This Week in Tech 1057: Ferret Trousering

Summary

This Week in Tech #1057: Ferret Trousering

Date: November 9, 2025
Host: Leo Laporte
Guests: Ashley Esquetha, Janko Roettgers, Ian Thompson

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Episode Overview

This episode brings together veteran tech journalists and personalities—Ashley Esquetha, Janko Roettgers, and Ian Thompson—to dissect a wide array of tech headlines and issues from the week. The panelists, all now freelancers, deliver witty, candid, and sometimes irreverent takes on topics ranging from Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar salary package, the precarious landscape of streaming and sports rights, the increasing threat of digital scams and social media lawsuits, child safety online, government policies, streaming fragmentation, the demise of the Farmers Almanac, and more. The show’s light-hearted moments—like the saga of the viral "fedora detective," ferret trousering, and reminiscences about Vegas—match the seriousness of its investigation into digital well-being, regulation, and the future of tech media.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Panel Introductions & Freelancing Life

• The panel opens with Leo introducing his three guests, who are all now freelancing after long tenures at major outlets. Ian recounts how he wrote 5,000+ articles at The Register over 15 years ("It was nice to sort of slow things down, consider and start new options." – [02:18]).

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2. Elon Musk’s Trillion-Dollar Pay Package and Tesla’s Prospects

• Shareholder Approval & Feasibility
  • Leo and the panel pour cold water on the attention-grabbing package, citing Tesla’s declining market performance and high bars for Musk to actually receive the payout.
  • Ian: “Tesla’s market share is dropping faster than—well, I’m not going to say that, but he's about as popular as pineapple on pizza.” ([03:39])
• Self-Driving & Robotaxis
  • Massive skepticism is voiced about ambitious promises: 20 million Tesla deliveries, driverless fleets, etc.
  • Ashley compares it to offering a child an impossible reward: "Like telling my 6 year old if you can eat an entire pan of broccoli, you can have this cake. Great incentive—not going to happen." ([04:28])
• Waymo vs. Tesla Robotaxis
  • The team notes Waymo’s much smaller fleet, increased safety, and San Francisco’s reactivity to mishaps.
  • Ian: “The idea that they’re going to get a million [robotaxis] on the street and not face massive lawsuits seems farcical.” ([06:01])

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3. SpaceX, Apple, and Wireless Connectivity

• SpaceX’s Cell Network Ambitions
  • SpaceX is buying wireless spectrum, aiming for satellite-to-phone. Elon wants Apple as a partner, which the panel jokes about—"Tim Cook sitting in a tree, Tim, Elon Musk, kis..." ([11:20])
• Chinese Astronauts Trapped & Space Debris
  • The panel notes the mounting risks of orbital debris, referencing the Kessler Syndrome and historical space trash incidents.
  • Ashley: “This is how horror movies start. This is the plot of a new Alien movie.” ([11:57])
  • They lighten the mood by marveling that the stranded Chinese crew have managed to bake chicken wings (“We can’t get you home, but you can have drumsticks.” – Leo [14:34])

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4. YouTube, Meta, and Scam/Fraud Content

• Content Moderation Extremes
  • YouTube pulls tutorials showing how to bypass Windows 11 account sign-in, citing “risky or illegal” behavior that could “risk serious physical harm or death,” which the panel finds bizarre ([17:19]).
  • Meta, in contrast, is exposed for letting fraudulent ads flourish, generating an estimated 10% of revenue from scams ([20:04]). Leo: “I’m not sure I fully blame Meta… You can be overzealous like YouTube, or too lenient like Meta.”
• Regulatory & Revenue Incentives
  • The group highlights how platforms only act when forced by regulations or potential financial risk, not out of moral imperative.
  • Ian: “Until you start fining companies based on revenue rather than profit, then that’s never going to change.” ([25:29])

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5. Child Safety, Roblox Lawsuit & Regulation

• Texas Sues Roblox
  • Ashley: “It is a social media platform. If you do not have the levers in place to protect your most vulnerable user… you have a responsibility. Unfortunately, we don’t regulate these companies. And so what ends up happening is, kids get hurt and then they are forced to do it [make changes]—after the fact.” ([27:57])
• Protecting Kids Online
  • The panel discusses whether large platforms can actually police themselves. Consensus: they don’t want to.
  • Janko: “It’s impossible to completely solve these issues, but they could always do better—and if they just did a little better, it would improve… lives or, in some cases, save lives.” ([31:58])

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6. Global Moves to Age-Restrict Social Media

• Australia & Denmark Ban Social Platforms for Minors
  • Countries are passing strict access laws (Australia under 16, Denmark under 15).
  • Ashley: “We’ve basically created societies in which being a kid is frowned upon.” ([93:31])
  • Leo: “Should the government get to step in in loco parentis?” ([98:37])
  • Ashley: “We should be regulating what the companies are doing, not what we do as parents.” ([98:37])
• Decline of Third Spaces for Kids
  • Panel notes loss of physical community spaces for youth; digital spaces are their “third place.”
  • Ashley: “Kids want free play in person, organized activity. We are not… providing it.” ([87:18])

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7. Streaming Wars, Fragmentation & Sports Rights Mess

• YouTube TV vs. Disney
  • Janko breaks down the messy carriage disputes, unbundling, and surging subscription costs.
  • Janko: “People are getting so much of that stuff elsewhere. Pay TV bundle isn’t the only thing in town anymore… The power dynamics have shifted.” ([55:47])
• Apple Acquires F1 Rights
  • Leo and Ian geek out over Formula 1 broadcasting and whether Apple will improve or fragment the experience.
  • Ian: “Nobody trusts Apple… They are ruthless when it comes to wringing the last cent out of every possible consumer.” ([43:56])
• Subscription Fatigue & Streaming Sprawl
  • Leo reads a Tumblr post satirizing the explosion of ridiculous streaming services ("It's literally on Dippy. You could probably find it on Wings... It's on Poob.") ([62:12])
  • Ashley: “We're basically back at cable.” ([63:48])

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8. Media, Libraries, and Digital Archives

• Internet Archive Legal Attacks
  • Lawsuits force the removal of 500,000 books and rare music from open library projects.
  • Ian: “It’s not like this was allowing piracy… If you want to read something and you’re willing to put the time in, fine. But you don’t get a copy. You can’t pirate it.” ([129:44])
  • Leo: “Publishers really don't want libraries of any kind to exist.” ([130:12])
• Role of Public Archives
  • Panel laments the loss of access, especially to works no longer available or at risk.

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9. Government Policy, Cybersecurity & AI Bubble

• US Cybersecurity Budget Cuts
  • Staff cuts at CISA and other agencies are seen as “security vandalism.”
  • Ian: “For every dollar you invest in CISA, you get 10, 20 times that back.” ([115:12])
• OpenAI’s Trillion-Dollar Spend & Possible Federal Bailout
  • Discussion of OpenAI’s wild spending plans and their CFO’s search for a federal “backstop.”
  • Janko: "We got a number actually a couple days ago... OpenAI lost eleven and a half billion dollars in a quarter." ([142:40])
• AI Regulation & Value Creation
  • Recognition that while consumer-facing AI is overhyped, there’s real value in B2B and coding AI.

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10. Memorable/Light Moments

• Fedora-Wearing Louvre “Detective”
  • The photo of a stylish, Poirot-esque bystander at the Paris Louvre theft goes viral ([160:20]).
• Ferret Trousering (Legging)
  • Ian explains a Yorkshire tradition: "You seal off the bottom of your trousers, you put a ferret in, and the winner is the one who keeps it in there the longest.” ([151:39])
• Vegas Childhood Stories
  • Ashley recounts wild, nostalgic tales of family football viewings and airborne ice-machine fights at Circus Circus. (“My grandpa ended up getting in like a bar fight because somebody was harassing my aunt at the sports book…” – [76:05])
• Obituary: The Farmer’s Almanac (not the Old Farmer’s Almanac!)
  • The team bids a tongue-in-cheek farewell to the century-old print staple.
  • Ashley: “If your business lasts 207 years, you can call that a win.” ([176:13])

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Elon Musk’s Package:
  Ian: “...never gonna go anywhere near that given the limitations... Tesla's market share is dropping faster than... he’s about as popular as pineapple on pizza.” [03:39]

• On Content Moderation:
  Leo: "You can be overzealous like YouTube, pull stuff down that's not... or you can be like Meta and be very lenient." [20:08]

• On Kids & Social Media:
  Ashley: “We’ve basically created societies in which being a kid is frowned upon… They don’t have a third space.” [89:25]
  “We are not giving [kids] or equipping them with the skills to understand that... We’ve lost the art of conversation so deeply.” [92:17]

• On Roblox’s Responsibility:
  Janko: “It’s impossible to completely solve these issues, but they could always do better…” [31:58]

• On Streaming Fragmentation:
  Leo (paraphrasing Tumblr): “It’s literally on Dippy… It’s a Fibo original. It’s on Poob. You can watch it on Poob…” [62:12]

• On Archives & Libraries:
  Ian: “You’re literally killing off information which is not available in any other format.” [128:01]
  Ashley: “Publishers are diametrically opposed to the existence of the library... they’re not making money.” [130:34]

• On OpenAI’s Finances:
  Janko: “OpenAI lost eleven and a half billion dollars in a quarter.” [142:40]

• On Ferret Trousering:
  Ian: “It’s a long-standing tradition... you put a ferret in your trousers and the winner is the one who keeps it longest.” [151:44]
  Leo: “You don’t want to put it in your pants, I can tell you that right now.” [151:42]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 02:18 – Ian on leaving The Register
• 03:39 – Musk pay package skepticism
• 06:01 – Robotaxis lawsuit skepticism
• 11:20 – SpaceX and Apple/Tim Cook joke
• 14:34 – Chinese astronauts and wings in space
• 17:19 – YouTube pulls account bypass videos
• 20:04 – Meta’s scam ad revenue, regulation
• 27:57 – Roblox, lawsuits, and child protection
• 55:47 – Janko on shifting power in streaming
• 62:12 – “It’s on Poob” – Streaming fragmentation satire
• 86:33 – Ashley: "Kids want free play… we don’t provide it."
• 115:12 – Ian: “For every dollar in CISA…”
• 129:44 – Internet Archive’s value & threat
• 142:40 – OpenAI’s financial losses
• 151:39 – Ferret trousering explained
• 160:05 – The Louvre’s viral “detective”
• 176:13 – Obituary for the (non-old) Farmer’s Almanac

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Tone & Style

• Relaxed, irreverent, and conversational
• Witty, biting, sometimes sardonic
• Reflective, critical—especially when addressing regulatory failures and the future of tech

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Conclusion

A densely packed and wide-ranging episode, “Ferret Trousering” showcases the best of TWiT’s panel banter and deep dives into both whimsical and weighty trends in tech. From the giggling skepticism about trillion-dollar pay packages to earnest worries about kids online, from dissecting streaming’s absurdities to mourning the decline of open knowledge, the episode delivers concise insight, memorable anecdotes, and sharp critique—anchored by a panel whose shared roots in big media and current freelance freedom make for lively, no-holds-barred conversation.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. Ashley Esquetha is here. We'll see her newly remodeled studio and talk to her about gaming. Janko Rutgers is here. He's got the latest on the YouTube vs Disney dispute. And we'll talk with Ian Thompson, our friend formerly of the Register, about his new life as a freelancer. That plus all the news, including Elon Musk's trillion dollar salary, right after this.

[Ian Thompson]

Podcasts you love from people you Trust.

[Leo Laporte]

This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week at Tech, episode 1057, recorded Sunday, November 9, 2025. Ferret trousering. It's time for Twit this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. Hello, everybody. I'm Leo Laporte and we have old friends joining us. I always like, like it. Well, I pretty much always have old friends joining us because I get to choose. Ashley Esquetha is here. Haven't seen Ashley since her remodel.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yes, finally I don't have to make it look the way a media company says I have to now. It's my office.

[Leo Laporte]

The Haunted Mansion, ladies and gentlemen.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yes, it belongs to me.

[Leo Laporte]

There are no windows and no doors.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, actually there is a door right there.

[Leo Laporte]

For some reason, I feel like it's a ph. Like it's a dummy door.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's a fake door. Yeah, it's a fake door that opens like a bookcase to another room, which then actually just makes it a door. It's actually.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that remarkable. Well, you've invented something. CEO of Rowdy Skeleton and always welcome. It's nice to see you.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Nice to be back.

[Leo Laporte]

Yonko Rutgers is also here. His newsletter is lopass cc. He covers everything, including media. We've got some conversations about media today, so we're glad to have Yonko.

[Janko Rutgers]

Thanks for having us all.

[Leo Laporte]

Welcome, sir. Yeah. And Ian Thompson, our dear friend from nowhere, now freelancer. Well, all freelancers here. And I like that. I like that. Welcome to the club. Ian, how long were you at the register?

[Ian Thompson]

Ooh, 15 years and just over 5, 000 articles, so. Oh, yeah, I, I crunched the numbers and it was, I think for the last 22 years I've done 2.6 articles a day. So it's nice to sort of slow things down, consider and start new options.

[Leo Laporte]

You're like Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts. You're just ready to stop now after all those quite.

[Ian Thompson]

I've got a newsletter and a podcast coming out. Nothing with Twitter, of course, but well.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Ll have to tell us when, when that's official. So I mean you can plug it anytime you wish. People follow you on Blue sky that way they'll know. Yeah, yeah. I a I n T H O M S O n There's no P and there's an extra I just so.

[Ian Thompson]

You know, it is bizarre how often it gets. It gets said as Lane and I've never yet met an American called Lane.

[Leo Laporte]

And Lane is here. Understand it, Lane's in town.

[Ian Thompson]

I blame the lack of sans serif fonts.

[Leo Laporte]

So Elon Musk one. That is one hell of a pay package. The shareholders approved it, I have to say. Why wouldn't they? Because he's never gonna go anywhere near that given the limitations, the requirements. Right, Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean it was interesting that the Norwegian government hedge fund actually said no we're not going to support this but the terms and conditions of it, it's just there's possible way. I mean Tesla's market share is dropping faster than. Well I'm not going to say that that'll be slightly rude but Tesla's market share is, is not good. He's about as popular as pineapple on pizza.

[Ashley Esquetha]

You can say it, it's fine.

[Ian Thompson]

Actually it was a slight slightly off color thing but no, I mean Tesla's market share is failing. Optimus is still at the we need human operators behind each one phase. It's just not going to happen. It's a great attention getting headline but you know it's just Elon at the moment amongst Tesla buyers is about as popular as pineapple on pizza. And if any of you do like pineapple on pizza then there are those can have a discussion.

[Ashley Esquetha]

There are those but it's a small number. Yeah. This is like telling my 6 year old if you can eat an entire pan of broccoli, you can have a whole. I will give you this entire funfetti cake all to yourself. Like great incentive, great incentive. Now just just not going to happen.

[Leo Laporte]

It would have to Tesla to get the full trillion. Would have to get to a market valuation of 8.5 trillion. Was considering that Nvidia just got to 4 trillion and it was like wow. Yeah, that 8.5 seems fairly high that he's got to have 20 million Tesla's delivered. 10 million full self driving subscriptions paid. A million Optimus Bots, good luck. A million driverless robo. You know what, of course you're voting for this because it makes Elon feel good and it's never gonna happen.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, this is just an ego stroke. It's just. Yeah, I don't.

[Janko Rutgers]

But you don't. None of you think he's gonna try anyway and mess up a whole bunch of things by putting more cars.

[Ashley Esquetha]

A hundred percent, 100. He's very incentivized.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Just because if I told my 6 year old that he would try to eat the whole trail properly and throw up all over my house like 100% it's going to be that. But like. Yeah, no, it's going to be a total mess disaster. But I mean, geez, you know, they could put 1 million cybertrucks delivered and that still wouldn't even have. I think that wouldn't even have happened at this point. So.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean they're reduced to buying their own cybertrucks. Just try and keep, you know, keep, keep inventory flowing. The robo taxi one I thought was hilarious given the fact that some people in San Francisco, including a very ill advised city supervisor having an absolute panic attack because Waymo ran over a cat. Robotaxis have been involved in a significant number of accidents and the idea that they're going to get a million of those on the street and not face massive lawsuits seems quite frankly farcical.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, no, it's ridiculous. How many of they have in San Francisco, Leo Waymo has 300 robotaxis. It's like 3 to 500. It's not even, it's like almost nothing. Yeah, that's the city it's probably most prominent in.

[Leo Laporte]

They're everywhere. I mean every third car is it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, it's a Waymo.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

So 300.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Say they're very safe drivers though. I was in one recently and on a Saturday.

[Leo Laporte]

Drive like a grandma.

[Ashley Esquetha]

They do drive like a grandma.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, well, I mean I was in one on Saturday night in San Francisco and they are safer than most of the drivers on the road.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what I would say. Even with whatever, you know, flaws in the robo taxi, humans are the worst drivers by far of all the possibilities. Right?

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, It's a definite layer 8 problem there. But Robotaxi, you know, the whole robotaxi thing. I was speaking to Dan o' Dowell who is just fanatically anti Tesla and some of the stats of what they did in Texas, for example, these things, they don't have lidar, the software is buggy as all hell and I just don't see it happening. They are going to get drowned in lawsuits.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Within the first thousand, there'll be so many lawsuits that it will just be over. Like I Mean, I just can't imagine a world in which they actually have a million in commercial operation. That is just that, isn't it? That's. I agree with you. Farcical. Literally, farcical.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, get ready because they want to move the robo taxi. Obviously for fiscal reasons. They want to move it out fast. Besides San Francisco and Austin, it's going to Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Houston and Miami. Desa says we're going to have, we're going to cover half the US population by the end of this year.

[Ian Thompson]

Bear in mind though, this is a musk deadline. You know, according to him, we were supposed to be on.

[Ashley Esquetha]

We're supposed to be on. Yeah, we're supposed to be on Mars. We're supposed to have full like gen AI. We're supposed to have full self driving level 5 autonomy like 5 years ago. Just. Okay. Like every time he says something now and makes some insane promise, I'm like, okay, peanut, like, good for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that what you call your 6 year old?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Also, he makes less insane promises, if I'm being honest.

[Leo Laporte]

Who did that? Nobody. At the shareholder meeting, he Musk said the company would be able to enable vehicle owners to text while the vehicle drives. Oh, that's good. We want that, don't we? We all want to be able to text while we're driving.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Guess what, everybody? I already do. So.

[Ian Thompson]

Not the thing.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I live in la. I live in la. I literally stopped in traffic. Like that is. That is literally everyone just stopped and texting.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I kind of like the Waymo scheme because you can actually download your own soundtrack when you're driving. And that's fantastic because it's. The Night Rider theme was made for that, you know.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, man, I never thought of that. Now I'm gonna do it, whatever that was. Yeah, don't sing it too good, Leo. You're going to get a licensing hit.

[Janko Rutgers]

I know.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Sing it bad on purpose.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's what I'm doing. That's it. I'm singing it bad on purpose.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, that's the ticket.

[Leo Laporte]

SpaceX is moving fast to become a cell phone company they're now going to buy. So they bought $17 billion worth of spectrum from EchoStar in September. They've now announced they're going to buy another 2.6 billion of wireless spectrum. Almost said worthless spectrum, no wireless spectrum. They're going to trade SpaceX stock to EchoStar, which is EchoStar. Remember this goes back a ways. EchoStar. You might have covered this Yonko. It was all this deal with T Mobile and Sprint, and they were going to create their own cell phone company with Dish. So it would make it okay for T Mobile and Sprint to merge because we wouldn't be losing a company, we'd be gam. A company.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, funny. Didn't happen, huh?

[Leo Laporte]

Never. None of that. No, no. So now SpaceX can offer satellite connectivity to cell phones directly. Of course, the cell phones will have to be, you know, you have to have a system on the chip that does that. IPhones can do it. T Mobile. I'm a T Mobile customer. I can use SpaceX as not a cell carrier, but at least for emergency texting while I'm driving. Apple is working with Global Star, but Global Star is looking for a buyer and Elon really is hoping that Apple will sign up and use SpaceX as a cell carrier.

[Ian Thompson]

That would be very interesting because when you consider the two companies, they're both huge control freaks. So the idea of those two working together, it's like cats and dogs living together.

[Leo Laporte]

Tim Cook sitting in a tree. Tim. Elon Musk. Kis. I don't see it. No. Or Peanut. I should call him Peanut from now on.

[Janko Rutgers]

Now on.

[Leo Laporte]

Speaking of space, Chinese astronauts are stuck in space after suspected damage to their return craft. They're on the. Not our, not the iss, but the Tiangong Space Station. Collision with space debris struck the spacecraft. They were supposed to come back in. That's not good.

[Ashley Esquetha]

They've already been there for six months. Yeah, they've been there for half a year. This is how horror movies start. This is the plot of a new alien movie. And yeah, I would hate this. Like, this is also. We gotta figure out better solutions for like, orbital trash. Seems like a really good idea.

[Leo Laporte]

Seems like a problem.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, it's a really big issue.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, we're launching more and more satellites up every day. I was stunned to learn that the Starlink satellites, one or two a day, come down.

[Janko Rutgers]

Oh, really?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, they burn up in the atmosphere. They're so, I guess so cheap, relatively speaking, to put up that they don't care, they don't mind.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, I interviewed Kessler, the guy that came up with the Kessler Syndrome, which scenario where everything breaks up and space becomes unusable. And he was actually quite complimentary about StarLink. He said SpaceX are actually pretty good about maintaining enough propellant to deorbit as they need. But just the amount of stuff up there, I mean, what was it, eight, nine years ago? The ISS got hit by a paint flake. It was traveling at 16,000 miles an hour. And yeah, it tore a chunk out.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't take much.

[Janko Rutgers]

A couple of.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. To add to the space junk. Russia has been testing anti satellite weapons which blow satellites up in space. What could possibly. That's exactly the Kessler Syndrome, isn't it?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Seems like a great idea, except it isn't.

[Leo Laporte]

It was. It was the plot of Neal Stephenson 7eves, which was the moon got hit, then broke up into pieces. And of course there's a chain reaction. And if this continues, Kessler said you could blot out the sun with all the debris in space and it would be the end of life on Earth. Yeah, that's nice.

[Janko Rutgers]

Maybe then we actually need some country to send up some bumps up there and.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, because they know that's not.

[Ashley Esquetha]

What they make the trip.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they go and they o.

[Janko Rutgers]

What if we light them up? I'm just thinking out loud here.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Light them on fire.

[Leo Laporte]

What if we.

[Ashley Esquetha]

What if we found a way to like, yeet them farther into space, out.

[Leo Laporte]

Of our orbit or do what elon's been doing, SpaceX has been doing, which is give them enough propellant so they can deorbit safely and burn up in the atmosphere. That's the right way to handle it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I thought you were gonna say make empty promises, but a little too strongness.

[Leo Laporte]

Futurism points out that the Chinese astronauts are living the life up there, though it's not so bad. They recently were able install an oven allowing them to bake chicken.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Listen, you got to take the W's when you get them. You got to get your dubs.

[Leo Laporte]

We can't get you home, but you can have drumsticks.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And dubs are for wins.

[Leo Laporte]

Here they are making. Making wings in space. Wings in space.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Look at them floating in there. Look at them floating in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Look at them. Well, they have to have a special basket. Yeah, this is. Oh, delicious. Don't open that. Don't, don't. No. Oh, don't. No. Careful.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Xenomorphs can smell that. I just want to put that on.

[Leo Laporte]

You're attracting aliens.

[Ian Thompson]

I was gonna say they need a cat up there, but no, I didn't.

[Leo Laporte]

What I didn't realize is that buffalo wings were popular in China. So I guess this is a.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Look how happy they are. You know what? Good for them. Good.

[Leo Laporte]

So what if we're stuck in space? We got wings.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Chicken wings.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean, to be fair, I don't.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Even have wings right now. Now I want wings.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know what that. Oh, that's barbecue. I don't. Oh, Man.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, yeah, I got some. That looks pretty good.

[Ian Thompson]

But how long ago is it the Pizza Hut spent pizza up to the ISS? I think it was about 20 years ago.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Say, it's been a minute.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Eat some pizza.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It took longer. Well, no, that was Domino's. I say it took longer than 30 minutes. So it was free.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, but what do you tip the delivery. Delivery driver for getting into the money?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, so an extra astronaut on safe trip home.

[Janko Rutgers]

What if they just leave it in front of the door and take a photo and then just.

[Leo Laporte]

You left it outside? What are you talking about?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, left it on your contact. Free delivery. They'll even do it to the iss.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. All right, well, we wish the best for those poor guys stuck up there. It's not. I mean, remember, our own astronauts got stuck there for a long time.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, that. That was. Yeah, it was nine months, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

They went up for a week and they ended up staying for nine months.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah, because couldn't find the backsides with both hands and a torch when it comes to building orbital craft, but yes.

[Leo Laporte]

All right.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Why can't that ever happen to like, you know, Katy Perry on Blue Origin? Why is it always like good, hard working astronauts and not like Lauren Sanchez and Katy Perry?

[Leo Laporte]

Are you gonna be mean about them? Poor Katie.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I'm mean, I'm just saying it would be nice if we could just keep her from making more music. That's all I'm saying.

[Ian Thompson]

I would be happy if they stopped calling themselves astronauts. Because they're not. An astronaut is a profession.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's space tourists. Yeah, space tourists.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's funny how they. The press. Press relations at Amazon or Blue Origin responded by saying, well, they're doing work up there.

[Janko Rutgers]

What?

[Leo Laporte]

What work? Exactly.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Influencer work. That's what they're doing up there.

[Leo Laporte]

Doing work.

[Ashley Esquetha]

They're being influencers.

[Leo Laporte]

They're doing work.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Space influencers. Fine, that can be your title. But you are no astronaut, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

If you're an influencer. YouTube has lost its marbles. They're removing Windows 11. Bypass tutorials. Of course. These are the tutorials that show you how you can sign in with Windows 11 without creating a Microsoft account. Something that's not that hard to do. We've talked about how to do it, but YouTube is saying it risks physical harm, so we're pulling them down.

[Benito]

Well, this is Benito. We have a bunch of hands on Windows episodes about that, so I gotta see if those are still around.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, cyber CPU tech has been. Their channel's actually at Risk content flagged and removed. Here's Cyber CPU Tech. Here's a screenshot again. The warning strike you received was issued based on a violation of harmful or dangerous content, which prohibits content and encourages or promotes behavior that encourages dangerous or illegal activities at risk, serious physical harm or death. You mean bypassing the Windows Microsoft account login? Is that risky?

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean, it says risk, risky or illegal. I think it's probably more the illegal part and people get hung up on the risky part. Where I could see that being if I. I'm not. I know Nothing of Windows 11, so I'm the wrong person to talk to.

[Leo Laporte]

You, but I don't even know if it's.

[Janko Rutgers]

I would imagine. Well, if it's a content protection that could.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think they're claiming that.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I think, yeah, the wording of this is really particular, which is, I would understand if they said encourages dangerous activities that risk serious physical harm or death or illegal activity, but they're saying that it's harmful or dangerous content that encourages dangerous or illegal activities that serious harm, physical harm or death. Which they're trying to lump both of those in as well.

[Leo Laporte]

It's illegal and it causes harm or death.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's like very strange.

[Leo Laporte]

The word is very strange. They did restore the. A couple of the channels, saying it was automation, not AI. They were very quick to say it wasn't AI, it was automation. I'm not sure what the distinction is. But automated takedowns, this is. We've talked about this before. This is kind of part of the problem of YouTube. But then you see that. But then you also see the fact that Meta has done nothing to take down fraudulent videos or schemes or scams. In fact, internally, according to a whistleblower, they projected 10% of their revenue, $16 billion, came from fraudulent ads, fake ads.

[Ian Thompson]

I'd be surprised if it's that low, to be honest.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, I agree. That seems low.

[Leo Laporte]

Reuters cited an internal document which estimated that meta shows 15 billion ads a month. 15 billion ads a month that show clear signs of promoting fraud of some kind. Now they. So this is the. This is the yin and yang. You can be overzealous, like YouTube, pull stuff down that's not fraudulent or even risky, or you can be like meta and be very lenient. And then you get this. Of course, it doesn't help that Meta makes money on.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, this is. See, this is that problem where it's like the line item of, you know, either lawsuits or, you know, risk, basically, that the financial risk for them to have these Ads up there is like, it's much lower than the money they're making from actually selling these ads. So it's a line item for them.

[Leo Laporte]

They said, oh, 10%. So overly inclusive. This is their own internal report, by the way. It turns out Meta has a rule. This is the problem. The team that vets advertisers can't block ads if doing so would cost meta more than 0.15% of its revenue. There's a rule.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's a line item. Yeah, it's line item.

[Leo Laporte]

That's going to cost us. You better let that through. We're making too much money on that. Meta also said that's not a hard.

[Janko Rutgers]

Limit, just a number. I read the whole Reuters story and it's kind of bonkers. There's also parts in where they. So they realize that it's a problem and so they had teams on it. At one point they put up a dashboard with like the scammiest scammers highlighting accounts that had re scamming and then some of those accounts with these really scammy ads that showed up in their, in their charts essentially for being the scammiest scammers were still up for multiple months and not taken down because somehow those efforts were not connected or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

They're making money on it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I guess every time I log into Facebook Marketplace to like try to source something locally that I don't want to buy new, I see inevitably every time there's at least a good handful of sponsored ads that are very clearly AI generated product images that cannot either, cannot possibly be real or are. You know, it's like it started with all the photoshopping with like the celebrities with the T shirts where they're like this celebrity, like didn't you know, they're not actually endorsing this T shirt company, but they're just slapping celebrities like holding up a shirt or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Here from here from the Reuters story are three examples. American help sponsored, paid for by American Assistance Group. The government is giving out $710 to all Americans. Claim your $710 tariff relief. Obviously bogus. Yeah. Elon Musk holding up a sign that says, hey, it's me. I have a gift for you. Text me. Done.

[Janko Rutgers]

People hold up a sign. It's always a good sign. It's always real.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't know why, what the done part is for. But anyway, here's one that's actually saying.

[Benito]

That'S what you need to text him. You need to text done to him.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you text him done.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, maybe that's.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm done, Elon. Ok, here's a million dollars. Did you. Here's one that actually says we're going to help you. If you've been scammed, cybercrime experts can advise you this is evil. It's the anti fraud lawyer team.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh man. Just like the Avengers.

[Leo Laporte]

He's got the. The statue of justice blindfolded, holding the scales behind him. He must be real. Stand up against deception. Hold your. Uphold your rights. But it's deceptive. It itself is deceptive. A free consultation.

[Ian Thompson]

So. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And I can. I could but see, I think. I'm not sure I fully blame Meta for this because we just had a story about how you can be overzealous as well. So.

[Janko Rutgers]

And when one of these examples with the government is giving you all this money, that just reminds you of all the junk mail that you get from people promising you mortgage relief or whatever. It's always related to some government initiative that doesn't exist. The scams have been around for a long time. The question is whether now that they're online, a company like Meta can do more and p. Probably yes. But it is a balance. You're right.

[Leo Laporte]

And McCormick is not offering a coaster with a set of your favorite McCormick spices for $10. McCormick said no, that's not us.

[Ashley Esquetha]

What? I'm upset. I'm not gonna get that in the mail. I, I paid good. 10 good dollars for that.

[Leo Laporte]

I got a point out that I, I don't know how you distinguish this from a fraudulent ad. This is right. I mean I.

[Ashley Esquetha]

If you're not Internet savvy, especially I mean if you're just a regular person, you know, like my.

[Leo Laporte]

This looks real.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, it looks real. Of course.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's. You get a handy stand with ready made spices for your dish. It's ideal for cooking or as a cute gift. A taste of tradition in every jar. Don't miss it. And then just shop now, button. But it's not real. McCormick said no, that's, that's not.

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean anybody who has bought spices in recent months, we'll know that that's not real because that's not what should cost anymore.

[Ashley Esquetha]

The price of spices.

[Leo Laporte]

$10 for that?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Have you tried it says it's a coaster. And it. Those might be really tiny bottles.

[Ashley Esquetha]

There are apothecary bottles that are one in China. It's a dollhouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Airplane liquor bottles or something.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, but I mean they're never going to make a serious attempt to crack down on this until there are Fines which make a difference, you know, I mean, say, I don't know, the FCC or the ftc finds meta 150 million or something, that's money down the back of the sofa for them. So, you know, until you start finding companies based on revenue rather than profit, then that's never going to change.

[Leo Laporte]

A British regulator last year said it found Meta's products were involved in 54% of all payment related scam losses in 2023. Double all the other social media platforms combined.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean they, they have no interest in cracking down on it. Why would they? Because they.

[Leo Laporte]

One Meta spokesperson said, well, the way we handle this is by charging scammy ads more. That really discourages them.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh boy.

[Leo Laporte]

What?

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, that's, that's how you. Okay.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Rather than voluntary strategy, Reuters goes on to say rather than voluntarily agreeing to do more to vet advertisers, the same documents take the company's leadership decided to act only in response to impending regulatory action. They did it till they couldn't get away with it anymore.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, that's basically how it goes. I mean, it's not to say that Meta is alone in this by any manner of means. There are plenty of tech companies that play this game, you know, it's. But they are probably the worst.

[Leo Laporte]

Roblox is being sued right now as well.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, this is very, very similar, but just a different, much sadder and upsetting series of stories.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it goes after kids.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, it's just a, it's, that's a, that's a very frustrating, that's a very frustrating story to like follow and cover.

[Leo Laporte]

Texas is suing Roblox. Actually this is more serious, not for document fraud, but because they're allowing. They haven't stopped people from endangering children, deceiving parents and profiting from a digital playground that conceals predators and a manipulative psychological design behind a facade of family fun. Your 6 year old's too young to be a Robloxer. I would imagine.

[Ashley Esquetha]

He will never be a Robloxer. That is actually, it's not allowed in our house.

[Ian Thompson]

That's responsible parenting. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Not having played with it, it seems pretty interesting and cool because the kid is encouraged to create their own games and design their own. It seems like in many ways a well meaning platform.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, but all well meaning platforms, unfortunately, when children are such a big part of your base. And it also is a platform in which it is a social media platform. If we consider it, if we consider it what it actually is. I argue and I Think a lot of other people who have studied Roblox and other games like it. I would argue it is a social media platform. A lot of kids spend all their time in Roblox with their friends. Very similar to Fortnite, for example. Like I, I have argued on few occasions that Fortnite is also a social media platform, is an interactive social media platform, but a social media platform it is. And I think when you do not have the levers in place to protect your most vulnerable user and in this case is, you know, kids as young as three to five. I mean I've seen, I've seen small children at my son's karate dojo who they're, they're too young to do karate and they're on Roblox on an iPad. And it's just, it's, it is, you have a responsibility to protect those users in my opinion. And unfortunately we don't regulate these companies, you know, at a, at a legal level. We don't force them to do it. And so what ends up happening is, is kids get hurt and then they are forced to do it in some capacity. Whether it's, you know, the bare minimum or more than that or whatever it is, it happens when they get sued. So someone has already been harmed here.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And that is, that is a problem for me. Like if you're not proactive about protecting literal children, then like what are you even doing? Like it's. But, but again this is like the same thing as Facebook. Not really going after scammers because it's like it affects their bottom line, it affects their, you know, daily active users, it affects their time spent in games, it affects all of those things that then affect their bottom line. And so it's a line item to them. The settlements from these lawsuits are often a line item to companies like this. And it's really disappointing and extremely stressful as a parent to know that type of stuff. And also just societally it's upsetting to know that sometimes we are just harm that is done to us as a customer is just a line item in these corporations ledgers and it's just really disappointing.

[Leo Laporte]

Texas says in the lawsuit, in its own, its own in game currency, Robux obscures real world costs, encourages compulsive purchase and provides leverage for predators to hunt and abuse children. Rather than being lured by candy, modern day predators have lured children with Roebucks. Do you think that's actually going on? There's a here cure cure 100%. That's a pause.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's a, you Know, send, send these types of pictures to me and I will give you some Robux. Don't tell your parents that I'm doing this. It's, you know, it happens. It, it was happening, Leo. Like you remember AOL chat rooms were like it was happening there. Like it was happening there. This is again like to, to your point earlier we, it is Yonko's point earlier. It is all about, you know, a modernization of grooming. It's, this is just the next generation of it. These scams have always existed throughout time. Yeah. Before the Internet was invented, like all of it has already existed. It's just supercharged now that more people now have access to more people via the Internet.

[Leo Laporte]

What about the argument in the case of Roblox and of Meta that when these platforms get so big it's almost impossible to police them?

[Ian Thompson]

It's possible to police them. It just takes money that the companies aren't willing to spend and techniques which might cut into their mind market share slightly. And I think that's something that really needs to be stressed is that you can fix these problems in a vast majority of cases just with some fairly simple tweaks. But it costs money and it will cost them. You know, it'll make it slightly hard for people to log on and you know, sales teams are not going to allow that to happen.

[Janko Rutgers]

I think, I think you got to acknowledge kind of both, right. It's, it's impossible to completely solve these issues, but they could always do better and if they just did a little better it would improve the lives or in some cases save lives even of a lot of people.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm sure that's what the courts are gonna decide. Is Roblox doing enough? Texas calls it a multi billion dollar digital hellscape that preys on innocence under the banner of play. Yikes.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I just, yeah. To that last bit, I think, I think Yanko, you're absolutely right. It's, it's not that you'll ever completely eradicate it, but that isn't an excuse to not do anything.

[Leo Laporte]

Forced to responds. We are disappointed that rather than working collaborative, live collaboratively with Roblox on this industry wide challenge and seeking real solutions. The Attorney General has chosen to file a lawsuit based on misrepresentations and sensationalized claims. We have introduced over 145 safety measures on the platform this year alone.

[Ian Thompson]

Hmm.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And I would argue if we looked into it, I would maybe bet on the fact that many of them were implemented because of previous legal settlements like Meta.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we don't do anything as long as we make money until we get told we have to do something. All right, I want to take a little break. Maybe the solution is to ban social media for young people. It's happening in Australia in just a few weeks and it's about to happen in Denmark and perhaps elsewhere, maybe even here. We'll talk.

[Ian Thompson]

Particularly ironic considering Denmark's attitude to privacy recently. With the.

[Leo Laporte]

With control, right?

[Ian Thompson]

They provide chat control. Yeah. Well, I wonder if it's all from that. It seems.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it sounds like it's a. It's of a piece like this. It's. There's a attitude. Anti. Anti. Online attitude. Maybe.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Also, Yonko has some, I think insight into what's going on with YouTube and Disney. He says sports streaming is a fragmented hot mess. We'll talk about that.

[Ian Thompson]

That's good lunch.

[Ashley Esquetha]

True facts. Yonko knows what's up.

[Leo Laporte]

Yonko knows exactly what's going. Yonko knows. He knows. Poob has it for you. Right? Poob's got it. It's on poob. Alright, we're gonna take. I'll explain that as well. If you don't know what I'm talking about in just a bit. Great, great, great panel. Yago Records is here. Lopass CC is his newsletter. We also have Ian Thompson, late of the register. Now, now footloose and fancy free.

[Ian Thompson]

Just.

[Leo Laporte]

You just interviewed who? I'm excited. Yeah, our good friend Corey about his new book which is selling like crazy.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, this is what I was talking to him about. Two and a half thousand word feature on. Can we say in shitification?

[Leo Laporte]

Oop, you can because it's.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's a real word now in the dictionary.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, yes.

[Ian Thompson]

In Merriam Webster.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not only in the dictionary. I mean there are lots of words with bad words in the middle, but doesn't make them bad words, does it?

[Ian Thompson]

No, I don't think so. I mean therapists.

[Leo Laporte]

I can drink a cocktail. I wouldn't want to suck it down, but I could drink it. So I think we can say insertification. We do have a host that insists on calling insured ification, but I think that confuses people.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it is in fact the name of the book. So I think. Yes. Yeah. And good, good on Corey, of course, a regular on this show. We talked with him not so long ago about the book which was about to come out at the time. He's on book tour. Right.

[Ian Thompson]

Just headed over to Europe with it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Glad you Got a chance to talk to him. Where's that interview gonna show up?

[Ian Thompson]

I'll be in PC Pro the in December.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome. I will look for it. And Ashley Esquetha who also. We're all freelancers now. None of us works for a big company. We all did.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No more nine to fives for me, thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't we like that?

[Ashley Esquetha]

I don't think I can go back. I think it'd be. I'd have to be for a dream job that's like a dream or true dream job maybe I would think about it, but yeah, it's nice.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, when I worked in radio, every segment had to be 7 minutes and 45 seconds long. And you know, there were morality clauses and all sorts of things you couldn't do if the sponsors would get upset. And I just like not having to worry about that. And I can say things like, suck a cocktail in it, and nobody's gonna yell at me except my wife.

[Ashley Esquetha]

You might hear from Lisa.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't. I watch.

[Ashley Esquetha]

She is your. In fact, she is your fcc. She's your personal fcc.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's true. I told Patrick Norton, it's gonna be nice not to work for the man. And Patrick, who was my partner at TechTV, said, Leo, there's always a man. In this case, it's a woman, but it's a man.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Lisa.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, Lisa.

[Leo Laporte]

There's always a man. There's always somebody. Our show today brought, I said, a piece of software that's suddenly popular in Australia and Denmark, I'm not sure why. ExpressVPN. Yeah, my favorite VPN, the only one I use. Going online without ExpressVPN. I don't know what's a good analogy. It would be like being at a coffee shop and leaving your laptop unattended when you ran to the bathroom. Right? Most of the time you'll come back, it's there. But what if one day you come back and your laptop is gone? Everyone needs a great VPN. Everyone needs ExpressVPN. Every time you connect to an unencrypted network in that coffee shop, in a hotel, in an airport, your online data is not secure. Any hacker on the same network can see you. And with a cheap device, the WI FI Pineapple is an example. Easily, readily available online, can gain access to and steal your personal data. You don't have to have a lot of technical knowledge, just one of those devices and there's reason to do it. Your data is valuable. Hackers can make up to $1,000 per person selling personal info on the dark Web. That's why when I'm at the airport, which I won't be for a while now, that they seem to be shutting down. But we were hoping to go somewhere. But maybe not. Anyway, when I was at the airport last at sfo, you know, you open your laptop and it says, free sfo Airport WI Fi free. And I said, oh, that's great. And then my finger hesitated as I was about to select it, realizing that could be trouble. Fortunately, I also remembered I got ExpressVPN. I don't go anywhere without it. Fired it up and was able to use the free airport wi fi safely. ExpressVPN stops hackers from stealing your data. It creates a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and the Internet. No one can see inside. So you can use those open Wi Fi access points without risk. ExpressVPN is the one I use. It's the best VPN out there. It's the only one I recommend because of their commitment to keep your privacy private. As I said, I use it when I travel, I use it at the airport, but I use it when I arrive to, you know, watch the Formula one races. Don't tell me what happened, Ian. Is it getting exciting with the last few races or, you know, gotta watch the Niners sometimes. Sometimes you don't want to watch the nighters. But I can. And that's the point, no matter where I am. ExpressVPN is the best VPN, not only because it's super secure. I mean, this is strong encryption. It would take a hacker, a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. But it's also everywhere you are. It's easy to use. It runs on everything. You've got iPhones, Android phones, laptops, Linux, Mac. It runs on your tablets, it even will run on your router. So your whole family can stay secure at home. And they even have a new thing, which I love, which is optional. You don't have to do it. But it's a dedicated IP service that's engineered with innovative zero knowledge design. So we've talked about this before. When you use a vpn, you're private up to the server, but the server also has to respect your privacy because they can see you as you have to emerge out on the public Internet. You have to do that. So you've got to trust the VPN provider. I trust ExpressVPN because they always go the extra mile. They're server trusted server technology, which they design and has been Vetted by independent auditors. Third party. And they confirm it runs in RAM sandbox so it can't write to the hard drive. And when you close the connection, that's your own server right there, it goes away and there's no trace of your visit. But even if, as if that weren't enough, they run a custom Debian Distro that wipes the drive every morning. When they reboots the machine, there is no record of your visit. And now with this. This new thing is so incredible, ExpressVPN cannot even connect you to the IP address you're using. It's zero knowledge. Even they don't know. So you are really private. Rated number one by top tech reviewers at CNET and the Verge. Frankly, it's the only one I use. Secure your online data today. Visit expressvpn.com twit that's E X P R-E-S-S vpn.com twit Find out how you can get up to four extra months. Expressvpn.com twit expressvpn.com we thank them so much for their support. ExpressVPN so, last Monday. Sorry, did somebody want to say something?

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, I was just gonna say. You haven't seen the Grand Prix yet.

[Janko Rutgers]

No.

[Ian Thompson]

Okay. It's an absolute stonker. Get on there.

[Leo Laporte]

I watched the show. I watched the Sprint yesterday and that was wild. And I watched the first 17 laps of Brazil this morning, but I haven't seen the finish.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, let's just say that the top. The three people on the podium really deserve to be there. And I won't. Oh, I can't wait out there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's getting exciting because we've got both McLarens are. Are very close to winning the championship. It's anybody's game, Pearl. Max had a bad day yesterday, but we'll see, you know.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah, Like I say, no spoilers not being.

[Leo Laporte]

Never give up on Max. Anyway, I'm sorry with the F1 talk, we, Ian and I have bonded over formula. What do you think of. Speaking of streaming, what do you think of Apple buying F1 rights in the US? Well, first of all, let me ask, are you a Crofty fan or do you watch F1TV?

[Ian Thompson]

If Martin Brundle's on, then I'll watch the international stream. If not, then I'll listen to the F1TV stream.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Crofty fan, particularly. But you like.

[Ian Thompson]

Crofty's great. But he's. Crofty can't carry the show. The show on his own. You need A racing driver along there with him to actually, you know, give a decent.

[Leo Laporte]

My favorite is your. Is your fellow countryman David Clothard on the.

[Ian Thompson]

Yes. D.C. is marvelous when he's not.

[Janko Rutgers]

When he's on.

[Leo Laporte]

I will. Must watch it anyway. But I mean, I'm hoping that all of this team will be preserved because Apple has bought the rights from ESPN, had them for a long time, didn't do F1 justice at all. They were even putting ads in the middle of the race, which is nuts.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So you like. I subscribe to F1TV, their Liberty Media streaming solution. But Apple convinced Liberty to give that up in the U.S. yeah. And Apple's going to be in charge of not only putting it on Apple TV instead of espn, but of streaming. Of a streaming, I presume, a streaming service or something.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, basically there's a little concern in the F1 community. Sorry about this, Ashton.

[Leo Laporte]

Yanko, you must cover this.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I love this. I like. Yeah, this is like very fascinating. I love the business of television. So this is like very fascinating to me.

[Leo Laporte]

So ESPN was paying, I think 50, 60 million a year or. No. Was it a year? No, it wasn't even a year. It was.

[Ian Thompson]

They were getting it for peanuts.

[Leo Laporte]

20 a year for three years or something like that. Apple has ponied up $750 million, not.

[Ian Thompson]

To mention another 300 million to do the F1 film to promote their involvement with it. So there's a lot of concern amongst the community that Apple are basically going to take it over and jack up the prices year by year. Whereas F1TV has actually been fairly stable in pricing. And also nobody trusts Apple. I'm sorry, they're no longer the cuddly company that people remember from 20 years ago. These are ruthless when it comes to wringing the last cent out of every possible consumer. And I, I've never subscribed to Apple tv. I guess I'm going to have to.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to. If you're an F1 fan in the US, you're going to have to subscribe.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. It's either that or, you know, ah, it's time to pirate. But I don't do that anymore because.

[Leo Laporte]

I, I just want to mention ExpressVPN, our fine sponsor, will let you go to Britain.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

And watch.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. But even then you've got to pay Sky TV to get their car. Oh, so you know, it's you. You're screwed either way, I'm afraid.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll see how they really loved. I, I loved the streaming service. F1TV streaming service. Because not only did you have a choice of whether you'd watch Crofty do the sky broadcast or the international F1TV team, which I really like, so you could choose your announcers, but you also had access to all the driver cameras, all the driver radios, and in fact, I've been using on the Mac, there's a really great program called F1 viewer that uses your streaming subscription and opens up a bunch of windows so you can, you could, if you want, go crazy. And on my big screen, I do that, watch all of the cameras and everything. And there's also a data view, there's a racetrack view. It is amazing. And for about a hot minute, somebody made a Vision Pro app that would do that. Now, the hope for Vision Pro owners is that maybe Apple has purchased this and will incorporate it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I mean, that would be cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I am such a fan, I would buy a Vision Pro just to watch that.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, the driver cam thing's really interesting because each of the circuits do their own TV production. Some of them are lousy at it.

[Leo Laporte]

Some of them are terrible. It's just like cut away as something exciting's happening and.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. And then now let's look at the driver's girlfriend where just when he's about to overtake.

[Leo Laporte]

They must have heard the criticism because the last two races, there's not been one shot of a driver girlfriend. The race before it, it was at least a dozen. They kept showing because they all date models.

[Ashley Esquetha]

So they're attractive, famous.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but they didn't do it well.

[Ashley Esquetha]

They were hoping for the Taylor Swift effect, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

They were. You know what? That's what it was. Oh, my God, you're right. It was so. It's been so good for the NFL.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Why not us?

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't even think of that. But you're Exactly. That's why there was suddenly all those girlfriend pictures. So what do you think, Ian? What do you think?

[Ian Thompson]

Will Apple people, okay, hardcore Formula one fans will transfer to Apple because we have to.

[Leo Laporte]

We have to.

[Ian Thompson]

You know, there's, there's a, you know, there's, there's an addiction to be fed there. I think it could be quite handy in bringing new fans into the sport. But there is going to be a significant number of people who will choose to pirate if Apple jack the prices up too much. So it's that age old thing between don't rip customers off and they'll stay the legit, legitimate service. If you do rip them off, then they'll pirate it and, you know, it's I much prefer having a legitimate service. I mean, I was happy to pay.

[Leo Laporte]

For F1TV, which did go up. I think it was 150 bucks for the.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, you went full premium?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, full premium. Can I. Well, let me also. Just as a. As a pop culture idiot who can't get enough, let me just. Let me just sell you F1 fans on Apple TV, because everyone's missing out on Apple TV who doesn't have a subscription. And here's why.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to talk about plural later.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Okay? First of all, you got a lot of great sci fi happening on. On Apple tv. You got foundation for All Mankind. You got Pluribus. Now, this is Vince Gilligan's new show. This is the guy who created Breaking Bad. It's amazing. You've got severance. Like there are. Please. If you are not. If you love good television and you do not have an Apple TV subscription, what are you doing with your life? Because there's so much good television.

[Leo Laporte]

Slow Horses may be the best show on TV right now.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's so good and, like, there's just so much good television happening over there. It is the new hbo. When Plepler was at hbo. It is the new. It is that. It is that HBO is developing. Interesting. Yes, yes, it's. Now we have Zazlov's hbo. I don't want that. I want. I want whatever this is happening over at Apple tv, which is like, these shows are extremely high quality. They're very, very good. Apple's putting a lot of money into them. And I really have hope, I genuinely hope that buying F1 brings more people into the. The television ecosystem, the narrative, like storytelling and fiction ecosystem of Apple tv, because it is very, very high quality and so many people are missing out on it.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the advantages Apple has is they don't have to make money on Apple tv. No, they want to sell you on.

[Ashley Esquetha]

The Apple One subscription.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's which I pay for.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, I pay for that, too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, because you get a lot.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's a good deal stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah. Janko, you haven't said a word here. You're. You're from Germany, so I thought maybe you'd be a, you know, Michael Schumacher fan.

[Janko Rutgers]

I'm not a big Formula one fan, but I actually did just look at the. The coverage to just like, refresh my memory on that deal with Apple, and it does sound like they will offer some stuff for free and, like, all practice sessions for free in front of the paywall. So, Ian, to your point, it could be that it actually brings in more people who maybe never watched ESPN because they don't watch regular TV anymore. Or maybe they didn't subscribe to the F1 streaming service.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, I watched some F1. I'm interested in it based on Drive to Survive. Like, I liked that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what did it, by the way.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I'm very curious about. I'm like. I'm like, I'm totally. I will watch it now that I have. I don't want to subscribe to another service. And so now that I already have a service I'm subscribed to, I'll totally check it out. Like, I'm very interested in checking.

[Leo Laporte]

The drunk with F1 in the US is that the all the races are in the middle of the night?

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not the best time to stay up. But you can't put an ad in between. You know, it's two hours and you cannot put an ad. It's worse than soccer, football, right, because you can't put an ad in there. Meanwhile, American sports like baseball and NFL, you know, football are made for TV ads, right?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Taking breaks every like 30 seconds.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like they designed it for that, right? There's only 11 minutes of action in an NFL football game, which means there's about two hours of ads designed.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It was created here in America, so that's like commercials in mind already.

[Ian Thompson]

But I mean, to Ashley's point, the drive to survive effect is very real.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it's huge.

[Ian Thompson]

In 2008, the first year I came over here, I met up with the San Francisco Formula one club and we went down to a bar in the Tenderloin at 9 o' clock on a Sunday morning to watch the Brazilian Grand Prix. And there were like two dozen of us there. And after Lewis won, we got very, very drunk. Now, the last time I went to see went to an SF F1 event, there was the entire pub was rammed out. And this was after Drive to Survive came and there was a queue going down the block for people waiting to get drinks and a lot of very disgruntled people having their partners explain to them the ins and outs of tower strategy and the rest of it. But the drive to survive effect is real, and the more fans, the better. To be honest, I kind of missed the old days when it was slightly more of a sort of niche. But hey, you know, if more people get excited by it sounds good to me.

[Leo Laporte]

So the only thing that worries me is Apple spent a lot of money on Major League Soccer, mls They've been running baseball games on Friday night. And in both cases we had high hopes that Apple would use its technology chops to make this, you know, somehow better. A lot more data or whatever. And in both cases, no, they haven't really done anything to bug me with ads for games I don't want to see. But there is an opportunity because there is no more highly technological sport than Formula one racing. And there is if they have terabytes of data a second coming off of those cars and there's a huge opportunity. Plus with the Vision Pro, this could be, you know, they could have, you know, spatial views of first person spatial.

[Ashley Esquetha]

View from within the car, like up.

[Leo Laporte]

For sure.

[Ashley Esquetha]

For sure. It would make them sick. But I mean, it's cool.

[Janko Rutgers]

If they didn't invest much for the millions of people who have Apple tv, I don't think they will invest a whole lot for the, what, 200,000 people who have a Vision Pro or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean it makes this product which has been, frankly, laggard has not really been taking off. It gives it maybe some hope for the future. I don't know.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's a small. That's a little tiny piece of a pie though. I mean it just like little bones.

[Leo Laporte]

I just realized I'm wearing a sample San Francisco 49ers shirt. You're wearing a city of Los Angeles T shirt, Ashley.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yes. I obviously bought in Japan, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like it. I like it now. But Yanko, what are you wearing?

[Janko Rutgers]

Oh, this is Wormbo. Yeah, it's from this YouTube show that I watch. It's called someone news people who like news shows that I sort of like Wormbo.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Janko Rutgers]

And he's like off brand Muppets without being a officially licensed.

[Leo Laporte]

It kind of looks like.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, yeah, he's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

And he's like the weird sidekick that everybody hates. It's. It's a great show. I can highly recommend it.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it W A R M B.

[Janko Rutgers]

O. Oh, you don't need to Google the name of the guy of the character because it's just some more news on YouTube. And there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, and it's like it's definitely a. Has a leftist bend to it, but there's a puppet. Exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Hello there, General. Okay. Hey, Warmbo. I love it, I love it that you're showing the flag for your favorite creator.

[Ian Thompson]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a good thing. I like that. Now let's talk about YouTube TV, which is distinct from YouTube. YouTube TV is their cable, basically cable channel. Yeah. In fact, When I got, when we moved, we got rid of Comcast Cable TV and we subscribed to YouTube because it's got a DVR built in. It's got all the same channels. I can watch Monday night. Oh no, I can't watch Monday Night Football because they are recently. Yeah, so this is, this is, we've seen these carriage disputes before this happened. It's even happened before with Disney and YouTube TV, where, you know, Disney on all of its channels, they have abc, they have espn, they, I mean they own a ton of stuff, will put up things and YouTube TVs ripping you off. In two days you're not going to be able to watch your shows and, and you know, call YouTube TV and then YouTube TV says, oh, the Disney people are creeps. So this battle has gone on, but normally these are resolved before the big game.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, it's interesting because I mean these things happened even before streaming. Right. So it used to be cable companies would fight with TV networks and it was about the price of what they had to pay. And back in those days, ultimately the networks always wanted because they had all the good stuff. They had the games that people wanted to watch, they had the shows that people wanted to watch. And then if you paid Comcast 80 bucks, 100 bucks a month and they didn't deliver it, you got really mad at them. And then eventually Comcast had to cave. Now it's sort of different because people are getting so much of that stuff elsewhere. So with Disney, people subscribe to Disney, so they have access to all the kids stuff on Disney, they have access to the Marvel stuff on Disney. Then sports, there's so many more options to watch sports now.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Janko Rutgers]

So the big pay TV bundle isn't the only thing in town anymore. And that really changes sort of the dynamics. And plus you're now dealing with companies like Google who are in everybody's business with all kinds of different things. So suddenly, and I don't think there has been official confirmation yet, but recently suddenly Movies Anywhere didn't stop working for Google services. So Movies Anywhere is a Disney service that's kind of like a locker in the cloud. You can buy a Blu Ray disc of a movie of a Marvel movie, and then you can unlock the online version to stream it to your iPad or these types of things. And it's like an industry wide consortium, multiple companies involved. So if I buy a movie on YouTube, I can then go to my Movies Anywhere app from Disney and I can watch it there and vice versa. And now suddenly Google pulled out and Said the stuff is not working anymore. All the stuff that you bought on, on YouTube before, it doesn't show up there anymore and so forth.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Even works with Apple, Apple's movies, which is kind of amazing.

[Ian Thompson]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

So I have 169 movies and movies anywhere bought in a variety of different services. But you're saying the stuff I bought on Google's Play Store is no longer going to be available to me?

[Janko Rutgers]

You would have to check.

[Leo Laporte]

That's terrible. Unfortunately, I don't ever buy anything on the Play Store, but if I had, I'd be upset.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah. Wow. And so Google has a lot more power now. The power dynamics have shifted where the networks aren't as important anymore and cord cutting. Obviously the overall numbers of pay TV subscriptions have gone down significantly as well. The ESPN has its own streaming service. ESPN has true streaming services, actually, which get really confusing during this, during this conflict right now because people are like, well, I'm paying for ESPN plus. Shouldn't I be able to watch this game? And then, oh no, actually I have to subscribe to ESPN Unlimited or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S called worse than that because I pay for YouTube TV's Sunday Ticket, which is, is very pricey and in theory gives you all the games. But we're not. And fortunately ABC and the other and ESPN only broadcast a handful of games. It's Monday Night Football is the one that we're really missing. That's an ESPN game. Lisa says, okay, let's pay for ESPN. But that means now I'm going to have two $200 subscriptions.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

The issue with all of this is that pay TV or industry has worked for the longest time with these big bundles. So that you as a consumer had to buy these big bundles. Leo, you have to pay like 80 bucks for YouTube TV. But Google has to buy these bundles too. When they do business with Disney. Disney says, oh, you want ESPN? Well, great. Why don't you also get Disney XD and ABC channel 17 or whatever, like package of 20 some channels, most of which get very little viewing. But they had to get. And they had to like bundle it all and put it all. There's even like things where you can't offer bundles without ESPN to a certain number of customers. You have to like x percent of your total audience have to have a bundle that has ESPN in it. Otherwise you won't get espn. And these types of things have contributed to this really expensive cable bundles and now online pay TV bundles. But it's increasingly unsustainable for everybody involved.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Apparently unfortunately, the one thing that, the reason why it was like that for so long is because you have to. ESPN is basically a huge moneymaker and it subsidizes even in the cable TV era, before YouTube existed. It's like sports really does for cable. Sports really does subsidize a lot of that other content.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's just, you know, you don't have a game show network if it can't be bundled with it. With a YouTube, you know, or sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

With a ESPN, nobody would pay for game show TV.

[Ashley Esquetha]

The flip side was, but I'm a freak of nature who would pay for game show network.

[Janko Rutgers]

And the flip side of that was that everybody was basically forking over $8 or something a month to Disney for ESPN, even though only half of the country was watching it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Was watching, right, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Espn.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I don't watch sports almost at all. But when I subscribe to these things for these other channels, like I am in fact paying a large chunk of my subscription for espn.

[Leo Laporte]

So ESPN is the most expensive cable channel out there. I think it's. The last time I checked was 13.95 per subscriber. So it was very, very expensive because it's got ESPN live football, live sports. And live sports is one of the few things in this streaming, this streaming world of that still drive traffic.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's a guaranteed constant revenue make. It's a revenue generator.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is why Apple TV and Netflix and Amazon are all putting live sports on their streamers because that drives traffic. The difference, as you point out, Janko here, is that Disney, abc, ESPN have their own streaming services. They compete directly head to head with YouTube TV does this. Are we going to go back to unbundling now or am I going to have to subscribe to five different services? Because what it was the promise of YouTube TV or by the way, there's also FUBU, which is an ABC ESPN Disney owner owned thing. I think they may want us to buy Fubu instead of YouTube TV. Right. Because Fubu has locals. They also own Hulu, which has locals.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Well, they're spinning down Hulu. They're getting. They're, they're.

[Janko Rutgers]

Are they.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, that's, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Are they replacing Hulu with fubu?

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, I think they're just rolling all of it into Disney, Disney plus. I think it's just.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I'm gonna have to mention the Tumblr post from orcboxer that goes a little like this. In fact, I thank Paris Martineau because I had never heard of this until Wednesday and she told me about this on intelligent machines. Have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's literally on Heebie. It's on Pootie with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You could probably find it on Wings.

[Ian Thompson]

Dude.

[Leo Laporte]

It's on Gumpy. It's a Fibo original. It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. Log on to Poob right now. Go to Poob. Dive into Poob. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you. This is an old post, but it's become more true. More true over the years.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Every day.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crazy. So Hulu doesn't have it anymore?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Well, they won't have an app. They're still gonna exist. But the app is being phased out into Disney plus by next year, by 2026.

[Leo Laporte]

I think consumers are gonna revolt, right?

[Ashley Esquetha]

I don't think so, no. Because here's the thing. Like, how much did we pay for cable when we had it before? Before YouTube? $130 a month for everything.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you know how much YouTube TV is? It's 75 bucks, 85 bucks. It keeps going up 95 bucks.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Here's something. Still cheaper than a traditional cable package.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, no, because I still have to buy Internet.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Well, that's true. That's true. But you here, at this point, I think Internet is basically like, you're not buying Internet for street. For television. Like, you're not necessarily.

[Leo Laporte]

You're.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But YouTube also is its own search platform that has a myriad of other types of content on it. Like, you're not just getting a cable package. You're also getting like. Like a vast amount of information and entertainment that would not exist on cable if. If we did not have YouTube. So I, like, I go back and forth on this because do I think anybody should be paying, like a hundred dollars for, you know, a streaming bundle? Like, because we're basically back at cable.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going back to that. Yeah, yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, but also, I do understand that making content costs money. And, like, and I have so many friends who are writers and below the line crew people who are out of work because the cost. Because consumers are demanding that this cost stay very low. And so there is no money for production. I mean, I can't tell you how many articles are in the LA Times and in all of our local papers here in LA about how our industry has just been completely decimated by, you know, two things. One, this Sort of like huge expansion of, you know, more traditional golden age of television time, which was like the Sopranos to basically the end of Game of Thrones. Like, that's kind of like right in.

[Leo Laporte]

There until we get to season five.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I was gonna say.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But that even. But that even. Quality. Quality agnostic. The golden age of television for the industry was that there was so much work available, everybody. And then all of a sudden we went to, instead of 16 episode seasons, we're now down to eight. We're now hiring, not a writer's room, we're hiring maybe three people to write a season of television, sometimes only one. And so the amount of jobs and this goes all the way down. Like, people don't realize, they think of, of, oh, well, I'm sorry. Like some rich network star isn't working as much. Like, it's not those people. For every one of those, for every one of those people, there's a hundred people who work in craft services who are PAs, who are literally just making ends meet because they're getting paid minimum wage or a little bit more if they're in a union. Like, fortunately, we have lighting and rigging people, cinematographers, producers. Like all these people who work on a production. I mean, you, you know what the credits look like from an Avengers movie. Like, that's. And it's like all those people are out of work. And it's like the, the expectation of the viewer for the quality of content that they demand. That costs money. And it costs money to give people that experience. And we talk a lot about how frustrated viewers are about things like sequels and remakes, but the thing is, or how the visual effects of, let's say, a more recent Marvel movie might not look as good as one from five to 10 years ago. And it's like, that's because less people are working to make an equal amount of work. It's a lot of work. And less people are being asked to do those jobs. And they're just being absolutely crushed by being overworked, underpaid, and a lot of people just aren't working. They're straight up leaving the industry.

[Leo Laporte]

Like you. Actually, I'm a creator and I know a lot of those people, but I wonder if the rest of the country cares that much.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I mean, they don't. They don't. And the thing is, is like, a lot of people think of Hollywood as like a very fancy, rich people privilege job, but, like, this industry is built on blue collar. Like people who work their bodies to the bone carrying kino lights that are the size of like, they're humongous, they're hanging lights. They're. They're literally doing all of these things. They're spending, you know, time away from their families to shoot in remote locations for months at a time, often in like harsh conditions. Like, not every television show is a three camera sitcom that is a nine to five. And even those jobs aren't nine to fives for below the line people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yanko. And it's you quote in your Lowpass CC newsletter, which got republished on the Verge. J.J. watt, football star, who said enough. It's just frustrating. He was trying to watch the Money line football game and he couldn't. Like me, like my wife, we couldn't. And I think he might in a way be the voice of the country. Isn't there a risk that people just say, screw it, I'm just gonna watch YouTube?

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean, there's always that risk for sure. I think it's sort of a weird thing because in the same story I mentioned that actually sports is getting more popular, so there's more people self identifying as sport fans than even five years ago has gone up significantly. And some of that has to do with stuff becoming more available. Right. So you can now watch different things in front of the paywall. There's multiple streaming services, there's some stuff on Apple, there's some stuff on Netflix. And if you're a casual sports fan, it's actually a really good time. Because if you just like care about hanging out with some buddies and watching something.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, if you don't care what you're watching.

[Janko Rutgers]

Exactly. But if you're a hardcore fan, it's really difficult. And to go back to like. Ashley brought up good points. Why it's hard to always find like the boogeyman there. But if you want to find a good boogeyman, like one area to look at is possibly the leaks, which have been like really slicing and dicing these rights up. And why is there an NFL game in Brazil once a year? Well, you can sell that if you already sell the domestic rights.

[Leo Laporte]

They were in Berlin this morning.

[Janko Rutgers]

You have more stuff to sell.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. Janko knows what's up. Subscribe to his newsletter, everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Yeah, it's frustrating for everybody involved and it is hard to find a boogeyman. I don't. I think the problem is you've got to. These behemoths fighting each other. Except somebody pointed out it really isn't a fair fight. Disney. Disney's market cap is what, 40 or 50 billion? Google's market cap is in the trillions. They are not equals. We might kind of think of them as equals. They're not.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, we've also got Larry Ellison Jr entering the game. And you know what that means. Everyone's prices are going to go through the roof. So, you know, like, if he's learned at his daddy's knee, then we're all screwed on that front.

[Leo Laporte]

So his Sky Dance has already bought Paramount, CBS and is now looking to buy Warner Brothers Warner Discovery.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Y well, no, I think. Isn't it just Warner Brothers now because they split those like Discovery?

[Leo Laporte]

It's unclear the plan. Zaslav's plan was to split it, but I don't think it's happened yet. Right.

[Janko Rutgers]

They might be completely on the blog. They. They might split it up because there's also other companies in there like Netflix is looking at it and Netflix wouldn't want to own a cable network. They don't care about that.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, they don't really care about that. But they'd be interested in Warner Brothers catalog. Yeah, the catalog for Warner Brothers is vast. So I would imagine they would be very interested.

[Leo Laporte]

So we've seen this happen so many times before in the Internet era. This is the disintermediation part where everything's just kind of crazy. Nobody's happy. Janko, how's it gonna resolve? Do you have any. Do you have a crystal ball? Do you know.

[Ian Thompson]

Know?

[Janko Rutgers]

I wish. I don't know, to be quite honest. I mean, it's. It's also really hard to predict because all of these things going on still need to account for what actually the consumers are going to do and how they're going to respond to all of it. And so just the rise of YouTube proper. Not even talking about YouTube TV.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

YouTube proper is now the biggest media distribution company basically in the US when it comes to television, Television stuff that gets watched on TV screens, they're bigger than Disney with Disney plus and Hulu and ESPN and all the cable networks combined. It's just because people are on YouTube so much and watch so many things on YouTube movies, YouTube originals or like YouTube creator shows, but also like obviously stuff that ended up there one way or another. People just watch a ton of YouTube these days. So in a way all of this may be moot at some point because people are going to find ways to watch it anyway somewhere else or just going to switch to other types of programming. And I think that's what's interesting about the sports number too. Like the number of sports fins going up. Somebody on The Verge where that got syndicated pointed out, has maybe also to do with sports betting getting more popular. That could be it. But I think it's also that people are falling in love with new types of sports and not entirely new types of sports. But one example for that is the rise of the wnba. Right? So came sort of got really, really popular. It didn't come out of nowhere. Obviously, people. The WNBA has been around for a long time, but it's gotten really popular in just recent years. And then there's other sports that are still sort of bubbling below the stage surface that could, like, pop up and maybe get distributed completely differently and, and outside all of. Of these traditional paywalls. So it's going to be definitely interesting to watch. But I unfortunately also don't have that crystal ball.

[Leo Laporte]

I tried.

[Benito]

This is bonito. It's like sports betting is actually a big part of this because they're funding the leagues a lot now. Like, you've seen DraftKings arena and all that stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's big money. I don't know. I. I remember after the baseball strike many years ago, I kind of lost interest in baseball. I think there's a risk. I. I really think there's a risk that people could just get fed up. And there's so much good stuff on.

[Janko Rutgers]

YouTube, but also there's so much good sports. Right. So maybe you get fed up with NFL and you instead start watching cricket.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Curling on Apple tv. That's when you start doing.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe that's why Apple's buying it. Spending a lot of money.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Fingers crossed. They're like, someone at Apple TV's like, ooh, fingers crossed. People hate football in a minute. Like, come watch some racing cars. Come watch Lewis Hamilton look really cool and race a car.

[Ian Thompson]

You see, I'm with Giles from Buffy on this. With American football, it's like, why anyone would get. Why anyone who thought they were manly would get dressed up in 50 pounds of armor just to play. Rugby is just, you know, American football.

[Leo Laporte]

Is a perfect sport.

[Ian Thompson]

What with men in tights.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, that's. That gets the female side.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I love a man in tights. I'm gonna just stop you right there.

[Leo Laporte]

It is marketed and. And packaged perfectly in every respect.

[Ian Thompson]

That's an unfortunate statement given how tight those tights are. But I would like.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I would, in fact, like all men's sports to involve tights.

[Leo Laporte]

To see Australian Rules Football, because footy. Oh, yeah, they're wearing short shorts.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Listen, Australian rugby. I'm a fan. I'm a fan. I Don't know what's happening. I'm a fan.

[Janko Rutgers]

I don't know what's happening in an NFL game half the time.

[Leo Laporte]

So. Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Couldn't tell you what was happening. But wow, I love it. Watching it. It really so good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's what's imprinted on you as a kid, right? Whatever. It was like baby ducks that you watched as a kid. What did you watch? Young as a kid.

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean. Soccer. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And same for you, Ian. Probably right.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Soccer and rugby. Yeah. Formula one. You know, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's imprinted. Yeah. Ashley, what was your favorite sport when you were a kid or did you have one?

[Ashley Esquetha]

I have very fond memories of my family taking myself and my cousin, we are around the same age, to Las Vegas very often to watch football at the sports. The sports. Sports books.

[Leo Laporte]

UNLV or.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Watch NFL at the sports Strip.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, yeah, we would. I did.

[Leo Laporte]

We didn't go to a lot of.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Live at the time. Didn't go to a lot of live games. But let me tell you, I spent many hours at the Circus Circus.

[Ian Thompson]

So sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a casino for kids.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Fond memories. Because the 90s was the time that Vegas decided to pivot and make it like a family friendly destination. And so, yeah, I have fond memories of spending much time at the Circus Circus Midway when I was like 5 to probably 12 years old while my grandparents and my parents and like my cousin's parents.

[Leo Laporte]

Ashley, you go watch the. The acrobats.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I'll never forget. There was one time, I believe it was the year the Bills were playing in the Super Bowl. I don't remember what year it was, but this is like a big deal for my family. And so they went to Vegas and my cousin and I got in a big ice machine fight in the hallway like near our room. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I understand you just a little bit better now.

[Ashley Esquetha]

My grandma showed up and was like, we have to go. And we were like, what's the problem? My grandpa ended up getting in like a bar fight because somebody was harassing my aunt at the sports book. They got in an argument about who is the better team. Like my aunt threw the first punch. It was crazy. I have very fond memories of so many football. Like I have have Vegas football memories very specifically. But yes, that was a big part of my childhood.

[Janko Rutgers]

I. I liked how you started this story with. That's when this Vegas really became family friendly.

[Leo Laporte]

And I was a failure, by the way. That's when they shifted everything.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, it was a success for me. Though, because I have so many core family memories.

[Leo Laporte]

Vegas, it's the family place. Yeah, sure. A Wally world for the 90s.

[Ashley Esquetha]

100%. Was that. Yeah, but it was. Yeah. My family's very big into football and so watch a lot of football. And then I was also just. I loved the Lakers when I was. It was the Showtime. It was Showtime. So when I was a kid, so I. I. Showtime.

[Leo Laporte]

What a great show.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Johnson. No, the Showtime era. And.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I know, but that was. Also became a show about the bus era.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Showtime. Such a good.

[Leo Laporte]

Called Showtime.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, really good. But, yeah, I was a big Laker. I was a big Lakers kid, L.A. baby.

[Ian Thompson]

Don't go back to Circus Circus now because it has gone downhill massively.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, God.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I stayed there once. Someone put me up there for CES one year, and I. I almost left the town. Like, I almost just dipped.

[Leo Laporte]

When Ziff Davis was doing poorly for a long time, we stayed at the MGM grand, but then the. The company hotel became Circus Circus, and I knew we'd gone downhill because the TV remote was bolted to the side table, as was the lamp. I kind of had a feeling. This isn't quite.

[Janko Rutgers]

I will never come to McDonald's in the middle of the casino.

[Ashley Esquetha]

They do. They do have a McDonald's and actually a very good steakhouse inside that hotel. But I will never forget when I went for ces, there was a sticker on the window of the hotel room that said, if you're not alone, call this number if you're thinking.

[Leo Laporte]

I was like, oh, my God, this.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Hotel room is haunted. Like, I have to leave. I can't be here. Like, this is not. This is not a good place.

[Ian Thompson]

No, I stayed there for my first defcon and.

[Ashley Esquetha]

The cheap price.

[Ian Thompson]

I should. I shouldn't tell you this, but I walked into my room, checked out the bathroom, and someone left a floater in there, and it was like, really? We are not staying here.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Gotta go.

[Ian Thompson]

Not as bad as the old Imperial, but, you know, pretty bad.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Pretty bad, yeah. Oh, the old ip. Yeah, that was a bad one, too. Like. Yeah, I have. Yeah, I know. I have stayed in almost every hotel.

[Leo Laporte]

How about the Debbie Reynolds hotel? Was the old riverboat?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, my God, Leo, this is like, old school. I remember staying at the El Rancho and they had a bowling alley in the basement. Like. Like I said, I've been to Vegas as a child. I've been to Vegas more times as a kid than I have as an adult, which is saying something.

[Ian Thompson]

Good Lord.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, well, more Vegas memories. Coming up, you're watching this week in tech. Ashley Esquetha, Janko, Rutgers and Ian Thompson. Wonderful to have all three of you. This is fun. We'll get back to the news in just a bit. But first, a word from our sponsor, Shopify. Now imagine you're lying in bed late at night. You're scrolling through a new site you found, hitting the add to cart button on that item you've been looking for. And now you're ready to check out. Then you remember your wallet is in the living room all the way downstairs. And just as you're getting ready to abandon the cart. Ah, there is hope. You see it. That purple Shopify button. If you've shopped online, chances are you have bought from a business powered by Shopify. That purple shop pay button you see at checkout, it makes buying so incredibly easy. There's a reason so many businesses is sell with it because Shopify makes it incredibly easy to start and run your business. I love that sound. Actually, my son got his whole career started, you know, TikTok star making sandwiches, selling on Shopify. It made it possible for him to create the salt Hank website. It did all the it made it so easy for him. That's why I'm kind of a fan. Shopify is the commerce platform behind 10% of all all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to upstart brands like my boy Salt Hank. Shopify gives you that leg up from day dot with hundreds of beautiful ready to go templates to express your brand style and forget about the code. Tackle all those important tasks in one place from inventory to payments to analytics and more. Ask Hank how did you do this all yourself? You. He said Shopify spread your brand's word with built in marketing and email tools to find and keep new customers. And did I mention that iconic shop pay button? It's used by millions of businesses around the world. It's why Shopify has the best converting checkout. If you want to see fewer carts being abandoned, it's time for you to head over to Shopify. Love that sound. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com go to shopify.com twit shopify.com twit thank you shopify for supporting this week in tech and frankly for helping my kids get off the family dole. I very much appreciate it. Shopify.com TWIT on we go with the show. Let me see here. What else is in the news? I knew we'd have some fun conversations about. About this YouTube situation. I guess I'm gonna have to subscribe to ESP now. It's not ESPN plus, it's. It's the other one. That's the one J.J. watt was upset about because he had the wrong subscription.

[Janko Rutgers]

Right? Yeah. Espn. I'm actually blanking on it. I think it's ESPN Unlimited. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's crazy. It's crazy. Denmark's. I mentioned this. Denmark is planning to join Australia. Australia banning access to social media for children under 15. Australia's law goes into effect December 10th. I don't know how they're going to do this. Australia's going to ban access to social media, including YouTube, by the way, for anybody under 16. On Friday, Denmark's government announced an agreement to ban access to social media for anyone under 15. The move would give. In Australia. I don't think parents can get around it. In Denmark, parents, after a specific assessment, I don't know what that means. According to the Associated Press, would have the right to let their children access it from age 13. How you enforce this is a big question. As far as I can tell, it means that all social media in Denmark and Australia would have to ask every single user for proof of age, which is a privacy nightmare.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean this sort of thing is going on in the UK as well when it comes to accessing adult content. It creates an enormous database of personally identical information which is stored by third party companies who are very vulnerable to attack. In the Australian case, actually it's quite interesting. There has been a surprising side benefit in the number of influencers have actually left Australia and emigrated to other countries so they can carry on their careers there. So Australia is actually gay, you know, in terms of having less useless, you know, people floating around within their society. But, you know, from a, from an actual enforcement perspective, I just don't see.

[Leo Laporte]

How this is possible by December 10th in Australia.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's ambitious.

[Leo Laporte]

It is extremely ambitious. So Facebook is included in this. Instagram is included in this. Even WhatsApp app is included in this. The one that's going to be toughest is YouTube. But I think it's also tough for anybody who's 15 who suddenly is going to be going to have access to their friends.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. The hard thing is is there was a really good article in the Atlantic recently called what Kids Told Us about how to get them off their phones. And this is a. They, I think Harris poll, I want to say, did a survey and they asked kids ages 8 to or. Yeah, Harris Poll, kids 8 to 12 and asked them what would, what would. How do we get you off your phones? Because they're like, kids are just on their phones a lot. It's how they socialize.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's really hard.

[Leo Laporte]

They're, they're, they don't go outside and.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, we don't have a lot of therapists and also we, we don't have a lot of third spaces anymore for kids. So we used to have places. Somebody argued the other day to me and I thought it was so fascinating and I agree with it 100%. Horror movies have done so well at the box office because it is one of the few third spaces left for teenagers to go see a horror movie with their friends.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And I think that that is such a fascinating observation and I would love to see more research put into that. That. But about half of the 10 to 12 year olds that were surveyed, and I think it was about 500 of them said that they use social media. Most or all of their friends use social media.

[Ian Thompson]

So I mean, do you have a 6 year old? Do you.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Are they allowed on social media or. Excellent.

[Ashley Esquetha]

He doesn't have. I'm, I'm very. He will not have a, he will not have a phone or access to social media until he is old enough to understand disinformation, how to research AI like this is like a whole. I'm like very, I'm very adamant about good hygiene as it comes, as it, as it relates to like being online. Excellent. But they basically said, what, what do you want? And these kids basically all said more freedom. We never get to play unsupervised or unstructured. It's always in a soccer league or, you know, I'm always, I'm always brought together with my friends, friends for an arranged play date where my parent. Where everybody's parents are watching us. Like there's just no unsupervised or unstructured play.

[Leo Laporte]

Do kids in your neighborhood play out in the street at all? I don't see that anymore. I used to when I was a kid. That's what we.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Halloween. Let's talk about Halloween. When we bought this house. We bought this house 13 years ago. And the first time we had Halloween, we had probably 60 to 80 trick or treat. Trickers. We ran out of candy the first couple years. We ran out of candy last night. Our last, last Halloween, just a couple weeks ago, we bought. I figured Friday night Halloween, it's gonna be, it's gonna be popping lots of kids. We're gonna have a ton of kids coming around. It's not a school night. And we had less than 25 trick or treaters.

[Janko Rutgers]

Even then.

[Ashley Esquetha]

We gave two. We gave like, two extra bars to people. So it's probably less than that. It might have been like 20, 20. And we literally. These kids want free play in person, organized activity. They would rather have those things the younger they get. Especially that that is the case. Yeah, yeah, they would rather have these things. And. And we are not. I don't know how it is in other countries. And I would imagine, obviously, places like Denmark have more walkable cities, for example. They have. Have more. They have better public transportation. In Japan, you have kids that have a lot of independence because they run errands. They start running errands at the age of, like, small errands. There's like a Netflix show about it. At the ages of between two and four, like, they. They're sent down the street with a little bit of pocket change to get something for their parents. And they. Their. Their independence is constantly fostered. And we don't do that here. We have a very kind of. There's a. There's a layer of fear that a lot of parents have about something happening to their kids. And I think. I think there are many factors that go into that. I worry every day about things like gun violence in this country. I worry every day about things like online predators, which is why my kid doesn't play online games. I worry about those things. But we also try really hard to give him a sense of independence. We try to have him do things for himself. We make him order his own food at a restaurant. I don't do that for him, for you. Because he needs to be able to interact with the world. He's able to talk to a human being and look them in the eyes and ask for what he needs. And so. But we also. I feel a lot of times like a failure as a parent because he is an only child. And we don't have a lot of times that he gets to have unstructured play because a lot of other parents are like, well, we'll just see you in, you know, karate, or we'll see you in, you know, at this event. And I'm just like. But I think. Think structured Halloween is now trunker treats. So they do these trunk or treating events where you go from car to car and the trunks are decorated and that's it. Most parents prefer that. But this.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that because of COVID that we just got used to doing it?

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, this has been happening Even before that. And I do think that like just, it's been wild for me like to go from a person who did not have kids. Kids, but likes kids and like understands their role in society. Like I, I am a big proponent of like, you should have your kids out in society. You should have them on planes. You should have them because that's where they learn to be an adult. You're teaching them to be an adult. And I see so many of my friends who sometimes like, they're not my friends, but people I know who don't have kids complaining about things like crying babies on trains or like, you know, whatever. Kids, kids being like a three year old being like walking around at a restaurant. Restaurant. And it's like they're just learning how to be a human. Like they're just kind of learning that. But we have created, I think our society in particular has created such a, created such an unfriendly space for children like to just exist. Like we don't have malls anymore where you could, you know, just bum around with your friends. Like we, we have malls, but like that's not a place where people much longer. Yeah, it's just because of, because of the Internet. Internet. And, and the thing is, is again, social media, like I consider places online spaces, like Fortnite is a third space for kids because they don't have that. They don't have that in real life anymore. They don't have a place they can congregate in without some suspicious adult saying, oh, something bad is happening here and calling the police. And, and it's just, it's not fair to them. It's really unfair to them. And so I, I think it is terrible that these kids are going to have an element of their social life stripped from them that they have no control over. I think that that is unfair. But I also do think that social media is incredibly unhealthy for small children. They should not have access to it. They do not need it. They need in person socialization. The, the whole point.

[Leo Laporte]

But what about a 15 year old?

[Ashley Esquetha]

A 15 year old. I think it's both. They're still only 15. They're still a child. Like, and it's, they need in person social interaction. A good example.

[Leo Laporte]

But if it's not, if it's not available to them, which it seems not to be.

[Benito]

I think Ashley hit it on the head when she talked about the parenting parents being scared of everything outside for their children. I think this is really the big problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Like there's no stranger danger.

[Benito]

Stranger danger I grew up in the 80s and it was far more dangerous in the 80s for me to be alone in the mall than it is today.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Way more than it is today. We have cameras, we have, we have so much technology.

[Benito]

Don't allow it anymore. Parents just don't let their kids be alone anymore.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

When I was 15, my parents were sending me away on holiday on my own and it was fantastic, you know, I got to share a room with a professional backgammon player who taught me how to play properly, you know. You took a bus across Europe to get there.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

On your own, you know, and you learn how to deal.

[Ashley Esquetha]

You lived life. You lived life. And we see a lot of stories about like, I'm sorry, I'm like totally dominating this conversation. I have so many thoughts about this.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but do you have strong feelings about it? And you have a six year old.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, but I also see like so many Gen Z kids who are in their 20s being like, dating is impossible. Right? Dating is so impossible. And the thing is, is like, yes, you feel really lonely because the only way you're interacting with people is through a screen. And when you inevitably have to interact with a person in person, they are not equipped with the tools of the lost art of conversation. I run a media training company. It is my job to teach people how to communicate with other people. And it's like we have lost the art of conversation so deeply. Especially here in the US but a lot of Western countries we've lost the art of communication because it's through a screen you lose things like tone, you lose the ability to read people's faces. Faces and read a room. It's. We joke about the, the phrase read the room. But the thing is, is we've lost that art. We don't have it. And we're now seeing things like, you know, people feel so lonely, they feel so isolated on screen that they're now turning to chatbots for, for companionship. And we're seeing these awful stories coming out of if these kids who have committed suicide because their chatbot is encouraging them to do these things, because it's all it is is just vomiting back their tone of voice, their pacing and structure of their writing, they seem like a friend. And these are children, they do not have the skills. We are not giving them or equipping them with the skills to understand that that's what it is. They really feel that they've made this connection because they are children. They are vulnerable. Even an 18 year old is still a child as a teenager and it's just, it's impossible to have these, like, conversations when people just ignore the fact that like, we've basically created societies in which being a kid is like, frowned upon.

[Janko Rutgers]

What's the solution then though? Is it to enforce these age restrictions on social media services and on YouTube or. So I'm, I'm sort of. I don't actually know whether that's good or bad, but I'm somewhat hesitant because I think it also could give social media companies a way out. We've seen that before with companies like Matter and Virtual Reality where they basically were like, well, our headset is not for people under 14, so nobody's using it under 14. And then you go onto these services and there's clearly young kids there all the time. But so when you enforce these age restrictions, the same thing could happen. Right?

[Ashley Esquetha]

So, yeah, I think it's a combo. It's like a combination. It's a combination of education to parents. Because the thing is, parents I talk to about Roblox have no idea. They have no idea that news is not getting to them. They're not receiving the story about the lawsuit in Texas. They're not receiving any of that news. And we've kind of hit a breaking point in our news consumption where people are so burnt out by the fire hose of news that is coming at us all the time on social media platforms, on, on our news apps, like from everywhere that we're tuning out and saying the most important news will reach me. And that's actually, there have been surveys done with like Gen Z kids who. That's how they feel. The most important news will certainly reach them. And that's all that matters to them. They're not gonna go seeking out other information. And I think we have a duty to one, like really change the way that we educate people like about misinformation, AI disinformation. Like there is a, there's a responsibility there of education to like do that job. And I don't know how to do that without like completely overhauling the way that we educate people in this country. But also, like, I am of the, I am of the thought that, that I think regulation to have like any company that has a service or product with that, that is a social media online, like that has any kind of element of social nature should have an. Should have at least one ethicist for every X amount of users that you have. Like, we really have abandoned ethics in computer, like in computer science. Science. And there have been like, Leo, I've talked about this thread A bunch of times on Twitter where there was a guy and he used to be a physicist and then he is a computer programmer and he was talking about how every major scientific progress that we've seen, like major inventions, discoveries or eras of time, we've always had a reckoning ethically in those eras. So when the chemical, the chemist community, they had to reckon with things like chemical warfare and dynamite, like what, what, how did those things change society? Like those, those were things they had to reckon with. The physics community obviously had to reckon with the bomb. Like that was their major ethical reckoning. And the computer science industry and, and, and just in general, just that community has never really had a major ethical reckoning in the same way. And so we have these companies that have these pie in the sky, like, oh, we're being so helpful to users, we're really going out of our way to change their lives for the better. But they're forgetting to also think about the worst people on earth and how their products can be weaponized to harm and we're just not. Or again, they're choosing to ignore that in favor of number go up. And that is a thing that regulation needs to step in and help solve. And I don't think you ever solve that problem. You're always going to have, you're always going to have situations that skirt the system or figure out a way around the system. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying every single day to fix these problems.

[Leo Laporte]

I worry that government wants to replace parenting, though. I understand it's very difficult for parents nowadays, but, well, they shouldn't get nervous.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Regulating what we do as parents, but they should be regulating what the companies are doing.

[Leo Laporte]

I think government should say to companies is you need to give parents the tools to do this. And then people will say, well, parents won't do it. Well, sorry, but that's doesn't mean the government gets to step in in loco parentis. I think, I think, yeah, I agree with you that the tech companies need to be forced to give parents the tools. I don't agree that governments should say things like nobody can use social media under the age of 16. I don't think that that's the government's job.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But, but also like, what about cigarettes though, Leo? I mean, it's like cigarettes we have, they're illegal for, for children to use under 18.

[Leo Laporte]

We know there's clearly cigarettes harm to kids. I don't think we know that.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I disagree. I disagree. I think there's very clear research that says to Be harming children by allowing them to have access to social media.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And by the time we really know, it might be too late to do anything about it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's what I'm saying. So maybe a whole generation of.

[Leo Laporte]

We may have already lost. A whole generation. We may have already lost.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's exactly right. And that is the thing I don't like.

[Ian Thompson]

I think there's a real business opportunity here because social media companies like Facebook et al have recognized that they get more engagement if they encourage bad news news stuff which info angers people, you know, gets them, gets them wound up. If you like, if you could get a social media company who said explicitly our algorithm is meant to boost positive news, positive things, they get less traffic certainly. But I think parents would feel a lot more comfortable letting their children loose on those.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe you have a kid friend. I'm sure that's what Roblox was intended to be, a kid friendly social network. Did, did. Remember Neopets, Ashley? Did you use Neopets as a kid? Yeah, that was a kid friendly social network.

[Ashley Esquetha]

So kid friendly. But there were also groomers on that platform and Neopets did things to help mitigate that.

[Leo Laporte]

They stopped it. Maybe big tech has become too profit focused. There's certainly a lot of money in.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I think that, I think that most large corporations have abandoned their. It's the inside ification of these companies which is they've abandoned their customers for the benefit of shareholders. And that's really unfortunate because I think they could be doing some amazing things and making you know, the products that they aspire to be building, they could actually be making.

[Leo Laporte]

It's interesting. Disney created or bought Club Penguin. Same idea, Ian. They said, oh well, there's money to be made in child friendly social media networks.

[Janko Rutgers]

And it's so adorable.

[Ian Thompson]

It really was, it was so cute.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's gone, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Because it's not as profitable as the other way.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ian Thompson]

I mean it's exactly. That's what it comes down to. And unless you can say, unless you can get a significant buy in from parents just like, yeah, we trust this, this is going to be around, this is safe for our children to play on then you know, I agree with you totally actually on common spaces. But I think that as you say, there are no common spaces and kids to don't growing up, you know, your.

[Janko Rutgers]

Parents maybe, maybe one thing to take back from this, away from this is that actually some of this might be up to us and, and I'm just going to like tell a really brief story but when I moved to this neighborhood that I live in now, and I live in Oakland, in, in California, there was no trick or treating in our neighborhood. There was basically nobody coming by.

[Ian Thompson]

Wow.

[Janko Rutgers]

And we had really. Well, I mean, Oakland has its own issues. Had its own issues, but it was also, I think, just sort of like, you know, there's sometimes these generational shifts and whatnot. So nobody was really going. And then people stop decorating and then you don't come to the neighborhood because there's no decorating. It's sort of a self fulfilling prophecy, essentially. And at the time, our first daughter was relatively little and we got together with a couple of other families from our preschool and we were like, well, we should, you know, organize something and why don't we do this in the neighborhood? There was like two, three families in the same neighborhood neighborhood. And so we started like the first year that was really just like two, three families. And we walked around and went trick or treating and people were kind of excited, opened the doors and oh, nobody has come by for a while. So that was fun. So we're like, oh, we're gonna do that again. And so we did it over and over and over again. And at some point it was 50 kids rushing houses. Basically. It was a gigantic group. We used to buy like 30 pizzas. And it was, it really brought the neighborhood together. It was us.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the solution we'd like to see is for parents to step up and do it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. It's also parents getting off their phones and not using their phones as the place. They also are socializing.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, how many times you go to a restaurant or an airport waiting area and you see all the small kids on iPads, just, you know, because the parents thing to do. I know you don't, but during like, you're an outlier, I'm an outlier.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But it's like I, during the pandemic, right after lockdowns ended, we, I would take him. He was like probably less than 2. He was probably a year and a half old, maybe a year and a half. I would take him every Sunday to have breakfast at our local like favorite place. And, and we would sit there and I would have him just sit. And like, we didn't, he didn't have like crayons or he wasn't interested in any of that. And we would just, we would just sit and I'd like, I've tried really hard to like, like really make sure like when he was old enough to start knowing what he wanted, I would Tell him he had to tell the waitress or I would tell him. Like we would talk to people at the other tables and he. We still to this day doesn't have. He still to this day does not have an iPad though now we have. He really wants to play Uno while we're waiting for our food.

[Leo Laporte]

That's okay. Card games are good.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, it's just very funny to see like two grown adults and a six year old playing cards at a table like yelling Uno at each other. Which is like very funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Lisa and I always bring cards when we go out to eat.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But we have, we literally have like decks of Uno, like Uno decks in each of our cars, like just in case for whenever we go to a restaurant. But yeah, it's just, he doesn't. He has an iPad. Like he uses it for things like he plays guitar and he plays.

[Leo Laporte]

But you don't use it as a babysitter. And I think that that's, that's the problem. Yanko, your kids grown now?

[Janko Rutgers]

Yes, they're older. One one's off to college knowledge.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I feel fortunate that my kids are 30 and 32. I didn't have to. I mean they were raised in the Internet era, but it wasn't. Yeah, it wasn't like this. It was Club Penguin and it was Neopets. It wasn't, it wasn't like this.

[Janko Rutgers]

I, I find it interesting though. And that's not actually even like I, I wish I could like pat myself on the shoulder for this but it's. It sort of came natural to them. There's almost like a backlash in that generation going on. Like my older daughter, true. She's collecting CDs. She's talking about getting a flip phone.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I'm so glad to be seeing that type of. Those types of trends are great. And you are seeing more and more like the younger Gen Z and old, like older gen Alpha kids are choosing to have fully private social media. Like they are not interested in. They have like a fully private one that they keep private. And then if they want to make content, that is a separate, separate public thing, which is what you should be doing. If you want to be a content creator and you also want to exist on the Internet, you've got to protect your piece. Like it is very important. If you are going to have any kind of public face on the Internet and be a personality, you should be protecting yourself. And like these are ways that they are figuring out. Like because they are just sort of kind of feeling around in the dark on this. They don't have any precedent. Like, that's how they're figuring out to do it. And I'm glad they are. I think that's amazing that she's collecting CDs. That's a. That's. That's a. That's awesome.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, she collected vinyl and just renting.

[Leo Laporte]

It, let's be honest.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No CDs, man. That's where it's at. I let, like, I love it. I love that. I have. I got a couple friends who are, like, whose kids are older, kids are really into collecting tapes. They're really into cassettes. They love cassettes. And I'm just like, you know what? Good for you.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break. We'll come back with more. We've got some passionate parents here. I like, like it. And of course, you have a cat, right, Ian?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I think you heard her earlier in the show. Very noisy.

[Leo Laporte]

And do you let your cat on social media? That's the question.

[Ian Thompson]

Stumpy gets the occasional picture, but that's about it. But quite frankly, we've just had the clocks change in the US And I'm just dealing with the fact that she hasn't quite.

[Leo Laporte]

Cats don't understand that, do they? Don't quite get that.

[Ian Thompson]

I got my face poured this morning.

[Leo Laporte]

But, yeah, I'm probably a bad cat dad because I have scanned my cats Persona into Sora, and now people can make AI videos of. Of Rosie, and it's. It's probably a terrible, terrible thing I've done here.

[Janko Rutgers]

Cat Astrophe. It's a cat.

[Ian Thompson]

Nice one. Respect.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Good. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Our show today, brought to you by Zip Recruiter. We love these guys. What? Hey, I got a question for you, especially if you're an employer, right? What if you could consistently, and this is true for anybody, could consistently find whatever it is you're looking for right away. Everything from a parking space to the perfect holiday gift jackets or jeans. It fit perfectly. Imagine how much time that would save you. Well, while you may never instantly find those things, if you're hiring, you can find qualified candidates right away time and time again with ZipRecruiter. And today you could try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology works fast to find top talent. With ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you can unlock top candidates contact info instantly. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. If you want to know right away how many qualified candidates are in Your area. Look no further than ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And right now you can try it for [e-mail] TWIT again that ziprecruiter.com TWITzipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. All right, I could, I think we could spend another three hours talking about the, the plight of kids today. It's genuine, it's real. I don't know what the answer is and, and I think we're all struggling with this. And you know, it's going to be an interesting social experiment when they hit majority in 10 years and, and they're voters and they're, you know, they're the people who get jobs. And I don't know what's going to happen.

[Janko Rutgers]

It's interesting. I just to close the circle there a little bit on some of the stuff that Ashley said before for the whole thing that happened this week with Zoram Mamdani getting elected as mayor of New York, there was an article that sort of explained at part of the reason for it being the lack of third spaces and youth coming out and finding those third spaces and canvassing because he had like 100,000 canvases knocking on millions of doors. Really unprecedented. And some of that seemed to have been that people, people who felt isolated at home, went out, met people and.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it cuts both ways because as as many have also pointed out, the, the kind of lost generation, particularly of young men, were very much a part of how Trump got elected in 2024. So it cuts both ways, doesn't it? People, people. That's what Hannah Arendt said about totalitarianism, is that totalitarianism attracted lonely people because it was a way to create a community. And that's who was attracted to Nazism in Nazi Germany. That's who was attracted to fascist movements, totalitarian movements. So it's a very, it can cut both ways. You seek community in a variety of places.

[Janko Rutgers]

Before this gets too dark, just want to point out that also with the election of the mayor and you York, it's an interesting example of somebody who tried to be a SoundCloud rapper, realized that wasn't his real potential.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that where he started was on SoundCloud?

[Ashley Esquetha]

He's on SoundCloud. Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

Dr. Mr. Cardamom or Dr. Cardamom or something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's hysterical. Well, see, that's okay. So Maybe he is, in a way, speaks to youth because he is of their generation and he has suffered.

[Benito]

That's a sign of the time.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a millennial.

[Benito]

At some point, all of our politicians are going to be Exxon Cloud.

[Ashley Esquetha]

We'll have these ex influencers, ex YouTube channel X, YouTuber X, you know, ex Instagram influencer.

[Leo Laporte]

They can't do any worse than we baby boomers have done. I'm sorry. I apologize as a baby boomer.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Thank you for that apology. I think it's the first one I've heard, but I'll take it.

[Leo Laporte]

We did our best. We tried. We really did. We were, you know what? We were a pretty kind of. I think we were very idealistic. My generation was in the 60s.

[Benito]

Well, you guys were the beneficiaries of the New Deal. That's why.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

You see, if we'd only known that. We thought it was the acid. So how did I know? The Department of Defense has decided to take an interesting tackle. The National Defense Authorization act will be coming up to a vote at some point when Congress decides to come back to work. One of the priorities proposed by the NDAA is less of an obligation to prove that the technology they're buying is effective and worth the money. According to Lawfare, this year's Defense policy bill will roll back data disclosures that help the department, department, the dod, understand the real costs of what they're buying. Testing requirements that establish whether contractors promise is technically feasible or even suited to its needs. This is, they say, primarily due to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's goal of maximizing lethality by acquiring modern software at a speed and scale for our warfighter. You know, you can only do that if you don't test it. If you don't care whether it works.

[Janko Rutgers]

It'S definitely going to be lethal in some way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be lethal for somebody. But as we know, over the years, there have been plenty of defense contractors who have attempted to scam the government and the military. Stepping back on oversight seems like maybe the wrong direction, but it's a direction we seem to be taking in a variety of areas. Wired has this story. The government shutdown is a ticking cybersecurity time bomb. We talked about this a little bit last week with Alex Stamos, who was on the show. Lily Hay Newman, writing for Wired, says many critical systems are still being maintained and the cloud provides some security cover. But experts say any lapses in protections like patching and monitoring could expose government systems.

[Ian Thompson]

It's a Recipe for grift, you know, I mean, basically, defense contractors have traditionally ripped off the government on a very large scale. This is just saying, oh, kick away a few more guardrails and see what happens. And what happens is that people will get the, the governance, the government will get ripped off, the software will work less and less effectively and move fast and break things. Gets an explosive edge to it.

[Leo Laporte]

We've effectively shut down cesa. Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office announced it had been hacked. The agency was infiltrated by, according to the Washington Post, a suspected foreign action sector. This is, some are worried, the beginning of a kind of collapse of our cyber security.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I mean, the Cesar cuts have been absolutely savage, particularly at Black Hat and DEFCON this year. We're speaking to a lot of former people at cesa and they were like, look, if you're over a certain age and you've made a, you know, a decent amount, they're just saying, well, it's not worth the hassle. And the younger people coming in, sure, they're very keen, they're very on the ball, but they're, they've got virtually zero experience and increasingly less and less funding. And the logic on this is baffling because for every dollar that you invest in something like CISA, you make 10, 20 times that back. In terms of security, CISA is the.

[Leo Laporte]

Computer, rather the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. And even during the shutdown, cutting staff has continued. It's just an excuse to fire more people.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Such a loss for generational knowledge as well. I mean, for all those younger group, all those younger people who are coming in and getting, you know, new jobs, you're, you're just not getting the transfer of knowledge from the. These people have had just like decades of experience, you know, working with these systems and figuring out how, how to get things done. It's just, it's really, is a tragedy, honestly.

[Ian Thompson]

It's security vandalism. Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there is some good news. China has suspended its export restrictions for five years on minerals critical to the US technology sector. We are completely reliant on China for things like these super magnets that are used in almost all of our electronics. Lithium ion batteries, semiconductor sectors, solar panels. The ministry in China had imposed controls in December of last year on these rare earth metals, you may remember, and apparently Trump was able in his meetings with Xi in South Korea last week to get them to back down on that. So that's good news.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, I mean, they are. America is spinning up more and more where they've finally Woken up to this after 10 years of warning that China was dominating this market. But it takes takes about five years to spin up these kind of mining and manufacturing facilities. And it's desperately needed because otherwise China's got its thumb over pretty much every area of advanced technology which we need to build with.

[Leo Laporte]

In the last 72 hours, the administration has announced a $1.2 billion investment into two rare earth startups made to deal with Kazakhstan for critical mineral minerals. You know, the minerals, it turns out, are pretty important and may have a lot to do with our foreign policy in Ukraine, in Venezuela and other places in Greenland. In fact, maybe that's the secret behind a lot of our foreign policy is the demand, the need for those eight or nine minerals which up to now have been solely available from China. Samarium is the number one on the list. A key element for magnets used in jets and missiles. China dominates from mining to separation and manufacturing those magnets.

[Ian Thompson]

And this was a deliberate policy. We've seen the same thing with the solar panel market. We've seen the same thing even with WI Fi routers. TP Link was selling WI fi routers at well below the cost of manufacturer because they wanted a massive market share.

[Leo Laporte]

We talked about this last week. Half, about half of all the routers in the US are TP Link. They are going to be banned because they come from China.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, it's.

[Ashley Esquetha]

We're doing great. We're doing great guys. So.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that should be fun.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, no, I mean I interviewed Mike Rogers, the ex head of the NSA and he was fanatical about this. He was just like, do you don't realize what we've just done? This is stupid. It's just.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I don't know.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh man. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there's no lack of technology being used by ice. ICE has managed to improve their technology stack to a great degree. There's two ICE agents taking pictures for face recognition. Newly licensed software can give access. This is from a story from NPR to vast amounts of locations based data. ICE revived its previously frozen contract with Pegasus for spyware that can hack cell phones and ice. The Department of Homeland Security has said in every case that these technologies can be used against American citizens as well as illegal immigrants. They also have new AI driven software contracts to ramp up their social media surveillance surveillance. And apparently they're considering hiring 24, seven teams of contractors to scour places like Facebook and TikTok and to create dossiers on users. We are about to live in the 1984 surveillance government that George Orwell was.

[Ian Thompson]

Warning us about land of the free. Indeed. I mean, also, there's a, you know, coming back to what we were saying earlier, there's very little evidence that these things are 100% accurate. And the consequences of a false positive, you know, you get, what, three, four week stay, all expenses paid, in Aga, in Alligator Alcatraz, just because some software bloke screwed up with a picture of your face. Now I'm an immigrant, Janko as well. I'm presuming it's deeply worrying. You know, it's. We've already been told that.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

What worries me as a US citizen and a CIS white boomer. It doesn't seem to matter whether you're a citizen or an immigrant or a green card holder.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No. And these. And the. The AI. AI is not infallible. This is like. It is insane to me that anybody is looking at any software that is legitimately adding third arms to people when it generates video and being like, this is very reliable. Like, it is not like it hallucinates it. It can easily say, oh, this is close enough to somebody who we have marked in a database as someone who's undocumented. Like, it's just. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. We had that kid arrested the other week who had a bag of Doritos, which the AI took to be a gun.

[Benito]

It's always been proven also that all these facial recognitions are historically bad at looking at people of color in general.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, yeah, very. Because they're designed. They're not even mostly designed by people, like, from the top down. It's just like, oh, God, this is infuriated.

[Leo Laporte]

Individuals cannot decline to be photographed. Photographed. When an ICE agent approaches you and the photos are stored for 15 years even if there is no match.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. On the other hand, if you take a photo of an ICE agent, then you're liable to be arrested and. Or threatened with shootings. So.

[Janko Rutgers]

And they're all wearing masks because they.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Don'T want to be identified.

[Leo Laporte]

You can download. It's on Google's app store. It's called Mobile Identify, created by Customs and Border Protection. You're not supposed to use it unless your deputy identifies guys to work with ice, but it is on the App Store. I haven't tried to download it. Basically, agents in the field just point their phone in somebody's face and can instantly learn details about them.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. I should just say, as someone who's going for American citizenship at the moment, I for one, love that, love our new overlords, and would have Nothing said against them whatsoever.

[Leo Laporte]

We're thrilled. We're thrilled. Oh, have you ever used Archive Today? Archive is Archive. Yeah. I confess I might have used it once or twice. This is a site. I didn't realize it been around for so long. It's been around for a very long time. And it allows you to get past pay walls.

[Janko Rutgers]

Among other things.

[Leo Laporte]

Among other things. I pay for almost a. I mean, I pay for literally dozens of newsletters and newspapers and everything because we use them in the shows and I want legitimate access. But every once in a while I run up against something that I haven't paid for. And it's a very good way to share those stories. 404 reports the FBI has subpoenaed X.com trying to unmask the owner of our copy. Today they're going after him. By the way, I have a subscription to 404 Media. I know it doesn't look like it, but honestly, that's one I'm happy to pay for.

[Ian Thompson]

They do damn good journalism. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Really good. Really good. According to the Verge, the subpoena was sent to two cows. The web domains registrar. Not to. But this was.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I think I posted it on X.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, by. By Archive. Today they went to their registrar demanding the customer subscriber name, address of service and billing address, telephone records, payment information, Internet session info, network addresses, the services the site's owner has used, such as email or cloud computing services. The subpoena says the info relates to a federal criminal investigation being conducted by the FBI. Doesn't reference a particular crime. I didn't know this. They've been around since 2012.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. Been a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

No one knows who. Who runs it. The original domain was registered by somebody named Dennis Petrov, which is a common Russian name apparently claiming to come from Prague in the Czech Republic. So I, you know, I don't know what will come of this.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I know that they posted and said if you're using Archive is to stop doing it because that it could probably.

[Leo Laporte]

They might have access to everybody who's ever used it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. Also you just hope they've got decent data sanitation on there and they're not keeping that many logs other than those which they actually have to, rather than just leaving it on a server somewhere to be scooped up.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, on the other hand, you all worked for organizations that were ad supported. This show is ad supported, often paywall supported. I mean, these were circumvention techniques that are probably illegal, right?

[Ian Thompson]

Yes. I mean, the Register never actually put up a paywall, but more and more people are doing it. The BBC for example, has now put up a paywall for US users and overseas users. And I never thought that would happen, but you know, I mean, businesses have a right to put themselves behind a paywall. That's fine. But there are legitimate uses for is.

[Leo Laporte]

What are the legitimate uses?

[Janko Rutgers]

I use it sometimes actually when I do stories because if I have a scoop of something that happened recently, I found some job listings that mentioned some product that shouldn't have been mentioned or something. And obviously I archive it before I contact the company address as a journalist because I know they will take it down. But then also to make it available, instead of me just adding like a screenshot or something to a story, I can just link to that archive is page which shows the original job listing even after the.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Janko Rutgers]

It has been taken down.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because it saves it, right? It saves it. Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And also, I mean in, in a, in a country where we literally have government websites either going down, being deleted or completely changed every single day, it also is pretty valuable tool for preserving that information.

[Benito]

I would argue it's in the name of the archive.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and let's talk about the Internet Archive because Brewster Kael says we survived but wiped out the library. This was Internet Archive was being sued by record labels and others, is I think a very important service. Right. For all the all purposes you just described. After years of bruising copyright battles that threatened to bankrupt the Library, more than 500,000 books have been removed from their open library. Brewster Kahl, talking to Ashley Blancher at Ars Technica said, we survived but it wiped out the library.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, I was actually at the library a couple of weeks ago for their celebration for the one trillionth webpage archived. And it's a fantastic resource. It's run by very dedicated people who could probably earn twice or three times their salary if they were out in the, you know, in the broader tech world, just screwing people for money. For money. But it's an incredibly valuable resource and to have it butchered this way is terribly upsetting because you're literally, literally killing off information which is not available in pretty much any other format. You know, it's like I'm a science fiction nut trying to find, you know, science fiction books from the 50s or 60s. You can't buy them online because they've all been pulped, but some of them being scanned into the Internet Archive. And it's the same for a whole variety of, you know, fiction, non fiction media of any kind. And this kind of wanton vandalism is, is going to hurt everyone in most cases.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not the actual creators of the content that are suing, it's the publisher, it's the music publishers. And last year the archive lost its final appeal in the book publishers lawsuit over the open library project. The publishers were seeking damages of up to $400 million. They apparently arranged a confidential agreement on a monetary payment and the archive was able to pay whatever they asked for. The archive settled another suit. They were digitizing 78s these, you may remember kids before. Before there were 33 and a thirds before there were 45s there were 78s and, and publishers sought damages of up to $700 million on these long ago forgotten recordings that needed to be I think preserved.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

For our. As our hero heritage. Another confidential settlement reached, but the publishers were looking for $700 million in damages. This is tragic. I contribute of course every month to the Internet Archive as I do to Wikipedia and other things that have made the Internet the most useful thing humanity has invented.

[Ian Thompson]

It's not like this was allowing piracy. For example, if you get a book out from the Internet Archive, if you don't read it for 15 minutes, you know it gets sent back to the, you know, you get logged off. This is. If you want to read something and you're willing to put the time in, fine. But you don't get a copy, you can't pirate it. It's a scanned in page. You know, it's just absolutely bonkers and it drives me up the wall.

[Janko Rutgers]

I mean I think what led to the beginning of the lawsuit with the book publisher in particular was that they sort of loosen some of those restrictions during the early Covid days where they were saying it's the emergency library, you can now check out as many books as or before it was limited to. They had a physical copy of the same book somewhere in the shelf and they're called storage. And one person could check out that book and when that. Until that person returned it, nobody else could read it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, they listened to all the caps on loans and I think that was the thing that like made the publishers very mad.

[Leo Laporte]

But as Corey Dynamic Dr. O pointed out, publishers really don't want libraries of any kind to exist. No, of course not. And you know they're savvy enough not to go after your public library, but if you can shut it down, Libby.

[Ashley Esquetha]

For things like that, they have like hoopla. So. Which is great. It's a great resource. Like I use hoopla. I'm a Big fan of that service. But these publishers are diametrically opposed to the existence of the library as, like. Like, because it's. They're not making money at the library. Like, it's just not. That's not the point.

[Ian Thompson]

I didn't. You see, but this is. Again, I. I wouldn't be a journalist if it wasn't for my local library, because I spent so much time down.

[Leo Laporte]

There and look at all the books behind you that you've paid good money for. I mean, you.

[Ian Thompson]

And this is just one bookshelf. There's three more around the house.

[Ashley Esquetha]

You know, took my kid to the library yesterday. I'm. Check out something. Mike, I'm sorry, but you read too many books too fast. Fast, like, for me to be buying.

[Leo Laporte]

You Barnes and Noble.

[Ashley Esquetha]

To go to Barnes and Noble every week. Like, good for you ripping through Dog Man. Like, it's going out of style. And, like, I just can't keep up with financially.

[Leo Laporte]

100 more Captain Underpants books.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It is literally the drill post where it's like, help me budget. My Help me budget. And it's like 3, 600amonth.

[Leo Laporte]

Just like that. We go to the bookstore, a hundred dollars left later, she goes back this big. And then she'd say, okay, I finished them a week later.

[Janko Rutgers]

Let's go back.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I'm like, no. He's like, I thought we were going to Barnes and Noble. I'm like, no, we are going to the library. You're going to rent some books. You're going to learn to use the computer to search for the books, and then you're going to go find them.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's like, okay, the Internet archives. Great. 78 project was digit. Digitizing 400,000 old shellacked records.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No one's doing that.

[Leo Laporte]

Pressed from 1898 to the 1950s.

[Benito]

Not only is nobody doing that, there's people like Universal who let their entire warehouses burn down of the original burn.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And they just. Well, because they. Before they could get around to doing it, because it's just a zero priority.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, yeah. Also, if. If I would highly recommend it. They do guided tours of the Internet Archive every Friday afternoon. And it's a beautiful building.

[Leo Laporte]

I've always wanted to go in there.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, they. I mean, it's up by Clement, San.

[Leo Laporte]

Francisco, just by Golden Gate Park. Yeah, it looks like it should be the. It's like, it's got pillar columns in front of it.

[Ian Thompson]

It's kind of Roman. It is actually a former church. And, you know, they've got the server racks set up in the aisles they've got pews where you can. They've got some really a. They've got a lot of great technology for scanning and dealing with older media, which is fascinating for a geek like myself, but it's also, you know, they've got like little stat, three foot high stat of everyone who's worked there for a certain amount of time sort of going along the walls, which is a bit freaky when you first see it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like the Game of Thrones hall of fame.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Like 600 years. It'll be like, say people will go as tourists, they'll go there and then there'll be all the little, the little statues of all the people who work there.

[Leo Laporte]

It'll just be like in the 21st century were so short, they were so small. You see how small they were? Yeah. Brandon Butler's a copyright lawyer and the director of. Executive director of Recreate, which is a coalition of libraries, civil libert. Online rights advocates, startups, consumers and technology companies, you know, supporting opening up a little bit. The copyright law said the idea that somebody's going to stream a 78 of an Elvis song instead of firing it up on their $10 a month Spotify subscription is silly. It doesn't pass the laugh test. But given the scale of the project, multiply that by statutory damages. That's where you get $700 million dollars. That makes it an extremely dangerous project. All of a sudden. We've gotta, we've gotta fix this.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's, that's so unfortunate.

[Leo Laporte]

It's, it's sad.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Free and fair Internet is very hard. It's, it's becoming less and less common and it's, that is, you know, I, I donate to the EFF every month and that's like a big really important organization for me. Like I'm like, just like, please just keep fighting. Like I'm not a policy wonk. I don't know what the answers are in terms of like navigating the system to be able to like continue to have these types of things. But like I just like, all I can do is just give money to people who are much smarter than I am and hope that they can figure it out.

[Leo Laporte]

Me too. We used to have a bumper sticker on the screensaver said the Fair use has a posse. Which is the EFF's motto at the time. Time.

[Ian Thompson]

And yeah, I mean I went to this year at defcon. They have, in fact for the last couple of years they've had a, an EFF poker game where you pay 250 bucks to. To. To play and the money goes to the eff. And I went this year and it was absolutely fantastic afternoon.

[Leo Laporte]

What a great idea.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, nice. That is really cool. I like that a lot. I'll have to go do a tour. I didn't know they did tours.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, the Internet Archive. Yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I would like to go check that out the next time I'm in town.

[Ian Thompson]

I'll have check that out Friday afternoons. I highly recommend it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's great.

[Leo Laporte]

As Barry FM says in our Discord Chat, our club Twit Chat, libraries are at least 2,000 years older than socialism. I don't know what it means, but I like it. I like it.

[Ian Thompson]

If libraries didn't exist and somebody put. A politician proposed it. Now can you imagine the rhetoric that we get?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, yeah. Oh, this is.

[Leo Laporte]

You mean you don't have to buy a book to read it? Oh, no, that's not okay.

[Ashley Esquetha]

This is literary communism.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, another break. We'll be right back. You're watching a very fun episode of this Week in Tech with Ian Thompson. Are you looking for work or you like being a freelancer?

[Ian Thompson]

If the. I'm kind of with Ashley on this. If the right job came up, I mean, I am happy being a freelancer. The only caveat to that is health insurance in America, which is just. Isn't it absolutely insane saying. Yeah, the only.

[Leo Laporte]

Are we not the only developed nation that doesn't have some sort of national health?

[Ian Thompson]

It's just pretty much. Yeah. I mean, you should not be able to do.

[Leo Laporte]

Medical bankruptcies. Should not be a thing.

[Ian Thompson]

No. I mean, okay, the sw. The Swiss, for example, have. Have a private system run by private insurance companies, but that. What. How much money they can earn is severely capped.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

Maybe that's the solution, you know, so that you can actually get decent health care at a decent price. But yeah, it's coming out of an employment situation and getting my own healthcare an unpleasant shock, shall we say?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, yeah. My husband got laid off in June and. Oh, that COBRA bill was.

[Janko Rutgers]

Oh.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, yeah.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Upsetting. Yeah, I was. I was insult. I was offended by it, honestly. Like, it was. It was like almost double our mortgage, which was.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm on Medicare and I still pay a huge amount of money, so I don't know what. I don't get it. I really. I don't. I don't understand it. I really don't. It's just. Something's wrong, but I don't know.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's very broken. Very broken.

[Leo Laporte]

Also here, Yenko records who Is also a freelancer. Also paying for his own health insurance.

[Janko Rutgers]

Actually my wife, but. Oh, good.

[Leo Laporte]

There you go, Mary. Well, that's the key, isn't it? Yes.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, yeah, it helps for sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep. And Ashley Sketha, I hope your husband. Has he found work? Is he. He looking for work?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Just started a new job on Monday.

[Ian Thompson]

Congratulations.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Very good. We were. We're a little. It was a little tenuous for a while, I bet, but yeah, no, he found a good. Seemed like a good company. They're like, they do LED production rentals, so he does a lot of, like, technical event production.

[Janko Rutgers]

Nice.

[Ashley Esquetha]

So it's all like the. You know when you go to a CES booth and you see all the, like, big LED screens and stuff, stuff like that. So he. He, like, eventually, yeah, he ain't gonna.

[Leo Laporte]

Take that job, baby. That's a good job.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Not. Yeah, I hope not. I mean, he's really. He's. He's good at it. So he's a. He's a fixer. He's like a person who just like, he's never had a show failure in, like, the 20 years he's been doing this. So he's very good at his job. So hopefully this is a place where the owner of the company seems like a good guy who, like, understands work, life, balance, which is good.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not one of those nine, nine six guys, huh?

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, no. And he definitely is like a huge. He leaves too. Like, when it's time to leave. He. So he's like. He really kind of sets a good.

[Leo Laporte]

Example, which I found that so offensive when Eric schmidt and other CEOs say, oh, what do you mean? No, you don't get to have a personal life. If you're going to work in a startup. You got to work all the time.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. Unfortunately, like, people have other commitments, like their families.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Their friends.

[Leo Laporte]

If we're going to survive as a country, we have to support families in a well.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And also, just like, even if you're by yourself, you should be able to have hobbies and find joy and do stuff like that. What is the point of working for all that money if you're working at a startup that's like, doing really well? Like, if you're. That's gonna, you know, make a billion dollars or whatever. What's the point of all that if you have no time to actually enjoy it?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, let's be fair. The people who make all the money are not the people working nine nine.

[Ashley Esquetha]

They're enjoying it.

[Leo Laporte]

They're enjoying.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Enjoying all that money. Yeah, they're doing, they're doing, doing fine.

[Leo Laporte]

We're gonna take a break, come back with more you're watching this week in Tech. Our show today brought to you by netsuite. Every business these days is asking the same question, really, how do we make AI work for us? Obviously the possibilities are endless, but guessing is too risky. Of course. On the other hand, sitting on the sidelines isn't really an option either. One thing's almost certain, your competitors are already making their move. No more waiting. With NetSuite by Oracle, you could put AI to work. Today. NetSuite is the number one AI Cloud ERP trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It's a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into a single source of truth. That connected data is what makes your AI smarter. So it doesn't just guess, it knows knows. It's got the data intelligently automates routine tasks. It delivers actionable insights. It can help you cut costs and make fast AI powered decisions with confidence. And this isn't another bolted on tool. It's AI built into the system that runs your business. NetSuite helps you stay ahead of the pack. Right now, get NetSuite's free business guide demystifying AI AI at netsuite.com TWiT the guide is free to you at netsuite.com TWIT netsuite.com TWiIT n e t s u I t e netsuite.com TWiTV thank you NetSuite for supporting this week in tech. We appreciate it. There was speaking of AI kind of a back and forth OpenAI at one point I think Sam Altman said, said, you know, the government, Sam Altman has now made commitments to I think $1.7 trillion in spending this to a company, maybe they're making money, but not anywhere near $1.7 trillion. So Sam said, well, maybe the government could help us out. It's actually was their CFO Sarah Franklin Fryer who was speaking at the Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event. Friar said OpenAI is looking to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and, and this was the two words that scared people. Federal backstop or guarantee that could help the company finance its investments in cutting edge chips. Obviously she backed down a little bit. She posted the next day on LinkedIn saying I used the word backstop. It wasn't quite right. And in fact the Trump administration immediately responded. David Sachs said no, no, no federal bailout, no guarantees from the United States government.

[Janko Rutgers]

Um, and, and we got a number actually a couple days ago too.

[Ian Thompson]

Right.

[Janko Rutgers]

About how much money OpenAI makes or doesn't make, which was somehow like, tucked away in Microsoft's earnings.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's right.

[Janko Rutgers]

Lost eleven and a half billion dollars in a quarter.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah.

[Janko Rutgers]

Which is quite amazing.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. You could feel Ed Citron's blood pressure rise.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Just that joker edit. Just him smiling. Ed Citron smiling. And yeah, his having an apoplexy. Just. Yeah, that Ed, really, I, I gotta give Ed a lot of credit here because honestly, like, how, how he wakes up every day and doesn't just like rage.

[Leo Laporte]

He does.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I'm talking about like Michael Douglas and falling down. You know what I mean? Like, where he just doesn't snap everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

I worry that his head's going to explode at some point.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I do, too. I do too. He's a good guy, but I do worry about him. I worry about his. I worry about his stress, his cortisol levels.

[Leo Laporte]

Leo, Sam Altman said OpenAI is on track to generate more than $20 billion in revenue this year. But revenue is not profit. No, you can, you can generate 20 billion in revenue and lose 20 billion because your costs are double that.

[Ian Thompson]

So there was an interesting interview with an analyst who said that when the AI bubble pops, the very first thing they're going to do is to the government and say, look, if you let us go under, China will win the AI race, so give us lots of money, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Ian Thompson]

That's going to be their playbook. And he's already hearing rumblings about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. All right, well, we'll, we'll, we'll watch this.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Is David laying that rail? They're just laying that track right now.

[Leo Laporte]

David Sex post on X. By the way, he's a podcaster. I just want to say that there will be no. He's also the AI and crypto czar in the White House. There will be no federal bailout for air. And actually, he's got a good point. He says the US has at least five major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take his place. It's a competitive environment.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But what if they all fail? That's.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I didn't need my retirement, really. I, I'll be living on food stamps.

[Janko Rutgers]

No, you won't. It's not just the point that, that you're going to have one less model. It's all the money that is invested in those companies by other companies and promised to other companies.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's like it's kind of shell game. They're just all passing a Trillion dollars between them. There's that graphic that came out the other day that was like, here are all the deals. These like six companies have all. Yeah, they're just all passing this like money around. Very concerning.

[Leo Laporte]

But and you know, I admit I have a little bit of a vested interest in this because my retirement is basically invested in the US stock market. And even if you invest it as I do in index funds like the S&P 500, it's completely dominated by the magnificent seven AI companies. And when they do well, I do well. When they don't, I don't. I had a terrible week last week and it completely. I don't want to see an AI collapse. And, and so admitting that, that I have definitely a vested interest in the success of AI I have to point out AI is not completely made up. There is some genuine value generated by it. It's useful. I mean, I use it every single day and I find it very useful. I understand that, you know this right now the cost far outweighs the potential for profit. It's very, very cost 1, $1.4 trillion that OpenAI is going to spend. That's crazy.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, isn't it? Nvidia is worth 16% of US GDP at the moment, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

Nvidia basically dominates the stock market. And as Nvidia goes, so goes my retirement.

[Ian Thompson]

It reminded me I'm going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

A Walmart greeter in two years. I'm just telling you right now.

[Ian Thompson]

Well, it kind of reminded me of my brother in law used to work at Virgin Records and when the Spice Girls were at the height of their fame, he was at their Christmas party and one of their guys was. And the Spice Girls accounted for 25% of our profits last year. Isn't that great? And he was like, no, it's not. Because two years later nobody's going to care about the Spice Girls. And they're up the spout.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And also. Well, and the thing with AI right now is that like so many of these like solutions are what is that? Somebody had made a thing and they were like, AI the way it should be is it does the things I don't want to do so that I can go be creative, not the other way around.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Like, like it shouldn't be creative for me so that I can go fold more laundry. That's like the last. Or like, you know, do, you know, do more things that I hate.

[Leo Laporte]

I think there is the. That's a good point. And these, unfortunately these AI companies and OpenAI is the worst defender of this have focused on kind of the consumer market and chat GPT and things that consumers like to chat with AI. Seven more families are suing open AI now over their kids over suicide and self harm and psychotic breaks. I mean it's not good, it's problematic. I think that consumer use of AI is the thing that we least value. You know, the chat bots, the, the generated, you know, Sora generated thing that.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Takes up the most data.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the, it's what everybody thinks about. But, but I'm using AI for coding. Companies are using AI very successfully. There is a real value to it. So it's in a weird situation where they're. The thing that gets most attention is probably the least useful.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Right? I mean I think this is where like so for me, like in a perfect world, this is the argument for UBI where it's basically like if AI is going to permeate everything we do, then everybody that.

[Leo Laporte]

But who's going to pay for universal basic income? Where does that come from?

[Ashley Esquetha]

These companies?

[Leo Laporte]

You can't even pay food stamps.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, I understand, understand Nvidia. It has a market cap of over $4 trillion. And you're saying we can't find the money for this. Like of course we can. We can find the money to feed people, we can find the money to house people in this country. We could do, we could do those things. We choose not to do those things. It's an active choice. We choose not to do it.

[Leo Laporte]

We are a wealthy nation.

[Ashley Esquetha]

We are a very wealthy nation and there are people who are not paying. Like when we think about, you know, people talk about like, oh well, when we were so good or like when things were so great. Like we were like American infrastructure had a boom period when we were taxing the wealthiest people in our country at.

[Ian Thompson]

90% on, on the very highest earnings.

[Ashley Esquetha]

On the highest earnings.

[Ian Thompson]

But yeah, as we were discussing at the start of the show, we've now got Elon Musk giving himself a potential $1 trillion trillion dollars pay rise. And you know, he's not going to be paying anything, maybe 1 or 2%.

[Ashley Esquetha]

On that, 1 to 2% of that. And the thing is, is like we could have these things. We could have these things. And we choose not to implement tax law. We choose not to enforce tax law in order to have these things. Like we could have them, we could pay people. Every single person in this country. There are countries that pay their citizens based on natural resources that are sold in their country. Norway does this. Why not pay Americans for their data why not pay every American for their data?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and as you point out, or somebody pointed out, money is kind of made up. The Federal Reserve pumped $22 billion into the economy last week because the banking system was showing signs of stress. And they just, where did that money come from? They just print it, they made it.

[Ian Thompson]

We gave 40 billion to Argentina, for goodness sake. You know, meanwhile, yeah, people are starving in American streets. It's sight on Halloween too.

[Leo Laporte]

The Fed injected $50.35 billion into the US economy because of a short term credit crunch. I suppose that's probably enough to give some money to people for ubi. I don't know if it's enough, I don't know.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But I mean, but the thing is, is let's say, let's say the, the top, let's say any company that runs an LLM or AI that's been LLM that's based on a Internet scraping model, which is most of them, like all of the biggest ones, like people should just be paid for that data. I mean, I've argued this whole, I mean I've been arguing since I was 20 years old that like our data, we should be paid for our data. Like we should be compensated for our data. I know that we have to give our data for a lot of things and to make some technology better. Like, I understand that, but also like don't, don't just give away your data. Like we have so much power. Power as consumers. We could all effectively be like, no, I don't think we're going to do that anymore. I think you need to pay us for that.

[Benito]

You pay us for that information. Somebody's making a lot of money from all this data.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Of course. Yeah, of course. Well, they're, well they're not having to pay. That's, that's the other problem is like they're not having to pay for that data. They, they want it to be free forever.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, it's a, it's a fascinating reverse ferret by the technology industry and the publishing industry.

[Leo Laporte]

What's a reverse ferret?

[Ian Thompson]

Fast turnaround around.

[Janko Rutgers]

It looks like something you don't want to Google.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't want to put it in your pants, I can tell you that right now.

[Ian Thompson]

Actually. No. Trousering ferrets is a Yorkshire tradition. You seal off the bottom of the trousers, you put a ferret or a ferret into your trousers and the winner is the one who keeps it in there longest. I'm not kidding. Look it up. It's. This is actually still my favorite fact.

[Leo Laporte]

I'VE learned today.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Favorite thing I've learned today, 100%.

[Leo Laporte]

Trousering is actually the name of it.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. It's a long standing tradition going back to when people drank a lot more. But you have to be a little.

[Leo Laporte]

Inebriated to put a fairy.

[Janko Rutgers]

I heard they used to do it at Circus circus in the 90s, but yeah.

[Benito]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

I think you might have seen that in Vegas the last time you were there.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Midway. It was a midway act. There was the acrobats and then there was ring. Yeah.

[Ian Thompson]

So yes, the media companies. Do you remember back to, you know, LimeWire, you know, when those sort of things first came out? You know, data theft is a crime. You know, you wouldn't steal a car, that sort of thing. But now, oh, no, it's fine, really.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Steal it from us. It's fine. If they're using it, stealing it from us, they're like, oh, no, no, this is how it should be but not the other way around. Can't do that.

[Leo Laporte]

Wait a minute, I just got it. A reverse ferret is a tariff.

[Ian Thompson]

Really. Yeah, I used it that way but. Oh, and I've, I've just actually looked it up. I'm wrong. It isn't ferret trousering, it's ferret legging. There's a wicked page on it. I'll put it.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's more kind of, more descriptive to call it ferret trousering legging could be a variety of things.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Well, see, trousering puts it in a very specific geographic location.

[Leo Laporte]

We know where.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, I think that that's a. I think you maybe have a better turn of phrase here, Ian.

[Leo Laporte]

Ferret legging. What is.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I think you've, I think you've, I think you've usurped the leg. Yeah, no, I don't want.

[Leo Laporte]

Put it in the trousers.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah, just, just put it in the discord. But yes, it was.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't ferret. Rather sharp teeth.

[Ian Thompson]

Oh yes, sharp pointy teeth and very scratchy claws.

[Leo Laporte]

And they're, and they're also cranky. Especially when you put them down your.

[Ian Thompson]

I was going to say if, if you put anything down your trousers, chances are it's going to get cranky.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, Just asking for a friend.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Let's take a training specialist. I'll take the fifth there.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. You know, you know the story. Okay, we're going to take a break. We have the final stories which are equally amusing. We're going to, we're going to finish it off with, with dessert coming up as we continue this week. In tech with Ashley Esquea, Janko Rutgers. I almost called you Renko Jetkers.

[Ian Thompson]

Janko.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, reverse ferreting me here.

[Leo Laporte]

I've reversed ferretree here and Thompson, Ian, good to have all three of you welcome our show today brought to you by my favorite password manager, the one you should use, Bit Warden. I love it. Right off the bat I'll say. The reason I chose Bit Warden is because it's open source and in my opinion you should never use anything that relies on encryption unless you know that the encryption has no backdoors, that it is done properly. Open source is the only way to to go. Which is why Bitwarden, in my opinion, is the trusted leader in passwords, but also, by the way, passkeys and secrets management. When I say secrets, you know I keep my SSH keys in Bitwarden. It generates them, it will serve them up. It's a great way to keep them because there's no way I can accidentally upload it to GitHub by accident, publish it. Those private keys are really, really private. That's Bitwarden's promise. Bitwarden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction action by G2 and software reviews more than 10 million users across 180 countries, over 50,000 businesses. The thing about being open source I also like is it means they can innovate. They can innovate fast, for instance, and they're geeks. They just launched the Bitwarden MCP server. Okay, I'll explain why you need this. It's available right now on the GitHub as the rest of the Bitwarden source code is. MCP, of course, is that technology that allows your AI to do agentic AI to communicate with other AIs and other workflows. Bitwarden's MCP server enables secure integration between AI agents and your credential workflow. Because you don't want your AI agent to go out with your passwords and say, hey, let log me in. And that would be a mistake, right? Expanded documentation and distribution are coming, but right now it's on GitHub. It's a secure, standardized way for AI agents to communicate with Bit Warden. Of course users will benefit because you get a local first architecture, which is very important for security. That Bit Warden MCP server is running on your local machine. It keeps all client interactions within the local environment, which minimizes your exposure to external threats. It may integrates very nicely with the Bitwarden command line interface. That's another reason I love Bit Warden. I love the command line. You don't have to use it of course. Bitwarden is very elegant, works beautifully on Mac and Windows and Linux with every browser. Users by the way can also with Bitwarden opt for self hosted deployments, which means you get greater control over system configuration and data residency. This MCP server is a perfect example of why open source is important. MCP is an open protocol for AI assistance that comes out of anthropic. 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Unlimited devices, unlimited passwords, unlimited passkeys, even support for hardware keys. Bitwarden.com TWIT this is the solution. And if you have friends I know you use a password manager because you're smart, but if you have friends who are are not family members who are not they are really putting themselves at risk. Tell them about Bitwarden. It's free for individuals. Bitwarden.com TWIT It's a public service, really. Bitwarden.com TWiT we thank them so much for their support of this Week in Tech. All right, I have to tell this story. This is hysterical. You may have said, remember the Louvre burglary, where the guys went up in the thing and everything? And you may have seen the famous photo which everybody fell in love with, of the. Of the French detectives. Let me see if I can find this picture. The French detectives lined up. Actually, the police lined up in front of their cars. And then somebody who looked like Hercule Poirot in a fedora and a vest. Do you remember this picture?

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. Although it should be pointed out that Poirot is Belgian, not French.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, all right, all right. But this famous picture, which I loved so much, I clipped it. I just thought it was. It was so cool.

[Janko Rutgers]

I considered dressing up as him for Halloween. I couldn't put it off. But.

[Leo Laporte]

He became a Internet legend as the Fidelity Dora man. Right. And I just assumed, oh, he must be the guy in charge of the investigation. No, he's a 15 year old who. In fact, that's his mother in the red scarf behind him.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

He just happened to be there. He was photographed that Sunday. The picture went viral. He's a local teenage fan of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.

[Janko Rutgers]

And he dresses like that every day.

[Leo Laporte]

He loves to dress like that. He said we were going to the Louvre with our family. I didn't know there was a heist. I just was there. He asked about the closure, and an AP photographer taking a picture of the security cordon happened to capture him in the frame. He had borrowed. He borrowed the vest from his grandfather. I mean, the whole thing. He says, I like to be sure chic. I go to school like this.

[Ian Thompson]

My goodness, he must get bullied senseless.

[Leo Laporte]

No, he's French. It's okay.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. I was going to say, he is so French.

[Leo Laporte]

He's not being a bully.

[Janko Rutgers]

This is.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I think they need to put that picture in the Louvre.

[Leo Laporte]

That's. I agree.

[Ian Thompson]

And did you also heard about the. The Lou password?

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, I did.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

Tell us what it was, Lou. But you had to capitalize it, by the way.

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, I think it was all lowercase, wasn't it?

[Ian Thompson]

Oh, I mean, rats.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Even worse.

[Ian Thompson]

It's kind of like. Okay, nobody is out of the loop on this. The U.S. military safety code for nuclear weapons used to be eight zeros.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Ian Thompson]

Even so, if you're the Louvre and you've got all these isos antiques and nobody actually thought to say, you know what, why don't we use a password manager and do this properly?

[Leo Laporte]

They should have used bit warden anyway. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Pedro. What's his name? Pedro Elias Garzon Delveau.

[Ashley Esquetha]

If he didn't dress like that with that name, I'd be disappointed.

[Leo Laporte]

He's a very deper. And he is now Internet famous in a very good way.

[Janko Rutgers]

I think that's also what's so great about this story. Like we talk today about all these terrible things going on in the world, terrible things going on online. And every now and then this stuff still goes viral and everybody gets excited about it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I love it.

[Janko Rutgers]

And you kind of remember how, how good the Internet used to be at some point or at least a site that we all loved about the Internet and it's still kind of there. It still kind of exists every now and again. Pops up in its head.

[Ashley Esquetha]

We get those great pop culture moments where everybody comes together and has like a little party on social media and it's, it's really good still. It's still really good. But man, I wish there were more of them. I do that. My favorite, my favorite post on Blue sky about the Louvre password was someone, someone reach reposted and said I owe so many video game designers an apology. And I thought that was the perfect post to describe that password.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it was a password for the camera system, not the security system. Just to be fair. I mean it wasn't like they rode up in the cherry picker, but the camera system still. I know it wasn't a good password. We know that you have the most.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Price, you have some of the most priceless works of art on the earth.

[Leo Laporte]

I agree.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And you. Oh it just. Yeah, that's a, that's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, a couple soon you will not be able to get on social media.

[Ian Thompson]

In Denmark a couple of months ago, a couple of French museums got, got ransomware completely and one of them got broken into and had gold nuggets stolen out of their natural history from the Natural History Museum. So I think the French really need to work on this, on this security thing, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, that's what happened to me the last time I did ferret trousering.

[Ian Thompson]

So much trouble with Yorkshire.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought, Ashley, you might have something to say about the fact that Grand Theft Auto 6 has now been delayed again. It's going to be a year next year now.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, a year from now. Just in. You know what? I'm glad that they did it after the elections. I will give them that. Thank you for not giving people.

[Leo Laporte]

You think we'll need something, A reason to stay home.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Like it's like because now like no one will be able to have an excuse of like, oh, I'm playing.

[Leo Laporte]

If you stay home to play Grand Theft Auto 6, maybe you shouldn't be voting.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's. Listen, just a thought. I don't disagree with you but also like we got to get. We got to get people a polls. Yeah, this is. They delayed it so big time.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it going to be Duke Nukem forever? Is it ever going to be?

[Ashley Esquetha]

No, no, no. This is a real game. It. It's down. God. It was down like 7% in extended trading hours. I think EA for the shareholders did not take the news well. That was not Take two is the company.

[Leo Laporte]

But isn't it EA that distributed. Maybe I'm wrong. I thought ea distributed it.

[Benito]

No. 2K distributes that.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Not yet.

[Ian Thompson]

Any news on Half Life 3? We have been waiting.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I was laughing. I saw something say there was a rumor about Half Life three and then somebody else had said like, like my brother. My brother in games. It's been 20 years. Mark it.

[Ian Thompson]

We're.

[Ashley Esquetha]

We're going to about to mark the 20 year anniversary of rumors of Half Life 3.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes. Oh my God.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, that aged me real hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Very true. But yeah, so. So GTA 6. It was. It was supposed to launch this year. It got delayed I believe until April of next year, maybe May of next year. And then. And now it's being pushed. Of course it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they just fired a whole bunch of people for trying to unionize, which they claim was not the case. They say actually it was because they were leaking company secrets like. But conveniently all of those people or most of them were attempting to unionize. So a lot of stuff kind of a lot of gray area happening in there. But. But I think it's hard because I'm so. Listen. Every video game shipped is a miracle. And a game this big to. To ship a game like that is to take the extra time. Feels like it's worth it for them to not have. If they have any game breaking bugs, if they have any, you know, major issues at launch. I mean that is. That is not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Remember what happened to Cyberpunk 2077.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's not. They can't do that. They cannot do that. Like it's just, it's not a thing they're going to be able to do. Yes, they will be able to patch the game. Yes, they will. It's going to be an ongoing, I'm sure like live service game, very similar to GTA Online. But, but yeah, I think this is just such a, such a big game. Like it's sort of like crossed over into this like mythical territory in like the games community where people. I think the expectations might be getting into the unrealistic at this point but I, I don't, I genuinely don't know how it's going to turn, turn out.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe they're putting electronic voting into Grand Theft Auto. Maybe that's it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Well, it's not, it's the second, I believe it's the second biggest. Minecraft is the biggest game franchise. It is, it is by far and away.

[Benito]

But Minecraft is a franchise. Minecraft is one game.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Well, they, I mean Minecraft is a platform. It's a platform.

[Leo Laporte]

There's one game, a franchise.

[Ashley Esquetha]

They have Minecraft dungeons. They have.

[Benito]

Yeah, but that's still.

[Leo Laporte]

It is a persistent.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, it is a persistent game. But I mean who's to say that GTA 6 is not going to try to create something of a Fortnite esque like metaversey type contained sort of thing where it's like, oh, this is going to be now a persistent, you know, living thing that we're going to update.

[Benito]

So I only say that's a delay. It's like actually it's what keeps 2K and take two games afloat. Like GTA keeps that whole company afloat.

[Ashley Esquetha]

This is their tent pole. This is their tent pole pull franchise. Like this is, this is the thing and it's like they, they are, I think GTA 6. Like it makes me worried because I feel like it is a little bit like too big to fail at this point. But yeah, it's a. Listen, I am always glad if you're going to spend extra time polishing your game and maybe giving your developers less crunch. Like those things sound great but of course, you know, like investors never want to hear that you're delaying a game and customers never want to hear that you're delaying playing a game.

[Leo Laporte]

How about Pluribus? Let's talk about that. We said we were going to talk about it at the beginning of the show. This is the new Apple TV show that debuted last night.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's so good. Everyone should watch it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's really good. They only have two episodes. You can Only watch two. I hate that I like to binge.

[Ashley Esquetha]

You know what, though? I like that they're doing that because we have been missing for a long time in the binge model the opportunity to have water cooler talks about each episode.

[Leo Laporte]

And Apple's smart. They even have a podcast associated with it that they promote.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Severance is a great example of why you should let people just. Especially when you're creating a show that's a little bit of a mystery box. Yeah, Apple's been very letting people talk about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Vince Gilligan, the creator guy who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, has been very careful about what they've revealed. The truth trailers reveal nothing except that we know Rhea Sjorn, who was of course one of the standouts of Better Call Saul, is the star of this show. We know it's something about. Because the tagline is something like the unhappiest person in the world. But it really didn't tell you what the show was about until you watched it.

[Ian Thompson]

We need more of that, you know, and also I liked it, actually. The episodic side of things. I mean, a good example is great British people bake off, you know, because they won't put that on Netflix until a week after it's screened on tv. So for a week, you've got people just talking online about, did you see so and so wasn't that an amazing cake? And what a disaster.

[Ashley Esquetha]

But, you know, yeah, yeah. And it's. It gives people that opportunity to, like, have that communal conversation about it. I mean, Severance is a great example of them doing that. They, they gave people the opportunity. But if you look at something like, for example, Stranger Things, the first, you know, half of the last season or whatever that came out, or Squid Games is another really good example. Talk about a show that really captured the zeitgeist. Like when it came out during the, I believe the pandemic and then everybody watched that first season, it was incredible. Everyone was kind of talking about it. And then they dropped the entire, like, first half of the second season, like, in a chunk and then the other half and people were done talking about it after a week because everyone had binge watched it, talked about everything, and it was done and dusted and everyone, everybody had moved on.

[Janko Rutgers]

But that was also maybe because the season wasn't as good. I mean, the first season was binge watching.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I agree. But even just not letting people talk about it over, like, week to week, I think really hurt the show. Especially the first half of the second season, which was, I thought was quite good. But then I thought the second half was really uneven. But I think they really missed the mark on and I think this is sort of Netflix's kind of cross to bear here is like they really love the Binge Model and I think it does hurt them in the sense of like having those extended conversations drawn out over time that people like people are really excited about collectively watching an episode together.

[Janko Rutgers]

I think the counterpoint to that is that the Binge model helps shows that maybe wouldn't get as much exposure. Like especially foreign shows like actually even something like Squid Game that the first season became so popular if they had just like released one episode at a the time. Like it really takes some momentum. It takes some time. So people getting excited and really into it and talking about it required was required for it to get such a global success. And I don't know if that would have happened if they had started with like a week per episode model completely left field.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah, I think you're right that people should. I think you're right that the studios really need to look at everything in a case by case because a show like Squid Game has a very clear premise right up front. And so it's not a mystery that's unfolding. It's not something that requires that week to week discussion. A Lost, for example, is a very similar type of show that would require a week to week give people the breathing room to talk about it. But I think that you're right. I think there is space for both of those. I do think that it doesn't have to be just one or the other. But I do think that shows like this in particular really benefit from the weekly release drop.

[Leo Laporte]

I also think it has to do with the show like the. It's a creative decision and I think the person who created the show should get to choose. Frankly, I don't think it should be chosen by marketing executives. I think of the guy. It's just like, you know in the day when musicians said we're going to make an album and you got to buy the whole album, you're going to play it all the way through because it's a conceptual thing. Thing. I think this is what the creative should get to decide anyway. Vince Gilligan, I don't know if he had anything to do with it being, you know, week by week, but it is Apple's given it two years and so far I think the reviews are pretty positive. It could be Apple's biggest hit yet.

[Ian Thompson]

It's an interesting premise as well. I like the sound of it.

[Leo Laporte]

I love the premise.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. The log line is great.

[Janko Rutgers]

And.

[Leo Laporte]

And do you think now you haven't seen it, right, Ian? And you haven't seen it, Yonko. But Ashley's seen it and I've seen it. My wife insists it's gonna turn bad. It's not. The show is not gonna be bad, but it's gonna. Something really. Like these aliens. There's something afoot.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Yeah. Well, so the logline of the show is the most miserable person on earth must save the world from happiness.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Ashley Esquetha]

And yes, and I think that you should never bet against Vince Gilligan.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, he is really good. He is really.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I almost said. Someone in the chat said, is it. It's going to break bad. And I almost said that it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Going to break bad. That's exactly what she's saying. Yep.

[Ashley Esquetha]

It's going to break bad. It's going to make a left turn somewhere.

[Leo Laporte]

Last story. I always. I often end this show with obituaries, but very rarely an obituary like this. After 200 years, the farmer's Almond Almanac.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Is shutting down for gosh, press f to pay respects.

[Leo Laporte]

We used to get the old Farmer's Almanac. The tradition was you'd get the old Farmer's Almanac and then when the new year came and then use the old one in the outhouse for toilet paper. But no, that was not my tradition. But we used to get the old Farmer's Almanac. It would tell you the weather for the whole year ahead of time. 200 years.

[Ashley Esquetha]

100 years, man, that is. That's wild.

[Ian Thompson]

Yeah. And yet Reader's Digest is still going.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Lighthouse Digest is still going.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that'll be. Because that's distribution model is very good for Lighthouse Digest. So I have a feeling, I mean, we've seen a lot of print magazines go, this has been a bad decade for print. But this is, this is one that is going to be kind of sad, I think, to look lose. It's.

[Ian Thompson]

I've got to say, the, the, the sheer audacity of saying this is what the weather is going to be for the next year was, is just mindboggling. But, you know, it's got all those, you know, little inspirational, red sky at night, Shepherd's delight, red sky, morning, shepherd's house is burning. That sort of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I never.

[Ashley Esquetha]

When they remake Back to the Future, he's going to go to the future and they're going to be like, sorry, we don't make. We don't print the sports almanac anymore. Like wow. Sorry about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow. 207 years of fond farewell to the old seven.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I mean, hey, listen, if you have a business and it lasts for 207 years.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I feel like you could call that a win.

[Leo Laporte]

Our 207th anniversary, we might be willing to call it.

[Ashley Esquetha]

That's what I'm saying. Like, rowdy. Listen, if Rowdy Skeleton makes it to 207 years in business, I feel like I could accept that as a win.

[Leo Laporte]

What does Rowdy Skeleton do? I love the name. What is Rowdy Skeleton?

[Ashley Esquetha]

Well, inside of every person is a skeleton fighting to get out all the time, Leo. And I don't know if you know that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so true.

[Ashley Esquetha]

The skeletons always win, by the way.

[Leo Laporte]

But just like inside my pants is a ferret trying to get out.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Always trying to escape.

[Leo Laporte]

Always trying to escape.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Rowdy Skeleton. We are a media train. We do a lot of media training, so we do media training for tech and video games in particular, because we helped build modern media. It's me and Ross Miller, formerly one of the founding editors of the Verge. We do things like we have created major workshops for Fortune 50 companies. We have done smaller stuff on Zoom. We do remote work. We do all kinds of media training, production. We also do, like, we're doing some sponsored content for some familiar faces that you might start seeing soon that are redacted, that I'm not allowed to talk about, but. Rowdyskeleton, yeah, that's what we do. And I'm really proud of it. I'm really proud of the work that we do, and I really love that. Our biggest goal is to a lot of people who start working in tech and games, they don't get into it to be on camera. And a lot of times they are called to be on camera because of the shift to video. And so the things like developer directs or state of play or things like that. You're seeing project leads that are not necessarily comfortable being placed in front of a camera to talk about their video game or a founder for their startup. They're not used to that.

[Leo Laporte]

I see that. And I feel for them because I.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Know how and I feel for them. It's hard. It's really hard. And so. And it is a skill. And so we, we like to tell everybody that we train that you do not have to be an introvert or you don't have to be an extrovert to be good at it. And if you're an introvert, you don't. You can be good at this and you can still be Authentic. You don't have to pretend to have a big personality. There's a thing called presence that can draw people in, even if you are not big personality wise, like if you're not loud or you gesticulate a lot. And so, so, yeah, so we. So we do a lot of media training, and it's. It's really nice for me to be able to help people have confidence speaking in front of the camera. And also, I want them to be successful. I want the things they work on to be successful. And if I can help them deliver that message in a compelling way that feels authentic to them and to their audience, then I'm happy to help.

[Leo Laporte]

I have a retraction to make already.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, my gosh.

[Leo Laporte]

Apparently the Falmer's almanac, which is 207 years old, is not the same thing as the old, Old Farmer's Almanac, which comes back even farther. I had no idea. So the Old Farmer's Almanac, I want to be very clear, is still around.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Oh, the Old Farmer's Almanac straight up took them out.

[Leo Laporte]

It's 234 years old and it's still going. Apparently, after all this time, they finally put the Farmer's Almanac out of business.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Can you imagine if you're the. If you're the person running the Old Farmer's Almanac, it's like this is the greatest day of your life.

[Leo Laporte]

Finally.

[Ashley Esquetha]

Finally, finally.

[Leo Laporte]

And it was the Old Farmer's Almanac that I used to get, the one with the yellow cover. They're still around, so I apologize.

[Ashley Esquetha]

You're still gonna get that. You're still gonna get that in the mail to use as toilet paper. Leo, you're doing all right.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank goodness. The outhouse is not gonna go without.

[Janko Rutgers]

Good news for ferrets everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

There, like their website, this says we're still going strong. 234 years. We're still going strong. Okay. Wow.

[Ashley Esquetha]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

I had no idea. Janko Records, lopass cc. I think you're doing well. Yes.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yeah, I'm doing all right. Got this new syndication deal with the Verge going, which is.

[Leo Laporte]

I think that's great. That's good news.

[Janko Rutgers]

But if you want to read all of it, go to Lopaz CC and.

[Leo Laporte]

Subscribe 17,000 AR VR and streaming executives and enthusiasts subscribe Tribe, including myself. And now you're doing you. Are you doing. So you're. It's just syndicating it, which is cool. I love it. Well, congratulations. That's great.

[Janko Rutgers]

Thank you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yanko Records. He's on the Mastodon at j a n k0. I say that because we don't have a slash across our zero in the lower thirds, just to be clear. Thank you for being here, Yanko. We appreciate it.

[Janko Rutgers]

Thanks for having me.

[Leo Laporte]

And Ian Thompson, who is now available freelancer. It's great to see you. Thank you so much for.

[Ian Thompson]

Always a pleasure. Always a good chuckle as well.

[Leo Laporte]

We love introducing you on elements of.

[Ian Thompson]

British culture to America.

[Janko Rutgers]

Yes.

[Ian Thompson]

Everyone go out, grab yourself a ferret.

[Leo Laporte]

And now that you, I hope, have a little more free time, maybe we'll see a little bit more of you on the shows I'd like to do.

[Ian Thompson]

I'll be around.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you. Thanks to all of you for joining us. A special thanks to our Club Twit members who make everything we do here pop possible. Your support covers 25% of our operating expenses. We would not be able to do what we do without you and we do a lot. We of course give you ad free versions of all the shows. Access to the fabulous Club Twit Discord, which I like to call the Disco. We also have a lot of shows specifically for club members. Like yesterday or Saturday, I guess it was Friday's AI User Group Photo Times Coming up in a week with Chris Marquard. It'll be this Friday and we're going back to our corn maze in our Dungeons and Dragons adventure, the Horror in the cornfield Nov. 17. There's also home theater geeks, Stacy's Book Club and a whole lot more Micah's Crafting Corner. So many reasons to be in the club. I hope you will consider supporting what we do by going to Twitt TV Club Twit. By the way, there's a coupon there right right now for the holidays if you want to give it to yourself or others as a gift. 10% off the yearly membership. There's two week free trials. There's family and corporate plans as well. Find out more at Twit tv Club Twit. We thank all of our club members for making this show possible. 20 years we've been doing this. Thanks to the club members, maybe another 204more. We also stream the show live not only in the the club for the club members in our Discord, but also on YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. So you can watch us live there every Sunday afternoon from 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8pm Eastern Time, 2200 UTC after the fact. You can download audio or video of the shows from our website Twit TV there's a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech. That's where the video lives. Great way to share clips. Best thing to do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. And Apple just announced they're going to do automatic chapters in Apple Podcasts, something we've never done because it's so much work. So, you know, maybe that's the way to subscribe if you if you like the idea of chapters in this Week in Tech. But either way, subscribe, listen, and we'll see you here next week. Thanks for joining us. And as I've said for 20 years, another twit is in the can.

[Ian Thompson]

This is amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

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[Ian Thompson]

Up to.

[Leo Laporte]

800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phone via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement example Apple iPhone 16128 gigs 829.99 eligible trade in example iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel Contact Us hi, I'm Chris Gethard and I'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people online. The phone I tweet out a phone number. Thousands of people try to call.

[Ian Thompson]

Talk to one of them.

[Leo Laporte]

They stay anonymous. I can't hang up that's all the rules. I never know what's gonna happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison.

[Ian Thompson]

I've talked to people who survived mass shootings.

[Leo Laporte]

Crazy, funny ones. I talked to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses up as.

[Ian Thompson]

A pirate on the weekends.

[Leo Laporte]

I never know what's gonna happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today.

[Ian Thompson]

Beautiful.

[Leo Laporte]

Anonymous.