be a good time—go get some ice water, Dylan.

Dylan: I did. I’m back now with my ice water. I’m ready to go now.

Leo: Oh, good. This would be a good time maybe to check in and see what you missed this week on TWiT.

Narrator: Previously, on TWiT.

Fr. Robert Ballecer: What up? What, what, what?

Bryan Burnett: Our faces look really weird today.

Narrator: This Week in Google.

Leo: What does Alphabet mean to Google.

Jeff Jarvis: I guarantee you it will get cited as “See Larry Page wants to take over the world and do all these huge things.” I don’t think there’s some gigantic secret agenda to this. I think it’s what it appears to be. Which is freedom to innovate.

Narrator: This Week in Computer Hardware

Patrick Norton: The big story, 16 terabyte SSD from Samsung. This is the largest drive period. Not just the largest SSD, but the largest drive you can buy, or will eventually be able to buy when they ship it.

Narrator: Know How.

Fr. Robert: They did a presentation called “Hacking a Linux Powered Rifle.” They figured out the way the credentials are tasked over the scope, it’s horribly insecure. So they routed in and they were essentially able to effect the variable. And suddenly you’re actually shooting at something else.

Narrator: All About Android.

Ron Richards: Something’s got to move up to take over the Android program.

Jason Howell: Or does Sundar stay in this role, but for everything? He’s a superhero.

Ron: The S stands for Sundar.

Jason: He’s Sundarman.

Ron: Sundarman.

Narrator: Technology for your eyes and ear holes.

Leo: Sundarman to the resuce.

John: Hey.

Leo: What?

John: You’re not supposed to embarrass the guests by telling them that we abandoned the show.

Leo: Oh, you’re all back.

Jason: We were always here.

John: You should have gone right to the house ad.

Jason: We were always here.

John: You should have gone to the house ad.

Leo: (Laughing) they never left.

John: That is so unprofessional

Leo: I lied. We actually used massive technology servers in the basement to Chroma key them out.

John: I understand that you’re losing your lease.

Leo: We don’t know that.

John: Oh.

Leo: No, actually we’re not losing our lease. For sure we have a lease. And it goes through April 2017.

John: Ah. That’s a long time.

Leo: Anything could happen by then.

John: Oh yea.

Leo: You know where I’m glad I don’t work? Amazon. Did you read the New York Times article? Amazon says, they boast that they have unreasonably high standards for their white collar workers at Amazon, the article goes. Workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late. E-mails arrive past midnight followed by text messages asking why they weren’t answered. The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Hey, you know that Dvorak guy, he’s not as tall as he looks. Employees say it’s frequently used to sabotage others. The tool even offers sample texts like, “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks. You should fire this guy.” Many of the new companies—

John: That’s exactly the voice.

Leo: You should fire this guy. This is stack ranking. They call it purposeful Darwinism.

John: Stack ranking’s the worst.

Leo: Stack ranking basically. And remember that was something Microsoft finally abandoned under Satya Nadella that you were railing against the idea.

John: For years.

Leo: But your co-workers rank you on your performance and that the bottom person is gone causing kind of—

John: Yea. It was invented by Jack Welch at G.E. And then G.E. dropped it.

Dylan: It sounds horrible. I mean honestly, I do not want to work at a place like that. They talk about people regularly being reduced to tears in the office by their performance reviews. It all sounds like a miserable, miserable place to work.

Leo: Bo Olson who worked there two years in book marketing said, “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

Dylan: Yea, everyone crying.

John: If you’re a sadist it has got to be hilarious.

Dylan: But I will say this. Lots of people work places where nobody gives a s***. I don’t know if I can say that on TWiT, but nobody cares. Nobody cares enough to actually get the job done. It’s too easy to get away with doing nothing. And I bet for a certain kind of person, working at Amazon and actually accomplishing things despite the often bruising environment, you know for a certain kind of person I bet that would be a really welcome change.

Leo: The author of the article, authors Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld point out that Amazon does not allow anybody but the top level executives to speak on the record to journalists. So they talked to—that’s a revolving door—

John: Where was this printed?

Leo: This is the New York Times.

John: Ah, well of course it’s after the Washington Post.

Dylan: This is maybe, sort of—

Leo: The Post did a similar story?

John: No, the Washington Post is owned by Bezos, so this is why –

Leo: Oh, you wouldn’t see this in the Washington Post.

John: One newspaper going after another. They’re going to get, there’s going to be retribution, I guarantee it.

Jason: So did you see the rebuttal?

Dylan: Come work for us, you know.

Leo: More than 100 current and former Amazonians were interviewed. Some of they said, “Hey, I thrived because I was pushed beyond my limits. This was good for me.” But no, I didn’t see the rebuttal.

Jason: It’s in the show notes. It’s a LinkedIn post by a guy who works in the infrastructure development at Amazon. And he said it doesn’t reflect the Amazon that he lives in every day. He’s never seen anybody cry at their desk or anything like that. He suspects that these stories are from the early days of Amazon and that the company has adapted and is not like that anymore. It may be that they aren’t like that anymore in general, or just where he works. But I think, I thought it was really interesting, and it makes you at least think about you know, whether—when you’re putting a story together about how awful Amazon is for the New York Times, do you ignore the parts of it that don’t fit the narrative that you want to tell? Because this guy basically says, “Look, this isn’t true. Nobody asked me to write this story but it’s not true.”

Leo: One thing that Nick who wrote this, Nick Ciubotariu, points out that as he tried to post a comment in the section of the New York Times article—

Jason: It was moderated out, yea.

Leo: It was moderated out. Which does make you kind of wonder if there is an axe to grind here.

John: Yea, this is the war between the Post and the—there’s 3 papers in the country that make a difference.

Jason: I have heard horrible things about working at Amazon, but most of them come from people who worked there in the 1st 10 years. I have not heard—I’ve heard, the stuff I’ve heard about Amazon lately has been more in line with other tech companies, which is yea, in some places they can work you hard and have expectations that you won’t have a life. But not necessarily to the extent that you saw it in the New York Times article.

Leo: Yea, I’d almost prefer this to working for Tony Hseih at Zappos because they have this kind of—it reminds me of Office Space where you had to have, you were rated by how much flair you had. You have to—

Jason: At the restaurant.

Leo: At the restaurant. You know you have to be fun loving and creative and wear costumes. That I’d find more annoying than someone yelling at me, “Laporte, you suck. Get to work.”

Christina: Well and now Zappos has this holacracy thing, do you know about that?

Leo: Yea, and people are leaving in droves. Because you have no boss. Except that you do, it’s just a crypto-boss more than anything.

Dylan: I think it could work. I think it could work. I spent some time in the last couple of weeks talking to this company inDinero, startup here in San Francisco. And they run on a similar way to Zappos. But they explicitly say they’re not trying to do the whole holacracy thing. They actually have bosses. But they got rid of all the middle managers and they basically have little teams of employees deciding how to fulfill whatever it is the bosses say that they need to accomplish.

John: That’s very mid-lineal.

Dylan: It seems to work pretty well from what I could tell. I don’t know, I was only there for a day but it seemed like a kind of cool way to work. They’re like, “Look you’re grownups. You figure it out. We’re not going to tell you what to do every minute.”

Leo: We kind of do that. Don’t we let people be grownups here? The problem is you let people be grownups, then they act like children and you have to fire them (laughing). Sometimes, some people do not live well in that environment. Like if you have no rules, they take advantage. They go, “Oh, I’ll come in later.”

John: Not everybody’s a rule follower.

Leo: But some people thrive. Some people thrive.

Jason: It’s like unlimited vacation, right? The people that go, “Man, unlimited vacation, I’m just going to take all the vacation.” Well you’re not what that’s for.

Leo: That’s not the idea. In fact that’s what happens if you don’t take any time off, do you?

Dylan: Right, because you still have your job obligations, right? You have to figure out how to get your job done even though you are on vacation.

Leo: Is that what we do? I think we do something like that. We don’t have PTO. You can just take time off but you have to cover yourself. Mostly with ashes. So these things like alternate sides of the same coin.

John: Lot of material here.

Leo: You have the stack ranking brutal environment; you have holacracy which is some new-agey adjustment.

John: It’s a millennial thing.

Leo: It’s millennial. But millennials are—aren’t millennials the people who got trophies no matter how well they did?

John: No score soccer.

Christina: That’s exactly who we are.

John: Everyone’s a winner.

Leo: Is that a canard, Christina, or was that really how you were raised?

Christina: No, it’s for real. And it was one of those things where I was a very, very much a perfectionist as a child. And I knew what the real awards were versus the bs ones.

Leo: Oh, so it pissed you off.

Christina: Oh, yes. It made me mad but it also made me mad if I got the, like the mulligan award. Like, “Thanks for being here. Here’s your trophy.” I’m like, “No.”

Leo: Screw you.

Christina: Yea, that’s exactly how I felt. I was such a perfectionist and I was such an overachiever that for me it was disastrous. But yes, no, we completely got—

John: How was it disastrous? How was it disastrous? You liked it.

Leo: It ruined her. Look at what a mess she is.

John: You wouldn’t be on this show. How did it ruin you? Come on. You’re fine.

Leo: Did you get into the workplace and were you hurt that people didn’t give you trophies for--

Christina: No, actually I experienced rejection early enough, I was like 15 or 16 and I didn’t make the elite drama troupe at my high school. And that was like my first real experience with rejection. I was almost 16. And thank God I experienced it then. Because a lot of my friends didn’t expect—

Leo: You weren’t prepared. Yea.

Christina: Well, a lot of my friends honestly when they got to college, they didn’t know what it was like to be around other students who were like all the best and didn’t know how to deal with the fact that they weren’t the top students and freaked out in college. And a lot of my other friends who got through college and got into the workforce and never experienced loss or rejection, and completely and totally were unable to function.

Leo: Interesting.

John: Yea there was this really good, I think it was two episodes ago, Brian—the real sports show, it’s on HBO.

Leo: Gumbel.

John. Brian Gumbel did a whole block on this topic and about the no-score soccer, everybody gets a trophy, and all the rest of it. And they said that is the problem. These kids get just patted on the back for doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, knowing nothing. The go to college and the next thing they know they cannot understand why they got a C.

Jason: They do start keeping score in soccer when they’re in 2nd grade.

John: At some point. In the cases they showed this woman at 19.

Christina: Yea they do but you still get a trophy at the end. You still get—

Leo: This sounds like a right wing conspiracy.

John: She’s right. She’s right.

Dylan: Just this week there was a football player who got into the news because he showed a picture on Instagram that showed two trophies that his kids had gotten. One of these sort of consolation prize trophies. And he said, “I’m taking these trophies away. Because you did not earn them. You cannot have these back until you have trophies that you actually earn, for really getting something.”

John: Actually most parents are like the opposite.

Jason: Also I can assure you that the kids know what the score is. They know what the score is.

Christina: Of course they do.

Jason: They all know what the score is.

Christina: Well, of course they do. And that’s why the whole thing becomes even more of a farce because then you create these levels within your own groups of who was the real person valuable and who is not. And that just makes everything more Lord of the Flies and more terrible.

Leo: That’s what makes people crazy really as if there’s a truth and then there’s this lie that is the public story--

John: Which is the reason to listen to the No Agenda Show every Thursday and Sunday.

Leo: Because you speak the truth. Now twice a week.

John: No, we actually do some research.

Leo: That’s your mistake right there.

John: And we actually reveal things that are unusual.

Leo: Unusual.

John: Yea.

Leo: Yea. False flag operations, things like that.

John: No, no you’ve got the wrong show.

Leo: Ok.

John: We don’t do any of that.

Leo: Really?

John: Rarely.

Leo: Ok. That’s where I learned the term.

John: No you didn’t.

Leo: From you.

John: No.

Leo: No?

John: No.

Leo: You were here on this show explaining that to me.

John: No.

Leo: No?

John: No.

Leo: All right.

John: You’ve known about falsifying when you were in college.

Leo: I’m hallucinating.

John: You’re a little kid in college.

Leo: Wag the dog, I know, I know, I know.

John: I don’t know about that.

Leo: Coming soon to a venue near you... I don’t know where Apple would have their—their spaceship campus isn’t done. Eventually their venues will be there. Are they going to still be at the Yerba Buena Center this time?

Jason: Last time they were at the Flint Center.

Leo: That’s right.

Jason: In Cupertino. So it might be back there.

Leo: We don’t know.

Jason: Who knows.

Leo: Flint Center is where the Mac was originally announced. And it’s a little bit of a bigger venue than the Yerba Buena Center.

Jason: Or they can do Moscone West. They like Moscone West too.

Leo: That’s huge.

Jason: It all depends on how they, on what’s available really. What the real estate availability is like.

Leo: Well, you follow Apple. One of the stories – John Paczkowski is now at BuzzFeed – it kind of implied that everything was going to be announced in September. There wouldn’t be later announcements.

Jason: Yea. There was some thought that the iPad may happen just as part of the iPhone events.

Leo: And Apple TV.

Jason: And roll it out with iOS 9.

John: There’s one way to get people to go.

Leo: So maybe you do want a bigger event. iPhone 6 the next generation. As usual this is the every other year where they don’t change the hardware they just – well, they’re going to change it a little bit. Force Touch screen.

Jason: Force Touch.

John: So what are you guys predicting?

Leo: I don’t think that Force Touch really works for me. Do you like Force Touch?

Jason: I like it on the track pad.

Leo: I find it very confusing because I don’t really—first of all, it’s not a universal experience. It’s supported by the operating system but not by apps.

Jason: That’s the problem.

Leo: You press, sometimes it does something, sometimes it doesn’t do something. And sometimes you think you’re pressing light touch and your pressing Force Touch so the behavior is different from what you—for instance, I find it hard on my MacBook to drag an icon because I press hard. And then it does something else. So I think Force Touch is—you know, it always hard to invent new—

John: How come nobody here’s using a mouse? Oh, yea. Just as I predicted.

Leo: Nobody wants a mouse, it’s newfangled.

Dylan: It’s a millennial thing.

John: Newfangled.

Jason: If you wait long enough, you’re right again.

John: I know, that’s the idea.

Jason: All the way back around.

John: Yea, I can go long. Go long.

Jason: That’s right. Think like a Chinese.

Leo: It all comes around in the end. Yep.

John: So what are you guys predicting?

Leo: It’s not what we’re predicting it’s what the—

John: Yes. That’s why we’re here.

Jason: The rumor reporters and Mark Gurman in particular are so good at this.

Leo: It doesn’t matter.

Jason: And the supply chain leans so badly.

Christina: Supply chain leaks are the ones that really let you know.

John: All right, tell us what they say.

Christina: Ok, so apparently it’s a better reinforced shell for the outside.

Leo: No more bend-gate.

Christina: Right. Which makes complete sense. It wasn’t really a major issue. It was, I think that the video got a lot more attention than there were actual people. There were some people who had real problems but it was definitely not, it was definitely blown out of proportion. But despite that, it makes sense that they would want to reinforce metal where they could. So I think that a little bit sturdier shell. I think Force Touch for the screen, why not at this point? They might as well. They’re making it on the track pads, they’re doing it for the Apple Watch.

Leo: You can always turn it off if it doesn’t make sense to you.

Christina: Why not? Exactly. Precisely. You might as well throw it on and then you have an extra thing to give the S. So I’m sure—

Male Voice: What’s up guys?

Leo: Oh, sorry, that’s the bend-gate guy. He’s here to show us it’s not bending this time. With calipers. So these new shells, these are presumably the shells, right.

Christina: Presumably.

Leo: Because this is a supply chain. It starts to leak once you start manufacturing. And you know what’s weird though? If there are supply chain leaks, why have we not seen new iPad shells. We’ve seen a new Mini I guess, right?

Christina: Right. Well they might not have gone into production yet. And they’re probably doing way smaller amounts of the iPad then they are of the iPhones. So they probably need to start way in advance with the iPhone. How many did they sell? They sold what, close to 200 million iPhone 6’s. So they probably got to start those earlier. That said, we do have to be careful with some of these supply chain leaks because last year Marques Brownlee got what was supposed to be the sapphire glass.

Leo: And it wasn’t.

Christina: And it wasn’t. I mean that ended up not happening. So I have a feeling that this shell is legit.

Leo: By the way, that was the same source, wasn’t it? That was the guy in Australia that gives this guy his stuff. What’s his name?

Christina: Exactly, exactly.

John: Pipeline to China.

Christina: Right, so I mean, I have feeling these shells are legit.

Leo: Scotty Dickenson.

Christina: Scotty Dickenson, yea.

Jason: It’s entirely possible that the iPad will get announced in September, the iPad pro that we’ve been talking about. It may not even ship until October or November too, so.

Christina: Exactly. And I’m somebody who, I did not think they were going to do an iPad Pro and I still don’t necessarily believe it yet.

Leo: But I want the iPad Pro though.

Christina: Well, yea. But I think that with the iOS 9 and the dual app mode that is just screaming for a bigger screen.

Leo: It’s funny because one of the reasons people believe the iPad Pro rumor is because of this feature in iOS 9. We’re seeing the code now of dual windows on a single screen moving around. They actually showed it at WWDC.

Jason: And it works on the iPad Air 2.

Christina: It works on Air 2 and it works fantastically.

Leo: It makes more sense on a big screen and ironically the new Mini is the place that it is going to show up first. A much smaller screen, what is that, a 9 inch screen?

Jason: Well, I mean the Mini’s got the tech for it. It’s got all the same pixels as the Air 2. So if they do that and they upgrade its internals to be equivalent to the Air 2 and come out with an Air 3 as well, and then if there’s a Pro model. You know, I think the Pro model will happen. I think that there’s probably—

Leo: A 12.9-ish.

Jason: Yea, I think Apple has learned its lesson a little bit with phones. About saying, “You know what? Sometimes offering a bigger screen.” They’ll figure out how they use it and whether they want to use it or not.

Leo: Smart.

Christina: I mean I think that it might be something that they primarily sell with the IBM partnership. Just because I mean I can see it having some sort of consumer appeal but I think it’s mostly a business appeal. Me personally, carrying around a 12” tablet no matter how thin and light it is doesn’t appeal to me, because I might as well just carry around a MacBook.

Leo: It’s not clutchable.

Jason: There are a lot of artists who will be really excited to have a bigger screen and maybe integrated tablet like a pen, stylus functionality.

Christina: Of course.

Leo: Dylan’s using that Surface right now. And cartoonists love the Surface.

Dylan: I’m coming to you on a Surface Pro 3 right now. I have to say, there are things about this that I really, really like. I’ve been using it as my primary computer for the last 3 or 4 weeks. And it is lighter than a MacBook Air to carry around. It’s lighter and thinner. You can pop off the keyboard. You can use it as a tablet. It’s a little bit heavier than an iPad. Noticeably heavier. So it’s not the ideal tablet. But it’s really good for is the pen. Like using the pen with this is like, you know, drawing, I can take notes really quickly. The keyboard is ok. So it does a pretty good job of being sort of a general purpose switch between reading longer form things, or browsing the web, or taking some quick notes in OneNote. Or setting it up and typing and doing e-mail for a while. Like it kind of works. So I can see how an iPad Pro with a larger screen and some type of type cover could actually be really functional for some people. Because I will say this—

Leo: The Surface Pro 3. I could see Apple backing off on the iPad Pro because they’re going to say, “Well, you’re just copying the Surface Pro 3.”

Christina: Oh the problem never is—

Dylan: The opening for Apple, I’m sorry Christina. The opening for Apple I think is you’re still running Windows, right? Even with Windows 10, which is way, way better than what went before, 8.1, its way better. But like everything that Microsoft makes, it’s got all kinds of little tiny annoying bugs that eventually they are going to get ironed out I’m sure. But in the meantime are just frustrating and weird and janky. And they’ll never go away completely.

Leo: Well, there you have it. What is the feature of the new iPhone that is going to make everybody say, even if they have an iPhone 6 or 6 Plus, “God, I have to have that?”

John: Apparently nothing. It’s not necessary.

Leo: I don’t hear anything.

John: And it’s not necessary.

Jason: Most people aren’t upgrading from a 6. That’s the reality.

Christina: That’s true.

Jason: We in the tech talking community here, we always think, “Well, how much better is it than the last one?” But most people are upgrading from the one before that or the one before that, two or three years later.

Leo: Although that behavior is going to change. T-Mobile for instance says, “Buy whatever iPhone you want, just pay $15 a month and when the new one comes out, we’ll just swap ya.” No new cost.

Jason: Yea, you just got to pay more over time in order to do that.

Leo: Well you have to continue to pay $15 a month. I wonder if that will happen, if it will be faster upgrade cycle.

Jason: It will probably have more RAM and be faster.

Leo: It will be faster.

Jason: So a lot of people won’t care about that. It will have the Force Touch thing. Who knows, there may be some other little bit of hardware in there, the camera will be upgrade or something.

Leo: Better camera. 8 megapixels is starting to look a little anemic in the current crop of phones.

Jason: But the iPhone camera is good.

Christina: Yea, it’s a great camera. But if they did 10, if they did something else. I mean, yea, I think better camera. Maybe they promise better battery life with the combination of iOS 9. That could be something they could push to people.

Leo: This camera thing.

Christina: But it’s a great point that Jason makes, is that most people are not upgrading from the 6. They’re going from the 5 or the 5S. In that case you’re getting the bigger device. You’re getting the Apple Pay stuff. You’re getting the Force Touch. And I think a lot of people will be pretty happy with that.

John: Ah. Now you just got back from a long trip in Europe

Leo: Yes.

John: So did you take all your photos with your iPhone 6?

Leo: I brought a Galaxy S6 Edge and an iPhone 6.

John: So when I go to the—

Leo: And all the pictures I took were with my Sony of course, with a camera.

John: An actual camera?

Leo: A few pictures were taken with a camera phone.

Jason: I just took a 10 day road trip with my family—

Leo: And you didn’t bring a camera.

Jason: We didn’t bring the SLR. We just brought our iPhone cameras and it was fine.

John: You know once you get addicted to HDR…

Leo: And zoom for instance is something you can’t do very well with a camera phone.

Jason: That’s where it fell down. That’s where I thought I wish this was closer and it just wasn’t.

John: I’m telling you, HDR is the greatest thing ever.

Leo: You just discovered that, did you?

John: Well I knew about it before because I used to have an old Sigma and that kind of had all that.

Leo: So you shoot like 3 images at a time?

John: 5.

Leo: 5.

John: I’d try 7, you get black and it’s useless.

Leo: 5’s good.

John: 5’s good.

Leo: 5’s good. 2 stops apart? 1 stop apart?

John: 2.

Leo: 2. Yea, 5’s plenty.

John: And this little guy here, and I think –

Leo: Using OM?

John: No, I got the little one.

Leo: The pen.

John: Yea, the little bitty one.

Leo: The Olympus.

John: It has, it’s all—it has an HDR setting so you can shoot as many as you want.

Leo: Right, right.

John: Which I’m sure the Sony does.

Leo: The world has bifurcated between people who will only use a camera phone and people who want, who are willing to spend time, because HDR, you still have to spend time post processing. Willing to spend more time in that area. They are more serious about their images. But most people, remember most people used instamatics for years.

Christina: Exactly.

John: That’s the equivalent of what you’ve got with a phone. That’s a snapshot device.

Christina: Exactly. And it’s instant. You don’t have to get your film developed. But yea, you’re right. Most people used instamatics. Or they used Polaroids. Or they used the cameras. Which is fantastic.

Leo: So for that group, which is 90% probably, that’s good enough. And frankly, 6, oh I’m sorry, 8 megapixels is probably good enough as well. I don’t see people lobbying for more megapixels.

Christina: No I mean because we kind of learned that it’s the sensor size rather than the megapixel count to a certain extent. I mean having more can help at a certain level, but I mean it’s really the sensor count. And Apple to their credit, they’ve done a really great job this year with the campaign. You know, “Shot on an iPhone” or “Made on an iPhone.”

Leo: No kidding. Those are beautiful images.

Christina: Which is fantastic. Especially when they blow them up and they put them out in the stores. And some of that work when you actually see them blown up, it’s amazing what they’ve been able to do. And obviously there’s post processing involved and there’s other stuff and it’s really good photographers. But that’s just proof right there that these things can take really amazing photographs.

Leo: We got to hurry up because John’s leaving. The traffic for his commute home—

Jason: Well he got here late, he could always leave early.

John: It will only help.

Jason: That’s true.

Leo: So you’re going to wait until that red turns green and then go?

John: I’m listening to the conversation and I just happened to have this page up that shows the traffic coming out of here is terrible.

Leo: Terrible. So everybody, let’s do a long show. What do you say?

John: Yes, let’s go for the 3 hours.

Leo: 4 hours. 5 hours. Let’s go.

John: I can do a long show. Long shows are good.

Leo: You know, no one—very rarely do I get e-mails saying, “I wish that show were shorter.” But of course my feeling is probably what really happens is that people just stop listening when they’ve had enough.

John: When they feel like it. But they can always fast forward.

Leo: So really the show could be any length at all. Whatever you feel like. You don’t have to fast forward, just stop.

John: I’ve been watching Screen Savers.

Leo: How do you like that?

John: I have some thoughts.

Leo: Will you come in and be a co-host on the show?

John: As soon as I get the Vinegar book done.

Leo: Good, I want you to do Vinegar.

John: You want some thoughts on the show?

Leo: Sure.

John: Well a couple of things. I think the show for starters, and just to be honest—

Leo: No, be honest.

John: I like, I think it should be a little tighter. There’s too much chitchat like on this show which is fine. And it should be a little longer. I think tighter and longer.

Leo: And longer? Interesting.

John: Yea I think it’s really a 2 hour show.

Leo: No, I actually agree with you because it’s more like a TV show where this is really just a radio show or something.

John: I also thing that, yes, it’s a radio show. So I think a little tighter and longer would be a plus.

Leo: Tighter and longer. Yea.

John: Now if I wanted to get into little details, I could bring a couple of ideas in.

Leo: Yea, please.

John: So I listen to a lot of podcasts. Because we have the stream the No Agenda stream which puts random podcasts on besides ours.

Leo: Oh, that’s nice. Do you ever put any of our shows on there?

John: We’ve never been given permission or we never thought about it. But I would love to put a couple shows on. I think Security Now is an outstanding product.

Leo: Great show.

John: And I really, and I’ve said this before, I really like Scott’s show.

Leo: Wilkinson.

John: Wilkinson.

Leo: Home Theatre Geeks.

John: Totally geeky show. It’s great.

Leo: Yea, hey you like the geeky shows. You should. Those are good.

John: What’s kind of missing is that—anyway, I ran into Andy Ihnatko has this show that--

Leo: Ihnatko’s Almanac.

John: Yes. Ihnatko has some weird, is kind of an interesting character when he starts talking. And I know it sounds way too geeky but he actually got—It’s somehow entertaining when he talks about comic books.

Leo: Yea, because he loves them. As you do too, Jason Snell.

John: And I think your network is not serving, I guess you could call it the comic book space.

Leo: Oh my God. That’s absolutely intentional.

John: You should put—

Leo: That is absolutely a conscious decision on my part.

John: You should put a –

Leo: The comic book space does not need us.

John: I think that Ihnatko could do a small segment on the Screen Savers that would be fascinating.

Leo: All right. We will do a comic book space.

John: There we go. Ok.

Leo: No, we used to send people to Comic Con and stuff. And you know what I realized? Is there, we are for a tech enthusiast who is really interested in technology, computing, hardware, that kind of thing. And a lot of people conflate that with the geek culture side of it.

John: Conflate. There’s a word I don’t use.

Jason: It’s a good word. It’s not a vegetable.

Leo: I may be using it incorrectly. But anyway.

Jason: No, you got it, you got it.

John: Seems right.

Jason: And there’s overlap. We can get the Venn diagram.

Leo: There’s a set diagram, there’s some overlap. But there’s not enough overlap for me to do it.

John: The comic books? The comic book space?

Leo: Yea, I think it’s important for us to stick to our niche, to really have a laser-like focus. So you know what you get here. We used to due Current Geek Weekly. We used to do some of that stuff. And it never did very well for us.

John: Oh. Huh. That surprises me.

Leo: We had a Cord Cutter show, Framerate.

John: I thought people would just be fascinated by some of this comic book chitchat. I think that’s—

Jason: Well there’s some overlap.

John: Well you’re a comic book guy.

Jason: So I’ve got a whole network of geek culture shows, the Incomparable, right? When I left my job and decided to start up my own tech podcast, I went to a tech podcast network to Relay FM. Because I didn’t want to mix the 2. Because I felt like they are different. And there are people who are Sci-Fi and fantasy and comic book geeks who are not tech geeks. And the reverse is also true.

Leo: I also think the comic book segment is well served. Very well served.

John: I don’t pay much attention to it.

Jason: It is.

Leo: It is. It’s highly well served. I also feel like a fascination with superheroes and comic books is somewhat infantile.

John: You think?

Leo: Yes.

John: Huh. I would have never thought that of you.

Jason: You’re out of the club.

Leo: (Laughing).

John: I’ve always felt that you would—

Jason: Get out. This podcast is over.

John: You would have been totally into that whole thing with the capes and the tights and the whole thing.

Leo: I am never doing cosplay. I am never doing cosplay, sorry.

John: Leo into cosplay.

Leo: I’m an old fart. I’m not that interested in that stuff.

John: You once promised Jolie O’Dell on a show that you would do all that stuff for her.

Leo: You know I say yes to anything Jolie asks. I do, I just say, “Yes, dear. Whatever you want.”

John: All right. That was my input and that’s it.

Leo: Our show today brought to you by Gazelle. As you get ready for maybe a new iPhone, a new Samsung phone or gosh a new tablet. You’re probably wondering, “What will I do with my loving old tablet or old phone?” You could just throw it in the drawer but that would be like throwing 100 dollar bills in the drawer, nuts. Nuts. In fact worse, because at least a hundred dollar bill is going to kind of hold its value. That smart phone is depreciating by the minute. Go now my friends. Hie thee to Gazelle.com and get a quote on your old gadgets. It is never going to be worth as much as it is right now. Now the nice thing is, is that quote’s locked in for 30 days so by the time the new iPhone comes out or the new phone you want is available, you’ll know. Am I going to do this or not? There’s no commitment except from Gazelle that they will give you that price. So do it right now. Get all your stuff. Get all your gadgets. Get the quotes. When you decide it’s time to sell you press the button. They send you a box pre-paid. They pay the postage on anything worth more than a buck. The turnaround is fast. They will wipe your data if you forget to do that. I do recommend you do that, but sometimes you know, they buy broken iPhones or iPads. You can’t. They will. They will also send you a check or a PayPal credit or an Amazon card. By the way they bumped the price of that by 5%. And you know, you’re going to basically fund that next purchase by selling the old stuff. Gazelle. They’ve paid out nearly 200 million dollars to over a million customers. Now you may wonder what happens to the stuff that Gazelle gets? Well some of it they recycle. Some they sell on EBay. But the very best stuff they sell on their site. This is something new. Gazelle sells high quality, used devices. Certified pre-owned. There are two levels. There’s the certified like new which is basically new. And there’s certified good. Those might show some gentle signs of wear but you’re going to save even more money. Every device that Gazelle sells is backed up in 2 ways. First of all, they’ve been put through a very vigorous, 30 point inspection. They are fully functional. The screens are clean. There’s no scratches. These things are nice, sweet, in great shape. And they’re backed by a 30 day risk free return policy. So for whatever reason you’re not happy, you just send it back, they’ll send you your money back. Gazelle.com. Do it right now. Get that quote because I’m telling you, your stuff’s not going to be worth more tomorrow.

John: That’s true.

Leo: Gazelle.com Have you ever seen a gadget appreciate?

John: Never. Well maybe, actually—

Leo: Like some cars will appreciate.

John: Yes, the box of parts, the bag of parts that says Apple 1 has appreciated.

Leo: That has appreciated but you had to wait a long time for that.

Jason: The 20th Anniversary Macintosh too which almost nobody bought.

Leo: I have one over there.

Jason: Those are worth a lot more now.

Leo: Really? Are those worth money?

Christina: Yea, they are.

Jason: It is.

Christina: Oh yea, it’s like 7 grand on EBay.

John: 7 grand. Well that’s a big deal to you.

Jason: Keep waiting.

Leo: I’m waiting for 100 grand. What did that Apple 1 sell for? 3 million or something like that?

Christina: Something like that, yea.

John: I think it was $250,000.

Christina: A friend of mine has a—

John: Oh this.

Jason: Spartacus.

John: Ok, I got one. So what about the—

Leo: By the way there is nothing in here that will do anything. The processer and everything is in the subwoofer. Remember that, in the subwoofer?

Jason: The Bose subwoofer.

Christina: Oh that’s right, that’s right.

Leo: Via this.

Jason: Oh, so you don’t have the subwoofer?

Leo: No, I have the subwoofer.

Jason: Ok.

Leo: It’s just too heavy to bring over here. Look at the size of this cable.

Jason: Oh, here it is.

John: Here comes the subwoofer.

Leo: Here comes John with my subwoofer. Here, Jason, will you hold that for me?

Christina: So fun fact. That was the very first computer Johnny Ives ever designed for Apple.

John: Subwoofer or CPU?

Leo: This was a Johnny Ives. And that’s probably why it’s worth the money, right? All right, this is the big moment.

Christina: No, I think it’s just—

Leo: This is like when Tim Cook touched Bano’s finger.

John: Yea, you guys have to get married now.

Leo: Ohhhhhhh.

John: Yea, fantastic.

Jason: Come one, Spartacus. You can do it. I think it’s really meant for one person to do by themselves.

Leo: I think it’s connected.

Jason: No it’s not.

John: Now you can’t pull it apart. You guys can’t get it apart.

Jason: There you go.

Dylan: I cannot un-see that.

Leo: (Laughing) Wait until you see the animated GIFs that are going to appear on Twitter after this. That’s worth 7 grand.

John: Even though the guy that invented that—

Leo: Does it have to be functional?

Jason: I think it helps but it doesn’t have to be.

John: Now you’re going to break it.

Leo: Not anymore. Apple is delaying, according to Bloomberg Business Week, live TV service. The negotiations still not going. That’s why I think finally they said, “Let’s just ship that Apple TV.”

Christina: Yea, exactly. Plus I think the longer they wait, like the cheaper it’s going to get for them to get those deals.

Leo: You think?

Christina: Yes.

Leo: Like the cable companies, the networks. They’re all going to realize they’re screwed. They should make a deal with Apple.

Christina: Basically. I mean I think the longer that it takes, the more their subscriber numbers fall, the more their other services don’t pick up and the more they go, “Actually ok, fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine. You’ve got us over a barrel.”

Jason: Anytime Apple tries to make a deal, whether they’re the 1st ones to do it, at this point and entertainment company is going to say, “Uh oh. Apple is trying to screw us.”

Leo: We saw that happen before.

Jason: Right?

Leo: We’ve read that book.

Jason: So a lot of these unbundling deals are going to happen and then by the time Apple makes their final deal it won’t be so weird.

Leo: Yea. Interestingly, NBC Universal / Comcast has beefed up its investment in Vox which bought Re/code and does the Verge and does SB Nation. They’ve beefed up their investment in, is it BuzzFeed?

Christina: BuzzFeed. Yea.

Leo: And I think that these companies thinking is, “No, no, no, no. We’re not going to go the Apple route. We’re going to re-invent ourselves. We’re going to become a contact company for the internet. And these guys are going to show us how to do it.”

Christina: Yea, good luck with that.

John: Good luck.

Leo: Who did Verizon buy? Verizon bought AOL.

Christina: Verizon bought AOL.

Leo: Same thing, right?

Christina: I’m not saying they won’t be successful with some of the content. My question is, are they going to be successful by creating a venue called Watchable where you’ll watch—

Leo: Oh my God, that looks horrible.

Christina: It does look horrible. And so, and as someone who works at Mashable I was a little annoyed by the name. But our lawyers—no I’m kidding. But no, I mean it seems to me odd, it makes complete sense that you would invest in these companies because they’re the future of content. And obviously, especially if you’re NBC, your content is not doing well anywhere, right? So you invest where content is succeeding. But it doesn’t make sense that you would think that all of a sudden you could create—like what are they going to do, create a traditional television channel for this stuff? That’s not going to work.

Leo: It’s not internet. That’s what’s so weird about this. You will have to have a Comcast set top box.

Christina: Right.

John: What about Roku?

Leo: You’ll have to have the X1. No, it’s for the X1 system.

John: What about the Roku?

Leo: No.

John: That’s dumb.

Leo: It’s so dumb.

Dylan: Lame. Really lame.

Christina: You have to subscribe to actual cable. It’s not enough just to have Comcast internet you’re going to have to have—I mean look, the X1 is kind of an amazing box. I won’t lie.

Leo: No, mine’s horrible. No, no, no, no, no. Mine is a nightmare. First of all the hard drive’s going “Heee heeeeee heeeee.”

John: That makes your TV watching experience dynamite.

Leo: And the idea is that you have one DVR and then satellite units everywhere else. They never—and for a long time for some reason, the Comcast box didn’t know I had HBO. So every time I tried to watch, I could watch HBO but if I wanted On Demand they’d say, “No, you don’t have a subscription.” Well, what am I watching here?

John: That’s no good.

Leo: The thing is a piece of crap, exactly as you’d expect from Comcast. So now they’re partnering with, besides Vox and BuzzFeed, Awesomeness TV, Refinery 29 and the Onion. News sites like Mic and Vice. Mic is M-I-C not M-I-K-E.

Christina: Yea.

Leo: And NBC Sports. And this they say is to rival – now I don’t know if they say this or this is what the media is saying—to rival YouTube and Facebook. But it’s not internet.

Christina: No it’s not. That’s the thing. Nobody, no millennial that they’re—the audience that they’re going after. They’re going after cord cutters and increasingly what’s scary—

Leo: But if you’re a cord cutter, you don’t have Comcast.

Christina: This is my point. This is my point. Not only that—

John: It’s so stupid.

Christina: Exactly. But not only that, there’s an even scarier demographic that’s coming up called cord never. So these are people that once the graduate from college, never bother to subscribe to cable at all. Like I’m weird for someone in my age group where I actually subscribe to cable TV and that’s because I—

Leo: What?

Christina: I do. And I love it and I’m not going to get rid of it and it’s fine. I spend $250 a month on cable and internet.

Leo: What?

Dylan: Wow.

Leo: What?

John: Do you have any money?

Leo: Is that Cablevision though?

John: Do you have any money?

Leo: Who’s your cable company?

Christina: Optimum.

Leo: She’s obviously way overpaid by Mashable.

Christina: Clearly.

John: It’s because of –

Leo: No, no. I was kidding you.

Christina: I’m dual income, no kids, ok?

Leo: And you have your priorities, right? You know what you want. You want Game of Thrones and fashion forward watch bands.

Christina: That’s exactly it.

John: And no money.

Dylan: And The Bachelor.

Christina: And The Bachelor, yea.

Leo: But they’re DINKs

Christina: But we’re DINKs, so yea. Dual income, no kids. It makes it a lot easier.

John: Boy I haven’t heard that for years.

Dylan: See the problem with cutting the cord is that you miss out on a lot of stuff that other people are talking about. Like the fabulous Republican Primary Debate.

Leo: I agree. I think more people—

Dylan: You couldn’t watch that if you didn’t have cable. And Silicon Valley. Like everybody says Silicon Valley, talking about HBO.

John: Mr. Robot.

Jason: That comes over the top.

Leo: Mr. Robot, the USA Network.

Christina: Mr. Robot is a great show.

Leo: I feel like really, the truth is, while we pay a lot of attention to cord cutters and cord nevers, as soon as they get enough money they’re going to get cable (laughing).

Jason: I feel like the time line here is going to pretty simple. I’m cutting the cord and Comcast will be like, “All right. We’re sorry to see you go. But you know, we’re really your only high speed internet option, right?” And like, “No, no, I’m not cutting the cord literally, just the TV. I don’t want the TV.” And like, “All right.” A little time passes and then Comcast calls you and says, “Hey. Do you know that there are all these TV services that happen over the internet?” And you’re like, “Oh, yea, yea. I’ve heard about those.” “We could send you a box.” “All right.” And at that point you’ve got, you’ve cut the cord except now you have a cable box in your house.

Leo: And a $250 a month bill.

John: Get a Roku.

Christina: In fairness, we have like 100MB internet and we can run a server from our house. And we do. So, you know.

Leo: But this is, you know, everybody wants this. Everybody wants more choices. They want more content. They don’t want less content. They want to watch the Republican Debates. They want to watch Mr. Robot. And they want to watch their Roku. And so I think the trend is really in the – and by the way, cord cutting doesn’t, as everybody’s learning, save you money. Because by the time you buy HBO Now and you buy Sling TV and you’ve bought your internet, you’ve spent the same amount of money.

Christina: You might as well just get cable.

John: Or get the Dish Network. What’s wrong with that? That’s a great service. I love The Dish.

Leo: Because you don’t get Comcast Watchable.

John: I don’t want Watchable.

Leo: By the way Verizon is rumored to be doing the same thing.

Christina: Of course they are. Of course they are.

Leo: But what is happening here? I understand—it makes perfect sense. First of all, this is the same thing the music industry did, right? They said, “Ok, we’re not—our business model, we’re going to go kicking and freaking screaming and we’re going to do everything we can and partner with everybody we can to just maintain this business model.” Which is why Spotify is allowed to exist, which is why iTunes is allowed to exist. And then on the part of the content creators, well why not? It’s just one more platform that doesn’t cost me anything. It’s not an exclusive deal I would presume. Verizon’s deal will be called, according to Variety, G90. This is Janko Roettgers, one of the Gigaom refugees who’s a great media analyst and networks for Variety. Go90. It will be a mobile service launching they say this summer which is like almost over, so they better hurry.

Christina: Yea, I was going to say, so yea.

Leo: Full episodes of TV shows from select networks as well as music videos. It sounds a lot like Hulu. And short form content.

John: Sounds worse.

Leo: The service will be, how do you like this John, free of charge.

John: Nice.

John: Yea, everything’s free. Sure.

Christina: So by select networks they mean networks that no one wants to watch, right?

John. Yes.

Leo: Awesomeness TV, Vice—it’s the same networks.

Christina: Again, so ok, yea.

Leo: Mic (laughing).

John: It’s the same crap. So I have a little piece of advice for people who use the Roku. Has anyone gone and found the private channels?

Christina: Yes, those are so good.

Leo: What are those, John?

John: Well like the Pear Network.

Leo: The what network? The Pear Network?

John: You want to get the Pear Network.

Leo: Is it all about fruit? That’s a very token laugh but I think you for it anyway.

John: You’re welcome. The Pear Network is like a software bust that you can put other channels on. And the Pear Network you can get—

Leo: P-A-I-R?

John: P-E-A-R like pear, just like you thought.

Leo: Like pear. All right.

John: And once you get on Pear, you put Pear as one of your channels, and then when you go to that, there’s sub-channels under that. It’s dynamite.

Leo: So you go to the Roku store to get that?

John: No.

Leo: No I don’t.

John: You have to find—

Christina: No you have to go through the private channel.

John: Yea and there’s codes. You have to find the code for it and then the Roku has this rigmarole that you go through and you have to go through your system. It’s actually complicated. But once you get—

Leo: Basically you add them manually.

John: Yes.

Leo: There’s adult video. There’s all sorts of stuff.

John: There’s all sorts of stuff on private. But you could load--

Leo: Is there a directory somewhere I could find all that stuff?

John: No.

Christina: Well, no, somebody maintains one on some of the forums.

John: But they’re all lame.

Leo: Rokuguide.com Hey there’s the stoner channel.

John: Yes.

Leo: A 420 video platform featuring cannabis-related content. Or the Ex-Mormon Files – a collection of personal stories from Ex-Mormons.

John: Ah yea, that’s fascinating.

Leo: Illusions Demo. 13, count them, 13 optical illusions.

John: There’s a lot of stuff that’s crap. But –

Leo: Peru TV.

John: There’s a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff.

Christina: There’s so much stuff, yea.

John: IT is outrageous how much stuff there is.

Leo: There are literally several thousands of private channels.

Christina: Oh, yea, and there’s lots of it that’s like not cool, that’s basically piracy.

Leo: Does Roku know about this?

John: Yes.

Christina: Oh yes of course they do. Of course they do.

John: Because they have to give you a code to allow it to show up on their box.

Christina: In fact before they had official YouTube. I mean it took them years to get the YouTube deal, there was an unofficial channel for YouTube that you could get that used to like seed journalists.

Leo: Oh I bet—here’s one that Adam loves. Listen to police, fire and amateur radio broadcasts.

John: What would you say—why are you besmirching Adam who gave you a big send off at the awards show?

Leo: No, I bet he likes this. I bet he likes this. On the Mike, music celebrity driven weekly television show. The Nowhere Archive. Audio books, TV, music and more from the Internet Archive.

John: Yea.

Leo: That’s cool. You could watch every episode of The Computer Chronicle. Including the famous John C. Dvorak episodes.

John: Right, where I take the machine apart.

Leo: Oh yea. Weather Graphics, radar and satellite loops.

John: Fantastic.

Leo: But you know? If you have a TV on, it’s kind of fun to put that stuff on there.

John: Sometimes. What I like, especially because the Pear Network has a really great feed, they’ve got HBO, they’ve got Showtime, and these feeds come from some kid.

Leo: That’s not legal.

John: There’s some kid in Vietnam that’s got the HBO system because it’s all Vietnam subtitles. And he’s feeding it.

Leo: Where do I find out more about the Pear Network?

John: Just dig around, you’ll find it.

Leo: Channel Pear. Cloud based live streaming discovery channel, Channelpear.com.

John: That’s it. I think that would be it.

Leo: Works with most major browsers and the following devices: Roku, Plex, KODI. We’re putting them out of business as we speak, don’t you think?

Christina: I’m sure they’re based in a country where none of this stuff applies.

Leo: Ah.

Christina: I mean think about it.

John: This is for cord cutters. The Pear Network is perfect. But what I like—

Dylan: I’m totally signing up for this. This is great.

John: One of the best—

Leo: Wait a minute, they actually charge money.

John: No, no, no. Don’t pay attention to the money. It’s free. What you want, the good one is that you can get all the good, you get a number of outstanding Canadian feeds. I know that’s kind of—sounds idiotic.

Leo: No, no, no, no, no. That’s nothing like that.

John: But you can get CTV-Edmonton, which is outstanding. And you can get Global Toronto and outstanding product. Outstanding.

Leo: They’ve got Showtime on here.

John: Well the Showtime, believe me.

Leo: They have HBO on here.

John: Yea they do.

Leo: They’ve got basically, this is my cable line-up they have on here.

John: Yea.

Leo: Wow.

Christina: And what’s funny is a lot of times it will come in clearer than it will from your cable.

John: Yea, sometimes. The BBC stuff for sure comes better through Pear than it does through Roku straight. Anyway, that’s your tip of the week, ladies and gentlemen.

Leo: Channel Pear. P-E-A-R.com. Lot of them are from Vietnam. Wigs is agreeing. You know I think that frankly everybody who watches this network already knew about them except me.

John: That’s what it sounds like.

Leo: Wow. So Apple meanwhile is trying to negotiate legitimate deals with these people and—

Christina: Right.

John: They have to go up against this. It’s a nightmare.

Christina: Well the thing is well no, they can make this, they can make theirs easy. You just talked about you know—one you get it set up it’s fine. But it’s sort of a pain in the butt to setup some of these cord cutting solutions. So the real opportunity is for people that have the money but are just too lazy or scared to jump through the various hoops.

Leo: Don’t you think Facebook is going to be moving in big time on something like this? And has maybe a better shot at it than Apple or anybody else?

John: Facebook TV?

Christina: They don’t have the hardware. I meant they’re not in your living room already. Like Apple can sell you an Apple TV box and you’ve already got your phone and your iPad. Like Facebook is—

Leo: How hard is it to make hardware that will do this, though?

Christina: Yea but the problem is, who wants to buy yet another box? I mean I think they could but I just feel like having a product in the living room is why Amazon and Google and Apple are ahead.

Leo: Why does—so Facebook for instance, like I can’t get away. Ricky Gervais has invaded my Facebook feed.

John: Why?

Leo: Because he’s – oh so, this Facebook Mentions, which is this thing that was only open to celebrities who are verified, right?

Christina: Yes.

Leo: And I tried to get and I’m verified. But they say, “You know, you have to have a verified page, you can’t have a verified profile.”

Christina: You have to have a verified page. They are going to be opening it up to individuals who have verified profiles. Like journalists and people like you and I.

John: Why would you want to be involved?

Christina: Because you can have a Periscope-like feature.

Leo: And it’s right in the stream. So every time Ricky Gervais goes live, I’m seeing Ricky Gervais. Tray Radcliffe is using it for his photo wall.

John: Can’t you just block him?

Christina: Pete Cashmore is doing it.

Leo: Is Pete doing it? Of course Pete’s doing it because Pete was all over Meerkat when Meerkat came out.

Christina: Yep. Sure was.

Leo: Yea.

John: Can’t you just block it?

Christina: We had –

Leo: You could, but the point is it’s very engaging and this is a valuable, valuable thing.

John: Well if it’s valuable why are you complaining about it?

Leo: I’m not.

John: Well it sounds like you are.

Christina: He just wants it. He wants it.

John: Oh, you want to be annoying just like Ricky Gervais.

Leo: No, I’m not complaining at all. I’m pointing out—well, Gervais is annoying, but yea, you could block him—what I’m pointing out is that Facebook is doing, is up to something here, right?

Christina: Yes.

John: They’re always up to something.

Leo: But the problem is they can never stick with anything, can they?

John: One of these days they’re going to.

Leo: One of these days they’re going to nail it. A billion and a half users nail it? Do you think that’s true? That they have a billion and a half users?

John: I think they have a billion and a half subscribers or however you want to describe that.

Leo: They say monthly active users.

John: I doubt it.

Christina: Yea, I believe that.

Jason: I believe it.

Christina: I believe that.

Dylan: I believe it, yea.

Leo: I’ve been using it more actually. I like it.

Christina: I mean especially if you put all of the properties together.

Leo: Oh yea, because they have Instagram, they have WhatsApp.

John: Well Instagram, if you’re going to add Instagram then yes, no problem.

Leo: Instagram is only 300 million users.

John: Yea but Instagram is where the action is. That’s where it’s headed.

Christina: And WhatsApp too. So I mean they definitely have a billion and a half across all the properties. No question.

Leo: A billion and a half.

John: Yea, give them something to do.

Leo: Our show today brought to you by Lynda.com. They don’t have a billion and a half monthly active users but they do have 3,000+ on demand video courses that you will love to help to strengthen your business, your technology, your creative skills. We love to learn don’t we? I think that’s a human condition. And Lynda makes it easy. By paying one flat rate for every single video on the site, you get to choose what you’re in the mood for. You want to learn more about Windows 10 today? They’ve got essential training, ProTools 12 Essential Training. They’ve got soft business courses like Creating Customer Value, Building a Resume, Negotiating a Deal. If you’re into After Effects, you should be. That would be a great—you’d get a job in a minute if you’re an After Effects guru. They’ve got After Effects 2015 Essential Training. They just released a course, a series of courses on Office 2016 and Office 365 for the Mac. They’ve got great courses on photography. So for your hobby, for your business, for your pleasure it’s great. L-Y-N-D-A.com. You’re going to learn not just-- you’re going to learn from people that are great teachers, but not just great teachers. They’re working in the field. They’re experts. The Photography courses are by people like some of the great photographers we’ve had on the show. Including the wonderful Burt Monroy. There’s no one better to teach you Photo Shop. You’ll learn at your own pace. You can watch beginning to end or just dip your toe into little bits at a time. You can download the tutorials and watch them on the go on the iOS or Android platforms. Learn at your own pace. I love it. It’s great. In fact, we’re going to give you a 10 day trial so you can really see all the different stuff at Lynda.com. L-Y-N-D-A.com/twit2. That’s Lynda.com/twit and the number 2 and you can sign up right there for 10 days free. You’ve got the run of the place. It’s a great place to go, to learn, to enjoy. I love it. We’re talking the week’s tech news. We’re kind of wrapping it up here. Dylan Tweney is here. Great to have you. Dylan of course is a contributing editor, right? A venture columnist?

John: No, he’s the boss.

Leo: Are you the boss? He’s the boss of Tweney Media.

Dylan: Yea, I’m not the boss of VentureBeat anymore. I’m just a columnist.

John: What happened? You used to be the boss.

Dylan: Yea. I left after 4 years and doing my own thing now. Consulting and freelancing.

Leo: I love that.

John: Why did you leave?

Leo: Because everybody’s—Look at Jason here. Everybody’s doing that.

Jason: Same thing. I think I’m ready for MacWorld more now than I was in the last few years that I was in charge.

Leo: John, you never had a job did you? Were you ever on staff anywhere?

John: Yea I was at the air pollution district. I worked at Union Oil. I had a lot of jobs when I was a kid.

Jason: So when I was in journalism school, he actually came and spoke at my tech journalism class.

Leo: And what did he tell you?

Jason: Editors are evil.

John: Oh you were in that class at Cal?

Jason: That John Markoff taught. Editors are evil.

John: Yes, that’s what I said. I put it on the board.

Jason: Yep.

John: That was the Editors are Evil lecture, yes.

Leo: What else did he tell you? Did he say go out on your own? Don’t work for anybody?

Jason: That is the thing that I remember the most is that editors are evil.

John: Are very evil.

Leo: And then you became an editor.

Jason: Promptly became an editor. Yes, absolutely.

John: Well, he wanted to be evil.

Jason: At the place where John was writing the back page column.

Leo: You were his editor.

Jason: I was not his editor.

Leo: Oh. All right.

Jason: They shielded the young minds from John.

Leo: Why do you think editors are evil?

John: It was a long—he would better explain it than I could.

Leo: Because it was a long time ago.

John: I remember doing it. It used to be a pitch I had. And there was a reason for it. There was a good reason.

Leo: Editors are evil and mics suck.

John: It was mostly for the benefit of the students to get them a sense of things. It wasn’t like this generality for normal people.

Leo: Right. Right. Everybody needs a good editor. Even I.

John: Well, you in particular.

Leo: (Laughing). AT&T has been extremely helpful I’m proud to say.

Jason: Interesting.

Leo: When the NSA comes to call, the National Security Agency even said in a recently disclosed NSA documents that their relationship with AT&T has been, is unique and is especially productive. One document described AT&T as “highly collaborative.” Another lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.”

Jason: Finally good customer service from AT&T.

John: Not that they’re a customer.

Jason: Do you think they get the little pop up where it’s like, “Hi, I’m Mary. I’m your customer service representative. What can I do for you?” This is the NSA and I would like some help.

Leo: One document reminds NSA officials, “Be polite when visiting AT&T facilities.” Quoting “This is a partnership, not a contractual relationship.” AT&T’s budget was hire with the NSA than any other phone company. They have more taps in the NSA’s internet centers across the country than any other company. Twice as many as the next biggest, Verizon. In fact the NSA helped, I’m sorry, AT&T helped the NSA bug the United Nations, guaranteeing that every bit of internet traffic in and out of the UN would go through the NSA.

Christina: Wow.

John: What a great company.

Leo: (Laughing). Amazing documents. This is stuff that came out recently from, of course, Edward Snowden, jointly reviewed by the New York Times and ProPublica. The NSA, AT&T and Verizon declined to discuss the findings in the files.

Christina: Jesus.

John: Let’s just bring a spokesperson out and yell, “Lies!”

Leo: The company installed surveillance equipment in at least 17 of its internet hubs on American soil. Just because the NSA asked. You know, they’re glad to do it.

John: Yea, they’re friendly.

Leo: You know I can actually understand that because once you come to the point of you that look, the NSA is trying to protect us from terrorists, domestic terrorism. Then you want to help them.

John: They’ve done such a good job. There’s never—there hasn’t been any events.

Leo: Yea, look. They’ve been good. This is good for us. It’s good for all of us. I like the illustration on ProPublica which is the eagle on the seal of the NSA, the National Security Agency, with the AT&T death star as its eye.

Jason: Death star.

Leo: You know what’s funny, we have nothing to say about this do we?

John: Yea, I’ve got something to say.

Jason: Didn’t we already, it’s just a matter of degrees, right?

John: But nobody, you get tired of it after a while.

Leo: After a while, we know it’s true.

John: But you always knew it was true.

Leo: No you always liked—

Jason: Hey United Nations, what part of American Telephone & Telegraph did you not understand?

Christina: Yea, seriously. I just love that, you know, I mean, you know, what it’s Verizon and AT&T which of course both used to be AT&T until we split them apart because of monopoly rules. And yet—

Leo: Well there has been competition between the 2 companies to see who can be nicer to the NSA. I think that’s--

Christina: I was going to say, exactly.

Leo: Competition is good.

Christina: Yea, absolutely.

Leo: You’ve also been a fan of Kaspersky Anti-Virus. You always recommended them, Moscow based.

John: That was years ago.

Leo: Well, yea it was actually.

John: But I know the company and I think I’ve always kind of been a fan until probably —I probably stopped using them about 6 or 7 years ago.

Leo: You know in fact there was a great Google study where they interviewed security experts and normal people to see the differences. And one of the things normal people to a man almost said, “You got to have a good anti-virus.” One of the few things that security experts never said is “You got to have a good anti-virus.” People think an anti-virus is helpful. Of course in this day and age with zero day exploits it’s not particularly useful. But according to—and you know, I want to really qualify this, this is a Reuters story—according to former Kaspersky employees, 2 former employees, they had a campaign targeting Microsoft, AVG and Avast to fool them into deleting and disabling important files on their customers’ PCs. Attacks basically to retaliate against smaller rivals, the story goes that Eugene Kaspersky was pissed off that these other anti0virus companies were copying their software.

John: I think that everyone was copying the signatures. I think the signatures were—

Leo: That’s what Kaspersky was known for. It was known for its scanning. In fact that’s all it did, right? It was a very fast scanning.

John: Very fast.

Christina: Yea, very fast.

Leo: I’ve just been handed a note. “Dylan needs to go.”

John: Dylan needs to go.

Leo: So Dylan, thank you.

John: I’ve thought that since the beginning of the show.

Leo: (Laughing) you know, you all need to go. We’ve gone on and on and on. This has been endless. There’s still so much more to talk about, like Twitter extending DMs to an infinite number of characters.

John: That’s actually not a bad idea.

Leo: There’s great stuff. But I’ll tell you what. We will—and Jessica Alba who turns out to be more than just a pretty face. She’s also got a startup. 1.7 billion dollars promised.

John: Already?

Leo: Yea.

Christina: Honest Co.

Leo: Honest Co. Do you buy Honest stuff? I think it’s for babies, right?

Christina: Yea I was going to say—

Dylan: No, you wouldn’t buy—

Christina: No, absolutely not.

Leo: DINKs don’t by Honest stuff.

Christina: No, no we do not. That’s like our kryptonite.

Leo: But you would use Zirtual or at least you might have until they disappeared, firing all their employees with an e-mail.

Jason: I like this segment. This segment is the news you didn’t hear about.

Leo: The news you didn’t know about.

John: And you’re running it at the end. You should have done this at the beginning.

Leo: But then the show would be over.

John: The show is over.

Leo: The show is over. You don’t want to go inside the hook-up culture accelerated by the rapid rise if Tinder?

Christina: I do want to talk about the Tweet storm Tinder sent out.

Dylan: That was a fun story.

Leo: All right, we’ll let you go, Dylan. Thank you for being here. Dylan.tweney.com, Tweney is T-W-E-N-E-Y. Dylan20 on the Twitter. Great to have you. Thank you, Dylan.

John: See ya.

Dylan: It’s been really fun. Thank you, Leo.

Leo: Take care. Come back soon!

Dylan: I hope so! All right, bye.

Leo: Ok, tell us about Tinder.

Christina: (Laughing) they have the thinnest skin of any company in the entire world.

Leo: Do they really?

Christina: Yes they do.

Leo: They seem to own, they seem to own this space though, don’t they?

Christina: They do own this space. But they have, they can’t take criticism for anything.

John: Is it the comic book space?

Leo: (Laughing) no it’s the swipe left or swipe right space.

Jason: Are they worse or better than Uber.

Leo: They seem like they’re like Uber in that respect.

Christina: Look, they’re probably better.

Jason: Who could tell?

Christina: I don’t know, they’re probably better. I don’t know.

Leo: Who knows? I asked my daughter—

John: Now we’re getting somewhere.

Leo: I asked my 23 year old daughter—

John: Now we know why he’s interested.

Leo: Do kids your age, are your friends, are they all using Tinder? And she said, “Oh yea. Nonstop.”

John: Really?

Leo: She said, “But it’s not just to hook-up, dad.”

Christina: BS.

Leo: It’s mostly a hook-up app but actually she has friends, she has friends who are in relationships that were started on Tinder.

Christina: Yes, absolutely. People do have buildable relationships that way. For instance, my only experience with the app, because I am very happily married, is when my friend Carrie will let me go through Tinder for her. And then it’s a game. And I’m like, “He’s cute. He’s cute. He’s awful. He’s awful.”

Leo: It’s basically hot or not, right? You swipe left if you don’t like them—

Christina: It’s hot or not. And if both people swipe that they like one another then you can actually start a chat and a conversation. And then it makes it very easy to say, “Hey, I’m in this area and I’m nearby. Let’s meet up. And let’s go out or whatever.”

Leo: Her point was if you go to a bar, it’s a meet up. I mean this is—

Christina: Of course it is.

Leo: So it’s no different.

John: Yea it is.

Christina: There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s just a lot more efficient. I don’t have a problem with Tinder at all. I think that it does exactly what a lot of us base how we choose people and that’s based on looks.

John: I think it cheapens the human experience.

Leo: Well that’s a good point because when you swipe you’re merely swiping. There’s no text, right? It’s just a picture.

Christina: Yea. I mean sometimes they have their profile information but it’s almost entirely based on looks. But look, if you’re using an app like this, it’s mostly because you want to go on a date, hook-up, do whatever. It’s not looking for love. If that’s the case you might want to use, OK Cupid or Match or something like that. Or meet someone through friends. In most cases, and I’ve heard of a lot of friends like using this when they go on vacation someplace or they’re going to a conference. And you want to go out for drinks with somebody nearby or somebody in the area. So I think there are certainly valid uses. What Tinder took exception to was this article that Nancy Jo Sales, who’s a great writer, she wrote this article for Vanity Fair about how it was kind of the death of romance and how it’s kind of creating this dating apocalypse where people aren’t dating anymore, they’re simply just hooking up on these Tinders. And rather than kind of understanding the perspective of the person who wrote the article, who is, you know, a woman who is probably in her 50s, who’s writing this from a perspective of you know, talking to young people, and is writing it as a trend piece. It’s probably not going to get all the details right, but it’s certainly an interesting narrative story. Rather than just sucking up the criticism and going, “Hey, this is how big we are, big magazines are writing about us.” They just started to try to refute things point by point, insult her and—which was stupid. And like 30 tweets. 30 tweets they sent out. 30 tweets in response to this article. And it was absolutely insane. And I’m going, “You’re a brand who owns this entire market. You have to deal with the fact that people are going to criticize you. Just ignore it. You know, you’re making bank. Your company, that I see it spinning out Match, OK Cupid and Tinder into its own IPO. Like that’s insane. And like Tinder’s a big part of that. Like just accept the criticism and move on. There’s no reason to go after Nancy Jo Sales and Vanity Fair.

Jason: 30 tweets, too. 30 tweets. You’re doing it wrong. You’re using Twitter wrong.

Leo: You’re tweeting wrong.

Jason: I might suggest using your company blog at some point.

Leo: Yea or write on a Medium Post.

Christina: Seriously.

Jason: Write a Medium Post. Medium Posts are great for that sort of thing.

Christina: That’s exactly it.

Leo: It’s so funny. And of course when you do it on Twitter, you’re going to guarantee a tweet storm from other people mocking you and—

Christina: Well that was the whole thing is that it blew up in their face. If they had just ignored the story, it probably wouldn’t have gotten a ton of play. But because they bought into it, people who were never going to read the article read it. And it got passed around.

John: Someone was offended. Someone was offended.

Leo: What’s this Hinge?

John: Hinge. That’s the—

Leo: In this article they talk about—he’s interviewing a guy named Alex (laughing). It’s actually really—it’s a very funny article.

Christina: Yea it is.

Leo: How does he do it? So they’re talking about Alex. He’s a Tinder king. A young man of such deft text game—that’s the ability to actually convince somebody to do something over text, Marty explains.

Christina: So Hinge…

Leo: “How does he do it?” Marty asks. “This guy’s got talent.” But Marty, who prefers Hinge to Tinder is no slouch at racking up girls. He says, “I play I could be a boyfriend kind of guy—“

John: What are you reading from?

Leo: But then they start – this is the Vanity Fair article. “But then they start wanting me to care more and I just don’t.” “Dude that’s not cool,” Alex chimes in his warm way. “I always make a point of disclosing I’m not looking for anything serious. I just want to hang out.”

John: This sounds like good dialogue for the radio play you keep wanting to do.

Leo: Maybe.

John: You’ve got the voice.

Leo: So Hinge is another Tinder?

Christina: So Hinge is like Tinder. The only difference with Hinge is that it actually hooks you up with like your friend of friends. So, the thing is, Tinder you could be more of a creep, right? Because you might not know anybody. You might not be in the same social circle.

Leo: Is it women who don’t like this and men who do? Is that—

Christina: No, women love this. Are you kidding me?

Leo: Oh, ok.

John: There you go.

Christina: Everybody love this. Everybody wants an easy way to get a one night stand. Look, people love to pretend that they don’t like it. But it’s—I mean look. I’m really glad I’m married because I would not want to date in this environment. It would make it really difficult, I won’t’ lie.

Leo: It’s a very different environment. But I’ve watched that as my kids have grown up. They never did date. They went out in groups and there were hook ups.

Christina: And yea, there are hook ups and you meet people, you know, I was in a sorority and so you meet a bunch of guys who attract other things, and you go out with one after another. And then you know, it’s kind of one of those things where you know, in the old days, people used to find you on Myspace or on Facebook. And if you were in the area or in a class or something. I mean it’s not that different. This is just making it much faster. And the geolocation aspect is what makes it I think for a lot of people really saying—

Leo: And if you get down to the bottom line, like they say things like, “Ok, you’re a mile away. Tell me your location.” It’s efficient.

Christina: Right. That’s the thing. It’s efficient and you can kind of know, “Do I really want to meet this person and hang out or not.” You can meet in person, if it works, it works. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t.

John: After a slew of murders this will all end.

Leo: (Laughing) The Tinder Murders.

Christina: That’s actually not a bad point. Because that’s one of the things that kind of took Craig’s List down and certainly was the reason they got rid of their personal encounters section. You know you’ve got to be careful to a certain degree. That’s one of the areas where Hinge is probably a little bit better because you are authenticated through Facebook. So the idea is this person can be vouched for because we have similar friends in common. And that also means if I’m going to meet somebody on this site and we have similar friends, maybe if I’m a guy I’m not going to roofy this person. Because, you know, my friends will get mad.

John: All right we’re done.

Leo: I have to say, if you want to know more, follow the Tinder Nightmares Instagram feed. And you’ll get a pretty good—

Christina: Yea, that’s a gas.

Leo: It’s pretty funny. All right. We wrapped it up. Thank you everybody for being here. It’s so great to have you once again on the show, Christina Warren. Christina makes regular appearances on Tech News Today every—what day do you do Tech News Today?

Christina: I do it on Friday.

Leo: Friday with Mike Elgan at 10:00 AM Pacific, 1:00 PM Eastern time. We love having you on this show too.

Christina: I love being on.

Leo: Mashable.com. She makes great content over there. You should check it out. Thank you so much. I would swipe—which way would I swipe for good?

Christina: Swipe right.

Leo: Swipe right on you.

Christina: Yea.

Leo: Thank you, Christina. And I would swipe right on you too, John. Yea, because without you, there would be no me. I have to credit you with my success. Noagendashow.com. And anything else you’d like to—what are you up to these days?

John: Trying to finish that book on vinegar so I can do the Screen Savers.

Leo: Are you writing it? Are you actually—

John: Yes. I have a keyboard.

Leo: Making your own vinegar.

John: And I push buttons on the keyboard and words come out.

Leo: Minus your expertise, I tried to make vinegar and it was—

John: I keep warning people.

Leo: Without your expertise I don’t know what to do. I even had John come over to smell my mother.

John: Your mother smells great by the way. She has a good type of perfume.

Leo: You told me to throw it out.

John: You say that disparagingly, your own mother.

Leo: No, the mother on my vinegar.

John: Oh, that’s different.

Leo: You came over to smell my mother and you said, what did you say? You said “No.” You said, “That’s not going to be good.”

John: I don’t remember.

Leo: Yea I don’t remember either. That’s the problem. So what I did, I started doing what you suggested. Because I went out and I got a Spanish Vinegar maker.

John: Yea, big mistake.

Leo: Which is a scam he told me.

John: It’s just the improperative way to do things.

Leo: So he says, and I’ve been doing this, any time you have half, don’t finish a bottle of wine, stick some paper towel in the top, and put it in a cupboard.

John: Right, for about a year.

Leo: A year?

John: Yea.

Leo: Ah, ok.

John: And then you see if it’s turning into vinegar. If it’s not you dump it out.

Leo: When do you sniff the mother?

John: You never sniff, you sniff the liquid, the vinegar.

Leo: But the mother, isn’t that—

John: No, you have to watch out—

Leo: Can’t you have a poisonous mother?

John: Yes, yes, you can.

Leo: Well that’s why I need the book.

John: That’s very well known.

Leo: Finish the book. We’ll have you on.

John: Most of the mothers people use are toxic.

Leo: You see?

John: They’re using—

Leo: You think I’m making this up. I’m not making this up.

John: They’re not using wine vinegar culture.

Leo: Well I didn’t use any culture, I just put it in there.

John: No, a lot of—

Leo: Like the air would do it.

John: Yes. You will get some in some cases. But most of the vinegar culture is already in the wine.

Leo: Anyway.

John: Yea generally.

Leo: Should I just take a couple finger fulls of vinegar and sprinkle it on there?

John: Vinegar is pasteurized. It’s like—

Leo: See, that’s the problem. You need unpasteurized vinegar. Where do you get that? From John C. Dvorak. He said he was going to bring his mother. That I could use his mother. A cutting? A mother cutting?

John: Well you can go on and on with this material and it’s not impressive.

Leo: (Laughing) Ok, thank you, John. And how are you feeling, Jason Snell?

Jason: How can I follow that? It’s impossible.

Leo: Jason Snell is at The Incomparable and Sixcolors.com

Jason: Sixcolors.com

Leo: That’s probably the best place to go to see what you’re up to. It’s all right there.

Jason: I’ve got some, like Christina I’ve got some podcasts on Relay FM that people can check out.

Leo: Is that Relay.FM?

Jason: .FM yea.

Christina: Yes it is.

Leo: I didn’t know you were doing podcasts there too, Christina. What is your podcast?

Christina: My podcast is called “Rocket,” and it’s an accelerated geek conversation that’s 3 women talking about tech.

Leo: You could do that all by yourself.

Christina: I could, but it’s more fun with other people.

Leo: Because you are a rocket.

John: Yes, yes.

Jason: She’s the fuel in the rocket.

Leo: There it is. Rocket. Hire the right millennaills. Christina Warren, Simone de Rochefort, oh and Brianna Wu.

Jason: Briana Wu, yea.

Christina: Yep.

Leo: Does Simone de Rochefort pronounce her name that way?

Christina: Simone de Rochefort. Yea you got the last name correct.

Leo: I want to thank you all for being here. It’s been a long day but we wanted to keep the audience inside where it’s cool because it’s like 100 degrees outside.

John: It’s terrible outside.

Leo: So we decided to do an extra-long show for your health. We do TWIT every Sunday afternoon, 3:00 P.M. Pacific, 6:00 P.M. Eastern time, that’s 22000 UTC on TWIT.tv. Please watch live. You can be in the chatroom. You can participate that way or you could always come to the studio where we have air conditioning and heat in the winter. I think we have heat in the winter. You can find out more by—or just e-mail, tickets@twit.tv we’ll send you directions and we’ll make sure we have a seat out for you. Nice audience today. Thank you all for being here from all over the world. We have the Rock of Gibraltar. We have Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We have Finland in the house, a honeymoon couple from Finland. Isn’t that nice?

John: Yea.

Leo: Very romantic. Are you sorry you came?

Female Voice: No.

Leo: You can be honest. It was ok.

Female Voice: She didn’t hesitate.

Leo: It was long. Did you knit while we were...?

Female Voice: No.

Leo: No. Sorry. What else? Oh, you can get on-demand audio and video after the fact. TWiT.tv is the website but we of course we’re on every pod catcher and appliance something. There’s lots of TWiT apps. We don’t do those but those great 3rd party developers have made it easy on Roku, on Window Phone, iOS, Android. Just search for TWiT wherever you get your shows and make sure you subscribe that way. You’ll be here each week. Thanks for joining us, we’ll see you next time! Another TWiT is in the can. Bye bye.