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Leo Laporte (3:32)

Podcasts you.

Emily Forlini (3:33)

Love from people you trust this is twit.

Leo Laporte (3:44)

This is twit this week in tech episode 1021 recorded Sunday, March 2, 2025 Benito on high. It's time for TWiT this week at Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. I have assembled a fabulous panel for you today. Doc Rock is here. Our friend from Aloha doc rock from YouTube and eCamm. It's good to see you.

Doc Rock (4:15)

Thank you brother. Good to see you as well.

Leo Laporte (4:17)

Wonderful to see you. It always is. I always. Is it beautiful and right now in Honolulu.

Doc Rock (4:23)

Yeah, today is good. The last couple weeks have been a little weird, but today is flawless outside. So jealous.

Leo Laporte (4:30)

I'm so jealous. Emily Forlini is also here from PC Magazine. And you're in beautiful New Jersey.

Emily Forlini (4:38)

The most beautiful place in the world. In the world.

Leo Laporte (4:41)

You know, it's the Garden State. Come on.

Emily Forlini (4:43)

Comparable to Hawaii.

Leo Laporte (4:45)

Yeah, it's the Hawaii of the Mid Atlantic states.

Emily Forlini (4:50)

It's definitely not the densest state in the Union. It's definitely not super built up outside New York. But no.

Leo Laporte (4:57)

People, I think have a bad impression of New Jersey because they do. They look over the river and they see New Jersey and they go ew. But really, it is the Garden State. There's beautiful farmland. It's beautiful.

Emily Forlini (5:08)

It's true. Yeah. I mean, I'm in a really, I would say, desirable place to live. So I'm happy here. Good.

Leo Laporte (5:14)

It's great to see you. Also joining us, Janko Rutgers. Janko. Are you in la? Where are you?

Janko Roettgers (5:19)

I'm in Oakland, Bay area.

Leo Laporte (5:21)

Oh, it's kind of the east. It's kind of the LA of the Northern California or. No, there, there's no.

Janko Roettgers (5:27)

I mean sort of the east LA of. Yeah, the east LA of something like that.

Leo Laporte (5:33)

Anyway, great to see you. Low Pass CC is Yonko's newsletter. Of course you remember him from Giga Ohm and. And I'm going to mention all the old places and variety and it's great to have you here on TWIT this week. Did anybody emerly you were nearby? Did you go to the Amazon Echo event?

Emily Forlini (5:56)

Yeah, I did.

Leo Laporte (5:58)

I'm a little jealous they don't stream it.

Emily Forlini (6:00)

I know it felt cool. Like when they do that it justifies me going there in person. So I kind of like that. But yeah, it was a big event and they had tons of execs there. Andy Jassy, the CEO was there. So I thought that kind of said a lot and how important the event was to the company. So yeah, I'm sure we'll get into it, but yeah, I was.

Leo Laporte (6:18)

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

Emily Forlini (6:31)

So I didn't know the legend of Panos Panay. And so he walks on stage and he goes, remember the first moment that you asked Alexa a question? What a moment. And I was just sitting there by myself and I said in my head, this guy is a wacko. Like is this guy. And I didn't know he was wearing jewelry. And I mean, you know, I used to work at Amazon, so I was like, this guy is very not like cut from the Amazon cloth. And I was just trying to figure him out. So I wasn't on. On radar for the whole pumped thing. I was just taking in else that comes with this guy.

Leo Laporte (7:12)

Good. Which means you were paying attention to the important stuff, not our silly little game.

Emily Forlini (7:17)

It would have been fun. You know, I could have been in a whole the whole pumped joke but I was a total like novice.

Leo Laporte (7:23)

You immediately got Panos. Yeah, and I shouldn't knock it. Passion for the products. I think it was probably a smart move to hire him since Amazon's lost billions on Echo over the last decade. This is the beginning of the next kind of era of. And I'm trying to avoid saying the A word. A l E X A.

Emily Forlini (7:46)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (7:47)

Because I don't want to trigger anybody's device, but does anybody really have an Alexa in their house anymore?

Emily Forlini (7:53)

I do.

Doc Rock (7:55)

I swear. I don't talk to it.

Leo Laporte (7:57)

I do.

Emily Forlini (7:58)

And it's disaster. It's disaster. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And I was thinking about that, the whole event, and I was like, the big question is like, can they make Alexa cool again? I didn't come away from that event feeling like an affirmative. Yes, they can. You know, it was just the typical voice demos on stage. But it was. There were some things that were promising, like, okay, so I'll give them credit. It's interesting that it's going to be able to take actions for you. So instead of just doing, you know, Alexa set a timer, Alexa play music. You know, it should be more human, like, and then you can do things like say, text mom, I'm on my way, or what else. They give so many examples. They had crazy ones like, you can call an Uber. Yeah. Get a mechanic to the house to fix my oven. And you can upload documents to it, like your kid's soccer schedule. And it'll remind you, like, hey, Jimmy, you're bringing oranges on Thursday. And so they just want to know everything about you. And then they want to be able to take actions for you. And that's their assistant vision.

Leo Laporte (8:59)

Jennifer Pattison, too, was excited about that. She just reviewed a giant screen that does your family's, you know, soccer and lessons schedule and everything in the kitchen.

Doc Rock (9:09)

Skylight.

Leo Laporte (9:09)

Skylight. Thank you, Doc. You knew about Katie?

Doc Rock (9:12)

Well, Katie has one. Well, my manager at ecamm, she has one in her house and I love it. And I kind of want one, but I kind of, I don't know, like, I just want one just because it looks really cool and it does work.

Leo Laporte (9:24)

So you know what I did?

Doc Rock (9:25)

I'm an idiot, responsible to pick up my niece or whatever.

Leo Laporte (9:28)

So I ordered the 21 inch Amazon Aleco. There's a 21 inch screen which is basically like the skylight. And because this is one of the new features of Alexa is this, you know, AI generated calendaring thing. By the way, it'll be 19.99amonth, which is a lot unless you're an Amazon prime member, and then it's free.

Janko Roettgers (9:56)

So Nobody will pay 19.99amonth for it.

Leo Laporte (9:59)

Exactly. Prime is like $14 a month.

Emily Forlini (10:03)

Exactly. I did the math. So it's 139 a year for prime, and it's 240 a year if you get it on its own. So that's going to do that. It's a little fishy. I think either they'll increase the cost of prime because it hasn't gone up since 2022, which is a lot happened since 2022. We got inflation, we're in a whole new world. And then the other thing they could do is they could only add the coolest features to the paid version, you know, like ChatGPT.

Leo Laporte (10:30)

Yeah, there might be a difference.

Emily Forlini (10:32)

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

Janko Roettgers (10:46)

I could see them offer it through prime for maybe even a year or two and then slowly start to separate those things, get you hooked. Kind of like the same way they do it with prime video now. So you get prime video still as part of prime, but if you don't want to watch ads, you have to pay more.

Leo Laporte (11:02)

Right.

Janko Roettgers (11:02)

And so they're starting to give you some stuff. They get you hooked. Exactly. And then they offer you an add on subscription for this and that and ring and whatnot. So I think they've gotten pretty good, they've gotten pretty good at using prime to get people into the door and for this. I think that's actually the most interesting thing about Alexa. It's for the first time a voice assistant LLM powered voice assistant, new generation of voice assistant that's available to millions of users out of the gate. And they don't have to go to like a chatbot web interface anymore. They don't have to like install something else. It's just going to be there for them for a lot of people and it's going to be free. So a lot more people are going to be exposed to this type of stuff.

Doc Rock (11:47)

I think the biggest problem so far with Echo has always been, I know this is going to sound so mean. I know a lot of Muggles who have Echo because it was the cheapest entry level, like assistant device. But because of that's the baseline clientele, most people only know to check notifications for their package. Like they don't even use it to order stuff like Amazon thought they were going to do. I did in the beginning. I got a couple miss shipments and I was like, oh, you know, it's easier for Me to do it on my phone right before you.

Leo Laporte (12:18)

I order all the time because they run out of razor blades. And I go, hey, a word. Order me some razor blades. And then she says this is what you ordered last time. That shows you three or four. Would you like me to order those again? And I say yes. And it says what's your, you know, code? I say my code and then it's done. I think it's a pretty. But Amazon themselves, Amazon says nobody does this. So I'm just right.

Doc Rock (12:44)

And so that part I think it works. But I think a lot of moguls don't do that. So like I've used it to order things before and I do, you know, find out when packages are coming. But other than that, I think the primary thing I use Echo for is to do conversions that I can't do in my head just because I'm in.

Leo Laporte (13:01)

I do a timers for cooking. We do. Lisa and I both do. Because it's in the kitchen.

Doc Rock (13:06)

Yeah. So I have the echo in the kitchen and a dot in the living room and we have a big echo down here that we don't even use anymore. Because the HomePod sounds better. The HomePod mini sounds better.

Leo Laporte (13:16)

It's not great for music. Yeah, yeah.

Doc Rock (13:18)

So I mean legit like it literally became notifications and timers. So if they can. With this seemingly what they demoed, seems like some things that you might be able to get not just the Muggles in, but other people in. But Yanko's right because it is device that you can get into for 19 bucks anybody can get it. It doesn't require a 1500 dollar phone or a thousand dollar phone or what is it now 599 like it is.

Leo Laporte (13:42)

Do you think people want AI in the house?

Janko Roettgers (13:46)

Well, they're going to have it people. So that's.

Doc Rock (13:49)

You may not want it, but you're gonna get it.

Janko Roettgers (13:52)

But, but that's the thing. Like we all bought these smart speakers at one point. Like I have more Google devices around my house, but the same thing I use them for timers I weather. And that's pretty much it. Maybe you like to play some music, but it's also because they're so bad at any added complexity and if you just make that a little bit better. And some of the demos that they show were pretty promising. Right. So this whole thing even like home device control where they were like, well, play music everywhere but don't wake up the baby. And then it deducts from that that it shouldn't use the speaker in the nursery without you having to explicitly say, oh, play it in this zone and move the music into that room. And that device has this name now. It got so complex with a lot of these things, like taking away a little bit of that complexity I think people will really appreciate. And then it doesn't really matter that much to the average consumer. Whether it's like the newest generation of AI or something, it's just, it works better. It's just people to start using it.

Emily Forlini (14:47)

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

Janko Roettgers (15:35)

Sorry Leo, go ahead. Main thing that's going to hold it back is that they don't know enough about you. So they showed the demo where they're like, upload your kids soccer schedule. It sounds good, but it starts with you having to find the document and having to upload it through some web interface or having to use a special email address. Even like for emails, you have to send it to alexalexa.com I was told by Alexa, by an Amazon spokesperson. When you compare that to Google's Gemini, they showed very similar things last year when they unveiled it at Google I O. But it can search all your email because it already has all your email.

Emily Forlini (16:12)

That's true.

Janko Roettgers (16:12)

You can search through all. So instead of summarized as one document or summarized as one email, you can just tell her to summarize all the emails that you recently got from your kids school, which is a really compelling demo to anybody who has school age children.

Emily Forlini (16:27)

Yeah, we'll see if Google, I mean, I'm sure Google is watching this and saying all Right. We're going to have their event where they're going to put Gemini in Google home. And so the big question is, which one's going to be better? Right.

Leo Laporte (16:38)

Did Amazon address the privacy thing at all in the event?

Emily Forlini (16:42)

No, they put the foot on the gas and they were just like, we're going to.

Leo Laporte (16:45)

Quite the opposite.

Emily Forlini (16:46)

All your data. Quite the opposite. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (16:49)

That is, I've noticed in some of the stories what they consider a selling point, and it's one of the problems Apple's having right now is they don't intend. They're trying to protect your privacy. And so unlike these other companies, Google and Amazon especially, they're not doubling down on, hey, we know everything about you. Amazon said that, right? They said, you know, think of all the things we know about you. Isn't that a good. Isn't that a good thing? Yeah.

Emily Forlini (17:14)

And also, you can tell us more.

Leo Laporte (17:17)

Tell us your soccer schedule, tell us.

Emily Forlini (17:19)

Everything about your kids and, you know, all your medical information. Tell us what's in your house, what it looks like, who's doing what in what room, what you're buying, where you're going, who you're talking to, who you're emailing. That's what they want to know.

Doc Rock (17:33)

Will people sound crazy?

Leo Laporte (17:36)

Go ahead.

Doc Rock (17:36)

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

Emily Forlini (18:21)

Can we talk about it before we.

Leo Laporte (18:22)

Yeah, those are the people who don't have magic, right, Doc?

Doc Rock (18:26)

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I. That's my turn for, like, normal people that are not like those of us who came.

Leo Laporte (18:30)

Emily, tell me you read Harry Potter.

Emily Forlini (18:33)

Of course. I'm so jealous. You're using Muggle in a sentence and I'm.

Doc Rock (18:38)

Oh, I always.

Emily Forlini (18:39)

Your ways.

Leo Laporte (18:40)

We used to Call them normies, right?

Emily Forlini (18:42)

Yeah, I call them regulars.

Doc Rock (18:45)

Yeah, that's even better. I don't use normies because I'm definitely not normal and then I might sound like a diss. But yeah, I think, I think that, you know, it has such a, an opportunity and I know so many people that hate the fact that they're relying on Amazon because they're mad at Amazon for some of their other stuff. And I'm like, if any one of these guys would clean that part up, they could just take over.

Emily Forlini (19:06)

And it's just, I think the tech is just bad. I think most people like Amazon is so mass market. I think most people don't know or care about that stuff and I just think it's, it's not that good.

Leo Laporte (19:21)

Interesting. I think it is anybody who I use AI like crazy and I've given up on privacy years ago. So to me it's become very clear that you want to give AI more information because it'll be more useful. Here's an example. I just took a picture of all my supplements and asked ChatGPT to analyze it and it did a great job. But now of course somebody somewhere now knows all the supplements I take and, but I didn't care, you know. Yeah, is that how we're going to. Or are people going to go the other way and go, no, I'm not giving them that information?

Emily Forlini (19:59)

Well, I don't know. And I think another thing about this does, Amazon's vision actually is, is the same as every other tech company's vision in terms of these AI assistants. So all of them want to know as much about you as possible. All of them want their tech to be with you throughout the day as your assistant. And so that's the whole agentic AI buzzword that everyone here, that's what it is. Amazon is maybe different because they have the physical device in the home versus a phone or computer based thing. But it's not unique to Amazon. This is just the direction the industry is going.

Leo Laporte (20:33)

Well to that point. There's an interesting article. Every Sunday, Mark Gurman, who's the rumor guy, the Apple rumor guy at Bloomberg, puts out his Power on newsletter and every Sunday there's this massive dump of stuff about Apple, some of which is well sourced. He's very good at that. Some of which is his own speculation. In this case, he's identified Apple's AI crisis and he is sourcing this from people who, with knowledge of the situation. He's actually saying Apple is not going to get its full AI. What Amazon just announced, in effect, what other AI companies are already doing until 2027. Until iOS 20, which is pushed back already to 2026.

Emily Forlini (21:19)

It was.

Leo Laporte (21:19)

Right?

Emily Forlini (21:20)

Yeah. So that's, that's bad.

Leo Laporte (21:22)

Is that bad news or is Apple gonna be.

Doc Rock (21:25)

I'm cool with it.

Leo Laporte (21:26)

Looking back and saying, see, we, we told you that stuff's crap.

Doc Rock (21:30)

Listen, I'm cool with it. You know why? Because Apple is suit if you do. You know this as well as I do. Apple is super famous for rolling into the party late looking fly as hell. They're going to be suited and booted. When they walk in the door, they're going to be like, open AI. You look like a nerd. Sit down. They're going to be like, Alexa. That outfit is played. Beat it, Google. All right, Formidable, but move out of the way. They always walk into the door looking like Aegis Elba.

Leo Laporte (21:56)

Yeah, but they're so far behind this time. Gurman says Apple's half a decade late to the game and an even bleaker timeline than many of us imagine. I'm reading from his newsletter. On top of that, Apple's rivals are not standing still, given the speed at which they're operating now. Imagine where OpenAI and Google will be in two years.

Janko Roettgers (22:15)

I also think that's not necessarily true anymore, that Apple always waits and then rolls out the best product. Case in point, Vision Pro. I mean, it's a great visual device and so forth, but they really were like, not there yet where they wanted to be, too highly priced and so forth. And then the other thing, they're going to roll out, if the rumors are true, and I think Mark has reported on that quite a bit too, they're going to launch a smart display possibly as early as this year. So if the AI isn't ready, what's the smart display going to do? How smart could it be compared?

Doc Rock (22:46)

Just be a pretty display, as always.

Leo Laporte (22:51)

But see, I think that 21 inch echo that I just bought already is a smart display. And in a couple of months. Do you think, by the way, Amazon reported that they were having trouble with the AI. In fact, last year they, they kind of punted. This year they said, we're going to have a meeting on February, a go or no go meeting on Valentine's Day, February 14th. That was a week before this event or two weeks before this event. And apparently it was a no go, which is why they weren't able to announce availability at this event. What did they say about availability, Emily? It sounded a little mushy.

Emily Forlini (23:28)

They said in the Coming weeks, which is what everyone says. That's what everyone says. I can't tell you how many times I write articles and I quote coming soon or in the coming weeks. It's pretty standard. And the one thing was they did not allow us to interact with the product.

Leo Laporte (23:46)

That's telling.

Emily Forlini (23:46)

Hands on demos. And we tried and they were sketchy about it. They were like, come back in 10 minutes. Then we came back and they were like, yeah, no, you can't do it. And it was really weird and wow. So it's kind of like we don't know how much was canned and how much wasn't and we. But we definitely were not allowed to try it ourselves. So that was a bit sus.

Leo Laporte (24:04)

The good news is because all of the AI will be server side, virtually every Echo device made, even the old ones will work with this, right?

Janko Roettgers (24:14)

No, they're ruling a couple of ones out. Like the first generation, the really old ones, the Echo show device, not even super old ones like the Echo show devices. So the screen devices, not every of them will get it. I think third party devices with Alexa built in are generally not going to get it. So if you have.

Emily Forlini (24:31)

Well, they said it's only coming to Echo shows first. Like, like probably the newer ones which.

Leo Laporte (24:36)

Oh, it's not coming to the dots. It has to have display.

Emily Forlini (24:41)

There's no timeline for anything besides the shows right now.

Janko Roettgers (24:45)

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

Leo Laporte (25:01)

That's what I had heard as well. That's early access. So what does that mean? Normal people won't get it or you'll have to sign up for an early access version.

Janko Roettgers (25:12)

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

Emily Forlini (25:33)

You also need a Willy Wonka golden ticket.

Leo Laporte (25:38)

Do I have to sleep with grandpa to get that.

Doc Rock (25:42)

Comment from the two.

Emily Forlini (25:44)

Ends of the bed? Terrible.

Leo Laporte (25:46)

No, I agree with you. So I'm looking. I have a 5, an 8 and a 10. It'll work on the 5, 8 and the 10, right? These are all ones I've purchased.

Janko Roettgers (25:54)

Look at that.

Leo Laporte (25:54)

This is ridiculous. I mean, something wrong with me. Look at this. Why do I have so many of these?

Emily Forlini (26:01)

I'm learning a lot about your consumption habits, Leo.

Leo Laporte (26:04)

See, I told you. I don't care. I got no privacy.

Emily Forlini (26:07)

So what are your supplements? Just kidding. I don't want to know.

Doc Rock (26:11)

Leo, listen, I love this comment from the chat because this drives me crazy more than anything else. You know, when you. The reason why we sitting here walking around the words of the S lady and the A lady or whatever is because why is it 20, 25 and we can't name our devices?

Leo Laporte (26:24)

Yeah, no, I'm a big one on that.

Doc Rock (26:26)

No joke. Mine would be named Emily.

Leo Laporte (26:28)

Remember when the Moto X came out? When did the Moto X come out? That was like 10 years ago.

Doc Rock (26:34)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (26:34)

And you could say you could change the. This was a Google device because it was when Google owned Motorola. And you could change the wake word. I had mine be Help me Obi Wan Kenobi. Because I figured if I. That's a good one. Because I'm not going to say that by accident unless we're watching Star Wars. I think we're okay.

Janko Roettgers (26:53)

So I looked at. Just circling back. I just looked it up again. You will have to have an Echo Show 8, 10, 15 or anyone to get early access.

Leo Laporte (27:02)

So my fives will not.

Janko Roettgers (27:03)

Five is out of the gate, out of the door eventually.

Leo Laporte (27:05)

But it says eventually. They're gonna eventually have it for almost, quote, almost every.

Emily Forlini (27:12)

Well, actually, my colleague will Greenwald at PCMag made a good point that it's interesting that they didn't launch this along with a new device that supports it, which is like what Apple did.

Doc Rock (27:23)

Right.

Emily Forlini (27:23)

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

Leo Laporte (27:41)

Do you think the world. I mean, we're spending some time talking about this, but do you think the real world is even aware of this?

Doc Rock (27:48)

No, no.

Leo Laporte (27:49)

The tech world is.

Doc Rock (27:51)

Yes.

Emily Forlini (27:52)

No, I mean, I think it's sad for Apple. We've just totally glossed over them. I mean, do we even care?

Leo Laporte (27:58)

Well, Gurman says, despite what Apple has said, Apple says, for instance, iPhones sell better in markets where Apple intelligence is available. That may have nothing to do, by the way, with Apple intelligence. That may have a lot more to do with the, the affluence of that market. But Gurman says people aren't really excited about Apple intelligence. No consumer is desperate to use it and that's partly because it's crappy. I wonder if Echo plus is going to be a selling point or if people are going to care. Amazon may be stuck in that boat where they, you know, they lost $10 billion in the first 10 years of echo. Are. Have they done anything to make. Make a difference? Are they more likely to make money?

Doc Rock (28:45)

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

Leo Laporte (29:21)

And incidentally, you can rename the Echo. It can be Alexa Computer Computer, which is even worse. And it can be Echo.

Janko Roettgers (29:31)

Yeah.

Emily Forlini (29:32)

Well, do you guys think they're just followers? And maybe that's a bad sign because like I said, I feel like their vision is the same as the industries. I personally think voice assistants are bad tech and I have never liked them. I hate, I hate them in cars. I mean crash into the media and you're trying to get it to do something basic. You know, like my Alexa's collecting dust. It can't connect to my Spotify. Has taken it five years to figure that out. You know, like I've never ever had a good experience with a voice assistant.

Leo Laporte (30:01)

It's often frustrating, isn't it?

Emily Forlini (30:03)

It feels very tone deaf to me.

Doc Rock (30:04)

That the disconnect from the WI fi often.

Emily Forlini (30:06)

Right? Yeah. So many issues and just the voice like Alexa set timer. I don't want to do that. You know, like I've just. I'm out on this time.

Janko Roettgers (30:19)

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

Emily Forlini (30:45)

Right. It's just all the things they could invest in. I'm like, is this the right one? Is there momentum? Is there potential?

Doc Rock (30:52)

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

Janko Roettgers (31:42)

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

Emily Forlini (32:34)

And that's probably what's taking Apple a long time because Apple wants it to be able to Centex and have its little tentacles and the whole Apple ecosystem. And they also want it to be privacy focused. And so I think if anything, all those integrations would be what's delaying it. But also Mark Gurman is the main voice saying it's delayed. So I know we trust him, but he's the only one who said it was 2026 instead of 2025. And then he said now it's 2027. So I don't think this. He could be wrong. It's not official from Apple. I just think that's important to point out.

Leo Laporte (33:06)

That's fair. Yeah, that's fair. He could be wrong. What do people want with their AI assistants? Do they really want to have a conversation with them? Do Emily, what do you. Do you use AI for anything?

Emily Forlini (33:17)

I use ChatGPT and Gemini for like researching and ideation.

Leo Laporte (33:20)

Do you talk to it or do you type to it?

Emily Forlini (33:23)

No, I think I'm just like so out on voice tech. I talk to it if I have to to write articles and I have had that moment like that Panos wanted me to have. I've had that with Google, Gemini and ChatGPT voice mode where I'm like, wow, I'm actually talking to a computer for real. Right. I think it's cool. But I'm, I think just using my, my good old fingers, just typing, texting like I'm getting done what I need to get done and am using AI in other ways. So I haven't really found a reason to talk to.

Leo Laporte (33:52)

I find myself talking to. I have set up on the iPhone the action button to talk to chat GPT and I do talk. I do. I will ask her. Or is it might be Perplexity. That's the other one I use all the time is Perplexity.

Doc Rock (34:06)

Plexity is good.

Leo Laporte (34:06)

I really like. I don't. That's what I use for search now instead of Google.

Doc Rock (34:10)

Yeah, same.

Leo Laporte (34:12)

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

Emily Forlini (35:06)

I have the same feeling after I. I do use chat CBT a lot and to Google or not even I said Google. You know that's. That's the word for researching but I use it to get information. But it leaves me with a weird.

Leo Laporte (35:17)

Feeling like yeah, like ripped people off.

Emily Forlini (35:20)

You rip people off. And also like I actually can't fact check what you're saying because it's coming.

Leo Laporte (35:25)

That's a problem.

Emily Forlini (35:26)

Too many places and so it's. It leaves you with it just a. Just a twinge of doubt I think.

Leo Laporte (35:31)

Yeah. I have a whole thing on construction crane history on my perplexity with videos and pictures and this started in Mesopotamia in 3000 BC and those modern cranes, they have a specific name. I can't remember what it is but fixed high rise cranes that use elevator shaft are called internal climbing tower cranes. So just so you know.

Emily Forlini (35:55)

All right, quick fact check people in the chat.

Leo Laporte (35:57)

Well see then that's maybe my fault. I don't assume it's hallucinating especially Perplexity because he's usually going out in the web to find answers and people tell me you should be fact checking. I guess if you're a journalist before.

Emily Forlini (36:15)

Using an article that affects my opinion towards AI because I actually really need things to be right and it can create more time for me and so it could be why I'm a little more hesitant. It just doesn't really fit with my line of work. Work right perfectly.

Leo Laporte (36:30)

That makes sense. Yeah.

Doc Rock (36:32)

Journalists when you ask it to do things like that, especially poor research. One of the key things you could always tell it to is to pull you the sources and I always tell it to double check its facts and then oftentimes catch itself and it's like oh yeah, sorry I pulled that one. But you should look at this one and it'll give you the link. So it still speeds it up because.

Leo Laporte (36:50)

Yeah perplexity does that. It has footnote.

Doc Rock (36:52)

It will build you a list and.

Leo Laporte (36:53)

You can tap the footnote to see where that came from.

Emily Forlini (36:55)

From Gemini too.

Leo Laporte (36:57)

It makes it fairly easy to.

Doc Rock (36:59)

Gemini would be real bad if it's giving you the wrong links because it is Google and it has.

Emily Forlini (37:04)

It often gives. One time I asked it a question and it. One of the links was a poster website like a poster related to my question and I was like. It was like posters dot com. What the heck.

Leo Laporte (37:17)

That's not a good source probably.

Emily Forlini (37:19)

I'm thinking I kind of use it as like a directional thing. It's like a vibe giver like initial information and that can speed things up for sure. It's not useless, it's just I also have to use Google for sure and see.

Leo Laporte (37:32)

So that's the observation most experts have come up with, is that AI is good, useful in conjunction with a human. That it is a partnership but the human's in charge. That's the problem I have with Amazon's Echo, is there's no follow up or anything. You just talk into this box and you have to assume it's right. And I don't, I don't feel like you're in as involved because of the way the interaction is set up.

Emily Forlini (37:57)

Especially the one where it's like bring a mechanic to the house to fix my oven.

Leo Laporte (38:01)

What the hell?

Emily Forlini (38:03)

I know all these Amazon execs have tons of money, they don't care who comes to the house. But any mechanical do I want quotes. Because mechanics, especially if anyone's ever done work on their house or you don't know what the heck you're getting. And I definitely don't want Alexa sending some Joe Schmo to my house and then I end up with a 750bill in my house.

Leo Laporte (38:23)

I hear you. A bathroom remodel, Is that right?

Janko Roettgers (38:26)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (38:27)

Well, even I did that, by the way, on the web. I was looking for somebody to repair my shower and I got and I made a mistake. I went to a site that I think was a bogus site from Angie's List and I got literally for the first next two weeks, five or six calls a day from people who said, I hear you want a bathroom remodel. No, I just wanted my shower fixed.

Doc Rock (38:45)

No, we had the AC go out the other day and I called the company and I know the owner of the company and then he's like, okay, I'll send somebody tomorrow. Tomorrow. And it's like, yo, we have guys that work with him. That's what you mean. I love and do the connections. And so he knows not to send the guys that we don't like because that would just be a waste of time. Well, it's not we, it's the other person.

Emily Forlini (39:08)

Well, I mean if it's a bad person, I just be like, talk to my Alexa. Like I didn't call you.

Leo Laporte (39:13)

Hey, come here. Can you just work this out with Alexa? Because I don't want to have anything to do.

Emily Forlini (39:17)

Yeah, I'm not feeling it. It seems like a, a bad match. Also, she'll pick up the bill, you know your site visit bill or whatever.

Doc Rock (39:23)

Okay, so Leo, you asked the Question. I want to answer it now. Thank you, Emily. She said, Leo said, what do you want your AI to do? I want my AI to sit on hold with Spectrum to tell them that I've been in text since Jesus walked in Nazareth. I know. I rebooted everything. I know. What's broken just restarted on your end. They will fight you for like three hours. And when they finally do it, they go, oh, look, that works.

Emily Forlini (39:46)

Worked.

Doc Rock (39:47)

So that's what I want Alexa to do. I want Alexa to fight with Spectrum until Google kind of.

Leo Laporte (39:52)

Wasn't that the idea? Google announced this years ago.

Doc Rock (39:55)

Oh, yeah. That was like, years ago.

Leo Laporte (39:56)

It would call and intercede for you, and I don't think that went so well.

Emily Forlini (40:02)

That's what they're saying in this case is that they will call the mechanic. So I guess that mechanic is going to be bumbling around town in his van and he's going to get a phone call from an AI that's like, do you want to go fix an oven at one two three Downtown Street? And he's going to be like, what? And this is going to be the most just idiotic interaction of all time. And that's, I guess, the world that people want.

Leo Laporte (40:26)

Put up the Alexa signal.

Janko Roettgers (40:27)

Did you all see the video where two AIs were talking to each other? And then like, oh, now the AIs recognized that they're talking to each other. Instead, they're switching to this weird tweet mode and they were just playing modem sounds to each other.

Leo Laporte (40:40)

Oh, wow.

Emily Forlini (40:42)

It's like that. But the guy on the other end, I mean, I'm in Jersey, is some, like, Jersey Italian contractor. And know that's like oil.

Janko Roettgers (40:49)

Oil and water.

Leo Laporte (40:49)

They can't even send me for.

Emily Forlini (40:52)

They can't even send an email. I mean, it's bad. I'm. I've gotten quotes that are like screenshots of a screenshot of a screenshot. And it's like, where the heck. Who. Who are you guys?

Leo Laporte (41:00)

Like, I had a plumber.

Doc Rock (41:02)

You have just discovered what a muggle is.

Leo Laporte (41:04)

That's a mug.

Emily Forlini (41:05)

No, I love that you use that.

Leo Laporte (41:06)

That's from Jersey. I had a plumber come out and he said, boy, it was hard to find. I said, what do you mean it was hard? It's on the. The Google Maps. He said, oh, yeah, I don't have any of that stuff.

Emily Forlini (41:17)

Exactly. That's my point. They're saying they're gonna call these guys to fix your oven.

Leo Laporte (41:23)

I don't know how to get there. Let me look at the Thomas Guide.

Emily Forlini (41:27)

Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (41:28)

Oh well, yeah, we are having some fun now. Let's talk more about tech in just a bit with Emily Fornlaney from PC Magazine. Doc Rock. The YouTube Doc Rock. That one not Do Croc. That's a different one. Doc Rock also. Now, did you say that ecamm's gonna buy some ads? Because I heard you say that.

Benito (41:47)

That.

Doc Rock (41:47)

Yeah. What we're doing is like we're running it through all of this stuff and coming up with a new marketing plan.

Leo Laporte (41:52)

Because you know, twit's here for you. But that's not why Doc Rock is on. We love eCamm. In fact, we're using it right now. We use it with Zoom in conjunction. And so Bonito, who's running the operation at his house because he's got 10 gigabit symmetric ether Internet has ECAMM running on a Mac which is also running the Zoom, which is this call. It's a complicated thing, but it works quite well. He's doing the switching with eCamm. Anyway, great to have you Doc. And of course Janko Rickers, longtime friend going way back to the Giga Ohm days. Low pass CC is a must read. Really must read. Is it Substack? Who do you use for your newsletter?

Janko Roettgers (42:36)

I use Beehive actually.

Leo Laporte (42:38)

Much better.

Janko Roettgers (42:38)

Very happy with them.

Leo Laporte (42:39)

Yeah, I hear very good things about Beehive. Good. Well that's glad you got 17,000 people subscribing, give or take. That's very nice. Good for you, Janko. I think this is the future in so many ways. You know, a talented reporter who's made a name for himself and then does it on his own. Why should you?

Janko Roettgers (43:04)

I have a paid tier and I also do ads. So if any ecamm like company wants to do an ad in my newsletter.

Doc Rock (43:11)

Okay, putting you in. Hint hint.

Leo Laporte (43:15)

We'll have more in just a bit. It's great to have you all here too. Our show today, brought to you by our good friends at thinkst Canary. I've been talking about things canaries for about eight years now. We even have a Thinks Canary right over here. The idea is it's a honey pot. So the things Canary looks like a, you know, like an external USB drive, just a little black box about yay big. Plugs into the wall, plugs into your network work. You can then go into the console and you can give it a personality. Like it can be an SSH server or an IIS server, web server. It could be a. A Linux box, a Windows box. It could be a SCADA device. I mean there's really the sky's the limit. But these, these are not any of those devices. From the hacker's point of view, they're indistinguishable, but they are actually little honey pots just waiting, waiting for the bad guy to attack them. They can also create files, you know, you can spread around your network that looks like spreadsheets or PDFs or Word documents, whatever. I have a number of xlsx files that say things like payee information or employee information. The kind of stuff that a bad guy can't resist. So you sprinkle them around. And if, then if somebody accesses those lore files or tries to brute force your fake internal SSH server, your thinks Canary goes woohoo and will immediately alert you that you have a problem. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. Choose a profile for your things Canary device. It's kind of fun. It's so easy to do. You might change it all. You know, you can change it every day. I change it from time to time. It's, it's got, it's indistinguishable from the actual device right down to the Mac address. Then you register with your hosted console for monitoring and notifications. By the way, notifications any way you want. Email, sms. You could, I guess you could get a fax. It supports web hooks, syslog, it supports, it has an API, really any way you want it. Then you just sit and wait. An attacker who's inside has breached your network is inside. Or a malicious insider, an evil maid or that kind of thing. They make themselves known by accessing your bethinks Canary. They can't help themselves. They don't look vulnerable, they look valuable. They're like I gotta get into that thing. The minute they do, you will know. Visit Canary tools twit for just 7, 500 bucks a year as an example, you'll get five thingst canaries. You get your own hosted console. Upgrade, support, maintenance. Oh and by the way, if you use the offer code TWIT in the how did you hear about us box, 10% off the price for not just for the first year, but forever for life. As long as you use your things to canaries. You can always return your things to canaries with their two month money back guarantee for a full refund. So there is absolutely no risk here. You got it? Try it. I should point out that in the eight years that thinkst Canary has partnered with Twit, no one has ever asked for a Refund. Not once. Because they work. Because you. Once you get one, you realize, oh, we've needed this all along. Visit Canary Tools Twit. Enter the code twit and how'd you hear about us? Box for 10% off for life. Canary Tool Twit for your own. Your very own Thinkst Canary. We thank them for their support of this Week in Tech. So we were going to talk about Apple. I guess we've kind of talked about Apple and it's LLM Siri, we should say. Somebody said in the chat room, oh, Apple Intelligence is here. Yeah, we're talking about Smart. Siri. Siri's not going to get smart for some time. She's actually gotten dumber, right?

Doc Rock (46:53)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (46:54)

That's the sad thing.

Doc Rock (46:56)

100%.

Janko Roettgers (46:58)

I like to think we all get smarter. But. But perspective.

Leo Laporte (47:01)

We're getting. Yeah, maybe we're getting dumber too. I know as I age, I've forgotten more things than I knew. Google's founder. We were talking about Gemini. Larry. Larry, not Larry. Sergey Brin has tell the AI team. Stop building nanny products. You know, for a long time, one of the things AI companies have really worked on is AI safety. Safety. So that the AI wouldn't say something horrific or wouldn't teach you how to make bombs and so forth. But maybe that's holding you back. He sent a message to all the employees in Google's DeepMind division saying it's been, quote, it's been two years of the Gemini program. Gemini program and GDM, which is Google DeepMind. New York Times reported this. We have come a long way in that time with many efforts we should feel very proud of. He says at the same time, let me refresh this, because I can't scroll it past that point.

Emily Forlini (48:14)

You've just been making it up this far.

Leo Laporte (48:15)

Thus far, I. I've been making it up. I can't read it. What is. At the same time, what's going on? Is the Verge turned off? Scrolling? All right, let me go to the.

Janko Roettgers (48:26)

It might be their paywall. You hit their paywall.

Leo Laporte (48:28)

Oh, do they have a paywall? I think the Verge was free.

Emily Forlini (48:32)

No, they added a subscription tier.

Leo Laporte (48:35)

This is the problem. Now I have to pay for every source.

Emily Forlini (48:39)

Well, AI. I mean, someone.

Leo Laporte (48:41)

Oh, yeah. I could ask Perplexity. What Larry said. Does anybody. Can anybody see it and tell me what Larry said?

Emily Forlini (48:47)

I feel like he said, stop making me any products. I think that's.

Leo Laporte (48:49)

That's no more nanny products.

Emily Forlini (48:52)

What does that mean?

Leo Laporte (48:53)

He says, at the same time, competition accelerated immensely and the Final race to AGI is. I can't read the rest of it is a foot.

Janko Roettgers (49:03)

What is it is a foot. And then he says, I think we have all the ingredients to win this race, but we are going to have to turbocharge our efforts.

Leo Laporte (49:12)

What does it mean to stop building nanny products? Does that mean abandon AI safety?

Emily Forlini (49:20)

Okay, so I'm trying to think of the word nanny. Like, that's like someone who takes care of kids.

Leo Laporte (49:25)

Well, you know, sometimes they talk about nanny government, right? A government that doesn't trust its people enough, so it has to tell them you got to wear a motorcycle helmet or you have to wear a seat belt. That sometimes people say that's the nanny state.

Emily Forlini (49:39)

Both those things are really good ideas, by the way.

Leo Laporte (49:42)

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not saying I agree with them, but that's kind of the attitude, and I guess that's what Circuit Brin is saying.

Emily Forlini (49:52)

Well, I think it's hip right now to hop on the less AI regulation train that kind of like the Trump administration is ushering into. And they went to the Paris AI Summit and the whole thing was like, less regulation, less regulation. And so it seems to be in vogue right now to talk about. About not, you know, being responsible, which I. I kind of feel like they're setting it up so people have to pick. Like, you should just have an innovative product that also doesn't, like, kill you or teach your kid how to make a bomb. And I guess that's too much to ask. I don't know.

Janko Roettgers (50:28)

I mean, there's something where you could make the argument without calling it a nanite. Nana. Yes, Nan. I nanny product that they're sometimes overshooting it a little bit. When I was trying out the Ray Ban meta Ray Bans, I was trying a couple of things where I would just take a photo of a car and I was like, tell me about this type of car. And the AI initially told me right away, oh, I can't identify this license plate. And I can't talk about people's cars. I was like, I don't care who owns.

Leo Laporte (50:58)

Tell me the mate.

Janko Roettgers (51:01)

Which year was this car made? Or something like that. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (51:03)

Here's the good news, because Perplexity has gotten around the Verge paywall, and I have the rest. In the leaked internal memo, Brin expressed concern for Google's AI offerings of are, quote, overloaded with filters and various restrictions. Exactly what you were saying, Yanko. And he said, we have to trust our users rather than creating overly cautious products. He also said the AI team should be working 60 hours a week and should come in at least every weekday. Is that reasonable?

Janko Roettgers (51:37)

Nope.

Leo Laporte (51:39)

I think none of the people here even go into the office. Right, right.

Doc Rock (51:43)

No, listen, I, I definitely bust my, you know, first of all, you know how long it would take me to commute every day to work? There's 13 hours a day, both directions, 26 hours a day doesn't work.

Leo Laporte (51:53)

Yeah.

Doc Rock (51:54)

Who this thing? Years ago Adobe had a thing called R O W E Results Only work environment. And they were working deep into this. This was way back in like 2014. As a matter of fact, the last conversation I had about it was at a coffee shop in San Francisco with o'. Malik. How about that? That's how long ago this was. That's how long ago this was. Talking about full circle and it was starting to catch on. And I was over here doing workshops, teaching companies in Hawaii because our traffic is so bad that this works. And people are more, you know, advantageous with their work because they're not thinking about their kids, what they need to get done because they're, they could do stuff. And a couple years ago somebody said, oh, everybody needs to get back to work because they think everybody's lazy and now everybody's going back to it. And it was so dumb. It's really, really stupid. Like it's. He says it doesn't matter.

Leo Laporte (52:50)

He says 60 hours a week is quote, the sweet spot of productivity and allows for maximum output without risking burnout. That's five 12 hour days a week. I don't know, I think I'd be burnout.

Janko Roettgers (53:04)

I think what's happening here is that people at Google and Meta and so forth all have musk envy. They realize you can be an A hole, you can't treat the people terribly and maybe that accelerates your product a little bit. And then they build these to the point of how much AI safety you need. It's the same thing, right, where they build all these safeguards into their products and then Grok comes along and has an like, what's it called? A hole mode, Mask mode. I'm not sure, but yeah, exactly. There you go. That's a technical term, but really I think they're giving up too much here and they're like going way too far in the other direction.

Emily Forlini (53:40)

Yeah, it's like an a hole competition.

Leo Laporte (53:42)

But maybe are we lazy Americans and in other countries they're working those 12 hour days and are we afraid that China or India or Germany is going to exceed us, become better than we are?

Emily Forlini (54:00)

I think we're A little lazy, for sure. If you think about, like, what our grandparents were doing. Like, both my grandfathers were war veterans, and I'm, you know, at home on a podcast, and that's, like, the hardest thing. Oh, it's Sunday night. I have to get on a podcast. I mean, we're. We're a little wimpy. You know?

Leo Laporte (54:16)

If they were the greatest generation, what would you call your generation?

Emily Forlini (54:20)

The soft Internet generation?

Leo Laporte (54:22)

The softies.

Emily Forlini (54:24)

Yeah. Maybe soft shelled turtles. I don't know.

Benito (54:28)

Yeah, this is Benito. This is the reason they did all that, though, so that you could have a life like this.

Emily Forlini (54:36)

They did all that.

Leo Laporte (54:37)

They fart for your right to sit.

Doc Rock (54:38)

On your duff bonito. I want you to try that with Lolo. I just really. I want to see you try that.

Emily Forlini (54:45)

Yeah. I mean, yeah, like, I. I inherited a gun from my grandfather, who picked it up off a soldier in Japan in World War II. And I'm like, I've seen the gun. And I'm like, this couldn't be more different from my life.

Leo Laporte (54:57)

Yeah, it is a very different life.

Emily Forlini (55:00)

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

Doc Rock (55:35)

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

Emily Forlini (55:53)

Important. Yeah.

Doc Rock (55:53)

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

Emily Forlini (56:12)

Yeah, that's actually unproductive, for sure. But sometimes it's almost like we talk.

Doc Rock (56:16)

About his Game of Thrones.

Emily Forlini (56:17)

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

Leo Laporte (56:37)

By the way, you're right. The Verge wants 50 bucks a year or 7 bucks a month for me to read the rest of that article.

Emily Forlini (56:43)

Yeah, but sometimes it's almost uncool to think that going into an office is smart. Like, there's just become this whole trend that it's like, if I want to be in the office, people like, oh, are you a boomer? It's like, no, I just want to be invested in my work.

Leo Laporte (56:55)

I kind of miss, I'll be honest, I miss having my colleagues around me in the studio. We're now a completely remote company.

Janko Roettgers (57:04)

I mean, there are remote first companies that are doing great. Right. So I don't think you can make a universal rule, like, people have different needs, Companies have different needs. Sometimes maybe it matters for some other job jobs. I always thought it was really distracting. I've worked, like, in both worlds. I've been. When I was a variety, I was remote just by the nature of me being up. Up north and all of those folks being down in la. When I was at Protocol, I went back to the office, and I always thought, like, I got the least amount of work done in an office because of the meetings.

Leo Laporte (57:34)

Somebody talk to you and those doofuses who look over the barrier and say, hey, what you doing, Yanko? You writing? You doing anything?

Janko Roettgers (57:43)

So, you know, I always felt like if I really wanted to, to ride, and when I actually get something done, I have to go home or I have to go to a coffee shop.

Emily Forlini (57:51)

So a lot of people feel like that it's.

Leo Laporte (57:53)

I think writers do need some solitude. That's normal. Right.

Emily Forlini (57:56)

And it's also, like, different stages of your life. Like, if you're raising kids or you're taking care of an aging parent, or you have, like, responsibilities at home or even just, you know, someone you have to let in the mechanic that Amazon called, like, there's reasons that you have to be home sometimes and it's like the black and white of this guy saying like, you have to be in the office 12 hours a week is just like, do you even know how society works?

Leo Laporte (58:20)

That's a really good point. I mean, how are you going to get your laundry done? How are you going to bring the, what are you going to do with your kid? I mean, 60 hours is a lot to spend in an office.

Emily Forlini (58:30)

That's not good at all. Why would that, why would we want that?

Leo Laporte (58:33)

Yeah, well, it's not good. Quality of life maybe. I mean it is in the old days of startups, the startup culture, Apple and so forth forth. The guys who designed this Macintosh behind me probably worked 80 or 90 hours a week while they were developing it. I mean, that's how Silicon Valley started, isn't it?

Emily Forlini (58:50)

Yeah, but then they got rich and then they stopped working. And there's different, there's different times of your life when you need different things and some blanket statement about you have to be in the office 12 hours a day the rest of your life is just dumb.

Leo Laporte (59:03)

Somebody is pointing out that our old studio is now, now a shared workspace for remote workers. It's true. Why do people, why do people do that? Do they. That's because people need some human contact though, right?

Doc Rock (59:17)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dude. Co working is, is the bomb. I mean, I had a co working space for a while and it's, it's really a thing that is for that. Like so Yanko said, like you want to be by yourself, but every once in a while you want to be around people who will sort of push you. And that competitive spirit of like, I'm over here at that time writing for two hour, I'm doing my articles and these kids are coding of crazy stuff. I'm like, damn, I'm just a low life tech writer right now. I kind of was jealous. I wanted to learn how to code and so it kept me, it kept me in the game. But also I was able to add some of what's going on in their world to our articles and our stories and things. So it was great. You know, it was, it was fun. And you know the best thing I had of that I dragged a bunch of coded kids with me to like the last Mac world, something they never would have thought about going to. And they, they all say like that was like one of their greatest experiences. Right?

Emily Forlini (60:05)

So it's like the random world is of the one. Well yeah, you wouldn't have predicted that, you know, but if you're just at home and you have, you know, three recurring meetings that have been on your calendar for three years, and you're just at home doing the meetings. Like, that's not great.

Leo Laporte (60:21)

We get. We are more isolated in this era, are we not? I mean, and I. That seems to be not a good thing for humans. It's been the trend in the industrial age to become more and more isolated and to be moving away from your. Your family and your tribe. And, you know, I. I don't. I feel like that's, in the long run, maybe not good for our biology. Like we need.

Doc Rock (60:45)

That's why I go live twice a week so that my tribe could come and hang out on Zoom. So, like, they're sitting in the back.

Leo Laporte (60:50)

Room, like, hanging out on. Look, I'm with you guys right now, but it's not the same as if we were sitting around having a beer and. And shooting the breeze, is.

Emily Forlini (60:57)

This would be very fun. I would love.

Leo Laporte (60:59)

It would be more fun.

Emily Forlini (61:00)

I'd love to get a drink with you guys and talk about tech. Like, that'd be great.

Leo Laporte (61:04)

This is kind of sort of what this is, but it's. It's. It's the AI Version of it. It's the.

Doc Rock (61:09)

No, you know, the best thing is, Emily, go to Italian restaurant with Lisa. That's the party right there.

Leo Laporte (61:13)

When did you do that?

Doc Rock (61:15)

When we were in Denver. Me, Lisa, Micah, Maximilian.

Leo Laporte (61:19)

Was it wild?

Doc Rock (61:19)

That was so much fun.

Leo Laporte (61:20)

Yes. Well, that's the one. The three of them came home with.

Doc Rock (61:23)

COVID It wasn't my fault. I was good.

Leo Laporte (61:29)

I remember that.

Doc Rock (61:30)

Yeah, that's fine.

Leo Laporte (61:31)

Is that when this started? Is 5 years ago with the COVID epidemic? Is that when we all kind of started? Yeah. Right.

Emily Forlini (61:38)

Yes, yes. The year is 2025. That was 2020.

Doc Rock (61:42)

It's so crazy, right? It doesn't seem like that long ago, but it is.

Emily Forlini (61:46)

I know.

Leo Laporte (61:46)

Well, in fact, it's exactly because March 17th is when California closed down. So it's exactly five years ago that we started to get the news right around now into February. February, early March.

Janko Roettgers (61:58)

I remember I wrote an article in late February where I was looking at people on Kickstarter delaying their campaigns out of China, and this guy somehow got. I got somehow in touch with somebody who was developing a hardware product in China, and he was sending me photos of himself going shopping with a mask and with gloves on. And I was like, that is crazy.

Leo Laporte (62:18)

Who would want to ever do that?

Janko Roettgers (62:19)

Exactly. And then two months later, that was us.

Emily Forlini (62:22)

Seattle was the first city to do the shutdowns as we had the first cases, because I lived there at that time, and everyone thought we were crazy. Like, what are you guys doing? Like, you guys totally overreacting. And then it spread, but it was.

Leo Laporte (62:37)

It was really bad in Seattle. That was the first place in the US that was really bad.

Doc Rock (62:42)

Yeah, it was funny. To me, everybody's a visceral reaction. I went to school in Japan, so, like, masking up is no normal. Like, if you have a sniffle, you don't come to class sniffling in front of the whole class. You bash for the whole class so you don't make everybody else sick. So, like, I already had the equipment and everything because we go to Japan a lot, but it was so weird. Everybody's a visceral reaction to, like, oh, you're gonna die for breathing in the mess. And I'm like, when you as a child, when you were coming out, your mom was in labor for, like, eight hours with you, you know what they were wearing? Mask. You're not gonna die. You came into the world looking at people.

Emily Forlini (63:14)

Imagine you really took it all the way back to childhood.

Leo Laporte (63:18)

I pray that I don't go out of this world looking at people wearing masks. That's not what I want. Yeah, I would like to see their faces.

Emily Forlini (63:25)

Bad for dentists. Like, no one would be getting dental work done.

Leo Laporte (63:29)

Oh, I didn't even think of that. How did that come up for you? Emily? Is your husband a dentist? What's going on?

Emily Forlini (63:36)

No, because I thought. I thought during COVID it was weird you never saw people smile. Oh, and then that made me. I thought about that, and I thought it was nicer when people took the masks off because you can see, like, the full range of people's emotions. And then I thought about the dentist, and I thought about the dental industry, and then that comment came out.

Doc Rock (63:53)

I hang out with ugly people. I want them to put the mask back on.

Leo Laporte (63:59)

I just, for some reason, fixated on the thing that you said you had all the equipment. I just, you know, Doc Rocket had all the equipment.

Doc Rock (64:06)

Masking gloves is, like, normal for me. Number one, I always had gloves. I was a paramedic, so it turned.

Leo Laporte (64:10)

Out you didn't need gloves. Remember we were hosing down our groceries? We get groceries delivered. I would wipe everything down with alcohol swabs before bringing it in, Leave things.

Doc Rock (64:20)

Outside for hours just to make sure that, you know, there's. Yeah, we did all of that. But, like, mass, I still have. I always have them on deck because.

Leo Laporte (64:27)

You know, oh, I have them right over here.

Doc Rock (64:29)

I think the most frustrating Thing, though now because I fly more and maybe I notice it more because I'm always in an airport. How are we adults and we don't know to cover our. I might insert bad words on Twitter. Cover your mouth when you cough. People. So many people.

Leo Laporte (64:43)

I'm like, bro, like, what have we learned? Nothing.

Doc Rock (64:47)

Oh, my God, it drives me crazy. It drives me crazy.

Leo Laporte (64:49)

From the guardian. I want him to be prepared. Why parents are teaching their gen Alpha kids to use AI.

Emily Forlini (64:58)

Yeah, makes sense.

Leo Laporte (65:00)

Now you don't have kids, Emily. And Yeah, so none of us here have young people. But the.

Doc Rock (65:07)

I teach my niece and my nephew. Like, I want them to know everything. And, you know, it used to be.

Leo Laporte (65:13)

That you would teach kids to code. Right? Right. Now you teach them how to prompt.

Doc Rock (65:19)

Yes. And my nephew into making music.

Leo Laporte (65:23)

I would not. I think coding is going to be less important in time.

Emily Forlini (65:27)

I think, though, like, the curriculum's kind of just catching up. Like, it definitely wasn't standard to have computer science classes in school when I was in school. And now it's like, yeah, my niece is in, like, computer science class. And so it's kind of still catching up. I maybe prompting you could add it. And because it's supposed to be so natural, everyone can do it. Maybe you don't need a class.

Leo Laporte (65:46)

It's also, though, they're doing more than just saying, here's how you use AI. They're teaching them how AI hallucinates, how to validate what you get. They talk about one father who exposed his child to AI's hallucinarity, hallucinatory flaws by having him debunk chat. GPT generated world record claims by verifying it with the Guinness Book of World Records.

Emily Forlini (66:10)

You know what's so funny? Like, when I was in school, they were teaching us the dangers of Wikipedia.

Leo Laporte (66:15)

Yeah, that's changed.

Emily Forlini (66:16)

Go and cite Wikipedia. And that is like, the number one source for all chatbots is Wikipedia.

Leo Laporte (66:21)

You were in school when Wikipedia was around?

Emily Forlini (66:26)

Yeah, Actual paper.

Leo Laporte (66:28)

Young in Wikipedia.

Emily Forlini (66:31)

We were growing together.

Leo Laporte (66:32)

I have in the other room, I. I have the World Book encyclopedias that I foolishly bought my children when they were little, thinking that's what I grew up looking at. The World Book. They never, never needed that.

Doc Rock (66:45)

Dude. World Book in botanical on Sundays after church, just in there reading about snakes. And I had the one with the color pictures. I lived in those things.

Leo Laporte (66:53)

I loved that. It was a great way to learn stuff. But that was in an era where the other choice was to go to the library. There was no other way to get Information.

Doc Rock (67:02)

Yep.

Leo Laporte (67:03)

You know, do you remember like when.

Doc Rock (67:04)

We got in Contra or is that what it called in Contra? The the World Book on card of.

Leo Laporte (67:11)

The crappy one that they sold at grocery stores.

Doc Rock (67:14)

I thought I was in heaven and.

Leo Laporte (67:15)

I was like, that was based on Collier's Encyclopedia, which was sold volume by volume every month. If you got enough grocery stamps, you would get it, you'd get here. Now this month is B. It's B volume. And Microsoft was so cheap, they bought the lowest. They didn't buy Britann that because anybody the World Book, they bought Collier's Encyclopedia and started Encarta. But yeah, I bet Emily, you must have had Anarta when you were little. Yeah, no, you, No, I remember that name.

Emily Forlini (67:44)

I know the name. I don't say I used it. Can't say I have memories with remember.

Janko Roettgers (67:48)

About old people because it was in.

Doc Rock (67:50)

The case in the drawer. He never used it. It was just in the drawer from somebody.

Leo Laporte (67:54)

Do you remember CD ROMs, Emily?

Emily Forlini (67:56)

Yes. I had a CD case and it was like awesome.

Leo Laporte (68:00)

Was it music or was it games and stuff?

Emily Forlini (68:04)

Music.

Leo Laporte (68:05)

Music.

Emily Forlini (68:06)

Yeah, yeah. It was like sum 41 and Avril Lavigne and Evanescence, Skater Boy and All American Rejects and my burned CDs and.

Leo Laporte (68:17)

Yeah, yeah, I used to have a case full of burn CDs.

Emily Forlini (68:20)

Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (68:23)

That didn't last that long, did it?

Janko Roettgers (68:25)

I think it's making a comeback as somebody who has teenagers at home. One of them collects CDs.

Emily Forlini (68:31)

It is. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (68:32)

It's so weird.

Janko Roettgers (68:33)

Just going to like a thrift store. She's big into thrifting anyway, so going to a thrift store, going through all these CDs and finding something that you can't find on Spotify, apparently. Really gratifying.

Leo Laporte (68:45)

We have a record store in town. Yeah, but I, I, this, I, I saw this this morning. Morning. A review of a cassette player in Wired magazine and I thought, what the hell? Wired's reviewing a cassette player.

Janko Roettgers (69:00)

That is a good looking cassette player.

Doc Rock (69:02)

There's a bunch, there's a bunch of them coming out. Teenage engineering even has one coming out soon.

Leo Laporte (69:07)

But, but, but it's crazy. That's a terrible format for music.

Doc Rock (69:12)

Yeah, I'd rather them bring back the md.

Leo Laporte (69:15)

This, these, this does look very cool.

Doc Rock (69:17)

Cool.

Leo Laporte (69:17)

It says we are rewind on the front.

Emily Forlini (69:21)

I mean, cassettes have been cool for like five years they've been coming.

Leo Laporte (69:24)

Have they really?

Emily Forlini (69:25)

Yeah, that's not new.

Benito (69:27)

Hi, this is Benito. So the reason this is happening, I think my theory is that like vinyl is getting expensive. Now vinyl is expensive now. It's not cheap anymore. Like, you used to be able to get cheap vinyl, but since cassettes are cheap, so now cassettes are cheap.

Leo Laporte (69:39)

So, like, worth every penny.

Benito (69:40)

So people are buying cassettes or. Or CD. CDs are still cheap.

Doc Rock (69:43)

That makes sense.

Emily Forlini (69:44)

Sense.

Doc Rock (69:44)

Benito, you're smart. You know, dude, like maybe like two weeks ago, I was. I had my niece, you know, I pick her back to school. I went and go get froyo. Then she's like, hey, can we go to the vinyl store? And I was like, the what? Vin? It says right here.

Emily Forlini (69:57)

This.

Doc Rock (69:58)

This place has a vinyl store. And I was like, you mean vinyl? And then she was like, oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte (70:05)

So you know what? Why do we pronounce it vinyl? It should be vineyard.

Doc Rock (70:09)

Listen, it was just cute to me and be being an ex DJ defective. My niece is in the vinyl. I'm about that life. I' like, listen, I still have some, but I sold most of it, you know, right before you were born. But I still have all the music in a server.

Emily Forlini (70:22)

You seem like you could be a dj. You had a good radio. Like, I trust you with my music life.

Leo Laporte (70:29)

Nailed it.

Emily Forlini (70:29)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (70:31)

But honestly, five years. Any recording medium where the trick to get good audio out of it is to boost the hiss when you record the cassette so that you can lower the hiss when you play back the cassette. That's Dolby Audio.

Janko Roettgers (70:49)

That's not.

Leo Laporte (70:49)

That's not a good sign. That's not a good sign.

Janko Roettgers (70:51)

But the. The limitations that came with the tape that you have to, like, figure out how to get your perfect playlist for that special someone onto 45.

Leo Laporte (71:01)

That's true.

Janko Roettgers (71:01)

Mixtapes and like, stick around like, you.

Leo Laporte (71:05)

Probably know every mixtape. In seventh grade, did a boy ever make a tape for you? No. He probably burned a CD for you.

Emily Forlini (71:12)

Yeah, I burned a cd. Yeah. The only tape I ever had won at a roller rink. It was a Backstreet Boys. I won a roller rink contest and I got a Backstreet Boys tape. So that's the only one ever owned.

Leo Laporte (71:26)

Back Street's back, baby.

Doc Rock (71:28)

I. I'm pretty sure Leo is the same, but I submitted my audition to K I. K fm.

Leo Laporte (71:33)

Oh, yeah. Tape. You had real to real tape. I used real. I had little 7 inch boxes. I made dozens of them and would go to radio stations say, here's my.

Doc Rock (71:44)

Resume and here's my tape. Y So I use cassettes, but I had a kai reel to reel. But yeah, every day in school, sitting there and trying to make a different Mixtape for everybody that I know. Like just pause and record and stop and then getting that right amount before the auto reverse so that it came into another song. Like that was. That was. That was technique. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (72:08)

You seem like the kind of guy that would make mixtapes. You are definitely making mixtapes for the ladies.

Doc Rock (72:14)

Mixtape king. I was slinging mixtapes.

Leo Laporte (72:16)

Did you call yourself back then?

Doc Rock (72:19)

No, no. I was DJ Yogi back then because I was smarter than Yoga's mixtapes.

Emily Forlini (72:24)

I think they still use the word mixtapes. Like I. I know that word. I just. They applied to CDs. It just wasn't tapes anymore. Just the word, you know, persisted.

Leo Laporte (72:33)

Right.

Doc Rock (72:34)

I got a question for Leo.

Leo Laporte (72:36)

And there's a great movie, by the way with John Cusack called High Fidelity in which he makes yes, perfect mixtape. And I suppose as long as people still know what that's all about, about there's hope for this world. What were you going to say, Doc?

Doc Rock (72:49)

I got a question for you and Yanko. Did you have a brand that was like your go to brand? For me it was ASF Pro 2 crew.

Janko Roettgers (72:58)

I. I was kind of cheap. I bought TDK. Whatever.

Leo Laporte (73:05)

You guys are so old.

Doc Rock (73:10)

When. When Emily's crew came around, Memorex tried to be hit because of LA looks and Swatch. So they had these plastic ones, red circle and a square and a triangle. And it was like. Looked like toy. And I was like, I've never given anybody one of those.

Emily Forlini (73:25)

I feel like you're acting like Emily. Like when she was hatched like this.

Leo Laporte (73:28)

Little hatchling, young hatchling. Do you remember in the 70s, Memorex had a ad for how good its tapes were with Ella Fitzgerald singing a high note and shattering a glass? Do you remember that?

Doc Rock (73:44)

Yes. 100.

Leo Laporte (73:46)

We could watch it if you want. Can the amplified voice of Ella Fitzgerald shatter this glass? Believe it proved it possible with MRX2 oxide. MRX2 oxide.

Doc Rock (74:08)

It didn't.

Leo Laporte (74:09)

And that was also the one that had the guy sitting in the chair.

Doc Rock (74:14)

That's Maxel.

Leo Laporte (74:15)

That's Maxel. That's why I bought Maxel. I think you're right.

Doc Rock (74:18)

And those speakers that pass by him are B in not B.

Leo Laporte (74:22)

Those are JBL sentries. Right.

Doc Rock (74:25)

I think on this one, on one of the commercials, it's the 801s, but. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (74:28)

Oh yeah, the 801s are really good. Yeah. Yeah. But you could tell it's the JBL in front.

Doc Rock (74:33)

We are so old junk, but loud.

Janko Roettgers (74:37)

I still have a box or two of tapes in the basement somewhere that. That I Feel, just dig it out. Can't get rid of it.

Doc Rock (74:45)

Send us a message and let us know what's on there.

Leo Laporte (74:47)

Oh, save those. Now that you know that the tape's going to go bad, so you better get them digitized. Get them digitized. You have to go out and buy.

Doc Rock (74:56)

Mini disc would come back instead of tape because at least mini disc is recordable. But at least it sounded good.

Leo Laporte (75:01)

Yeah, mini disc was higher quality because it was, it was digital. All right, time out. We're going to take a break, come back with more with the young Emily Forlini, the old Leo Laporte and the middle aged guys Talk Rock and Yenko Records. Great to have you. I'm the old guy here. I, I've seen it. I've seen it. All my French.

Doc Rock (75:19)

I'm catching up. I'm pretty close.

Emily Forlini (75:21)

So with everything going on in the world, it's probably better to just be old. It's probably better to just.

Leo Laporte (75:25)

Well, my attitude is I'll be dead before it all comes. All the chickens come home.

Emily Forlini (75:29)

That's why you're giving all your information to AI. You're like, hey, hi, here I am. And then you're just gonna exit.

Leo Laporte (75:36)

No, that's true. No, that. But you actually said something. Because I've been a broadcaster for 50 years and done so much in public, I feel like if anybody's gonna give it all and forget privacy, it'd be me because I have no privacy and haven't had it for years. So I'm a good guinea pig. I wouldn't expect. I understand why anybody, especially you, Emily, would be reluctant to give over that information.

Emily Forlini (75:59)

You're like an organ donor for AI.

Leo Laporte (76:00)

I'm like an organ donor.

Emily Forlini (76:02)

Take my organs.

Janko Roettgers (76:05)

You can have my organs, but I'm going to keep my tapes or something like that.

Emily Forlini (76:09)

Have my organs, but they don't work so well.

Leo Laporte (76:13)

I like it. Organ donor for AI.

Doc Rock (76:15)

That's organ donor for AI.

Leo Laporte (76:17)

That's great. Our show today, actually, if you do care about privacy, this sponsor is for you. It's brought to you by Delete Me. And I got to tell you, we use Delete Me and it all came down one day a couple of years ago when a text came came out purporting to be from Lisa. Our CEO went to all of her direct reports saying, hey, I'm stuck in a meeting. I need to buy a hundred Amazon gift cards right now. Use your company card, buy those cards and send it to this address. Now, our employees are smart. They didn't fall for it. But What I realized is, wait a minute. They know way too much. They know Lisa, they know our phone number, they know our direct reports, they know their phone numbers. They, I mean, they know, they know way too much. And what I realized is this is way why we need Delete Me. If you've ever searched for your name online and you didn't like how much personal information was available, you know why you need Delete Me? It's because there are data brokers out there and it's perfectly legal who will sell any bit of information they can glean about you, down to and including your Social Security number. I just learned the other day that it's legal. It's legal for a data broker to sell your Social Security number number. And by the way, it doesn't cost much, not much at all. So we signed up, by the way for delete Me and it worked. When we searched for the my name in the national public data broker breach. Remember that? And Steve Gibson's name, we found not only our name and address and phone number, but also our Social Security numbers. I then searched for Lisa's name. It wasn't there. Her Social Security number was protected. That's why you need delete Me. And maintaining privacy is not just just about individuals. It's about your company. It's about your family too. Delete Me has plans for every kind of group, including family plans, so you can ensure that everyone in your family feels safe online. Delete Me's very smart agents will will help you reduce risk from identity theft, cybersecurity threats, harassment, and more by finding and removing your information from all the data brokers, hundreds of them. And it's really important because, because you want to use this service, because it's hard to know who all these are. They make that their business and there's new ones every day. And they also make that their business. To find them, you can assign a unique data sheet to everybody in your family. It's tailored to them. With easy to use controls. Account owners can manage privacy settings for the whole family. Then DeleteMe not only deletes that information, but it then continues to scan and remove your information regular, regularly. That's really important because it will come back. I'm talking addresses, photos, emails, relatives, phone numbers, social media, property value, yes, even Social Security numbers. Protect yourself. Reclaim your privacy. Visit joindeleteme.com TWIT joindeleteme.com twit offer code TWIT. If you use the offer code twit, you'll get 20% off joindeleteme.com twit we thank them so much for supporting us and the job they did protecting us. You know, if you have a company you're managing, should absolutely be using it. Joindeleteme.com TWIT well, this was a sad week. When we first started Twit, back in the zero fives, we used Skype because at the time that was the best way for me to get people on from all over the country, all over the world. Eventually we built Colleen. Colleen Kelly did it. She built something called Skyposaurus. You might remember this in the early days or Twit. We had a different Mac Mini for each person on the panel. So we would have three or four Mac Minis for this panel and then they would call into that Mac Mini. Then we would combine them all. That way we get separate channels for each person and I could mix out noise and so forth. Skype's coming to a close. After two decades, Skype is over. Microsoft bought it. They spent $8.5 billion buying it 14 years ago. They announced they're killing it in a couple of months. It's going to be over in May and they're going to move everybody over to the much beloved Microsoft Teams. You're laughing, Janko?

Janko Roettgers (80:41)

Yeah, everybody loves teams. Everybody's favorite product. Skype is kind of sad.

Leo Laporte (80:46)

It's very sad. Sad.

Janko Roettgers (80:48)

It was the really the thing for me as somebody who moved to the US and little over 20 years ago, that was the thing that kept me connected to my family back in Europe. And I used it all the time for calling. I had a. Remember when they used to do the thing where you could buy phone numbers through Skype.

Leo Laporte (81:06)

I did that. My daughter in high school spent a year in France. For 90 bucks I was able to get unlimited video calls with her in France. That's how we stay in school in Japan. Yeah.

Emily Forlini (81:19)

Echo. Where are you from?

Janko Roettgers (81:21)

Germany.

Emily Forlini (81:22)

Nice.

Leo Laporte (81:24)

Skype was first released in August 2003. So it's 22 years old almost. Niklas Zenstrom, Janus Friess and four Estonian developers. Remember ebay bought it briefly and then Microsoft bought it from eBay eBay for $8.5 billion.

Janko Roettgers (81:44)

The thing about Zenstrum and Freezes, those are the guy who's who built Kazao, right, The file sharing thing. And Skype used the same technology. It was for the longest time. I don't know if it was in the end anymore. They probably switched it out of Microsoft. But for the longest time it was a peer to peer product essentially where they had these not to nerd out on it too much, but I used to write a P2P blog. So they used to have this super node structure where they were basically like super users that had a couple hundred people under them. And how it peer to peer decentralized architecture so it would work without servers, which was really impressive for keeping a couple of million people online.

Leo Laporte (82:19)

I know this very well because we use Skype for a long, long time to run the network. And we would have people turn off their supernode, say, don't be a super node. Because we don't. You need all the bandwidth. And we got really good at getting Skype to sound and look really good. But when Microsoft bought it. You're exactly right, Janko. They turned off the peer to peer feature. They started hosting all the calls. And frankly, that's when Skype's quality went downhill. It was better as a peer to peer network.

Emily Forlini (82:49)

I think Skype is no doubt like a very. Probably one of the most famous and important technologies in terms of Internet life. But I mean, we gotta admit, it's kind of past its prime. I mean, none of. Does anyone still use Skype? I think it's fair.

Leo Laporte (83:05)

In 2023, 36 million people used it daily. Yeah.

Emily Forlini (83:10)

What?

Leo Laporte (83:11)

Yeah.

Doc Rock (83:12)

So this is funny. I'm sorry. It's funny. Emily said that. So for. For ecamm, in the beginning, we ended up building our own interview part. But it used to be, if you wanted. If I wanted to interview Leo and I'm using eCamm, he would call in through Skype. But it got just problematic in mid-2020. So in 2021 we rolled out our own, like, interview situation, which was working kind of good, but then we just realized that everybody knows how to use Zoom. So Alex introduced me to Andy at nab.

Leo Laporte (83:43)

Andy Caruccio, yes. We love.

Doc Rock (83:45)

Yeah, Andy's in the chat. I think he's hanging out somewhere. And then I was like, yo, you need to talk to your nerds. Need to talk to my nerds.

Emily Forlini (83:53)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (83:53)

We have migrated to Zoom. One of the things that was missing was this independent channel thing for each audio channel and Zoom ISO, which Andy Carluccio wrote as an independent, independent developer. And then Zoom acquired his company, made it possible to have separate channels for everybody.

Emily Forlini (84:11)

But why does Skype not.

Doc Rock (84:12)

That was the death of Skype to me.

Emily Forlini (84:14)

Yeah. Why did Skype not win that race?

Leo Laporte (84:17)

It's a really good question.

Doc Rock (84:18)

I say the same thing about Citrix and WebEx as well. Because they were Prime. And then when they saw Zoom, Zoom and Blue Jeans was these two little companies that were making a lot of noise, but nobody was really using it. And I swear to you, three months before the pandemic hit, I built a conference room for my buddy who owns a construction electric company here. And we did it off of the Citrix product. Like, go to room. Because it's like, oh, Zoom is a toy. Don't worry about it.

Emily Forlini (84:47)

Boom.

Doc Rock (84:48)

And then I was like, oops. I had to go back and retrofit that whole thing.

Emily Forlini (84:53)

Zoom has a dorky name. Zoom, I mean, could be better. And there's other tech out there there. But it, okay, this is so dumb. But it zoomed ahead, you know, like won. Like, how. How did this happen?

Leo Laporte (85:08)

It's funny because we have three experts in our, in our club. Twitch Chat right now. Andy Carluccio is there who works for Zoom. Alex Lindsey, who became, who became instrumental in moving us to Zoom. Along with Andy, we had Skype TX appliances from our, you know, from our Tricaster fellows, Vizrt trying to get Skype to work in multiple. I mean, we, we did everything to make Skype survive. And it just. Once Zoom took off, it was so much. Everybody knew how to use it. The qu. Look at the quality we're getting.

Doc Rock (85:45)

It's so good. You know what's funny to me about Zoom? Zoom matches almost Mike Tyson's little joke. Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face and Zoom came in, punched everybody in the face.

Leo Laporte (85:56)

Richard Campbell's also from our Windows Weekly. He's a Microsoft expert. He says the audio video DDL that runs Skype is the same one teams uses. So in some respects the Skype technology lives on in teams, but nobody likes teams that I know of. He says Microsoft had to migrate off the peer to peer product that we were talking about. Janko. Too much liability. They didn't. You know, it makes sense for a big corporation to think, you know, these calls are being hosted by anonymous people all over the world. We don't even know them. He also said they took on Skype for eight and a half billion because they owned endpoints all over the world to access the telephone system Microsoft did. So buying Skype helped Microsoft turn into a kind of telco. I think that was a vision that has not survived over the last, what is that, 14 years?

Emily Forlini (86:55)

Yeah. So Microsoft's 50th anniversary is in early April. Oh, and I have to write a piece about, like, what are the. What does the next 50 years look like? And it's just interesting when you think about this because it's kind of like, well, they kind of messed that up. So now Zoom kind of dethroned them and then they have their office products and Google is competing with sheets and docs and Gen Z really loves that web hosted service. So it's kind of like, like, what's going to remain for what's next.

Leo Laporte (87:24)

You think there's something.

Emily Forlini (87:25)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (87:26)

Do you think there's something that'll beat Zoom?

Emily Forlini (87:28)

Well, they're all in on, you know, AI. And Adela is like, pat himself on the back with his big chat GPT investment. And they're adding Copilot into all their products. Like Excel has a copilot button and you can just ask it, like, write a formula for me. So they're.

Leo Laporte (87:43)

We have, for the first time ever, we've turned on Zoom's AI companion during the show. I'm very curious what we're going to get.

Doc Rock (87:50)

Oh, man.

Leo Laporte (87:51)

We've never used it before. We always use our own after the fact. AI. So why did.

Doc Rock (87:56)

You know what, it's funny, Leo. Zoom is Patrick Mahomes. They're just really good. And he's the dominated.

Leo Laporte (88:04)

It's the goat.

Doc Rock (88:04)

And people. People try to hate it, but no matter how much you try to hate it, it just come back and go again and again.

Emily Forlini (88:10)

I thought that the whole thing was. We all agreed that the whole goat discussion was completely gone for Patrick Mahomes after the Super Bowl.

Doc Rock (88:17)

Yeah, I hope so, because I'm a Raiders fan. I can't stand him. But I mean, like, fans.

Leo Laporte (88:23)

We're talking, by the way, about hand, sport, ball. But. But.

Doc Rock (88:31)

So it was just too good. So nobody can out Zoom Zoom.

Leo Laporte (88:34)

So the pandemic obviously put Zoom on the map. But you asked the right question, Emily. Why Zoom? Why not Skype? Why not WebEx?

Doc Rock (88:42)

They were ready when the moment came and everybody else was trying to win off of their status of where they were. They weren't trying to hear what the people wanted. And Zoom was ready and highly flexible. And this is my opinion, the best thing that happened to Zoom was in that third or fourth week of everybody talking about it. They had, like, the naked people showing up at everybody's call.

Leo Laporte (89:04)

There was Zoom bombing. Remember the Zoom bombing?

Doc Rock (89:06)

Yeah, the Zoom bombing. So they had to fix that. So what? They proved that nobody else would do. Sky would have problems and so would Citrix or whatever. But Zoom was like, okay, we'll fix it. And they fixed it. Everybody else was still, we're Citrix. You're new. You don't know us. You do what we tell you. Well, also remember listening.

Leo Laporte (89:23)

Remember Zoom kind of got dinged because they claimed they were end to end encrypted. And then people said, well, you're not. And then they had to. When they went out and they got hired people like Alex Stamos to. To fix it, they bought people and fixed it.

Doc Rock (89:39)

That's why. Because they listened and fixed it instead of standing their laurels and beat their chest like, we're the big tech guys. Shut up, Muggle.

Janko Roettgers (89:46)

I guess everybody else built products for conference rooms. Essentially. They were like, we're going to build this big enterprise product and then Zoom build a. For everybody that worked for schools and homeschooling and all this stuff. And really, if you had put those pillow on if. If I had to deal with my kids being on WebEx or something, or teams or Chime. Remember Chime? That just shut down the Amazon product.

Leo Laporte (90:08)

Yes. Amazon just shut down their version of this.

Janko Roettgers (90:12)

That was a nightmare.

Emily Forlini (90:13)

Yeah, I think they just did predict.

Doc Rock (90:15)

Leo said it. Leo said it, and Alex back it up. So I'll say it back verbally. Zoom also went out and got good people. So when they saw what Andy was doing, they didn't get mad. A lot of companies would have got mad at what Andy was doing, but Zoom was like, oh, let's bring them in. And Andy definitely made Zoom better. So I happen to back up my buddy Alex because I don't want to have to fight when I get to.

Leo Laporte (90:36)

Zoom did something that at this, I think was one of the main reasons they succeeded, but it also was one of the main reasons not to like, like them. They installed. When you installed Zoom, they installed a background process that would always run on your computer. And that's one of the reasons Zoom was so quick and easy to use, because it was all. It never stopped running. And they actually. It became a problem on the Mac side because they were also running a web server. And when people figured it out, they kind of got mad. But. But it was the secret sauce to some degree. Zoom was ready. The minute you wanted to make a call, it just popped up. Right.

Emily Forlini (91:17)

I feel like, okay, here's a wacky theory. Do you think part of it is kind of sociological? Like, people were just ready at that time for new tools. They were like, this whole pandemic thing is completely new. I need to reassess my whole life. I need the new thing. I have to meet the moment. And everyone was like, oh, it's Zoom. You need Zoom. You need Zoom. Because I was just using Zoom because people were Saying, you got to use Zoom now. But if everyone was like, oh, you need Skype or you need WebEx, I would have just used that.

Doc Rock (91:43)

But it seemed like everyone rallied Pandemic. It, it, it caused so much trouble for us. It was always down, always broken, and always not working. And then we were technically probably losing people to just doing it with Zoom then. So, yeah, you know, the. I honestly think it. I think they were just good at the right time. And I swear to you, I stand on. I stand on this business because I really believe that they listened while everybody else was being cocky.

Leo Laporte (92:09)

Can I say something?

Janko Roettgers (92:10)

Oh. Malik wrote a story a couple days ago saying basically Skype died because they had too many middle managers and that was what they were relying on. And so that slowed them down to a crawl while Zoom was coming in and like super fast fixing things as they, as they came up.

Leo Laporte (92:27)

I think it could have been as simple as it had a better name.

Emily Forlini (92:32)

Well, I think Zoom.

Leo Laporte (92:33)

Doesn't Zoom sound like a great thing? Don't you want it?

Emily Forlini (92:36)

I think it sounds.

Doc Rock (92:37)

I think it's easy to remember. It's not a tech word.

Leo Laporte (92:40)

If you think about Skype is a tech word.

Doc Rock (92:42)

Skype, Zoom. Zoom is the only normal Webex mogul. Ready?

Leo Laporte (92:46)

Yeah.

Doc Rock (92:47)

Muggle ready.

Benito (92:48)

Hi, this is Benito.

Leo Laporte (92:49)

So like blue jeans sounds down market.

Emily Forlini (92:52)

Bonito online.

Benito (92:54)

So, like, what happened here is that Skype was garbage. Really? Like, no, it just was garbage. So like, no one could use it properly. I was working at Twitch, at Twitch at the time, and we were doing a lot of this kind of stuff also, and Skype just never worked. And that's really it. Like, if Skype had just worked maybe 75 to 80% of the time, it wouldn't have have lost.

Janko Roettgers (93:14)

And they started adding these weird features to it where suddenly there was news in your Skype feed or you had a Skype feed for some. Why would you need a Skype feed? You just wanted to talk to people, right?

Emily Forlini (93:25)

Well, they didn't predict the trend. They were developing a product for something else. That the way things happened didn't end up being what people needed. And they didn't predict that we would all be using video chats all the time.

Leo Laporte (93:37)

Let me read what else Om said because I think it's really good. This is Om's blog. @ohm Co, Microsoft talks about teams being their focus, showing that even today they haven't realized what made Skype a cultural consumer force. Microsoft Teams is a terrible product and I dread using it. In the simplest terms, teams is a Perfect encapsulation of a bureaucratic, archaic and outdated 50 year old company that's trying to reinvent itself as an AI leader. Does Ohm hate Microsoft?

Emily Forlini (94:10)

I agree, I agree. That's what I was saying. I agree.

Leo Laporte (94:15)

He says, for now, let's call it what it is. Microsoft bought and effectively killed Skype. I could write a PhD dissertation on this. For now, this is all I have to say. Microsoft didn't know how to nurture Skype and its bureaucracy killed one of the most iconic brands of the new century. Yes, that's actually he's right, isn't it?

Doc Rock (94:35)

100%. And so this was, makes it funny because we said this guy was a tech word but at the time, time that's what everybody was doing, making up these weird words, you know, your Skypes, your Googles, your Yahoos, your not Linkos. What was it called? I forget. Anyway, people were making up these weird web 2.0 words and everybody was about that life. So it got so popular that Oprah would call people on Skype.

Leo Laporte (94:57)

Yeah.

Doc Rock (94:58)

You know what I mean? So that's when I knew that they had made it. When I saw Oprah using it on the show. And then Microsoft bought it and crushed it also.

Leo Laporte (95:06)

And Yanko, your use and my use with my daughter in France confirms this. It killed the long distance call calling business. It was so much cheaper than a long distance call.

Doc Rock (95:17)

It was called Skype out number. Right. I remember buying a Skype out, Skype.

Leo Laporte (95:20)

In and Skype out.

Doc Rock (95:21)

And I was.

Leo Laporte (95:21)

And I had a Skype in number too. You could call me by phone.

Doc Rock (95:25)

And so when I got to Japan and I was able to call home all the time and just check to make sure everything was good. It was such an amazing situation. And I remember we were talking about this earlier, about that corny moment from panels. But I remember the first time I'm sitting on call and we had at that time my buddy Patrice was in Germany and then I'm here and my other friend was in California and we're having a conversation over Skype, right? The whole twit team. I'm sorry to our team. And we're like, is this wild? We're in so many different places. We can have this conversation right now.

Leo Laporte (95:59)

Financial Times interviewed Nicholas Zenstrom, one of the founders, just the other day. He said Skype was a revolutionary product of its time. And I'll always be proud and grateful for the early team members and, and investors who took a chance on us. Now other firms are innovating in this space to Offer new services for a whole new generation, many of whom will have no idea how expensive it used to be to call Australia. You don't remember this, Emily, but it used to be when you were calling long distance, you'd say, I gotta make this quick. It's long distance, right? It was. So calling home from Germany or calling Germany from America was a dollar a minute. It was hugely expensive.

Emily Forlini (96:42)

My grandma still thinks that's the case when she calls me across the country.

Leo Laporte (96:46)

Emily, I can't talk long. I'm calling long distance.

Janko Roettgers (96:50)

There used to be this whole thing when I still lived in Germany where you had to call a number before you dialed the actual number to then pay another company. And like weird calling cards.

Leo Laporte (97:00)

Oh yeah, you'd have a calling card.

Doc Rock (97:01)

You had that calling card.

Leo Laporte (97:03)

Yeah, you call the calling card number so that you could get it down to a buck a minute instead of five bucks a minute or whatever. Yeah, mci.

Doc Rock (97:12)

That's how MCI and, and a phone job. That's where we got Spread the fo n because spread had the phone drop F4 memory lane. Kids phone cards.

Leo Laporte (97:22)

First cassettes, now Skype.

Emily Forlini (97:25)

Well, I think Skype, you know, you got a, a skill in life is you have to, to know when to say goodbye, when you got to hang up the hat. I think Skype did its time. It was amazing. Maybe someone on this call will write a book about Skype. We have some Skype official.

Doc Rock (97:39)

So Skype is Tyson and Zoom is Logan.

Janko Roettgers (97:42)

Paul.

Emily Forlini (97:42)

Yeah, yeah, I think it's over. It's okay. Like Microsoft has a new tech, they think they're going to make better whatever. But why would they want to keep nursing this like dying video conferencing software?

Janko Roettgers (97:54)

The thing that I'm really sad about is that my father in law to this day calls it Skypy. And I'm gonna miss that. I think I'm gonna miss that the most.

Leo Laporte (98:05)

I'm gonna call you on Skypey. Good. The other thing that was interesting, before Spotify, Skype was a European company, it was an Estonian company. And that was pretty novel, at least in the US that there would be a European startup that was so dominant.

Emily Forlini (98:22)

You know, I actually saw that Estonia and ChatGPT made some kind of deal this week where they're giving all students in estonian Public Schools ChatGPT. And I'm not, I'm not kidding. This is real like Estonia is very.

Leo Laporte (98:35)

Digital first, you know, the, like a lot of former Soviet satellites, they're trying to find their way in a new world and they early on said, you know, our way forward is going to be digital, a digital economy. They have a digital idea card. It's actually a really cool country.

Emily Forlini (98:54)

Have you been there?

Leo Laporte (98:55)

Yeah. Many times. Well, twice.

Emily Forlini (98:57)

Really?

Leo Laporte (98:57)

Two times. That's many times. One too many. Well, not many. Almost many.

Emily Forlini (99:05)

I would say two times. Being to Estonia is many times.

Leo Laporte (99:08)

Well, it's not the. Yeah, exactly.

Emily Forlini (99:11)

Yeah. It's not the place. Maybe I'm sounding too American. I don't know. I just. I've never considered going there.

Leo Laporte (99:15)

It's a beautiful, beautiful Italian is a beautiful city. I remember walking. Walking through it, Lisa and I. And a guy running up to me saying, oh, Leo, I've been looking for you. I knew you were in Estonia, and I guess it's small enough. He found me, but he was going. He was going to Parliament because he had designed this year's Estonian Christmas card and he was going up to Parliament to show it to them. I. I hope you're still listening. If you are, I remember you. Let's take a little break. More memory lane. I don't know. I have to look, but maybe. I hope you're enjoying the show. We are. Emily Forlini, Yonko Records. Doc Rock. Great to have all three of you. Our show today, brought to you by Zip Recruiter. Love Zip Recruiter. You know, look, I like being a podcaster, having my own shows, interviewing incredible guests. We had Stephen Wolfram on Wednesday and having a wonderful team, people like Bonito, that help make it happen. If you're doing what you love to do, there's nothing better than being surrounded by people who love it as much as you do. And if you own your own business, that's the goal, right? That's what you're trying to do, to hire employees who love what they do, who love the work that makes everybody happy. They succeed, the business succeeds, and it makes it a great place to work, even if you're remote, like. Like we are. So how do you find those passionate employees who are a good fit for all of your roles? Well, I'll tell you how we do it. ZipRecruiter, right now. You can try it for free. Ziprecruiter.com TWIT ZipRecruiter is the hiring site employers prefer the most, according to G2. But I will also say we love it. ZipRecruiter's smart technology starts showing your job to qualified candidates immediately. But even better, their powerful matching technology works to find the top talent that fit your requirements. They send you a list. They say, hey, we have. We have resumes from people looking for work who seem like they'd be a good fit. What do you think? You go through it, you use ZipRecruiter's amazing screening technology with, you know, there are a variety of ways you can, it reformats all the resumes and makes it very easy to say yeah, let's, let's invite. And then you invite the ones you really like, the top candidates to apply. Now in a world where you're competing for the best people with many other companies, that's a really big asset because when you invite somebody to apply for your job, they're flattered. They, you go right to the top of the heap. They, they say yeah, yeah, you want me? Well, I want you. I love it. They give you a pre written invite to apply message that you can, so you don't even have to write, write it right that you can reach out to your favorite candidates. It's very nice, very personal. We, we've used it, we've used ZipRecruiter. Anytime there's an opening, we use ZipRecruiter and it really works fast to get you qualified people. Hire experienced people who are excited about what they do about what you do. With ZipRecruiter. 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. For Lisa and me, it's often within the first hour or two. It's amazing. See for yourself. Go to our exclusive web address. Try it for for free ziprecruiter.com TWIT please use that address so they know you saw it here. That's ZipRecruiter.com TWIT I, I will vouch for it. It really works. ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. We thank them so much for supporting our little show here and we are having some fun. I, you know, I think just to briefly go back to Skype. It was the technology that made Twit possible and it was the technology we used for the first, I don't know, 10, 15 years of twit. We're going to be 20 years old next month. So I really, I feel a little sad. I think we use Zoom now and we've been using Zoom for, well since the pandemic, so five years and it's been, been great. But Skype, thank you, thank you Nicholas for a great product that we, we wouldn't be here without. So I just wanted to say that it's kind of sad to lose it but again we stopped using it Years ago. So I can't really. I'm kind of. It's a little hypocritical of me, isn't it?

Emily Forlini (103:47)

Yeah, I feel like I'm coming in as the, the, I don't know, hatchling naysayer. Like, I didn't have the memories from it.

Leo Laporte (103:54)

You don't have any fun for it at all.

Emily Forlini (103:57)

I do. I. Some fondness for it, of course, but not the same way you guys do. I didn't build a business with Skype. And so. So my, like, unemotional view is just like, yeah, it's time to kill it.

Leo Laporte (104:07)

But I understand it's probably time to kill it. It is, yeah.

Emily Forlini (104:11)

But you can also, you know, give it a ceremonial burial, which I think we're doing here.

Leo Laporte (104:16)

I mean, look, we've gotten rid of Skyposaurus. We got sold those machines off years ago. I mean, we don't, you know, we. The Skype TX machines, we got rid of. So, you know, we've been Zoom for a long time. And really a lot of credit to Andy Carluccio for making it possible for us to use Zoom like this and to eCamm. Doc, I give you some credit because eCamm's integration with Zoom is a big part of why we still use Zoom.

Doc Rock (104:40)

You know, it's just one of those things that everybody knows how to do now. And I think that's that. That greased the wheel. Like, even still, at some point we had to teach people how to use Skype. Like Zoom. You just click link, you're good.

Leo Laporte (104:53)

Well, and look at network news. I mean, you know, I was reminiscing with Jeff Jarvis. He was on CNN not so long ago, and I think last. Last Wednesday, actually. And he had to go in, but. And I remember going to be on cnn, you had to go to a satellite bureau and you'd sit there and you'd have the earpiece and you know, and now it's all Zoom. Or actually, I guess they use WebEx, but whoever they made a deal with. But the aesthetic has changed, the technology has changed. You see people in their living rooms and kitchens.

Emily Forlini (105:29)

That can be weird.

Leo Laporte (105:30)

It is a little strange. It's hard, but getting used to that. And you see them wearing AirPods, and.

Emily Forlini (105:37)

Yeah, I'm doing a bi weekly segment on CBS for tech news. And I'm literally just in this room and then in a studio, like a huge picture of me and then there's like the anchor talking to me and I'm on the Zoom and I'm just like, well, guys, where can we see that?

Leo Laporte (105:55)

I didn't know you were doing this.

Emily Forlini (105:57)

Yeah, it's just through. Through work. It's like a PC magic.

Doc Rock (106:02)

I've seen it on cbs. I can send you some things to make your studio like dope.

Leo Laporte (106:07)

Yeah, look at his studio. It's dope. But then they'll think you're like dj, dj. What is it? MC DJ Rock?

Doc Rock (106:14)

No, she can be DJ info. Get it? Because you're here for the info.

Leo Laporte (106:19)

Get it? Info.

Emily Forlini (106:20)

Yeah, I love it.

Leo Laporte (106:20)

So who, okay, whose studio do you like better? I mean, background. You like Doc Rocks or you like this? Isn't this nice?

Doc Rock (106:27)

This is nice.

Emily Forlini (106:28)

Definitely competing directly, I would say.

Leo Laporte (106:30)

I think this is pretty special what I got here.

Doc Rock (106:33)

I love it. We. I actually, we just did a show where we were talking about. Talking about people building their studio rooms and I used yours as one of the examples.

Leo Laporte (106:41)

Oh, thank you.

Doc Rock (106:42)

I absolutely love it.

Leo Laporte (106:43)

Well, I have it. You know, I credit to Anthony Nielsen and Burke McQuinn who. And Russell Tammany, who put this all together. It doesn't look as. As nice from the other side, I have to tell you. It's kind of, kind of dumpy, to be honest.

Janko Roettgers (106:58)

Oh, don't break the clothes.

Doc Rock (107:00)

We call that the cone. The cone of cleanliness.

Leo Laporte (107:04)

Yeah, I had to get some trash out of the way. You saw me grab it. Oh, my gum's sitting there. Never mind.

Emily Forlini (107:10)

Oh, well, I feel like Doc Raw. Kind of looks like you have like a fog machine going or something.

Leo Laporte (107:16)

You should have a fog machine.

Doc Rock (107:17)

It's the DJ vibe. It's the DJ vibe. And now I know. You know what I have? I have what's called a black promis filter. And anybody that shoots video is like something you should do, especially when you pass. So you're not old enough yet. When you pass 50, you want a black promis filter.

Leo Laporte (107:33)

Oh God, I'm so far past 50. I mean, the double promised filter.

Doc Rock (107:37)

Promised filter. Like a 1.8 and you're good.

Leo Laporte (107:40)

Is that like Vaseline on the lens? What is that?

Doc Rock (107:43)

Almost like it adds highlation to the highlights and then it kind of like smooth things out.

Leo Laporte (107:47)

Can I get one of those?

Emily Forlini (107:48)

Anthony, because you've been deceiving us.

Leo Laporte (107:51)

I look so old. Wrinkles.

Doc Rock (107:57)

Yeah.

Janko Roettgers (107:57)

What's going on?

Leo Laporte (107:58)

I need to filter.

Doc Rock (107:59)

They, they say black don't crack, but it sure as hell wrinkles so good.

Leo Laporte (108:03)

No, you look really good. You look, you look like a young man.

Doc Rock (108:07)

Yeah, now just use it for the highlation because it makes the lights, you know, look better. Not so yelly. In your face. Right. And that's why I want to DJI Osbo. What do you call that little Nick thing? I have it right here. That's why they you that's the most popular filter because it looks really good at night.

Leo Laporte (108:21)

I'm writing this down. I gotta order this sucker right now.

Emily Forlini (108:24)

Yeah, I'm gonna have to redo my whole thing.

Leo Laporte (108:28)

You're moving? You just got there.

Emily Forlini (108:30)

Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte (108:31)

Where are you moving to?

Emily Forlini (108:33)

I'm just moving like across town because we bought house.

Leo Laporte (108:36)

You're staying in New Jersey. Oh, congratulations.

Emily Forlini (108:38)

Thank you. Yeah, so just, you know.

Leo Laporte (108:41)

Do you have a dog yet?

Emily Forlini (108:43)

No. We have a cat.

Leo Laporte (108:44)

Okay, so first you buy the house, then you get the dog. But you know what comes after that? I don't want to say. But.

Emily Forlini (108:53)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (108:54)

Did you know? I don't want to say. I told you, I don't want to say. So the biggest. Biggest heist in. First I was saying the biggest crypto heist, but I realized if it weren't for crypto, you would never steal. How would you steal $1.4 billion from a, you know, a armored car? You couldn't, right? Or from a bank? The biggest heist in history. We talked about it a couple of weeks ago. The Bybit crypto, I think they're the number two crypto exchange lost $1.4 billion in Ethereum. Ethereum. And now it is pretty clear it's it's the North Korean government hacking group Lazarus Group that did it. They know that because it went to a wallet that Lazarus Group has used before. Law enforcement pretty much seems to agree this the same wallets used against Femex and Bing X and Pollen X. This is in North Korea. Of course they have a problem with hard currency. Right. So one of the ways they get hard currency is by stealing cryptocurrency and converting it into dollars and other hard currencies. So at least I guess that maybe. Is that a little reassuring that it wasn't just some guy. No.

Emily Forlini (110:16)

Instead it was like a organized ring.

Leo Laporte (110:19)

Say it was a nation state. Hackers.

Janko Roettgers (110:21)

Yeah, that's reassuring.

Emily Forlini (110:23)

Really, Leo? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (110:27)

It was actually a very sophisticated heist because one of the things Bybit did to protect the wallet is they had multi signers. It was like in the nuclear facility when two people have to turn the keys in opposite sides of the room to launch the missiles. Multiple people had to have had only had part of the keys had to sign in. And they used a very sophisticated hack to get to fake that basically. So it's kind of impressive. Largest heist ever. The regime's hackers, Lazarus Group, has been linked to 58, at least 58 crypto heists. And last year, they stole $650 million in crypto hacks. This year, one hack, 1.4 billion.

Emily Forlini (111:12)

I think everyone just doesn't know what to do with all the hacks in the world. Everyone feels so powerless. I mean, crypto, maybe don't buy crypto, but it's like every day there's a new hack, and there's just. That's probably why everyone's quiet. It's like, at this point, what do we say? What do we.

Leo Laporte (111:26)

What are you gonna do?

Emily Forlini (111:28)

We just keep giving our data over, and we're all just kind of like, do, do, do hope this works out.

Leo Laporte (111:35)

Jimmy, in our YouTube chat, is saying, you could. You could steal a $1.4 billion in diamonds. Okay, but has anyone ever done that, Jimmy? Is the question.

Doc Rock (111:45)

Only on Mission Impossible. I saw the funniest meme the other day, and it was so funny, but yet it was so true. So, you know, you get these messages all the time. They're just like, hey. And then, you know, they expect you to start a conversation. Now we know better because, again, we're not Muggles. But somebody was like, hey, is that you? And the person in the meme said, you know what? Just send me the scam links already. I don't have time. Time for this. Insert your favorite bad word. And that thing made me laugh so hard because I get, like, 20 of those freaking messages a day, and they drive me crazy. And then I signed up for one of those services like Leo was talking about, and it has slowed down, but they're just so obnoxious. And we know better than to answer them. But I know lots of people who answer them, and I'm like, please don't talk to them. I know you just making it worse, but, oh, my God, it's super obnoxious. Obnoxious?

Emily Forlini (112:38)

Yeah, I got hit with one. This past two weeks, I've been getting calls from the same, like, scam operation, and now I'm just like, is this my new reality? Like, why does. Why do those things start and why do they end? It's just. Oh, God.

Doc Rock (112:53)

Obnoxious.

Leo Laporte (112:53)

So 12. So speaking of the Trump meme coin, $12 billion in value lost. That's a lot of people who. I mean, that's another kind of heist, isn't it? $12 billion. Melania is even worse. But I don't think as many people bought Melania So that's maybe better, I guess.

Emily Forlini (113:20)

Melania, my girl. What are you doing?

Leo Laporte (113:23)

What are you doing? What are you doing? So there is Congress. This won't pass, but a California Democrat has introduced legislation to prohibit the company's top officials and their families. Families from capitalizing on Meme coins. It's called, and I love this, the Modern Emoluments and Malfeasance Enforcement Act. The Meme act would prohibit the president, vice president, members of Congress, senior executive branch officials, and their spouses and dependent children from issuing, sponsoring, or endorsing a security future commodity or digital last said.

Emily Forlini (114:05)

Well, that's good. I feel like the adults have entered the room on that one.

Leo Laporte (114:09)

Well, you know, first of all, he's never gonna get through Congress, but it seems like they shouldn't have to make a law to prevent that. There is the Emoluments act, which has been around like, as long as the country's been around.

Benito (114:22)

Yeah, they made Carter sell his peanut farm.

Leo Laporte (114:24)

You know, they made Jimmy sell his peanut farm. But no, you're dollar sign Trump. Let's make corruption criminalism again. Said the congressperson. Our public offices belong to the public.

Emily Forlini (114:37)

Yeah, I mean, it's like I said, like, the adults have entered the room. It's like a parent with a teenager. Like, you shouldn't have to tell them not to.

Leo Laporte (114:43)

You shouldn't have to say this banana.

Emily Forlini (114:44)

Peels all over the kitchen and pretend it's Mario Kart. But, you know, if they start putting banana peels, you gotta be like, by the way, you can't put banana peels everywhere. And that's kind of like the vibe with this whole situation.

Leo Laporte (114:56)

Wow. Now I do have to. To say, okay, so people are going to say, leo, don't be political. But there I do want to say thank you. I never thought I'd say this to our new Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. So you may remember that the uk, it was never fully confirmed by the uk, told Apple that they would have to provide a backdoor to their advanced data protection end to end encryption. On icloud, this was leaked and a number of publications reported it. Apple, in effect, confirmed it by the next week, saying, yeah, we're not going to offer ADP to anybody in the UK anymore. Apparently there is an agreement between Washington and London not to do things that the Biden Justice Department kind of downplayed, according to the Washington Post, the demand for an Apple back door. On Tuesday, DNI Director Tulsi Gabbard called the British demand an egregious violation of American rights. And on Wednesday, lawmakers asked the Justice Department to investigate. Right on, right on. It turns out there was a kind of probably not publicized agreement that Britain wouldn't try to spy on Americans and America wouldn't try to spy on Britons. But remember, this UK order wasn't just for UK citizens. It said anyone in the world using advanced data protection. So good. I hope this administration takes this seriously and protects our encryption. It is a little contrary to what previous administrations, previous directors of national Intelligence, previous FBI and CIA directors have said. They all have said they want end to end encryption to have a backdoor because that's how law enforcement has to work in order to catch bad guys, terrifying terrorists and pedophiles.

Emily Forlini (117:16)

So that's how it works. It gets encrypted unless law enforcement wants access.

Leo Laporte (117:21)

Yeah. So until advanced data protection, Apple had the keys to icloud. And if law enforcement, and this happened again and again, in fact, they just caught some guys. Do you remember the heist where some major sports figures like Travis Kelce got their houses broken into while they were on the road? You were on a television, televised football game. And then the bad guys broke into his house and stole all his fancy watches. Well, they also made the mistake of taking selfies of each other with the contraband and posting it on their icloud. Right. And of course Apple turned it over to authorities. The authorities must have figured, oh, we think we know this, and asked for it and they got busted. But they weren't using adp. If they were using adp, Apple would not have been able to do that. And in the UK now, Apple will always be able to turn over anybody in the UK's information because they don't allow them to have end to end encryption.

Emily Forlini (118:22)

Sounds complex. It sounds like you wanted to just work however benefits you most. Like if you committed a crime, you don't want it to them to be able to access the data because then you know, can't do.

Leo Laporte (118:34)

The problem is, and I think we've said this many times, that if you put a back door in, it never is. It never ends up being only for law enforcement. Any backdoor means that it's not going to work well, and we know this from CALEA, the Law Enforcement act of, what was that, 1996 or something where the director of the FBI at the time said, we need a backdoor into digital telephony, we need backdoor into phone systems because we can't wiretap the bad guys anymore because they're using Digital phone systems. Congress approved calea and oh well, what a surprise. Here we are in 2025 and the government's saying, yeah, we can't get Chinese hackers out of our phone system. They used that same loophole, that same back door. So yeah, it was good for law enforcement, but it was also good for Chinese hackers who now live in our phone phone system. And then the government has said, yeah, it's going to be too expensive to get them out. We'd have to shut down the phone system, the national phone system for a day in order to get them out and upgrade all our equipment. And so we're not going to do that.

Janko Roettgers (119:46)

Maybe they can just move everybody over to Skype for a day before it shuts down.

Leo Laporte (119:53)

Just for a day.

Janko Roettgers (119:54)

You all use Skype, trap the Chinese there. The Chinese hackers, oh man.

Leo Laporte (119:59)

Then shut it down. They'll never get out anyway. I am often critical of the administration, but in this case I would. And we'll see what happens. Because it is somewhat unpredictable. But at least Tulsi Gabbard understands that the UK demanding that Apple eliminate its end to end encryption was a violation of an agreement that the Cloud Act's requirement that the terms of the agreement shall not create any obligation that providers be capable of decrypting data. If this administration stands up for end to end encryption, I'll be very happy. That will be something to laud them for and I want to make sure that I'm fair enough to laud them when they. When they are. When it's due. On the other hand, maybe the reason that we don't have Restream anymore is because it's been shut down in Ukraine. I don't know. One thing I'm not thrilled about. Pete Hegseth, the new Secretary of Defense, has ordered the Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions. We were hacking them. We were attempting to hack them because of course, Russia hacks us all the time. In fact, it is widely considered that a lot of the ransomware gains gangs coming out of Russia are operating with the tacit support of the Russian government, the nsa.

Emily Forlini (121:29)

Sorry, why did he do that? I feel like I'm just missing something with this administration in Russia. Why is it not a problem that they are working so closely with Russia and they're telling people to react to Russia?

Leo Laporte (121:44)

Inquiring minds would like to know, why would, would you shut that down? Furthermore, the cesa, the security folks who have been up to now very protective of our elections, has been basically Shut down by Doge.

Emily Forlini (122:09)

Yeah, like that's kind of.

Leo Laporte (122:12)

The CSA's placed several members of the election Security group, especially those focused on misinformation and disinformation on administrative leave. The US Digital Service has been taken over by Doge and there's a group, a government group that I did not know about that I don't think is widely known called. Was it F18? No, that's A. Yeah, it's F18.

Janko Roettgers (122:41)

Yeah, it's fucking.

Leo Laporte (122:43)

This is the group that like the US Digital Services, helps the government with modern technologies, including the IRS Direct File system.

Emily Forlini (122:54)

Right. Which was a huge win for people to help.

Leo Laporte (122:57)

I think it's a win digitally.

Emily Forlini (122:58)

That was one of a very exciting thing.

Leo Laporte (123:02)

Elon tweeted or Xed or whatever you call it about three weeks ago that they had shut down Direct File, which surprised me me because of course Direct File was a free tax filing system that for years companies like TurboTax, Intuit's TurboTax and H& R Blocks tax prep software fought against because they wanted you to pay them to do your taxes.

Emily Forlini (123:30)

They pretended to have situation like.

Leo Laporte (123:32)

Yeah, they lobbied hard against it.

Emily Forlini (123:34)

Yeah. But now they're. They're happy, they're thrilled.

Leo Laporte (123:37)

Well, that's what's interesting. The IRS had a trial last year with Direct File was very popular, I think 18 to 2020 states. Very popular. When Elon said deleted, I immediately went to Direct File and started to file my taxes and it was fine. But apparently Elon knew a little bit more than I did about what was coming because now the company that wrote the software has been deleted. So maybe I don't.

Emily Forlini (124:03)

Can't use that for your taxes this year.

Leo Laporte (124:05)

Well, I don't know if it's still. If it's still up or not.

Janko Roettgers (124:08)

If that's it anymore.

Leo Laporte (124:10)

If it breaks, no one will fix it. Yeah, and it will.

Doc Rock (124:13)

You know, in the middle, people already started and then, you know, people who are early, they started. But then like anybody that comes now, you're not going to get in. Like that would be absolute Ms. Well.

Leo Laporte (124:24)

And, and giving in to th. You know, those companies the GSA has eliminated. This is the latest workforce effort action for the General Services Administration. The entire team of 90 employees who worked for 18F, a government tech consultancy that helps other agencies with their technology.

Janko Roettgers (124:47)

I saw today that Mark Cuban apparently offered to sort of fund them as an outside group with the logic that eventually everything's going to break and the government needs to hire them again. And then they become outside consultants and keep their Jobs and do good work.

Doc Rock (125:02)

So like if you're going to privatize it, I would get as many of the people in the office, except, you know, Todd, because Todd's Todd and I would start a whole H and R block, you know, hopefully with somebody, one of our friends from the Valley would keep them going because it was great. You know, it actually worked. It worked better than Turbo Tax and all the rest of those things.

Emily Forlini (125:22)

Well, that's the thing. Like Elon is supposed to be pro tech and that, that was finally the government was getting techie and you could file your taxes instead of having to pay some other tech company to do it. So that was a real marker of the government becoming more tech forward. And so that seems like something that they would.

Leo Laporte (125:41)

Elon tweeted that group has been deleted. He retweeted somebody who said it's a far left government wide computer office. I'm not sure how it's far left left. It is now gone.

Janko Roettgers (125:59)

Everything that is free and publicly run is far left in the logic.

Emily Forlini (126:04)

Oh, okay. Is that it?

Leo Laporte (126:05)

It's like, well, I'm sure Intuit and then H and R Block are thrilled. Right?

Doc Rock (126:10)

Well, and guarantee you those 2hr block in intuit are definitely not far left. But it's just, it's funny. Like these guys get to the thing where it's like, okay, listen, I have admitted it a hundred thousand times. I am a die hard Raiders fan, but I cannot be like o Brady's the worst quarterback that ever lived. That's just stupid. He was good. I can't stand him, but he was good. These guys can't do that. That's the part that makes it so upsetting is they would just pick a line because the line is there and put no normal logic whatever is. And realize that in, in the end, if we start to make our government less tech capable, that makes us vulnerable.

Emily Forlini (126:52)

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte (126:54)

It is very odd that you would kill 18F given that it was dedicated to keeping our government technology modern and secure and up to date. Same thing with cisa.

Emily Forlini (127:08)

Well, maybe what he wants to do is it took his glory kind of like he wants to see that model and then he wants to launch a new tax service and get the credit for it.

Janko Roettgers (127:20)

I also just googled this really quick. Apparently Intuit paid 1 million for the inauguration.

Leo Laporte (127:26)

Oh. So you know, they've lobbied hard for a long time against any government free filing. I guess, you know, if you don't, I mean, it's, it's impossible to impute the intent or, or the Reasons why. We just don't know enough about why you would do this. But it may be that if you feel all government is bad, that any way to file your taxes through the government would be bad, you should be done by free enterprise. But who's going to collect the taxes? The government? What does the tax money go to the government? I just don't understand. You know, there is. And I wonder if this will proceed because he's already fired 6,000 people from the Internal Revenue Service. Maybe we shouldn't, just shouldn't file our taxes this year. Who's gonna, who's gonna stop us?

Emily Forlini (128:18)

Right?

Doc Rock (128:19)

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

Leo Laporte (129:16)

You know, it's like, well, it used to be, I don't know. Do you remember the Gangs of New York? Martin Scorsese's Great movie about 19th century New York City.

Doc Rock (129:24)

Daniel Day.

Leo Laporte (129:26)

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

Emily Forlini (129:58)

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

Leo Laporte (130:23)

It's ridiculously complicated.

Emily Forlini (130:25)

Exactly. But if they don't do it, they're criminals. And so it's. It's a real problem that the government created and it was trying to. To fix. And so I.

Leo Laporte (130:36)

Well, Janko, in Germany, you don't fill out a big tax form. The government tells you what you owe and you pay it. Probably they already took it.

Janko Roettgers (130:44)

You do have to file taxes. You do have to file things.

Leo Laporte (130:48)

In Scandinavia, they send you a postcard. I'm not sure what they do in Germany. Scandinavia, they send you a postcard. They say, according to our calculations, you made this much, you owe this much. Thank you. We already took it out of your. Your account. I can see why people wouldn't like that idea. By the way, I did go to the direct file. My current tax return is. You know, it's still there. It's still online. I am still, you know, continuing my 2024 federal tax return. So it's not down. But I think you're. I think you kind of nailed it, Yanko, when you said, but if anything goes wrong, there's no one who wonders who could fix it, because no one understands. Understands it.

Emily Forlini (131:29)

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

Doc Rock (132:04)

You just started a culture of hating taxes. Like, I don't know when that started because I don't remember it back when I was a little kid, but I remember it as, I guess, sort of as a teenager. Like, maybe it was 84 or whatever after Reagan, but like, our whole culture. Culture of like, I trying to avoid paying taxes or I hate paying taxes or taxes are bad or whatever. It's kind of crazy because I, again, I've lived in a bunch of different countries, and other countries just don't think that way. They Just think it's something that you have to do, but like we have an invisible reaction to it. Even though we use things that are heavily tax subsidized on a daily basis and have no problem using this stuff. I just don't want to pay for it.

Emily Forlini (132:45)

Yeah, like roads.

Leo Laporte (132:46)

Yeah. The irony is Elon Musk's billions and Elon Musk's businesses all come from heavy government subsidy, including SpaceX and Tesla.

Emily Forlini (132:57)

Yeah, I think it's like almost 3 billion went to, has gone to Tesla for government subsidies.

Leo Laporte (133:03)

Yeah. Let's take a little break. We need a little subsidy from our sponsor. We'll have more with Yanko Rickers, Doc Rock, Emily Forlini. You're watching this Week in Tech, brought to you this week by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. Enterprises to date have spent billions of dollars on security measures that aren't working anymore. Firewalls, perimeter protections to keep the bad guys from getting in. And then of course you have to have a VPN so your employees can can get in. It hasn't helped. Breaches continue to rise. There's been an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks in 2024. A record $75 million payout. And honestly it probably is a lot more, but people just don't want to admit that they got bit. The problem is that these traditional security tools are expanding your attack surface. VPNs have public facing IP IPs that somewhere a bad guy can hang their hat. And they can do it more easily than ever, faster than ever, with AI tools writing the malware. Plus once a bad guy gets into your network, you make the assumption, well, you know, anybody inside the network's gotta be an employee, it's gotta be safe. Right. So they're able to move laterally within the network. Look for all the places you back things up and start exfiltrating things. You probably don't want the public to like your customers information or your private emails. And those VPNs struggle to inspect encrypted traffic at scale, allowing complete compromise. It's not a good situation. Hackers are exploiting traditional security infrastructure, using AI to outpace your defenses. It's time to rethink your security. We can't let the bad guys win. They're innovating faster than we are and exploiting your defenses. But there's good news. The solution is zero trust Zscaler. Zero trust plus AI. It doesn't assume that anybody in the network is a good guy. It eliminates lateral movement within the network. Connecting users only to the specific apps they are authorized to connect to and not everything else. It also hides your attack surface, making apps and IPs invisible. Plus it continuously verifies every request based on identity, identity and context, simplifying security management with AI powered automation. And they need the AI because Zscaler analyzes over half a trillion daily transactions, most of those completely legitimate. But you need AI to find those needles in the haystack. The transactions that are fraudulent or malware or attempts to break in zero days, etc. Hackers can this is the bottom line. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization organization with Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI it really works. Learn more at zscaler.com Security zscaler.com Security I did not see this. Do you use Instagram? Apparently it was flooded with violent content. Meta has apologized for an error that filled some users real feeds with graphic videos of people getting killed. This happened on Wednesday. What kind of error?

Emily Forlini (136:30)

Zuckerberg pressed Share Screen Share Screen.

Leo Laporte (136:33)

The videos which were recommended on some users reels tab included well, I don't even want to. I don't even want to say what it was, let alone show you pictures of it. Some of the videos had sensitive content warnings, but others did did not. Wall Street Journal had this story saying A Wall Street Journal reporter's account features scores of videos of people being shot, mangled my machinery, ejected from theme park rides, often back to back.

Emily Forlini (137:03)

What, they just backed up the garbage truck and just dumped it on everyone?

Leo Laporte (137:09)

View counts on Some of the Promoted videos suggested that Instagram Instagram's recommendations had massively boosted their viewership view counts going into the millions.

Emily Forlini (137:22)

Maybe that was it. They just, they. It was like a machine learning thing where it was just trying to get the most views and it accidentally tapped.

Leo Laporte (137:29)

Some sort of file. Yeah. A Instagram spokesperson said we apologize for the mistake.

Emily Forlini (137:37)

Yeah, I'm sure they did.

Leo Laporte (137:39)

We have fixed an error, by the way. Even after Meta admitted it and said they fixed it, this Wall Street Journal's reporters feel feed was still full of horrific, horrific stuff appearing some appearing next to advertisements for law firms, massage studios and Teemu, which is if you don't know. A Chinese e commerce spokesperson said that the torrent of videos was unrelated to the company's decision to adjust its content moderation policies.

Emily Forlini (138:17)

Like you could sue them for harassment or emotional distress if you have bad.

Leo Laporte (138:22)

Dreams and you can't sleep well at night because of it. Yeah, yeah. I mean Meta removed more than 10 million pieces of. But what's interesting is they had these videos.

Emily Forlini (138:32)

Right, Right.

Leo Laporte (138:32)

But they were in the system.

Emily Forlini (138:35)

There's a trove. There's a trove.

Leo Laporte (138:37)

It's a treasure trove of violent imagery.

Emily Forlini (138:41)

I mean that does not sound good. I mean that's what's going on.

Leo Laporte (138:45)

They say they removed more than 10 million pieces of violent and graphic content from Instagram in the July through September period of last year. That was in its transparency report.

Janko Roettgers (138:55)

Now we know how the people who used to moderate stuff, for instance.

Leo Laporte (138:59)

That's right.

Janko Roettgers (138:59)

Felt like. Because that was basically their 9 to 5.

Leo Laporte (139:03)

Yeah.

Janko Roettgers (139:03)

Just these videos non stop.

Doc Rock (139:04)

There's a great report I saw recently about the. These people having problems now because they had to do all of that vetting.

Leo Laporte (139:12)

Oh, it's traumatic.

Doc Rock (139:13)

They had to watch so much of it. Like they're just like completely checked out and you know, fighting for their. What is it like trying, you know, you're trying to get the company to pay for their health stuff. But a lot of these guys got fired. Right. And then like so they're trying. They're Cobra. That's the word I'm looking for. Fighting for cobra exchanges and things like that. Because like they're still effed up but their cobras going away.

Leo Laporte (139:35)

Yeah, yeah. And meta says. Well, sorry.

Doc Rock (139:38)

Yeah, that's the word I was trying to say.

Emily Forlini (139:40)

Well, by the way, COBRA is also garbage and crazy expensive.

Leo Laporte (139:43)

Yeah, yeah. That's the. After you lose your job, the six months continuation of your health benefits consolidated.

Doc Rock (139:51)

But you have to pay for Consolidated Ciliate Benefits Act.

Leo Laporte (139:55)

That's good. You left out an R there somewhere.

Doc Rock (139:57)

I said I'm sorry. Consolidated Omnibus Benefits Reconciliation act. Cobra.

Leo Laporte (140:03)

Wow. I'm impressed. You're better than an AI doc. Rock. That's good. How did you know that I'm impressed?

Doc Rock (140:10)

My brain is broken, bro.

Leo Laporte (140:14)

Grant. Rob. The journal quotes one person, a 25 year old who works in the supply nature industry, saying he was shocked to see graphic videos of people getting shot and run over on reels on Wednesday. It's hard to comprehend. This is what I'm being served. I watched 10 people die today. What? What? You kept scrolling. What that. Oh. Oh my. Oh. Robinson said similar videos are being surfaced to all his male friends aged 22 to 27.

Emily Forlini (140:44)

Oh, that's interesting.

Doc Rock (140:46)

C9.

Leo Laporte (140:48)

We were not in the right demographic. It's the Joe Rogan crowd.

Emily Forlini (140:52)

Radicalize our young men out here one day at a time.

Leo Laporte (140:56)

Fascinating. By the way, YouTube says it now has more than 1 billion monthly view, 1 billion monthly viewers of podcasts 100%. Wow. This is from Variety, your old home.

Doc Rock (141:09)

No, no, this, this actually came from the CEO himself.

Leo Laporte (141:12)

And yeah, he said it.

Doc Rock (141:14)

Yeah, broke it down. Here's what's crazy. This. So I've been preaching this forever because I coach YouTubers, right? And I've been telling everybody like, yeah, short is cool and short is a nice flash in the pan, but you really want to stick to your long form content. And you need to remember that people are watching this on tv. So not only do they have that much people in podcast, but they have over 1 billion hours of people watching podcast cast on TVs. So just like when.

Leo Laporte (141:41)

Not on their phones, not on their computers, but on their televisions. In the television.

Doc Rock (141:46)

So like Emily, when you're doing, when you're doing the Bay News, kpix, whatever. Yeah, the. That like people are watching that on YouTube on their 65 at home. Like so.

Leo Laporte (141:57)

It's good. You look so great, Emily, for leaning and have a full.

Doc Rock (142:02)

We have a face for radio. But I think that's super impressive because it finally beat the other streaming platforms or device. I'm sorry, it used to be, oh, everyone's watching on your phone. And that, that, that conversation is gone. Most people are watching on TV in.

Emily Forlini (142:15)

The U.S. it's kind of nice. It kind of feels like we defeated the vertical video trend in parts. Like, there's life beyond.

Leo Laporte (142:22)

More than that. We're defeating tv, we're defeating the networks, we're defeating television. But it's funny. It cracks me up though, because he says podcasts with video are more than just a trend.

Doc Rock (142:37)

That's funny.

Leo Laporte (142:38)

We've been doing video since 2008. People mocked me for doing video. They said, you're a podcast. What are you doing video for?

Doc Rock (142:48)

Yo, I'm at a podcast event last month and I fought for your honor because people are like, oh, you know, it's not a podcast because YouTube doesn't have an RSS feed. And Blasey Blind video is just a fad. I'm like, bro, we've been doing video. We had a video podcast that's about to be 20 years old. We've been doing this mess forever. And I was like, Leo was one of the first. Thank you back in the day. And I'm like, you.

Leo Laporte (143:09)

You said Leo. Or did you say, I know this guy who was.

Doc Rock (143:13)

No, I said Leo. You know why? Because Tim, you remember Tim Stewart, right? He got a pod.

Leo Laporte (143:18)

Tim street got a podcast.

Doc Rock (143:20)

Tim, sorry, street. He got a podcaster hall of fame award. And so we Were talking about it and so we were trying to. To defend. Because the audio guys are mad that, like, podcasting and video is getting so big.

Leo Laporte (143:30)

You know what have to worry? There's still plenty of people who listen to audio podcasts.

Doc Rock (143:36)

100%. It's not that they don't listen. These guys don't want to do video because they think it's more work. I'm like, video is technically easier if you ask me.

Leo Laporte (143:42)

Well, I don't know. I mean, it's more expensive. That's for sure.

Doc Rock (143:45)

Definitely more expensive.

Leo Laporte (143:46)

How much do you think that cost? You know, I mean, it's not cheap. This stuff. Tim street, though. So let me just point out, because I've been around for a while. I've known Tim since back in the day. He ran French, made tv. You remember that?

Doc Rock (143:59)

Yes, he did. So good.

Leo Laporte (144:02)

It was women. I don't know if it was good. It was women dressed as French maids explaining stuff, right?

Doc Rock (144:11)

Yeah. That's so old school.

Janko Roettgers (144:14)

That was on Blip or something like that, right? Remember bft?

Doc Rock (144:17)

Yeah.

Emily Forlini (144:17)

Well, you guys are just waiting for me to comment on that.

Doc Rock (144:20)

No, no.

Emily Forlini (144:22)

Like there's just waiting.

Leo Laporte (144:24)

In the early days of podcasting, there was a lot of experimentation. I would say.

Doc Rock (144:29)

Yes. A lot of weird stuff.

Leo Laporte (144:31)

A lot of weird. Remember Tiki bar? Tiki. Tiki bar. Tv. That was great. Loved that. That was video.

Emily Forlini (144:40)

I think video is a big trend these days. Like that. Video podcasts are a big trend. Trend.

Leo Laporte (144:46)

We are now on doing video. We used to do only audio on Spotify. We now upload all our videos to Spotify.

Benito (144:54)

I worked for CNET in 2008. We were doing all of our podcast video already back.

Leo Laporte (144:58)

Yeah, well, that's because CNET was a television network.

Doc Rock (145:01)

CNET was seen it.

Leo Laporte (145:02)

So they had. They had all the equipment, right?

Benito (145:05)

No, no, we had to.

Janko Roettgers (145:05)

We had.

Benito (145:06)

We had. We had to build a new podcast studio. I had to build a studio. Yeah, we built the studio.

Doc Rock (145:09)

Yo, I was doing this mess when they had all the equipment it in my living room. I had to make it. It wasn't, but it's still, I guess because my family owned an electronic store, so we had video. But still.

Emily Forlini (145:19)

That's cool.

Doc Rock (145:20)

It. It's always been easier because of this. Like, I can see you guys when I'm talking to you and that's different from just being in your ear, right.

Leo Laporte (145:27)

According to YouTube, 31% of weekly podcast listeners choose YouTube as their preferred service. 27% Spotify, Apple Podcasts only 15, actually. That's not YouTube.

Janko Roettgers (145:40)

That's.

Leo Laporte (145:40)

That's Edison, which has been doing podcast metrics forever and ever. And I think it's fairly reliable. YouTube would be, with 1 billion monthly podcast users, would be far bigger than Spotify, which all told, had 675 monthly active users for music and video at the end of 2024.

Emily Forlini (146:00)

So, Leo, how does this make you feel about the future of the podcast biz?

Leo Laporte (146:04)

Podcasts are old hatch.

Emily Forlini (146:07)

Well, we need a new word, like a podcast video.

Leo Laporte (146:11)

I, Hey, I was lobbying against the word podcast Forever. Since 2005, I've been saying, yeah, what it's.

Janko Roettgers (146:18)

What.

Leo Laporte (146:18)

What medium do you. Why would you call it a podcast? That's focusing on the fact that you're listening to it on an ipod. That's not what it's about.

Janko Roettgers (146:26)

How about I want to call them.

Leo Laporte (146:27)

Netcasts because you get them over the Internet.

Janko Roettgers (146:32)

Yeah, but. Okay, I haven't. I have a different idea. How about we just call it tv?

Leo Laporte (146:35)

Yeah, we're not even tv. It's their shows video. And you consume them in a variety of ways. You might listen. People probably listen to them on the telephone. I don't know. There's lots of ways to consume it. And you shouldn't focus on how it's getting delivered. You should focus on the fact that it's. Of its content, what it's delivering.

Emily Forlini (146:54)

So if. If they filled the Coliseum in Rome with people and they played Twitch in the middle, what would you call it?

Leo Laporte (147:01)

Yeah. A podcast.

Emily Forlini (147:03)

Yeah.

Doc Rock (147:04)

Are we not entertained?

Leo Laporte (147:08)

I think it's the arena cast.

Benito (147:11)

Like podcast is just. It's a format now. It's not really. It's like a genre. So it's not a method delivery or anything like that.

Leo Laporte (147:18)

I wish that died. It's not a. It's not a good name, especially the ipod.

Doc Rock (147:23)

Is Bonito on High. I got it. I got agree with you.

Leo Laporte (147:27)

Not many shows have a bonito on high. So that's as.

Doc Rock (147:30)

As a person who was doing music back in the day, like, I hated the conversation where some people call it rap and some people call it hip hop. Right? Like they're the same, but they're not. But hip hop is the overarching culture. And one of the styles of music in there is. Is rap, but there's a bunch of other styles of music in there as well. And it was always that fight for the definition. So I kind of agree with you. It's more of a genre than anything else.

Emily Forlini (147:57)

I still think we need a new word for the. The video podcast.

Leo Laporte (148:02)

It's a show mock Show. It's a.

Emily Forlini (148:06)

We're back to talk shows. It's a talk show.

Leo Laporte (148:09)

It's a show with talking.

Benito (148:11)

This is basically talk radio. This is basically talk radio.

Leo Laporte (148:14)

Yeah, we're doing talk radio. That's right.

Janko Roettgers (148:16)

Wow.

Doc Rock (148:16)

I like vodcasts.

Leo Laporte (148:17)

It's my favorite word. Vodcasts.

Doc Rock (148:20)

Video on demand. Because I can listen to it when I. I feel like it.

Emily Forlini (148:23)

What about pidio?

Doc Rock (148:27)

Welcome to our video.

Emily Forlini (148:31)

Kind of sounds a little too much like a ped.

Leo Laporte (148:34)

Pedio. Let's see what else is going. Are you going to watch the Oscars tonight? We're going to get out of here because it's. I think the show's already begun. Conan o' Brien on it. There's a little bit. There's controversy about a number of the nominees for best picture. Here's what's an interesting one. The Bruce Brutalist, which starred, I thought was quite wonderful, Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones as Hungarian refugees after World War II who escaped the Nazi death camps and managed to make it to America where he became an architect. Well, he was an architect where he resumed his career as an architect. They speak HUNGARIAN TO each other and even though they had dialogue coaches approaches, they wanted to make the Hungarian that they were speaking more accurate. So they used an AI tool from a Ukrainian specialist called Re Speecher to tweak Brody and Jones Hungarian dialogue in the film to make it sound more authentic. That has sparked outrage among the ancients who run the Hollywood that they would dare. They would dare use AI in any form or fear fashion. In fact, some suggested it should disqualify it for awards consideration. There's so much fear of AI in Hollywood, isn't there right now among creatives in general?

Emily Forlini (150:07)

There is. And I feel like the industry is very much going towards. At least some part of the movie is made with technology. It's so.

Leo Laporte (150:18)

It is technology. I mean, however you make it, it's technology.

Janko Roettgers (150:21)

We had visual effects for such a long time, right. Is outraged because something shot in front of a green screen or something like that. Where's the real art here?

Leo Laporte (150:31)

Much of the film's dialogue is in Hungarian and apparently I don't speak Hungarian. But the Hungarian that Brody and Jones speak is very accurate. It's a difficult language to pronounce and they were able to do it. It's a very accurate. By the way, it's a three and a half almost. It's three hours and 20 minutes, very long. There is a mandatory 15 minute intermission in the middle. It's that long. Only cost $10 million to make. It was kind of a low that for now for a Hollywood film that's a low budget film.

Benito (151:10)

Extremely low. Extremely low.

Leo Laporte (151:12)

It was shot on VistaVision. When they, when they, when the movie came on, I watched it home. I didn't want to go in the theater. It said VistaVision. I thought, Wow. I didn't even know that was still around. I found out though. I watched an interview with the cinematographer from Vanity Fair and He said all VistaVision is. Is 35 millimeter port. You know, film like you would use in your camera, turned on its side so it's wide and. And so the, the normally film cameras I guess run up and down. I didn't know this. That makes sense. They've got a spool and it goes through the sprocket like this. They run it this way. The spools are on the side and they run it across. So it's still 35 millimeter, but it's wide angle. It's beautiful. It's a gorgeous film with an interest. Really interesting soundtrack. And I don't think that a little bit of AI to make the Hungarian sound better is. Oh, wait a minute. There was also some generative AI used for a sequence at the end of the film.

Janko Roettgers (152:09)

But I think also just to generate, create a couple of buildings or something like that. Architectural buildings essentially assets or so that.

Leo Laporte (152:15)

They would use because they had drawings. I don't think it'll spoil it to say at the end is a retrospective of his work as an architect. And they have drawings and they were not drawn by a human, but they were generated.

Emily Forlini (152:28)

I mean, I do think there is some, some line like the deepfakes in Hollywood are an issue. Like, okay, there's a Formula One movie coming out. Brad Pitt stars in it. If we found out that the Brad Pitt we were looking at was actually just AI recreation of him, that'd be co. Creepy. Feel like we'd be like violated as viewers. You'd be like, wait, what the heck? We would feel betrayed. So there is some line, but what you're describing I don't think crosses it. And as far as I'm concerned, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Doc Rock (152:55)

You definitely don't wanna. I don't know, like, it's just so weird because we watch so many things and a lot of us, especially the nerds like you ask any of us our favorite movies, we're like Star Trek, Star wars, like all kinds of sci fi oriented things. Tron, even the cgi. Like the movie wouldn't happen without it.

Leo Laporte (153:13)

So you couldn't do Tron without some sort of special effects.

Doc Rock (153:17)

I don't think that's us though. And I, I like what Sandra said. The reason why they're mad is because they only spend 10 million and they're nominated. Everybody else's budgets was way higher.

Leo Laporte (153:26)

Well, if you want the real deal, you should go to Netflix House. Yanko, tell us about Netflix House.

Janko Roettgers (153:33)

Yeah, so that's actually something that's going to come later this year. Netflix is opening two locations in mall where you can go and there's going to be a restaurant, there's going to be live experience so you can play a squid game without dying. And then you can go to a store and buy also some merchandise for your favorite Netflix shows. It's basically like a mini theme park in a mall which is really interesting. And Netflix has sort of worked its way towards this. They had some pop ups around a bunch of shows like Stranger Things. They had a pop up restaurant that just opened in Las Vegas, permanent restaurant called.

Leo Laporte (154:13)

It's called Netflix Bites. You can go there and have at the MGM Grand. I want to go there.

Janko Roettgers (154:20)

You can buy your chicken and waffles there with like 11 stranger things tie in somehow.

Leo Laporte (154:27)

So it's food from Netflix shows?

Janko Roettgers (154:30)

Yeah, essentially it's all themed around Netflix shows.

Leo Laporte (154:33)

Well, wait a minute, I want to see the menu. Let's see our menu.

Emily Forlini (154:37)

I'm kind of hungry right now.

Leo Laporte (154:38)

It's a well designed. It's getting to be time.

Emily Forlini (154:41)

You could go for a Fab 5 avocado delay or a Queen Charlotte's fruit tree.

Leo Laporte (154:46)

Oh, that's from Bridgerton. Right. I don't know what the Fab Five is.

Emily Forlini (154:49)

And egg.

Janko Roettgers (154:50)

Beef.

Leo Laporte (154:50)

Beef and eggs.

Janko Roettgers (154:53)

But essentially. So I wrote about this for Sherwood News. They're building this whole life experiences business, but they're doing it different than Disney does because Disney has the big theme parks that are billions of dollars of build outs and Netflix is, does these small things like in a mall relatively cheap because malls have too much space to give away now. And it's potentially a lot more scalable where you could have one of these in every city essentially. And then you can go to your Netflix house after you watch a movie or whatever during the weekend. And so it's a very different model. I call it the anti Disneyland. But I think it's a smart model where they really like get. Instead of going to Disneyland once or twice in your life or maybe a few more times, but many people go only once. I guess you could go to this multiple times. Per year. And they can swap out things and really make this sort of more like a movie theater experience, essentially.

Leo Laporte (155:54)

Isn't that funny? You don't go to a movie theater to see the show, but you'll go to a venue to experience the tea. Regency Tea from Bridgerton with finger sandwiches, scones, and pastries themed to the favorite families of the ton. Oh, I get it. You call Bridgerton the ton. Served with a paper menu designed by Lady Whistledown herself. Wow.

Emily Forlini (156:23)

Netflix is apparently very confident their shows are going to be good in five years from now, which I am not.

Leo Laporte (156:30)

They made some very good movies and yet to have won best Picture. Roma was amazing. I mean, so many good movies coming out of Netflix. They spend a lot of money, but Hollywood, guess what, doesn't want to give them an award. They're trying to save movie theaters. I think it's too late. Hey, we have to take one more break before we wrap it up and let you go watch the Oscars and let you go have something to eat because I know it's late. New Jersey. It's great to have you here, though. Thank you, Emily and. And Yanko and. And Doc. It's good to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by Express vpn. Have you ever browsed in incognito mode? You know, it's probably not as incognito as you think. Google just settled a 5 billion dollar. 5 billion with a B dollar lawsuit after being accused of secretly tracking users in incognito mode. Google's defense. Oh, incognito doesn't mean invisible. In fact, all of your online activity is still 100% visible to third parties, even in incognito mode. Unless you use Express VPN. That's the one I use. The only one I trust. And you better believe when we were traveling, went down to Santa Fe for the gem show, you get to the airport, and it says, free airport wifi, WI fi. Do you kind of get a squeamish feeling knowing using that? Right? Like, how safe is this? Well, I just. All I did, I used my iPad, fired up ExpressVPN, and used the airport WI fi, and I forgot to turn it off. And I got to the hotel, I was still using it. Good news. I'm safe in the hotel, WI fi, in the coffee shop, in other countries. I love having ExpressVPN on all my devices. Every. Everybody should. Why does everyone need ExpressVPN? Well, without ExpressVPN, third parties, even if you're using SSL, can still see Every website, especially in incognito mode. And when I see third parties, I mean your Internet service provider or mobile network provider, the people adminning the sfo free WI fi. They know exactly what you're doing. And guess what? It's legal for them to capture it and sell it on.

Doc Rock (158:42)

And.

Leo Laporte (158:42)

And they do. It's a profit center. Why do you think the WI fi is free at the airport? Why is ExpressVPN the best? Of course it hides your IP address, routes 100% of your traffic through secure encrypted servers. They're all over the world, I think over a hundred countries now. Very easy to use. I use it on iOS, Android, Linux, Macs, Windows. You can even use it on your routers. And it's so fast, nobody's going to say, oh, it's so slow now what's going on? You won't know. Like I said, I accidentally left it on the whole trip because I didn't even notice the slowdown. I was downloading stuff, iOS updates and stuff. 100 megabytes a second. I mean it was incredible. Just fire up the app, click one button, you'll be protected. And it's on every device. Phone, laptop, tablets, stay private on the go. Rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. It's the only one I use. Protect your online Privacy today. Visit ExpressVPN. That's E-P-R-E-S-S VPN.com TWIT if you go there right now, you'll get an extra four months free when you buy a two year package. It's a great deal. Expressvpn.com Twitz the only one I use. Let's see final stories here. A small microbial system is fun formed on the International Space Station. Maybe we don't want to go into that so much. Did you watch the the land the moon landing last night at midnight? Firefly? I didn't stay up till midnight, but. Very cool. You know. You did know that there was a lunar lander last night that landed on the moon, right? No. We see we don't care about space anymore. Elon notwithstanding, the Blue Ghost lunar lander was launched January 15th. It landed last night in the Mare Crisium, a region on the moon's near side. 10 NASA instruments aboard, including a drill to assess thermal flow and an electrodynamic dust shield. Firefly is the first private company to land on the successfully land on the moon. Blue Ghost Mission one.

Janko Roettgers (161:06)

So.

Doc Rock (161:07)

So when they did the launch, we had just Got to Orlando for this podcast event and Ken was trying to get me to go with him and I was like, dude, I just flew.

Leo Laporte (161:16)

Like, I'm tired, I want to go to bed.

Doc Rock (161:19)

Right.

Leo Laporte (161:19)

Here's a picture.

Doc Rock (161:20)

This is lost into there and. But he went and watched it. I'm like getting up.

Leo Laporte (161:25)

It's. It's. It's pretty awesome.

Emily Forlini (161:28)

That is pretty cool.

Leo Laporte (161:29)

Yeah. We're back on the moon. There it is.

Emily Forlini (161:31)

You see that? Bezos sending his new wife to space. All female crew.

Leo Laporte (161:39)

I want to make a terrible joke about her, but I'm not gonna. I'm just gonna say, good, have a good time. She's. He's not going. They're not going into orbit, right?

Emily Forlini (161:50)

Yeah, I don't know what.

Leo Laporte (161:51)

No, it's a. So it's just. It goes up and that's the one Shatner went on. It just goes up and down. Yeah, it's pretty high.

Emily Forlini (161:57)

Yeah. I mean, I don't really like that. It's like, oh, it's an all female crew. It's kind of like, I don't really think that your husband funding this. I mean, we could go into that. But I don't think she's a feminist icon because she's date. I mean, enough said.

Janko Roettgers (162:13)

Astronauts. It would be a little bit. Would be different story.

Emily Forlini (162:16)

Yeah, Yeah. I just miss going. I'm going to the moon and an all female crew. It's like, okay, you're not inspiring me.

Leo Laporte (162:22)

So the crew includes, by the way, not just Lauren Sanchez, Katy Perry, Gayle King from CBS Mornings, your colleague Aisha Bo, who's a former NASA rocket scientist. Amanda Wynn, who's a bioastronautics research scientist, and Carrie Anne Flynn, who's a filmmaker producer. It will launch in the spring, the 11th human flight for new Shepherd. I'm not going to make the obvious joke that the new shepherd is. Looks somewhat phallic. So I'm just not going to make that joke. Okay.

Emily Forlini (163:04)

I think you just did.

Leo Laporte (163:05)

Oh, I did.

Emily Forlini (163:06)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (163:07)

It does though, doesn't it?

Emily Forlini (163:09)

They all do.

Leo Laporte (163:10)

Well, no, this one more than. All right.

Doc Rock (163:13)

I should probably.

Janko Roettgers (163:14)

I'll be glad. Restream is down.

Leo Laporte (163:20)

All right, I'm going to show you a picture of the new shepherd rocket and you tell me if you feel like.

Emily Forlini (163:29)

No, I think you need to describe what you think. It looks phallic.

Leo Laporte (163:34)

I mean, I agree all rockets are roughly that shape.

Emily Forlini (163:39)

Yeah, but what are the details you have in mind?

Doc Rock (163:42)

Well, rockets are a common name brand used for such.

Leo Laporte (163:47)

No, it's not because of that. Let Me find a good picture of it so you can.

Doc Rock (163:53)

Did you know that the rocket company when we were kids.

Leo Laporte (163:57)

What does that look like to you there?

Doc Rock (163:59)

It looks like a rocket.

Emily Forlini (164:00)

Looks like every other.

Doc Rock (164:01)

If this model rocket sells a model version of the Blue Orbit.

Leo Laporte (164:06)

Oh yeah, you can get a Model 1. It's an Estes rocket kit I have. I used to. I love those. Those are so much fun.

Doc Rock (164:16)

The heck out of those things I put. They had the first one payload. It had like a little clear tube. You could put stuff in it. And I put cockroach in it.

Leo Laporte (164:25)

The first cockroach in space. Did. Did you recover the cockroach after the.

Doc Rock (164:34)

No, because you know what the hardest part is like if you. Those things caught a win, you had to go too far to pick them up.

Leo Laporte (164:39)

So they go way down.

Doc Rock (164:41)

Yeah, just leave it then go buy another one.

Janko Roettgers (164:43)

Maybe it's still up there somewhere. Who knows.

Leo Laporte (164:46)

It still is. The cockroach said. Wow, that was a. That was a trip. That was wild.

Doc Rock (164:51)

Well, we eventually end up doing was putting the rocket motors on like, you know, model cars and just running them straight across the parking lot, which is also stupid. Almost started a couple fires that.

Leo Laporte (165:00)

They go really fast, don't they?

Doc Rock (165:01)

Yeah, it's really fast until they hit a bump because it grinding smooth and then it's just a mess.

Leo Laporte (165:07)

All right. All 50 states have now introduced right to repair legislation. It hasn't passed everywhere, but I feel like the right to repair movement has really gotten a lot of traction and I think that's great. It's. The time has come. Right. Wisconsin on Thursday became the final state in the country to introduce a right to repair law. So far, laws have been passed in Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, California, Colorado and Oregon. Here's the map from iFixit. Actually, this is from 404 Media. But the map I think was generated by iFixit. The dark red is current, active and past. The pink is historic, and the black is past. I don't know why I can't read this map. I don't know what it means. But anyway, that's good.

Emily Forlini (165:59)

That's good.

Leo Laporte (166:00)

That's good. Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, we think it is time to conclude this gripping edition of this Week in Tech. Emily Forlini writes for PC magazine. Not just cars anymore, though. Yeah, everything.

Emily Forlini (166:16)

Everything. All emerging tech topics.

Leo Laporte (166:19)

Yeah. Do you drive an ev?

Emily Forlini (166:23)

No.

Leo Laporte (166:24)

Do you have a gas vehicle? Are you interested in driving an EV since you cover them?

Emily Forlini (166:32)

I mean, I've driven so many. I get press cars all the time and stuff. They're so, so, so nice.

Leo Laporte (166:39)

I love it. Once you drive an ev, it's hard to drive a gas vehicle.

Emily Forlini (166:43)

Yeah. I just think in a cold area like I live, if it's my only vehicle, I wouldn't.

Leo Laporte (166:48)

Yeah. Well, it's so nice to see you. Thank you for joining us, Emily. Forlini you thank now on all the socials. Anything you want to plug? What is that orange thing behind you? I've been dying to know what that is.

Emily Forlini (167:01)

I bought that to be an intriguing object.

Leo Laporte (167:04)

It is intriguing. Specifically, it looks like a Dyson TikTok machine or something.

Emily Forlini (167:09)

It's so dark in that corner. Yeah.

Benito (167:11)

You need to hit it with a light. You need to hit it with a light.

Leo Laporte (167:13)

Yeah. If you want it to be intriguing back. If you back off, it's your shadow back up and we can see it. Yeah, yeah. See. What does it do?

Emily Forlini (167:21)

It's a lamp.

Janko Roettgers (167:23)

Hold on.

Leo Laporte (167:24)

It come. It's intriguing.

Doc Rock (167:27)

A lamp.

Leo Laporte (167:28)

It is a weird looking lamp. Where does the light. Where does the light come from?

Emily Forlini (167:33)

It's charged right now. But.

Leo Laporte (167:41)

Wait a minute. So they're magnets. They're magnetic.

Emily Forlini (167:45)

Now this from the MoMA Design Store which I really recommend if you're looking for like cool household objects.

Leo Laporte (167:50)

Oh, I see. It glows around the ring and it has two magnetic balls in the middle.

Emily Forlini (167:54)

That turn it on and off.

Leo Laporte (167:56)

Oh my God.

Doc Rock (167:58)

Need, need.

Leo Laporte (167:59)

That is cool.

Emily Forlini (168:01)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (168:02)

So that's a work of art.

Emily Forlini (168:03)

Like if you want to. I mean. Yeah. For your setup or your, you know. Yeah, anything. Kitchen, home. They just have tons of cool stuff at the design store. Yeah. And I wanted an intriguing object. So I'm so glad you were intrigued.

Leo Laporte (168:15)

I was. Thank you. Emily.

Emily Forlini (168:17)

Yes.

Leo Laporte (168:17)

Dr. Rock is studio full of intriguing objects.

Doc Rock (168:22)

Yeah, I'm intriguing every time I go to Japan, especially in Kyoto. One of my favorite places, the MoMA Design Store. It is so crazy. You could find the coolest things there. So now I'm in trouble because I'm going shopping.

Leo Laporte (168:32)

Oh, are those lights behind you synchronized to your voice? It feels like. Oh, they are.

Doc Rock (168:40)

Yes, they are.

Leo Laporte (168:41)

Oh, that's really cool.

Doc Rock (168:43)

They're. They're govee curtain lights. But now they just came out with a new model that is actually nine feet. So I could cover a whole lot.

Leo Laporte (168:50)

Fill up the wall.

Doc Rock (168:51)

I'm going to get rid of these and get the new ones. I just looked it up yesterday.

Leo Laporte (168:55)

I'm so tempted to just add more and more things behind me. I'm just going to stop because I think it's, it's just want to keep.

Doc Rock (169:01)

It the way it is.

Leo Laporte (169:02)

It's just nice. Doc Rock is of course on YouTube. YouTube.com Doc Rock. He's also director of strategic partnerships at eCamm. We're very grateful to eCamm.

Emily Forlini (169:11)

They.

Leo Laporte (169:11)

They make the software that we use to switch the show remotely. Bonito is running ECAMM as we speak. Thank you Doc.

Doc Rock (169:18)

Hi. You must address him properly. It's Benito on High.

Emily Forlini (169:23)

Don't get it twisted.

Leo Laporte (169:24)

Benito and High.

Doc Rock (169:26)

Put some spec on his name.

Emily Forlini (169:30)

Repent.

Doc Rock (169:31)

Thank you.

Leo Laporte (169:33)

I am Benito on High. Yanko records as a great and I highly recommend it newsletter called Low Pass. It's at least lopass CC there is a free tier so it's. You don't have to pay but I.

Janko Roettgers (169:47)

There's a free tier. I'm going to do one more thing. I'm going to just paste a link for a one month free trial into the chat.

Leo Laporte (169:53)

Oh.

Janko Roettgers (169:54)

So if you want to try it out, give it a try in a.

Leo Laporte (169:56)

Few for our club members. Give the club members a little bonus there their one month free trial. Thank you. That's very nice of you.

Janko Roettgers (170:06)

Sure thing.

Leo Laporte (170:07)

SFBA Social. He's on the Mass It on at J0 because he's leet.

Janko Roettgers (170:13)

Thank you.

Leo Laporte (170:14)

It's great to see you.

Janko Roettgers (170:16)

20 something year old, very late.

Emily Forlini (170:19)

I guess I want to plug I'm you know, looking for Blue sky followers. Oh good act with people on Blue Sky. I still go on X a couple times a week so you can follow me there too.

Leo Laporte (170:30)

But don't, don't just don't. I like Blue Sky. It's everything Twitter used to be.

Emily Forlini (170:38)

Yeah. I'm excited about connecting with people on bluesky and some people I've followed recently through my work or my podcast appearances I do keep up with and they comment on my stuff and I talk to them and it's just been fun. So I guess I'll plug if you want to follow me on Blue Sky. I'd love to see you there.

Leo Laporte (170:55)

Good. Emily Forlini. Let me do this. E M I L Y F O R L I N I Do you follow? There she is. BSGuy Social emerging tech reporter for PC Magazine. Nice former Amazon person. And I'm not following you. I'm going to follow you right now. Look at that. Make Blue sky better by following the good people. Yeah, yeah. I think it's getting very close now to being a good Twitter replacement. Are you on bluesky Doc Rock?

Doc Rock (171:30)

Yes, I am. What's your learn how to type for leaning? Even though I know how to type My fingers were not behaving.

Leo Laporte (171:36)

F O R L I N I.

Doc Rock (171:38)

I am Doc Rocket. B Sky. Not social.

Leo Laporte (171:42)

There are a lot of Doc rocks on here.

Doc Rock (171:45)

Yeah, those guys are not me.

Leo Laporte (171:46)

This is the real Doc Rock. Content coach, podcaster, whiskey and coffee lover. There you go. Am I following you? Let me see. Yes.

Doc Rock (171:57)

I hope so.

Leo Laporte (171:58)

And Yanko, is it just Mastodon for you or do you also.

Janko Roettgers (172:01)

I'm also Blue Sky. I'm not super active, but same same name with the 0 also on blue sky from my old Twitter days.

Leo Laporte (172:08)

I don't feel a strong need for a Twitter replacement, but if there, if I did, this is a very weak endorsement. If I did feel a strong need for a Twitter replacement, it would be Blue Sky. How about that?

Emily Forlini (172:22)

He.

Leo Laporte (172:22)

He is the There right there. Yonko Rickers.

Emily Forlini (172:25)

There he is. I mean, I feel like we could just sell. Take a break from social media as well, but yeah.

Leo Laporte (172:30)

Oh, I'm not following you either. I better follow you.

Emily Forlini (172:32)

We're going to be on it. That's the place I find the least.

Leo Laporte (172:36)

Yeah. Right now, as it, as it matures, it's getting more of the negatives of the old Twitter as well as the positives. Oh, yeah, yeah. Unfortunately.

Emily Forlini (172:48)

Yeah, we'll have. We're having fun for the moment and we'll see what the next thing is and.

Leo Laporte (172:52)

Well, you know, there's a good reason to ask because I'm about to go watch the Oscars. I'll be tape delaying it, I guess because I missed the first hour, but I like to watch. I used to love to watch Twitter while I was watching the Oscars and that I'm not going to do with Twitter.

Janko Roettgers (173:06)

If you tape delay it, the best choice is Threads because they're only going to have the updates tomorrow, so you're going to be ahead of time.

Leo Laporte (173:14)

I'll watch it tomorrow and use a live feed on Threads. That's a good idea. Thank you, Janko. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Doc Rock. Thank you all for watching. A special thanks to our club members. You got a little benefit there with that free month of Low Pass CC. Our club is $7 a month, gets you ad free versions of all of our shows. It also gets you access to the Discord and a lot more fun. We had Stacy's Book Club last week, Micah's Crafting Corners. Coming up Thursday, we're going to do our photo segment with Chris Marquardt. All of that just as a way of thanking you for doing what the club does so well, which is support our network. If you'd like to know more. Twit tv Club Twit if you want to watch live, I We lost the stream halfway through restream. Some somehow cut us off for most of the streams. I think TikTok and the Discord were still up. But if you do want to watch live normally, you can on all of those eight channels. YouTube, Twitch, X.com TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, Kick, and of course in our club Twit Discord every Sunday afternoon, 2 to 5pm Pacific. That's 5 to 8pm Eastern Time, 2200 UTC. But you don't have to watch live because we are. What do we decide to call it? A vodcast. We are.

Emily Forlini (174:34)

We're a pity.

Leo Laporte (174:35)

We're a pity. You can watch the video, whatever. Whatever that is by either going to.

Emily Forlini (174:42)

The website what it is.

Leo Laporte (174:44)

That's the whole idea. We don't know. Yeah, you go to the website. TWiT TV or the YouTube channel dedicated this week in tech. Or best thing, get your favorite Pidio player. They used to call it podcast players. And subscribe. You could do it on YouTube too. Subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Just in time for your Monday morning morning commute. Next month, our 20th anniversary. That's pretty exciting. It's a long time to be doing video. If you. If you want to celebrate with us, we'll. Do we have anything planned? I don't think we do. Bonito on high. I think we have to plan something for April. Whatever, 15th. But I have to say good night now. And as I have said for the last 20 years, at the end of every show. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can. Bye.

Emily Forlini (175:35)

Bye.

Doc Rock (175:35)

This is amazing.

Leo Laporte (175:46)

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