This Week in Tech 1000Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this Week in Tech. It's a very special episode this week Our 1,000th episode. Yeah, we've been doing this for almost 20 years and I thought it'd be fun to bring back the original hosts of that very first episode. Stay tuned Kevin Rose, patrick Norton, david Prager, robert Herron and Roger Chang Join us for a very special Twit Podcasts you love.

00:27 - Kevin Rose (Caller)
From people you trust.

00:29 - Robert Heron (Guest)
This is Twit.

00:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is Twit this Week in Tech, episode 1,000, recorded Sunday, october 6th 2024. The reunion episode. It's time for TWIT. This week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Except this week is a little bit different. I don't know if we're going to get to tech news this week because this is our 1,000th episode of TWIT and I thought we'd bring back the gang, the old gang that was here for episode one and the first few episodes. Patrick Norton, been with us since the very beginning. It's great to see you, patrick, in St Louis, now St Louis, missouri. Yes, nice to see you. Everybody always asks me where's patrick? Where's patrick?

01:28 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
somewhere in the midwest he got in a motorhome and drove until he ran out of gas and that's where he ended up we took an airstream traded for a year-round quality rv, and we're doing a massive tour around the country right up until covet hit and then, oh, you know that's what turns out. 30 foot rv seems really small when all of the museums, national parks, libraries, restaurants and everything else is closed.

01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a bummer but you had a good time up to that point, absolutely, yeah, so nice to see my old friend from tech tv. We got co-hosts on the screensavers and, yes, one of the hosts on not only Episode 1, but Episode 0, you and Mrs Norton. Sarah was on Episode 0, the one we did from the brew pub. Robert Heron is also here. He was on Episode 1. I think Episode 0 as well, heronfidelitycom.

02:20 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Hi, robert, hello hello, I believe I still have the original audio files that we recorded for that episode you don't have to really save them because it's at twittv.

02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Slash twit one, but awesome, good to know all the shows. Are there? A thousand shows? Can you believe it's been almost 20 years?

02:40 - Robert Heron (Guest)
well, the uh, what is it? The 25th, third slash, 30th anniversary of Tech TV. Yeah, picnic is coming up.

02:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And are we going to have a picnic again in the park?

02:52 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Oh see, I'm not.

02:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't get invited, so I'm off to ask oh no. It's a nice hot day in San Francisco. Be good day to do that Also here. Roger Chang, who is a regular on many of the early episodes, and, of course, another tech tv lab rat like robert.

03:09
It's good to see you, roger it's good to be here you were, you worked on call for help with me and then, of course, now you're on the daily tech news show every single day monday through friday, monday through friday with tom and uh company, and that's awesome. That's awesome. So is that your uh job as podcaster?

03:27 - Roger Chang (Guest)
uh, I executive produce, but I'm also the booker, so I'm I'm, I'm aligning guests with the show, as well as, uh, planning out content and special weeks and, uh, all sorts of fun stuff so great to see you.

03:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And finally, david prager is also here. Prager, producer on the screensavers. You heard his name all the time in vain, and he's been very busy. In fact, all of you guys have been very busy. What are you up to these days, david? Well right now. You're retired, aren't you?

03:57 - David Prager (Guest)
you're retired, admit it no, not retired, I didn't um, so I, I, uh, I took, I took a full-time job, my first w-2 job in over 10 years. Um, I'm right, I'm building out video strategy for marketing for a company called automatic.

04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I took a full-time job my first W2 job in over 10 years. I'm building out video strategy for marketing for a company called Automatic Nice. I know Automatic. Oh yeah, matt Mullenweg. He's been in the news lately.

04:16 - David Prager (Guest)
I won't ask you about WP Engine or anything. There's a lot of drama. I could, if you feel like it.

04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You didn't take the buyout.

04:22 - David Prager (Guest)
No, no, I'm actually really excited to be there. There's a huge opportunity. You know there's everyone talks about. You know, wordpress is, you know, 40, 43% of all websites and I believe that's fairly accurate. Now, automatic of course, is a small percent, a very, very small percentage of that, but it's also, you know, the open source project which Matt started. They're co-founded is, you know, the is the behemoth, and so obviously they're having some issues, mostly around copyright, um, I'm sorry, around trademarking and you know it, it's it's turned into a public spat I and it's.

04:53
It's been very difficult, I think, for him, because it looks like you know matt mullen who, like, is being the the greedy bully, but at the same time, what you've really got is you've got a, you know, wp engine. It's a company owned by a large, uh, private equity firm, by real greedy bullies yeah they are to be honest yeah, with you, and so I kind of feel bad about how automatic's been thrown a little under the bus.

05:14
Now. Some of the posturing might not have been the best way originally started but, you know, after after many, many, many months of saying you guys needed to contribute to the project, which is not legally required, but they've also, you know, using the trademark and using the trademark. So, you know, matt and some of the folks on the executive team said, look, we need to tell these guys to stop taking advantage of us, stop taking advantage of the project. And that's how we got to where we are today. And so, as things come out, you know WP Engine felt bad enough that they wanted to file a lawsuit for everything from slander to libel, to extortion. And I think you know when things shake out and you really look at what's being fought over and what open source means, writ large outside of even just what WordPress is, we're fighting. The good fight is what I think. And so, and again speaking of the buyout, you know it was a generous offer. I think a lot of it was talking about alignment and whether or not, you know, the, the, the, the speak amongst the employees was. If you disagree, that's fine, you have every right to disagree. If you don't believe in what automatic is and you want to hurt automatic or you want to leak things from automatic, then obviously there's no place for you at automatic. And so they created this, this buyout offer. And my gut tells me also that, you know, some people were not aligned and I think some people are.

06:28
You know, have been there for a long time thinking about other jobs, thinking about even retirement, and when you give someone an offer like that, it makes you think about what you, where you are in your career, what you're doing, where you want to go and if you're thinking about leaving, regardless of what necessarily the reasons were. Even before the WP Engine thing came out, I think it was an easy way for you know, 8% of the company to take that offer and make that decision. So, if anything, I think you know from Matt's perspective not to speak for him, but I think you know we're kind of re-energized in seeing that we've got over 90% of the company that is really excited to be there. I'm fairly new there. I see our opportunity as extensive. I'm having a really good time with it, so so it didn't cross my mind at all, um, but it's interesting times because it, you know, this past week almost felt, you know, almost like a layoff, but it wasn't so.

07:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, you've got colleagues it was a huge percentage, it was a percent, yeah, 160, almost hundreds that's a big deal about 2000.

07:19 - David Prager (Guest)
Yeah, it was a big deal, um, but it's also nice to know that everyone left that left did did so voluntarily. What I've been impressed with is the, the remarks that people made on. You know, we have our own internet and different internal discussion groups and the. The kindness that came out of colleagues for each other, for a fully distributed company, was pretty impressive. How many, how many times people have gotten together.

07:40
They do a lot of meetups, so every team meets up one or more times a year. Every team meets up one or more times a year. Every division meets up one or more times a year. So it was fun to see how much camaraderie there was and how much respect there was amongst those staying and amongst those leaving side. Yeah, kind of feel really proud to be at an organization like that, amongst all the strife and and it's kind of a mess, because you know wordpress is, it's, you know, above the fold in mainstream tech news right now and it's not. I'm kind of hoping it's less about even wordpress but more about what open source is oh, people love drama.

08:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excuse me, but people love drama and it's bs. And I know matt. I've known matt since the early days of wordpress. I was an early user. They were a sponsor on our shows for many years. I've interviewed matt many times. He's a good man and, uh, a real supporter of open source. Yeah, he's great.

08:22 - David Prager (Guest)
I even ended up with the company because I I used to do well. After, after revision, three left. I started doing marketing and promotions videos for startups because I fell in love with startups and I fell in love with entrepreneurship, and so I would just do, yeah, launch videos and promo videos for various startups.

08:39
And automatic is, ironically, still startup, so I would do projects for automatic every now and then nice and so we just had a conversation, after running past each other, kind of socially, and started talking about what they were doing and what the marketplace was looking like and what their competition was doing, and you know where they were, where they were doing well and where they were doing wrong, and there was a lot that they weren't doing not marketing in general, but just like how are they leveraging video assets, which is is I'm pretty good at.

09:02
So, yeah, he's talking to joining the team and I and I had just had a daughter and I hadn't had any. Like you have a two-year-old, I do. Yeah, her name is emilia, she just turned two. Yeah, so when? So when I saw the, the benefits package, which is actually quite good, and I haven't had a benefits package since the last time I was, you know, full-time employed by an employer I was like all right, I think, I think I'll do this and and I've still got side projects and and he was like you can still, you know, do those.

09:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it was kind of an easy, good, easy opportunity to take so I mean, I'm excited benito show the whole group here because this is a pretty special group of people for our 1000 episode. Uh, you know, twit has gone through a lot of, uh, iterations and generations. It's almost 20 years and lots of different people have come and gone and so forth, but these are the cats that started. There's one face missing, though. Anybody who listened to our early episodes will say hey, where's kevin rose and kevin couldn't be here, but he did send us, uh, this greeting hey, leo kevin rose here just want to say a huge congratulations.

10:04 - Kevin Rose (Caller)
Really bummed, I can't be there for episode number 1000. I'm actually going to be in London during the recording, otherwise I would 100% be there. I remember going up for episode number one, we were shooting in some little tiny, cubby kind of back office thing on the ground, and that was just the beginning of watching you embark upon this amazing journey to create all this great content over the years, and you know, I think back at that time and obviously, with tech TV moving to Los Angeles and all the other things you could have done in media, the fact that you chose to take the entrepreneurial path is was just really inspiring, and I just want to say thank you for doing that. And I just want to say thank you for doing that. Thank you for going independent, for building the media empire that you have today and for entertaining and informing all of us over many, many years and many, many episodes. So a couple of quick reminders though.

10:58
When we started this episode, or we started this podcast, the iPhone didn't exist, bitcoin was not invented, social media and Facebook was one year old and it was a college. Only at that time, twitter did not exist. Windows XP was the dominant OS and YouTube had just been founded in February of 2005. It's crazy what has happened and what we've witnessed, what has changed over the years. Netflix was also a mail-in service at that time, so it was mail-in only. There was no online streaming of Netflix and um, lastly, the fastest processor at that time was an Intel Pentium four and it went up to 3.8 gigahertz, which oddly is doesn't seem far off from where they are today, but maybe that explains some of the problems.

11:45
Anyway, enough about that. Just a fun little trip down memory lane and all the stuff that you've seen over your career, and a huge thank you for giving me my first opportunity when I first got started on tech TV, by the grace of yourself and Paul block allowing me to do that first. I mean, it really kicked off my career and I'm forever grateful for that. So I love you, uh, wishing you many more uh, great episodes and and health and um, I don't know how you're not aging, but it's just. It is crazy to me.

12:14
I need some skincare tips as well.

12:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks. Thank you, kevin. Uh, it's great to see all of you. Uh, just such great memories. All of us were at tech TV tv. I think that's how this all got started. Is we worked at tech tv uh, which started in 1998, and I guess the picnic is for the 20? It would be the 25th anniversary, is that right?

12:36 - David Prager (Guest)
wow, that's I think you remember david you out. He was the studio actor floor director and he had a voice like this he did, and he would call it the speedway soiree. Remember, they do this every once in a while. This is this is that I think, and mark is him and marcus buick putting it together.

12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Marcus was the sound guy great sound guy yeah, it was what is that gonna be oh next saturday well, I guess I better uh find my invitation it's?

13:06 - Roger Chang (Guest)
uh, I think it was just an open invite. As long as you're on the, the tech here's the problem it's facebook, isn't it exactly. It's on facebook. It's on no it's on it's.

13:14 - David Prager (Guest)
You've heard the startup. It's called um. It's all text-based. It's called um. What is it called?

13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
everyone's guy. No, no, it's text text base.

13:23 - David Prager (Guest)
It's a text-based event app called um partyful great, I never heard of that partyful okay yeah, be it partyful, and yeah it's. It's actually quite good because it's just all text. You get a text message, you can use the app if you want, and then just all the Patrick.

13:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should fly out for this next Saturday. Come on out, we'll go to. We'll go to the Speedway he does, it's not gonna happen.

13:49
All right. Anyway, it's great to see all of you. A thousand episodes at roughly 52 a year is almost 20 years, kevin. Actually I'm glad he put that list together because I was thinking of doing it and didn't get around to it. But a lot has changed. But a lot has changed in your lives too. So I'd like to kind of catch up a little bit with each of you to see what you've been up to. Patrick, the last I saw of you, you were driving off in an Airstream. Was that 2018, 2019? 2019. Yeah, it was that. 2018, 2019, 2019. Uh, yeah, you and your wife, sarah, and and your two children one child, I can't remember. Now, two, two, that's what I thought. Okay, who are you? Two kids and how old are they? Uh, seamus. Seamus is 17, 17 and tristan is 12. Wow, so you've got teenagers. How is that going for you?

14:48 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
You know it's a teenager. You remember how much you enjoyed raising teenagers. It's good. Tristan's in, like you know, seventh grade, which is mind-blowing. He's going to a school here in St Louis. Seamus is still homeschooled and they're kids you know been it was.

15:06
It was fun, like the full-time rving thing was great right up until covet hit and uh and uh. You know full-time rving is a lot less fun with all the national parks, museums, parks, restaurants, libraries and everything else is closed did you uh plan on and on landing somewhere, or were you just going to drive?

15:23
forever. Remember 2008, when the economy collapsed the last time. So we had a list. We put together a list. The place where many of us were working at that point like they were going to run out of money that's when we bought the Airstream. Originally I had a list, sarah and I put together like 50 places we wanted to see, like potential towns and cities to live on national parks we hadn't seen. Then the company got more money and kept going until it was bought by Discovery. Revision 3 kept going until it was bought by Discovery and then 2019, we still had the Airstream in this list when it was time to leave California. So we had this massive road trip. You know that we basically went across. So we had this massive road trip that we basically went across. We had to establish domicile in San Diego, spent time in not San Diego in South Dakota. Full-time RVing is kind of fascinating, totally boring.

16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, especially with a family, I mean that's a Well. It was great, right, Because we got to see well, you know, it depends on the family.

16:24 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Also, we were just like going from national park to national park. Yeah, that's cool.

16:27
Spent a couple weeks with family in Denver, did a bunch of time in southeastern Colorado at the Great Sand Dunes and the San Luis Valley, came out to see St Louis and then COVID hit and you know we had this huge. We're going to come back through all of our favorite national parks in southern Utah to go to Zion and Bryce and then up through, you know, the I still haven't seen Joshua Tree in southern California. We had this, all this list of places to hit all the way back through California and Oregon and back out through Montana, and then COVID just shut everything down so we got a house in st louis and been here ever since so the company you're talking about, of course, is revision three, the company that, uh, kevin and prager started, right, was it you, and, and kevin, were you the?

17:16 - David Prager (Guest)
two principals. Well, there were actually five kind of fly wells is kevin and in a weird way, is kevin and dan heward who are doing that system yeah, they did like how to hack your xbox, by the way, which we talked about on the first episode of twit was system. Yeah, we talked about it yeah, and then, and then jay addison got involved. Uh, you, probably you know him, I think sure and he started equinix, which is a he's an entrepreneur, so he would.

17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He knew how to raise money.

17:40 - David Prager (Guest)
Yeah, yeah and so he said, hey, I'm, I'm because we at tech tv we did a. We did a field, uh, like a little field segment about how data centers work and jay was the guy.

17:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he was interviewed, yeah.

17:51 - David Prager (Guest)
So he became friends with kevin and saw that kevin and dan were doing this system show, which is kind of like a less uh, another version of the broken. It wasn't quite as the broken, I guess kind of an adultish, even though, know, it wasn't as much as you know how to explode your hard drive when the feds come and more about how to hack your Xbox instead.

18:12 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
It was probably the first DIY show that streamed online.

18:16 - David Prager (Guest)
Yeah, it was cool. But yeah, jay came in and said hey, how about I give you, you know, $50,000, you quit your job, job, and so then they created some positions, and then there's a guy named ron gordetsky who was their first kind of like systems guy and keith harrison, who's at the time he was shooting and editing.

18:32
Yeah, he was shooting and editing. Yeah, he was the technical director at tech tv but he was shooting and editing the broken. And then they wanted someone to kind of do some biz dev and some more production work, and so kevin asked if I would come join, and so we were kind of the founding team at that point. So I, I quit my job at g4. Um, I think you know the first job at, at revision three, I think my salary was like 40 grand and and then you know, and then we, you know, we built a little little empire of sorts you did really well.

19:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was dignation was the thing that really put it on the map right it did because it was so easy.

19:04 - David Prager (Guest)
I mean, it was easy in a weird way like this. This show in a weird way is easy. You find some tech stories with some good personalities and you talk about it and and that's what they did. You know they they might have fueled they brought it back, you know?

19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have you seen the new one?

19:17 - David Prager (Guest)
yeah, I went down there and helped them tape the first one, or participated in, I should say, and then um, I'm not sure the entire motivation, but I think he just wanted to, you know, after getting out of his nft uh stint, I'll call it that the owls, yeah, yeah uh, he wanted to get back into media because he's always been a media guy, even though that's his real love.

19:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was an entrepreneur and he always said I like making apps. Kevin we're talking Kevin Rose I like making apps, I like helping people make apps. But you know what he liked being a broadcaster. That's what he really liked doing.

19:48 - David Prager (Guest)
I think so, although I mean he's a good operator. He's a good operator.

19:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He knows how to do startups you know even Pounce, remember Pounce?

19:54 - David Prager (Guest)
That could have been Twitter, but it wasn't.

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, and I wouldn't even say revision three I mean we were almost too early and even the timing could have been weird. I mean we did well. So Revision 3, and what did you do for Revision 3, patrick? You were doing.

20:09 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I was the proof of concept that Dignation wasn't a fluke and other shows could make money.

20:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Aha, and what was the name of that show?

20:18 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
That would be Techzilla. I took over basically running System and Techzilla and Techzilla daily and helped out with some other stuff and then revision three got eventually got sold to discovery.

20:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it wasn't a big exit or anything, people just kind of got out well, at that point, oh, go ahead.

20:38 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I was gonna say after the economy crashed. I think any exit that didn't involve crashing and burning and getting a chair instead of a final paycheck was a solid exit.

20:50 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Discovery's buyout was a very and I'll say this in a very diplomatic way it was a very unique liminal space between what Revision 3 was and what it was, what Revision 3 was and marrying into a large media conglomerate that had different ideas of how things.

21:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you stay with it, Roger, after they bought it?

21:14 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I stayed on for a little bit and then, yeah, we decided to part ways.

21:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the media landscape has changed a lot in the last 20 years and that was just one of many waves, right, I mean. I mean, what look at what discovery is now?

21:33 - Roger Chang (Guest)
they're huge but you know what they are, that they're still swimming, that they're still swimming in some of the same kind of organizational systems. I think that Patrick and I encountered with You're being very diplomatic. Yes, I live in an industry town.

21:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to cut off my nexus, but we can read between the lines.

22:00 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I live in St Louis so I can probably say anything at this point, but I'm on the marketing side of the fence working for somebody that doesn't make media. But Discovery bought Revision 3 because they were fascinated that anybody could make money on the web, and they didn't get that and there were some really hysterical moments.

22:23
One of my favorites and I know Robert and Fragan and Roger if you're watching the video, watch their faces as I say this, because we got pulled out to this dog and pony show at headquarters at Discovery and the super senior executive vice president-y kind of person who was part of acquiring us was discussing like they make content for a hundredth of what we do per hour and I'm like my hand goes up and he's like patrick, I'm like it's actually a thousandth and he's like and they're free, you know, you know, and they're like you're explaining that we, we make content for much less money and at a much higher frequency. And I remember being like look, we have to do 52 shows a year minimum or you know we disappear. And I'm watching. You can tell all the producers in this audience of about 600 people, because the producers are all going, their heads are going back and forth. No, no, no, no, no like don't tell them that.

23:13 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Why are? You telling him that for.

23:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And youtube was around at this point, but but nobody knew what was going to happen yeah, nobody, economy did not exist, yeah yeah, so nobody really, but they had. But it's interesting because they had a sense that what was going on at Revision 3 was kind of the beginning of something. So that actually showed some intelligence on their part.

23:34 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
But there was also. There was so much internal friction and there was so much. Oh, it was never.

23:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's not a good match when you get a big cable network, but it was also funny because we were like you know.

23:46 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
They were like, well, how do you make money? It's like, well, our hosts do post-branded ads and they're like that doesn't scale. And we're like you've heard of Howard Stern and we started rattling off people and industries. They're like it's never going to work and we're like, uh-oh.

24:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh-oh is right, because guess who decides whether it works or not? They do, david Zasloff. Yes, david Zasloff gets to decide here.

24:10 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Let me give you one story that sort of succinctly ties together what Patrick has been saying and what I've only been intimating. So we had the opportunity to have the guys from Mythbusters Jamie and I'm always spacing on his name um, who's the other guy from adam? Uh, on, I got contacted directly. Okay, would you like to have them on there? It's part of this kind of uh, a sponsorship that they're doing with uh gillette on our show. It's like, hey, that's great, we're all part of the same family should go perfectly well.

24:44
Nope, I literally asked everyone in the office like, hey, you cool with this. This is okay, you cool with this? I asked Jim, I asked head of sales and Brad Murphy and they're like, yeah, no problem, this should be perfect Soon. As I tried to schedule it, I got a call from Discovery headquarters about some issues and I needed to talk to the producer of Mythbusters in order to kind of assuage any kind of concerns he might have of us doing something with Jamie and Adam. And it was weird because it took almost four days of back and forth phone calls to kind of like it. I was like this is the weirdest thing I have ever experienced and I remember Jim walked by. It's like, you know, if they didn't buy us, this would have been not, this would have never been an issue. It's like, yeah, yeah, that's right.

25:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, jim, you're talking about Jim Ladderback, jim Ladderback.

25:46 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Who is became CEO of VidCon?

25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
of vidcon. Uh, I think he's still at vidcon, I don't know if he's ceo, still he's not. He's finally semi-retired, yeah he retired well, he's. By the way, he's now a content creator, because I see him all over linkedin creating content he does a weekly newsletter on the distributes on linkedin about the creator.

25:59 - David Prager (Guest)
It's actually quite good. Well, he knows his stuff from yeah yeah and he knows everyone, yeah

26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he does love it, doesn't it? Uh, you're watching the two. I'm sorry this is very inside baseball everybody. If you want to come back next week, we'll probably get around to tech news, although that was a pretty good uh inside story about automatic there that we would not have had with you had not been here, david, so thank you.

26:22
I appreciate it we're fighting old battles, though, mostly because it's just the old timers sitting around the barrel. Uh, talking about the good old days. So, roger, you have kids. Yes, I have two. See, I thought that would never happen why why, I don't know. I just I don't know, roger, I just feel like.

26:43 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I'm forever. I'm forever like the fresh face, 23 year old Exactly.

26:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You, you never grew up from my point of view. So are you married.

26:52 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Tell them about the gown. I am very, very married. I've been married for 10 years. 10 years, yeah.

26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, that's congratulations. And how old are your children? That's congratulations. And and how old are your children? Uh, they are six and uh nine. One will turn ten with the new year and you love them apple of your eye.

27:12 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Yes, yes, as they get older, there are certain things that I am trying to uh work out, but overall I am I am very pleased with their uh, with their trajectory.

27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, Good for you. See, you know, I just didn't know you had it in you, roger. That's all I'm going to say, man.

27:33 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Wow.

27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

27:37 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I'm very happy for you. You're like a high school coach rolled in with a drunk uncle all at one time.

27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, that's me In a nutshell.

27:44 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Roger, you go do great things.

27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uncle coach leo, they call me that. And robert what? What are you up to these days, robert heron?

27:52 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I still do a variety of basically technical content and uh in-person assistance through my company, heron fidelitycom you do, you do a tv uh call a calibration and things like that and AV calibration assistance in terms of consulting uh, local businesses and individuals for their their AV needs.

28:14
I also have managed to stay busy with uh, either through a variety of other gigs that I just kind of pile onto it all, uh, namely either writing or doing consultation work for various manufacturers of the gear I'm usually getting hands-on with anyway, and I've yeah, it is ever since the tech TV days that led us down to G4.

28:38
And then eventually I ended up back at Ziff Davis Media through PC Magazine and Extreme Tech until they laid off the whole West Coast and at that point I got kind of it was like the third or fourth layoff I had been through and I was a little burned out on that and that's kind of what set me on the path of sort of, can I work for myself and how long can I do it?

29:01
And so far it's been just, it's been a fun ride and taken me around the world a couple of times and oh nice, yeah, in terms of the different companies you interact with, be it from Asia to you name it and and across the United States, there's a lot, of a lot of fun to be had and I'm still kind of doing what I've always done, while just keeping up on the latest and greatest as far as technology goes. I'll be at ces come january again. That's like my playground for seeing all the new stuff coming out, in addition to some local trade shows too, like through sid, uh society, society of information displays, when they do a local uh trade show here in san jose, and that's where you can really meet the scientists involved of who's crafting the technology you'll be looking at in the coming year or two. And between all of it, it's just I have a lot of people I'm grateful toward in terms of either helping me out being on your show back in the day, call for help as an intern taking over Roger's old position.

30:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Were you an intern at call for help?

30:10 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Well, I was I took over Roger's job and then, when louder back started the lab, Patrick, Patrick got me into there.

30:19
That's right and that that was is the word we're was a total highlight, because then it's like after G4 ended up being invited by Lauterbach, was working for Ziff Davis Media and their West Coast office, and I ended up going back to that environment which surrounded me with just some amazing tech heads and good writers, and just being able to create a new environment in the early days of streaming content, and it was all just utterly fantastic. And nowadays I kind of spread my time between my business and I'm a. I'm a member of my local service club for the last 14 years or so and that gives me a way to contribute back to the community and I work with a children's group every week, uh, teaching safety and other items, and oh that's it, it's just yeah, I do what I can and I really enjoy what I'm doing, and I have no kids.

31:18 - Roger Chang (Guest)
You're the only one on here, yeah I uh yeah, I never know that prager actually had a had a child at his advanced age I work with a lot of kids, though let's just say the tax deductions are are incredibly beneficial my kids are henry is 30 and abby's 32.

31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, and you remember them coming on call for help and they were this high.

31:44 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I remember when it was just Abby yeah, and then, and yeah.

31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then Henry was born yeah yeah, it goes really fast. That's all I can warn you. And just enjoy. I know it's hard as they get uh to get more teenager, but enjoy it because it's David you're right in the middle of it a two-year-old.

32:01 - David Prager (Guest)
Wow, that's uh, yeah yeah, it's crazy, it's what's, it's what's weird, is it? It's finally gotten to be sort of normal when I, when I say the word, like my daughter, like it feels normal it takes a while to get that, I mean you know, I only I got married 10 no in 2017. It took me a full year where I was used to say my wife, my wife yeah, yeah so

32:21
uh, but it's great, it's going well. We're just taking her out of her nanny program, so she's going into this preschool, and it was immediately. The childcare is so expensive, so it's it's like I feel like I just got a massive raise because because it cuts our childcare expenses in half and they were ridiculously high.

32:41 - Roger Chang (Guest)
So it is. It is no joke. Yes, childcare is very expensive. I am very grateful for the many programs California presents to parents. That helps alleviate some of the cost. Yeah.

32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a hard. I think people don't realize how hard it is being a mom and dad.

33:00 - Roger Chang (Guest)
It's a lot of work. It's a lot of work. It is very rewarding, like oh yeah, I was the worst thing you ever did in the best thing simultaneously, right I was at the first my kids first girl scout meeting like last month and I saw this is going to be weird but it's actually kind of cool. You get to be around the other parents as they're making the little friendship bracelets and they don't call them girl scouts anymore.

33:21
Right, it's brownies uh scouts, but it's uh brownies for the eldest and then daisies for my youngest.

33:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, isn't that sweet you're watching a special episode of this week in tech our 1000th episode. I thought I'd bring the old gang back together. We can catch up. We got more catching up to do, but I have to take a break because, uh, we're ad supported. Actually, we're also club supported. I know all of you have I think almost all of you have Patreon pages and clubs and that's one thing that's really changed and, I think, been very powerful is the ability to go directly to your audience and have the audience support what you do.

34:01 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I know Roger DTNS is doing great based on patreon support hey, I will say this if we had patreon back in the revision three days, it might have been a different thing, it would have been completely different. There is a level of uh uh, uh uh. There's a rapport between you and the audience that supports you. That I find to be very supportive. It's not how things used to be, where, if you weren't careful, things would just kind of devolve into a very toxic atmosphere.

34:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a very I mean it's no joke. No, it can. I've been there too, yeah.

34:40 - Roger Chang (Guest)
We have like six seven-year supporters're. You know they've transitioned into patreon from from their, from their, from their days of just watching when we started in 2014, and it is I I'm always impressed. Everyone has a very, you know, a very productive conversation. They have ideas. It's never very like you said something stupid and I'm just gonna rag on you, but it it's hard to describe.

35:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, I I'm always constantly amazed that it is as uh, healthy as it is what is clear to me, after doing this for 20 years, is that the real secret to uh, this kind of media I don't want to even call it podcasting, because it's now it's YouTube, it's a whole variety of things but the real secret is community. It's building a community around you. It's not audience. I kind of always said that, even in the tech TV days uh, it's not about an audience, it's about a community, it's about you and a group of people together and the ZDTV netcam.

35:38
Network. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look how far we've come, though I mean it used to be. We had to send them a.

35:45 - Roger Chang (Guest)
We'd send them a 3com net cam right with the, with the pci card that they had to install themselves, and then they had to pick up the phone because the you couldn't do both video and audio at any decent quality and especially yeah they'd be on the phone and there'd be one frame every four seconds, whether they could do video at a decent quality.

36:03 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
It it was just you know, oh forget. Video Accusive video was a miracle by any standards at that point.

36:10 - Roger Chang (Guest)
The phone was both a stroke of genius but also an indictment of the level of technology of teleconferencing at that time. Right, because, worst case scenario, the video goes dark, we could still get their audio and we could Right the the phone is going to work.

36:24
You could totally talk to them. But I mean the community, is it? What you've said is that you know having a strong community it's amazing because there is a we're very conscientious of this on DTNS is to have a conversation. It's not just a one way, blah, blah, blah. One way, it's a back and forth, and I think that's the key is to have a conversational, community-driven approach to the content.

36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We started a club about two years ago, club Twit, and it is now a significant part of our revenue and without it I don't know if we'd be able to continue to be honest with you, because podcast advertising is kind of uh dwindled. We found a a uh a niche with, because we're a tech podcast network with b2b technology companies, but uh, really the club is a big part of what we do these days. If you're not a member, by the way, seven bucks a month. Club twit, twittv slash. Club twit. Somebody was about to say something. I heard a breath.

37:25 - David Prager (Guest)
I do want to do that. Oh, I was gonna, and this might be out of left field dude Brad Murphy who used to do he worked at Tech today Brad, well love Brad, yeah, he did sales for revision three, and now he started his own company called um seismic, and they just put together, you know, advertisers with well, with what generally then is called creators, but you're, you would be in that bucket. I'm just almost wondering well, that's what's interesting david, like does he having brands onto your shows?

37:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
having done this for so long. Uh, I was. I was a creator, I was an influencer, but well before those categories existed. So I'm not now, because I've been doing it too long, to be a you know, one of the one of the kids today. Anyway, I do want to take a break. We'll come back with more of this great panel and more memories of Tech TV and Twit, as we do. Our 1,000th episode with Patrick Norton, robert Herron, roger Chang and David Prager it's great to have you and a little ghostly visit from Kevin Rose earlier on.

38:23
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40:38 - David Prager (Guest)
Episode zero which we did after Macworld Expo at a brew pub, the 21st Amendment brew pub which which Patrick was up and said Was it 21st Amendment or was it the one across the street from the W the Spanish Topics place? No, no, no, no, it was 21st.

40:51 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Amendment.

40:52 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Okay, yeah.

40:52 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Because I remember we were walking as a group down second to get to it.

40:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you guys were all on, and Sarah, your wife, patrick, was, but I wouldn't put her through this, so you represent the couple, uh. And then we did uh but but and that was so cool because we did that ad hoc, just without any plans we sat and talked, it was fun, put it up and I think 10, 20 000 people downloaded it and I was like whoa, um, I had already been podcasting the radio show that I do and uh, so I already had the kind of the mechanism for people to download it such as it was and so forth. But I couldn't believe how many people did it. But there was no way because you guys were all over. Most of you had gone to LA with G4. There was no way to kind of get.

41:40
And I was up in Petaluma to get everybody together until somebody called the radio show on Skype and it sounded really good and I said you're not on a phone, are you? They said no, we're on Skype. I said, ooh, maybe that'll make it work, although if you listen to episode one, kevin Rose was sitting on the floor in the attic. Patrick, you were on Skype, I think you were. Maybe you were under your oh, no, you had just gone. Come back from a long drive, somewhere like a road race or something probably from some Desert Race, desert Race, I think so yeah, yeah, something like that.

42:17
And uh, so, and the quality was so terrible and I can remember for years sunday night the show would be over and I would spend five, six hours working on this audio, trying to make it so that you could even understand what was going on, what people were saying stuff it was well you could probably.

42:36 - David Prager (Guest)
You could probably take that same audio quality and run it through some ai little ai now it's kind of sad because I mean even doing color correcting for video. You don't have to spend that much time on it it's so automatic yeah, it's incredible. And even for audio editing you can strip out I mean 10, five years ago.

42:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at the scriptsai. You can edit the text and it will do the audio edits and stuff. Have you heard? Uh, the new uhbook LM. Google's Gemini Notebook LM. That makes a podcast out of anything.

43:09 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Yes, I passed my resume through it and it's the most I will say. There's a level of hallucination that's both kind of worrying but also very like wow, I sound so much better than what I put into it. Also very like wow, I sound so much better than what I put into it, and it is a. It is both, I think, a very interesting display of the technology but also, I think, underscores the limitation. I passed my resume. I passed a couple of wiki pages. I put in a product web page I think it was like for soda and you tend to you tend to see where it repeats or the familiarity of certain aspects of it. But I mean, I, I, I, if you want to hear your entire life's work kind of spoken about in a podcast, uh, in a, in a very kind of a conversational podcast, in a very kind of conversational podcast.

44:04 - David Prager (Guest)
So, roger, when you did this, did it have basically like two anonymous-ish podcast hosts talking about? Let's talk about Roger.

44:11 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Chang yes, and they just talk to you, yeah. Yeah, there's a male, there's a female voice.

44:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they sound like podcasters, because they sound kind of dopey and like oh yeah, wow, like you know, I mean they're kind of it's very kind of ad libby, right, yeah it has that very conversational like whoa, whoa, hold on.

44:27 - Roger Chang (Guest)
So you're saying, and then they drop in the. I even dropped in an article.

44:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're saying that, roger. Chang worked at Revision 3? Is that what you're telling?

44:36 - Roger Chang (Guest)
me. I mean, it said I was at the cusp of the cable TV revolution. Oh yes, you were the cable TV revolution.

44:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yes, like, and it's just like wow, this sounds so much better than what I typed. It's kind of you know, I have mixed feelings about it. Sounds like you do too, roger, because on the one hand, it makes everything sound kind of mediocre, but on the other hand, it's kind of amazing that it can do that right.

45:01 - Roger Chang (Guest)
There will be a time where so much of it that we find so kind of jaw dropping or eyeball popping will become so rote and generic that people will automatically dismiss it. In the same way that when photoshop allowed you to alter images for the first time in a way that seemed semi-realistic and you didn't need to use airbrushing or anything, people's like, whoa, this is going to change things, but but people got used to it. And then you say, hey, this totally looks Photoshop, because you know, you know people, people acclimatize to the change and then they start seeing the seams and they start pointing it out.

45:37 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
There are moments when it's really surreal, like I know a podcast, I guess translated. You know a podcast and gets translated into several languages and the tool they use. You know, it's one thing for it to sort of like listen to the podcast and translate it into Spanish, but the thing it's it's one of the places where AI is actually working phenomenally well, because it not only turns the podcast into Spanish but it makes it sound like the person hosting the podcast is if they were speaking Spanish, so their accents relatively intact, except you know tree, you know speaking Spanish. It's really surreal when it works, when it doesn't work. Yeah, I think, roger Leo, the whole moment where you're just like that was almost like a human, but not.

46:20 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean it's weird because you bring up the translation thing, the. I mean it's weird because you bring up the translation thing. The one thing that I remember distinctly from the whole meta convention or a keynote that they did was, you know, with the meta glasses and then doing the real time translation.

46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

46:45 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Which is kind of like the golden, like the.

46:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stanley Cup of like real-time. It's the Babel fish from from Hitchhiker's Guide. I mean it's yeah, it would be amazing, I mean. But you know, I have to say every tech company has shown this demo and I'm still waiting for it to actually happen. You can kind of do it with your phone. Have you tried this at all? You know you're in Mexico and you say, hey, how much are the tacos? Google Translate is amazing.

47:09 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I just had this done to me two week, two weekends ago. Someone wanted some change to park at the beach because we were at the the beach over in Santa Monica and she didn't speak any English. So her daughter came out she must have been like 14 and she had her phone out and she just had it say what they wanted. I mean, you know, it's, it's definitely, it's definitely a technology that I think will be, the will be the kind of like when it works and it works for everybody.

47:38
Like you're just not you're not tied to a specific platform, you're not tied to a specific service. It's going to blow up because now people will have a way to con specific platform. You're not tied to a specific service. It's gonna blow up because now people will have a way to converse that you don't necessarily need to to to spend a lot of time, which is not to say that you shouldn't spend time learning a different language. I think it opens up your, your concept of of different uh things, um, being from a bilingual family. But it is, it is, it is very much like I. I think it will go a long way to helping people uh interact, uh in situations that might have been a little more clumsy otherwise totally.

48:15 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I've been in scenarios where I am the stranger in a strange land and that was the only tool I had available to me to communicate with those around me, and it served its purpose better than expected. And this is even going back a few years now, through across several languages and everything from trying to order a meal in a restaurant I otherwise wouldn't have set foot in to just people on the street, or I keep going back to Google Translate. But they have an ability just to have a message you can flash up on your phone in large text, and that was useful for just quickly signaling to someone who may not be that adept at their own language even, and being able to just get something across quickly or in-depth conversations like oh you know what, I need to understand fully what this person is trying to get across to me, and you can literally lay that device between you and them and just both look at the screen to reference what's being said and translated in real time. And it impresses me when it works perfectly.

49:17 - David Prager (Guest)
I had a several hour layover in Istanbul coming home and I took an Uber to just because I wanted to, like I'd never been to Turkey. Turkish is a hard language, that's a tough language, and the Uber driver whipped out his phone and just basically started having a conversation with me because he wanted to know what I was doing there and how much time I had. And we just had a short conversation. I give him credit. I didn't pull out any app. The Uber driver did.

49:41 - Roger Chang (Guest)
So you talked into his phone and it translated for him.

49:45 - David Prager (Guest)
No, so he his phone and it translated for him. So he said something and he played it for me and then he said I forget what the app was. It might have been Google Translate.

49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You hit a button and it switches it from Turkish to.

49:55 - David Prager (Guest)
English. And some of them I believe they'll just auto detect the language.

49:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right yeah.

50:00 - Robert Heron (Guest)
They will. Yeah, and the cool thing is I use Google's earbuds and so I can have the translated speech go into my ear and they don't have to hear that repeated. And it makes it even more seamless that way, where it is very close to being like the babblefish, which is the Star Trek universal translator.

50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is impressive, Patrick you're a writer, though, do you ever think? What do you think about AI and writing? There's a controversy coming up next month Na raimo the nano raimo folks were saying it's okay to use ai, and then a lot of writers are saying it is absolutely not okay to use ai for nano raimo well, I think using ai for nano raimo defeats the entire purpose what are you? What are you doing here?

50:42 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
in the process of creation and to become, but maybe for inspiration or something like that. You know you know there's. So I've spent most of my adult life writing. I've taught people to write and help people write. I've edited people's stuff. I've turned web articles into you know scripts. I've turned scripts into web articles. I've written for you know blah blah, blah blah scripts. I've turned scripts into web articles. I've written for you know blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right. So so you know I like books.

51:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um yeah, you have a few behind you. For people not watching, the video looks like you're on a library I.

51:17 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I'd say it's the vibe we're going for here, but the uh you know. So there's, it's interesting. Right. There was a sort of uh, you know somebody, a freelance client I worked with, had a service. It was like a gig economy deal where you paid, you know, you had a 12-month contract, you paid however much per month and they generated you know six thousand words a month for you. It was trash, it was bad.

51:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very mediocre, I find just well the notebook.

51:46 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Lm stuff is well hold that thought for a second right, because this was humans. Oh, and none of them. You know they didn't know what a lead paragraph was right, you know, they couldn't write a sixth grade essay. Um, you know, you were supposed to like tightly outline things and I would tightly outline things and they would not actually follow the outline it was. It was, it was a mess.

52:08
And uh, you know, and when chat GPT three was released, the client I was working with, you know, ran something through chat GPT three and they're like, how does this compare to such and such?

52:20
And I was like, well, that's better than what the service is doing and it's, you know, for all intents and purposes, free. Um, one of the things I know a lot of people who write content, whether it's on the marketing side or the, you know, whatever side you want to take is that different tools do the job better than others. Different services, like ChatGPT3, got worse and worse over time. It was like the more people used it, the longer and weirder the sentences got. So it went from like, you know, tight, clean copy with a solid lead to these sort of meandering things. I don't imagine there's anybody in this podcast right now who hasn't done a Google search and thought to themselves gosh, I really hate the SERP results being clogged up with this AI at the top or what, because I don't think I get through three days in a row without looking at Google's summary of search results without being horrified or laughing.

53:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I stopped using Google. I think they're making a big mistake. I think they've gone way downhill.

53:20 - Robert Heron (Guest)
That was one thing I've kind of appreciated, at Tech TV especially, was having a copy editor. Somebody could go over what I'd written and it made me a better writer in the end. And that's where I see AI right now is one of the best tools available. Granted, it's taken jobs away from people who study very hard to be very good at the written word, but it is a wonderful tool to go through and take a look at. Hey, just take a look at what I've written. Is there anything obvious and glaring? And then also for research, it is so much better to use a tool like GPT-4 or whatever you want, and as far as its ability to tell you where it's getting that information from and to present you with relevant facts about a particular topic, I enjoy it and I appreciate it for what it is.

54:06 - Roger Chang (Guest)
It's weird because I use ChatGPT, because I write a weekly column for the DTNS patrons and I run it through ChatGPT to copy edit. Then I take that and I pass it through my wife, who's a copy editor, and there are still things that need to be cleaned up and there's still things that need to be done, but it does kind of shave off some of the work. I will say that some of the alternatives it offers tends to kind of blandize what you're writing. If you write in a specific voice, it tends to make it a little more generic, which I find kind of not helpful if you want to stand out. I also find for research, I still follow up with all the links to double check, because there have been a few cases where ChatGPT but Gemini also does this, where it will confuse two very similar pieces of information as the same thing. And I go through, because the last thing you want to do is yeah, this so so happened to this person when it was in fact two different people with a very close sounding name.

55:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it sounds like you guys are all bullish on AI. Is that fair to say?

55:18 - Roger Chang (Guest)
anybody not, I am, I am bullish, but I'm also circumspect about what it can do. I think there's a. I think there's a hype cycle around AI where we kind of had the same thing with big data. What a decade ago everyone was saying you got to collect all the data, you'll be able to process it, you'll be able to find the best customers and then you'll target them with ads straight to their eyeball that sell them that one product that no one else wants but they want. It's not that I don't think AI will be fruitful. I just think there's also a lot of people trying to get into the space and it tends to froth up things, more so than I think people would understand it to be.

56:01 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I think it's a wonderful assistant and I encourage many people who may not even consider such a tool in their day-to-day lives. I know a lot of people in very blue-collar industries that are being asked now to prove themselves again within their say. They've just been bought out recently and they need to be more technologically astute, or however you want to put it. And that is a tool you can literally go to and just have a conversation with about, maybe, a subject you're not familiar with. I've also encouraged some of my young nieces and nephews. It's like hey, look, they're dealing with everything from like a class project where it was like okay, here's the coding language you guys are working with to make an LED turn on and off. I'm not a hundred percent familiar with what it is you're working with there, but I can ask. I'm not 100% familiar with what it is you're working with there, but I can ask say, chatgpt4 to provide sample code for this and give you guys at least an idea. It's a great start.

56:54
Yeah, it's a wonderful tool like that and every programmer I have come across in the last few years everyone has a paid account for GPT4. And they are using that as a base just to get the grind work done, as far as whatever project they're currently working on or trying to finish.

57:12 - Roger Chang (Guest)
We just interviewed Kevin Pereira from Attack on the Show and he actually uses ChatGPT to write or not ChatGPT another generative AI to write code for him for a thing he's working on. He's just like. I don't really know how to code, but it works and it works enough for what.

57:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to do that. Seems like there's a recipe for disaster. Well, and it does, I don't know what it's doing, but it seems to work.

57:35 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think there is a.

57:36 - David Prager (Guest)
I think it kind of reminds me of the WYSIWYG days of HTML editors, where it did a lot but at the same time it was like you need to understand what this command, what this library does.

57:50 - Roger Chang (Guest)
So if you need to fix something or change it, you understand how to go about it.

57:58 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I've also never thanked a Google search, but I regularly drop a thank you here and there at a chat. Gpt.

58:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Kevin Rose told me that and it responds Always thank the AI, you never know.

58:08 - Robert Heron (Guest)
You never know, you never know absolutely it's coming.

58:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you worried about the existential threat that some people talk about with ai? That it's gonna? It's gonna achieve the singularity, become as smart as humans and then just start to write us off?

58:23 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
or is that I'm not worried about it replacing everybody who generates content and ideas.

58:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's oh, which is, on one hand, it's ridiculous, right, you don't need it well, yeah, all I have to do is I have ten thousand, hundred thousand hours with the content on the internet. They could turn me into a bot easily, or could?

58:41 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
they right, I mean well. I mean there's moments when it's really close to the turing test and you're like this is, and then something goes completely sideways and you're like, okay, you blew that, but is it Max Headroom, or it's better than Max Headroom, isn't it?

58:54 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think it's better. This is the thing I'm not worried about having the general artificial intelligence come up and dictate in kind of that uh, the colossus way of, I'm going to take care of you and I'm going to manage human society, so just buckle under and I'll take care of the rest.

59:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just relax, I'm in charge now.

59:16 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think we are at a. I mean, it's not an understatement to say that society is at a change point, inflection point. That's not all that different than the industrial revolution, you think so you think it's that big a deal?

59:30
I have a number of friends that work in the industry, whether they do visual effects, whether they're writers for shows. They're very concerned about it and it's because they are producing work that a lot of these generative AI models are based on and they feel, whether rightly or wrongly, that, one, they're not getting compensated. Two, this is a way for certain companies, certain studios, to say, hey, I will use your stuff once and then I'll use generative AI to fill out the rest. So it's not like it's going to replace them, but it's going to shortchange them. If that makes sense, you agree.

01:00:15 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
It's certainly, if you look. Oh sorry, no go ahead.

01:00:18
I was going to say when you look at, you know kind of entry-level knowledge work. You know information processing the stuff like claims processing for insurance companies. Or you know basic processing the stuff like claims processing for insurance companies. Or you know basic level tech support, a lot of this. You know a lot of people I know who are pretty, you know, not particularly bullish on AI but bullish on giving the best customer experience, are like look, you know if we can train an AI to properly handle that first level of you know customer check right.

01:00:49
Everybody's called into their ISP and like the first or second question is like have you rebooted your modem, have you rebooted your router Right? And there's no reason a lot of that stuff can't be done by AI, and not particularly poorly. It's as it starts getting more and more advanced because they do level two or level three tech support. You know how much programming is it does. Can we trust its programming? How do we create an AI that affords security if you are doing work where your product will end up, you know, in three-letter agencies or the United States military or someplace?

01:01:22
There's a huge number of questions and Roger's absolutely right. You know it's like the beginning of the Industrial revolution. You know, at some level it was like we're going to make more money because we're going to weave cloth faster or make shoes faster, or make steel faster or make whatever faster, you know, and you fast forward 150 years and there's a lot of unintended consequences. I think for some people, what those unintended consequences are is is kind of like you know, is it nightmare fuel? Is it whatever? We'll figure it out as we go along. You know, looking at the energy consumption for a lot of the AI systems, that's a big issue, isn't it?

01:01:58 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Microsoft is working to restart Three.

01:02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mile Island. Granted, it's not the reactor that it's well known for it's not the one that broke, it's the other one.

01:02:08 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Yeah, it's a good one, but I think you know, again, there's a confluence of things. We have a demographic. At least in developed economies you have a demographic crunch. But even in emerging economies, whether it's in Latin America you're looking in East Asia people are getting older, there are fewer young people and so a lot of the nascent labor force that used to be an abundant supply to do all that stuff that made it so cheap to have, you know, your sneakers made at like 50 cents, you know a pair you know in some factory and then sell to you for 100 bucks, isn't there anymore.

01:02:41
And I think companies see AI as sort of a bridge for a lot of that work. And you know it's again, we're in that frothy period where it's really hard to determine how that plays out. What will be impacted is the call centers, right, the call centers that right now are either offshored to India or the Philippines, whether it's you know, have you? You know just websites where you used to have like just a bunch of articles that are written by AI to fill out a webpage to get clicks. I think it is a very I can see a lot of the concern. I don't think it's as negative as people think it will be, but it will require a reevaluation of how our education system prepares people, uh, for a labor market, that is, you know for an understanding of a labor market that's 50 years old part of the problem is it is so unknown right.

01:03:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know exactly what's going to happen. We're living in a in um. I mean, the california tried to pass an ai regulation law which the governor uh vetoed last week, and in a way I was kind of glad he vetoed it, because I think it's too soon. We don't know what AI safety is. We don't know what AI is capable of. We don't know if there'll be a singularity. Maybe it's just going to be a kind of a crappy writing tutor for the rest of our lives, and it seems sensible to kind of wait and see and watch what happens right before we make any decisions about it or regulate it I mean, one of the the truisms that has existed, at least in western society, is that a university education, uh, guaranteed you not maybe a great income, but a decent income.

01:04:26 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Right, you could go through four years, whether it's a bachelor, master's, or maybe not a master's, phd, you would be able to have an expectation of I can get into the corporate world, I can make X amount of dollars, I won't be super rich, but I can get by, I can have kids, I can do all that. That's all changed, right, like having a four-year degree no longer kind of guarantees you a certain standard of living and I think, for so long, what we consider to be white-collar, more educated kind of professions, and we kind of turned our noses down into trades, whether it's carpentry, plumbing, electricians and all that stuff.

01:05:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those won't be replaced. Those jobs are going to be replaced.

01:05:14 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Those are the jobs that my parents' generation. What my uncle does, right. I'm going to be a white collar worker.

01:05:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think your kids will be able to afford a house, Roger?

01:05:23 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I don't know. My wife and I have talked about it. I have already decided that I'm going to leave them my house, this house that I have right now. I'm going to leave it to them. I'm also going to but you're lucky.

01:05:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's generational wealth. It doesn't feel like it, I'm sure, but it is no. No, that's generational wealth.

01:05:38 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I am very, very well aware of how, yeah, there's people that don't get that Right, don't get that. And when the boomers finally shuffle off their mortal coil, we're going to have a demographic deficit, right, because they are such a huge chunk of the population, not just in terms of labor but of consumption, right, those are the people that still buy things, whether it's apparel, vacations or food or groceries. They're spending, and without them in the economy, a lot of things start to change. In fact, you can kind of see how it plays out when you look at countries like Japan that have a very advanced aging economy.

01:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have a problem, don't they? Yeah?

01:06:19 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean, you know this, once your kids are out of the house, your spending totally changes. You don't buy the same things, you tend to spend less, and I think AI is coming at a point where all these things are coming at once and people are like what am I going to do? My kids will not have the same opportunities. They might have better ones, they might have worse ones Too early to tell. But it is something that I think keeps policymakers, as well as just, you know, the regular folks, a little concerned.

01:06:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching a kind of a special version of TWIT, the 1000th episode, a reunion of all the original TWIT hosts. Robert Herron is here, and David Prager and Roger Chang and Patrick Norton. We're glad you guys could be here. It's really kind of fun to talk to you and find out what you've been up to today and what you think of the world today. We're going to take a little break. Come back with a lot more, so hang in there. Our show today, brought to you this week by CODA C-O-D-A.

01:07:27
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01:08:24
Take advantage of a limited time offer. This is just for startups. Coda C-O-D-A dot I-O slash twit. If you go to Coda dot I-O slash twit today, you'll get six Whoa, I didn't see this number. Wow, six free months of the team plan. That is a great way to get started. C-o-d-a dot I-O slash twit Start. Start for free. Six free months of the team plan uh, that's a. I love it when advertisers do that. That's a sign that they are confident you're going to start using it and say we can't live without a codaio twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech in our 1000th episode.

01:09:08
Uh, let's see here. Well, I should say, by the way, welcome to our viewers. We have, right now, 1,598 people watching on seven different streams. We stream on Discord for our Club Twit members, of course, youtube, as we have for many years. We also are on twitchtv, youtubecom, twit, twitchtv twit. We're on facebook, linkedin, xcom and kick. There you go. Seven different ways you can watch and I'm seeing a very active chat in all of those places. It's really great to see uh everybody in there. Thank you, uh, for being here for our 1000th episode. When we first started doing this show, it was audio only and I don't know if you remember, but we were like on AOL radio. We got some bandwidth from AOL, we got some bandwidth from here. A cup of bandwidth there cobbled it all together. It was just a crazy thing and I had no idea how we were going to get. As the numbers started going up, how we could get this out to people, I thought I'll just put it on a website. No, it doesn't work that way.

01:10:15 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I always laugh yeah, like I say, I remember somebody was like you know, bandwidth cost nothing. And I just had this bitter laugh in a meeting and they're like what's your damage? And I'm like, I remember redoing all of the rendering and all of the output for DL TV and I reduced our bandwidth cost by like 10 grand in a single place, by shrinking the file by shrinking everything down and somebody's like wait what I'm like trying to explain.

01:10:42
You know the early days of content, you know data, networks and how everything worked. Really, that's ridiculous. I'm like, well, yeah, you used to pay a lot of money. Now you don't?

01:10:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, it's gotten much easier. I mean, look at those seven places we're streaming. It's basically free for us. We don't have to pay for that. That's only a fraction of the people who end up downloading the show, but I think it's still nice. I think it's important you always did this to offer a live version if you can, because that's what you do, roger, with DTNS, because live is more interactive. People can talk back to you, you can have a conversation.

01:11:17 - Roger Chang (Guest)
It's more interactive, but it also. What I found is it gives the chance for the community to talk amongst themselves in a way that they normally couldn't if it was just a download.

01:11:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then they said that's what's happening in the chat rooms. Yeah, that's really cool, isn't it? They know each other now. Many of them have known each other for years and have chatted together for years.

01:11:36 - Roger Chang (Guest)
It's really, it's amazing I, and it's I again. I'm always impressed because there is a quality of conversation I think that you would be missing out on if it wasn't live, if you didn't have that option. Even if it's a small subset of the entire viewing or a listening audience, it's still engaging and it allows people who maybe haven't seen a live show. But it's like hey, I've heard that guy make comments three times. I want to be on it, I want to go live so I can talk not just with Sarah Tom during the show but also talk to the other members of the community.

01:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It develops a parasocial relationship between your audience and you right.

01:12:18 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Well, it turns that parasocial instead of like oh I look at you from a distance to a more bidirectional conversation, which I think is what you kind of want.

01:12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But we always experience that right, Patrick, We'd go out to those signings. I see people all the time who say I saw you and Patrick in Tom's River, or I remember the time we were in the CompUSA parking lot and it was a long line and we've been signing and signing and the rental company came and they took the table in the tent, oh yeah, and we and we still were signing and signing and signing.

01:12:53
They actually took the thing down because you only rented it for three hours or whatever those are amazing experiences because it was, even though it was a brief encounter, it was like meeting people you knew I would know it was.

01:13:05 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
It was, absolutely it was. I think it was Harry who sat me down when I first started. I don't know if you guys remember.

01:13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Harry Fuller yeah.

01:13:12 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Harry Fuller was like look, you don't understand. Yet, like you know, people are going to develop this intense relationship with you and you, just you know they're going to. They're going to watch you over dinner. You're going to be in their living room, they living room. They're going to see you more than they see their closest friends. They're going to watch you in bed. They're going to watch you.

01:13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
God help me in the toilet and I was just like I was like Harry, you're not really helping my anxiety.

01:13:33 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
But it was really amazing because, you know, writing for websites or magazines never had that kind of impact on an audience. So, yeah, it was that first time we went to St Louis. It was kind of like audience. So, yeah, it was that first time we went to st louis it was kind of like oh wow, um, what just happened?

01:13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there are people here. I remember the very first thing we did, the tech tv, uh sales team was going to las vegas, uh, just to kind of promote us with the cable company there and kate and I found out and kate said, well, why can we go? And they said, you want to go? They said, yeah, we'd like to, we'd like to go, and I think it was at a comp, usa. And I remember getting out of the car in the parking lot. I remember Kate grabbing my arm, her nails dug into my arm. She said there are people here. There were and there weren't. It was a hundred some degrees. Uh, ken Marcus.

01:14:26
Remember Ken from our producer. He hired me. He kept applying chapstick to my lips. He was going around, he looked like he had a greasy grin, but it was so hot I think he was trying to take care of us. It was a little strange. Patrick, I'm going to play something. This will be a blast from the past. To understand this, you have to remember that this is around 1999 and Dell computers had a very successful campaign with. That stoner guy said dude, you're getting Adele. And uh, we made this parody of that.

01:15:07 - TechTV (Announcement)
Mr and Mrs Nortoncorn, heyorton Corn. Hey, it's me Martin, the kid from next door. Sorry about the rhododendrons. Anywho, patrick here needs some help with his computer.

01:15:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi Mom, it's Martin Sargent Now Mr.

01:15:17 - TechTV (Announcement)
Norton Corn. Here's the deal you can get our friend Patrick the help he needs at Tech TV. All you have to do is watch Ta-da. Tell them what they get, patrick. They get Leo and Martin and Patrick and Jessica and Megan. Very good, patrick and Mrs Norton Bean. That's Norton Corn actually. Whatever the screensavers are on every weeknight. Perhaps that's why it's America's favorite computer help show. Perhaps Get the screensavers every weeknight at 7, 6 Central on Tech TV, all the computer help you need free, no special deals, no CD burner, no legal blah-de-blah ready, mr and Mrs Laporte, it's me, martin.

01:15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I miss Martin Sargent. He was something else. He was. He's still around. What am I saying? I sound like he's he's still around, but he is uh. He's a great fella and a very funny uh comic um he's a very good writer.

01:16:07 - David Prager (Guest)
Uh, because I used to.

01:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to have him do copyright work for me he worked at one of the big ad agencies, uh in San Francisco.

01:16:15 - David Prager (Guest)
Yeah but what's cool is I. I always saw him, as you know, he's really good at writing, you know sophomore comedy and that's not a dig, I mean she's really good at it. And then he started like writing serious stuff that would like pull up heartstrings about some of the promotions I was doing. And he just struck me how good of a writer he is. And actually, since we were just talking about it, I mean it speaks to what Patrick was even saying and Roger was talking a little bit about. Is that the personality that you can pull out a good copywriting, that it's going to be a while It'll get there, but it's going to be a while before you can really get that kind of pros from a seasoned writer.

01:16:49 - Roger Chang (Guest)
And I think you know Tom Merritt's been saying this for a while is that the future of AI will be kind of narrow cast to train on your specific data. So, david, you would have it train on your writing style. So that particular AI will be like David. You know, david, chad, chad, chad Prager or whatever GPT.

01:17:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think it will be able to impersonate David effectively?

01:17:13 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think it will His voice. I think it will do enough his voice that you could do a lot of the boilerplate emails I remember.

01:17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would read John C Dvorak, another early member of our little club here, and you could hear his voice. When you read his columns you can hear him go. You can really hear it, and that was when I first realized that a good columnist especially columnist they don't let reporters have voice but a good columnist, you can hear their voice as you're reading their text. But that seems like a very hard thing for an AI to do.

01:17:51 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I think we're at a good moment. I was going to say. I think we're at a good moment where there's still a bit of the uncanny valley where you can look at a photograph or you can look at text and almost tell it's still AI, but that is starting to blur. That's what I worry about when we can't tell.

01:18:08
It'll be a while though, I think, and I totally see a market, though, for being able to train these systems on your own personal data, especially going forward. You think about just the market alone, for, especially as people have recorded themselves, more now so than at any time in history, you could transform that into like almost like a living thing of someone who's passed, and to be able to experience grandma or grandpa 20 years from now with all the content they've ever produced, and there's a certain level of creepiness to that. But I think there's also a desire for a lot of people and the other aspect of AI too is just simply as someone to talk to for mental health. There is quite a bit that can be done in that aspect too, where people might be more comfortable talking to the computer rather than taking that first step toward getting into a professional's office.

01:19:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, let me talk about mental health a little bit, because that's another thing that has been coming up a lot in the last few years is this notion that the internet, and social media in particular, is bad for mental health and that we somehow have to protect our kids, uh, from social media. David prager, are you gonna keep your two-year-old off of uh tiktok or whatever is I?

01:19:23 - David Prager (Guest)
guess 10 years from now. For me she's. She's too young for me to dwell on it too much, but um well, you're gonna have to face this, though at some point. Oh no, no, I know, yeah, I mean, you know, I'm to the point where you know the main enticement of using a screen, even which was just a lean back experience, would be to distract her, so I don't have to deal with her type of thing do you ever give her the ipad and say uh, mommy and daddy the only time we do that is when we're cutting her fingernails oh, that's a good place for it, but that

01:19:51
makes sense. Yeah, it's something to think about, you know I. What's interesting is, if you look at, you know, what social media has done for you know, adolescents on instagram and a few other networks is, is that I almost feel like the reaction has been, in a weird way, in a glass half full kind of way, faster than I would have thought. It's taken less than a generation well, under a generation for the alarm bells to sound off. The fix isn't there. It's starting to get there. So I'm kind of cautiously optimistic that by the time you know my daughter is six and seven and eight, which is still, you know, four and five and six years from now, um, that maybe the infrastructure we put in place to have a better understanding of how to foster a growing brain and how to have positive social interaction skills develop, because there's a gap of a couple of years or more where we do have issues with that, and maybe I'm lucky that you know my daughter's young enough that maybe we'll be able to figure it out a little bit better. Patrick, what?

01:20:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did you do with your kids?

01:20:52 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Well, I mean we to a certain degree. We, you know, we did the same thing we talked about doing before. I had kids, which was, you know, the computers were out in public, we didn't let them use iPads in the room. We monitored their consumption. You know something I've been lucky, I've been.

01:21:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As soon as it's a phone, it's very hard to keep an eye on it, isn't it?

01:21:09 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
yes and no. I mean, it was going to say I've been lucky in that. You know, seamus is kind of gen z? Uh or gen alpha, in the sense that he just really isn't interested in a lot of the social media and it's it's been interesting to watch sort of early gen z versus late gen z, where there's, as you younger, they sort of look at social media as being this kind of incredible waste of time if they're not deeply enmeshed with it. So, you know it, it's been very curious to watch that uh cause Seamus looks at at.

01:21:40
You know, it doesn't really matter if it's Tik TOK or Instagram or or you know any of a number of other places where he's just like this is where people go to prove how stupid they are in public. Um, uh, you know, uh, he has a particularly fantastic going off on the whole, like people eating tide. You know the little tide things, and you know it was, I dunno. I, I've been lucky that way. I'm hoping for Prager that he doesn't have to deal with it at all, that they've, you know, mutated it down to the point where it's not even something people care about.

01:22:12 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Um, because, you know, especially when you're raising daughters, it's kind of like oh gee, whiz it was kind of interesting where sweden recently passed new guidelines suggesting that parents not expose any child under three years old to a screen period, and then from that point forward it was like, oh geez, they got the lights too late it bugs me when the government, though, tells parents how to raise their kids I mean, these were guidelines, though it, though it makes sense.

01:22:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, the parent it's. Ultimately it's the parents job this is.

01:22:45 - Roger Chang (Guest)
This is where my kids are. They both have fire tablets that I put google play on, but I I limit to what they access and I'm also very judicious about making sure they're not on social media. The only close enough social media, outside of maybe YouTube Shorts, is Roblox, but Roblox is like the one place where they can actually talk to their friends online. I hate Roblox. It is definitely an acquired. It's a hive of scum and villainy. This is the thing. One of the things that my wife and I do is to kind of make sure they understand what they see. I watch what they watch and I go through and I explain that guy doing that he probably either hurt himself very bad or, in some cases, that was totally fake.

01:23:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's one of those things where I have to explain like I don't leave it up to there it's probably good, I would imagine, to sit with a kid and go through some of these and say, okay, do you think that was real? It wasn't real. Those people were acting, in fact, to teach them media literacy, in effect, right well, I mean we started that when the boys were basically zygotes.

01:23:57 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I mean, you know, shameless, we started identifying advertising for shameless you have to right from the point he was capable of forming sentences.

01:24:06
They want you to buy that cereal shameless yeah it's bad for you I mean it's, you know, when you talk about the guidelines for the american academy of pediatrics are like, basically outside of video chatting, they're like you keep your kids off the screens. From 18 months and younger, you know, between 18 and 24, you can start introducing high quality media, you know, in small amounts. You know, don't hand them an iPad and walk away. Also been interesting. Like you know, there's been a couple cases, you know, where I've seen, you know, shames at one point, you know, snuck away with an ipad and coming back I realized he'd been on youtube for like four hours and seeing some of the holes that people end up on youtube oh, you can get.

01:24:49
There's this weird mixture of mind-boggling and terrifying.

01:24:52 - Roger Chang (Guest)
We're just like, yeah, yeah I think it's very important to understand that all that doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? Social media isn't this one thing that will either corrupt or liberate your child from whatever notions they have about life, and I think, as with anything else, there just needs to be consistent active parental engagement with everything. Needs to be consistent active parental engagement with everything, because what happens on social media doesn't exist constantly for their kids, because when they go to school at least when my kids go to school they talk about these things with their peers, and my daughter constantly asks me questions like so-and-so, says this is going to happen, we're all going to get washed away and the flood happens. And I told her it's, it's like no, that's why we have storm drains. You see these big holes with the greats.

01:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That takes the water away it's a teaching moment, isn't it?

01:25:46 - Roger Chang (Guest)
it's, it's constant. You know you constantly need to. I mean, people have been saying this since TV, right, tv's gonna rot your brain before TV.

01:25:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They said it. Jeff Jarvis, who's one of our hosts on this Week in Google, has written books about this. They said it about novels. They said people. They said it about pretty much every form of media. People are going to read novels and they're going to lose their ability to imagine stuff.

01:26:11 - Roger Chang (Guest)
They said this about comic books and the whole comic report. Seduction of the Innocent, the whole thing was like hey, your sons are running away up to the woods and they're carrying all these packs of comics with all sorts of weird and creepy things. They're going to get weird ideas. They're maybe commit a felony or worse.

01:26:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're just corruptible because they're so Right here in River City and that starts with a T and that round of B.

01:26:34 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Like you know, the old things, like the old Crypt Keeper comics where there's horror there's crime, and that's why they created the comic book code right, because they were afraid of kids becoming demented and movies Like there was a thing where you know people who were aberrant in behavior were punished at the end of the movie to show that you could not get away with it.

01:26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That justice would happen in the end the movie code yeah.

01:26:58 - Roger Chang (Guest)
And so.

01:26:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean Bad guys always have to lose, but I think in most cases we're smarter than that, aren't we?

01:27:04 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think what worries people is the scale right. Your kids can access my kids can access a tablet a lot quicker and it's and.

01:27:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI adding to that, and then foreign governments trying to subvert our-.

01:27:17 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Well, and this is why you constantly have a conversation with your children, right, you don't just say see you at the end of the week, you know, after you've maturated and soaked and marinated in all. The social media Also encourage other behavior, like. One of the things my daughter really enjoys is watching YouTube shorts where people draw, because she draws along, see that's great.

01:27:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's stuff like that. There are so many YouTube channels that are a better education than school. If you're started and want to know more about storm drains, I guarantee you there is a storm drain channel on YouTube.

01:27:51 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Watch it Really, I swear y'all storm drains for a while.

01:27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's going to go down the storm drain rabbit hole, and then you got trouble.

01:28:00 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think what's overwhelming for parents is there's just so many avenues for this stuff to come through.

01:28:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's hard because it's all new stuff that we didn't grow up with right.

01:28:10 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Yeah, and we grew up in TV and we grew up through the threshold of the invention of social media right, so we were already adults. Well, that's my question for all of us of the invention of social media right? So we were already-.

01:28:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's my question for all of us. Did we so? This has come up a lot lately with AI regulation. In fact, it happened on Wednesday. We had a guy on he said you know what? We didn't regulate social media when it started. We should have. We made a mistake. We've learned now that we made a mistake, that social media is deleterious to your mental health. Let Social media is deleterious to your mental health. Let's not make the same mistake with AI.

01:28:40 - Roger Chang (Guest)
That is what people are saying now. I think what is most damaging about social media is that the bulk of humanity has access to it, and what I've learned? Isn't that the best thing about it? So this is the thing. I was super big into the fandom. Patrick knows I used to go to Comic-Con every year. I was super big into the fandom.

01:28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Patrick knows I used to go to Comic-Con every year, Whenever we needed to know the name of a military vehicle or a military plane, we would say Roger, what is that?

01:29:07 - Roger Chang (Guest)
And he would say he would know. But those communities were really supportive, strong, but they were also very small. As more of a broader scope of humanity entered them, you got a lot of the same issues that you have in broader society. You have bullying, you have people making objective remarks about people the way they look, their appearance, their religious affiliation, their ethnic, racial background All the things that people try to get away from mainstream society seeps back in and I think social media has crested, uh, past the point where it was just a select few people were super into it.

01:29:45
Now to everyone and everyone's voice, opinion or whatever is kind of given the same level of of weight. And I think a lot of that has to do with where we are culturally on how to filter that. Because you know, when I was watching, you know when we were growing up and watching TV, we already had all the kind of rules about don't believe everything you see on TV. Some of that's just special effects Other than that someone just trying to sell you stuff. You know it isn't real. It's all fake, right. All it's all fake right. With social media we're still in that phase of like filtering out people, but because there's so many more people. With immediate and and uh quick access to it, they can indulge uh the emotive part of their brain rather than the rational part of their brain there's also.

01:30:31 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I mean, something you're you're not really acknowledging here is is so much as social media is built around an algorithm. The algorithm algorithm is engineered to generate traffic. It doesn't care if it's good traffic or bad traffic. It just wants more traffic to run more ads against. And that's where things get really, really weird. I mean, who can remember the last time they saw you know who? There's five people in this group who here has actually seen something they wanted to see in their Facebook feed actually pop up in their Facebook feed? Oh, never.

01:31:00 - Roger Chang (Guest)
And I haven't been using it since. You're totally right, patrick. You're totally right. Same thing with TV, though. There was a reason why reality TV took a boom in the early to mid-2000s because that was not only inexpensive, but people would watch it.

01:31:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was algorithmically driven in the sense that they knew this was what they wanted.

01:31:20 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Nielsen ratings right it didn't matter if it was Real Housewives of New Jersey or Orange County or Miami.

01:31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The feedback loop is tighter. You had to wait for the ratings to come out and you had to make sure. Now it's instant right. Oh, they like this, they like this, they like this.

01:31:32 - Roger Chang (Guest)
The scale deluge is so much quicker right, you can get smacked up the head quicker with clickbait than you could before.

01:31:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wouldn't want to watch TikTok without an algorithm. I promise you.

01:31:43 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I think it's healthy to realize that's what they're doing and that's how that system works and to be able to see that and to have that healthy skepticism, along with a well-rounded education, is an ideal that all of us have had, and that is what makes us people people like us too a little bit different from, yeah, maybe a lot of people just haven't had the similar opportunities.

01:32:04 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Well, and also a lot of people engage with social media.

01:32:07
Awful often do times in an emotional state where there might not be, in the best of mind, right, whether it's don't drink and type so back back in my health or call back in back in my high school health class we had to watch a video or a film not a video, but a film made in the late 60s by uh that showcased a reverend who had a drinking problem and he kind of described it in a very non-religious way of what was happening. And the whole thing was that alcohol removed the rational part of your decision making, just leaving your emotional component to take over. And I think when people engage with social media and they are maybe emotionally vulnerable or they might be like they're looking for comfort they are seeking certain things.

01:32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, to help them, you know I mean, when I see fan duel ads, one after the other, on football games, I think of all the people who are addicted to gambling. And now you can bet, like every three seconds you can place another it is yeah, it's terrifying the american way, though I mean it's capital alcohol.

01:33:16 - Robert Heron (Guest)
If if cigarettes could still be advertised on TV, they would yeah, and we'd be smoking like chimneys, all right.

01:33:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to take a little break because I gotta advertise something better than cigarettes. Thousandth episode. I remember now why I love you guys so much and I love getting together with you guys my old friends from tech tv who helped us start this week in tech a thousand shows ago. That is um a long long freaking time, isn't it?

01:33:47 - David Prager (Guest)
20 years how many, how many of those episodes were you not on? You think?

01:33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, almost all of them. No, I was here.

01:33:53 - David Prager (Guest)
No, no, no I mean, I just know that you like, you missed maybe six uh, no more than that.

01:33:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably uh six a year, let's say six a year, so 120, so that's probably on.

01:34:04
That's a good record well, yeah, you know, this is one show I I kind of it's hard for me to miss, but when I go on vacation we have good people who come in and fill in for us, uh, and that's nice. But uh, you know, I'm getting close to retirement. I'll be honest with you guys. I don't know how much, how much longer I can do this. You ever think. None of you you're all 20 years younger than me you got at least you got a long way to go.

01:34:29 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I'm a. I'm a gen x and younger. Yeah, we don't really expect to retire you don't expect to retire.

01:34:35 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Remember there was a whole thing like don't expect social security to be around when you need it, like when you reach your 60. Listen, I'll be 50 this year. I'll be lucky to see any of the money my parents got from Social Security, that's true, that's true.

01:34:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You guys are paying my Social Security, so I just want to thank you very much believe me, I am very well aware.

01:34:54
Keep up that good work uh, all right, I'll take a break. We'll come back with lots more with a wonderful group of people. Uh, I hope you're enjoying this trip down memory lane and it's fun to get you know a perspective from people been covering tech for 20 30 years on what's going on today too. I think that's very interesting. And and and and robert heron I, I think you're saying you might have blackouts. Your lights are flickering. They have a few times today and it's really hot in the bay area, unusually and we're in peak energy usage at the moment.

01:35:26 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Hottest time of the day it's been over 100 degrees.

01:35:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For the last and I have 5 000 watts of lights on right now.

01:35:34 - Robert Heron (Guest)
It's my fault I have doors closed. I think the air AC is running.

01:35:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have fans on Lisa, my wife just came up and said I don't think the AC is working in the house. I have something to do with all these?

01:35:45 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I. One of the things I learned after moving down to LA is you pre-cool your house in the morning when it's cold enough for your AC to heat up.

01:35:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the Texas trick. You open up all the windows and doors, get the cool air and then you seal it up I'm also in a rental with very poor insulation. I've come to discover good on the west side of the house well, robert, if, if you need to, if you hit some point, the lights go out, we'll just say okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was robert heron, I do appreciate it.

01:36:14 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Don't sweat it. I don't want you to think I'm just pulling the plug here.

01:36:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no, no hey, uh, we uh want to say thank you to our sponsor, long time sponsor of our shows melissa the data quality experts since 1985. Even longer than we've been around. When you need the full white glove service, or if you just need the nuts and bolts, melissa is the best for your enterprise. Melissa now offers transparent pricing for all its services, so that's nice. You don't have to guess when estimating your business budget. Join the 10 000 businesses worldwide that have benefited from melissa's industry leading solutions.

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01:38:31
Melissa, of course, treats your data like the gold that it is. They're committed to the security and privacy of all the client data in their care through responsible use. I mean they have a 38 year history of establishing and refining their controls to secure data. They're socked to hipaa, high trust, gdpr compliant, so you don't have to worry. Your data is safe with melissa. Get started today, try it out right now with 1000 records clean for free at Melissacom slash twit. Melissacom slash twit. If you have data, you got to keep it clean. That's the, that's the most valuable thing in your business and and you could do it with Melissa at a very affordable price Melissacom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech, episode 1000, and we've brought together some of the old timers, uh, from the original, the very first episode, actually episodes zero and one patrick norton, robert heron, david prager, uh, and of course, roger chang.

01:39:35
Roger, you ever get one of the? Get these meta glasses? You ever try these at all? Anybody use these? I'm going to take your picture right now. Look at that. See that little light. You'd never know I'm taking your picture. Have you tried them anybody?

01:39:51 - Robert Heron (Guest)
no, do they link to your phone for the processing.

01:39:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah some of it and they have very good sound in the temple pieces and they just did an update, which means I can, I can look at, I press stuff and I can, or I can just say, hey, meta, what am I looking at right now? And it'll say in fact, it does. It says you're looking at a. I'm at this, thinking I'll tell you a workspace with various electronic devices, cables and and equipment. There's also a person visible on the screen. A workspace with various cables and electronic devices and equipment. There's also a person on the screen in front of you. That's what it just told me. Now, these are getting better and better.

01:40:29
Some students figured out a way to put face recognition technology on these, and that's a little scary. This is a service called PimEyes. It's a face recognition technology and these Harvard students were able to put PimEyes on their meta glasses. And well, let's face it, mac on some poor woman on a subway by pulling up her docs. That is a scary, scary thought. This is something Google and others decided not to do for the long, you know, but if you can get around it with a metaglass, it's just a matter of time. Are you guys worried about this kind of use of AI recognition and things like that?

01:41:22 - Robert Heron (Guest)
never trust anyone wearing glasses. That's what it is oh, great, great.

01:41:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what, that's what I need to know so Robert and Roger are both wearing glasses, in case I mean.

01:41:33 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean this is the thing if you're in a public area, especially around something that tends to have a high audience.

01:41:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're probably already on camera, aren't you?

01:41:42 - Roger Chang (Guest)
You're already on camera, and they do use software Maybe not AI, but they use pattern recognition to I feel bad for your kids.

01:41:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Again, I'm feeling terrible for your kids, except for you, robert. I don't feel bad for your kids, but I feel bad for your guys' kids, because they're growing up in a world where everything is observed and recorded right. There's nothing that's not on camera.

01:42:06 - Robert Heron (Guest)
This also goes back to just having that healthy skepticism of when, especially with interactions with strangers, and it's like, look, maybe they are using a tool like that, maybe they do know things about you and you're being approached for some reason. It seems like a rare event, it doesn't seem like something I don't think you have to walk around being afraid of 24-7, but some people might and depending especially if you're just in a position where you have information somebody wants or somebody's trying to hit on you for some nefarious purpose.

01:42:40 - Roger Chang (Guest)
But I mean, this is the thing. It already happens with people on their cell phones, right that. Where do you think all these tiktok videos of people getting into a punch out at wall? You know, at the walfa house at 2 am in the morning it's, you know, they don't need glasses to do that. And I think one of the things is we haven't as a society, as a culture, sort of set up the barriers of what's considered appropriate and inappropriate for the technology. We're again still in that churn phase, in the same way that we've had for other technologies right. Recording someone without their prior knowledge is a big no technologies right. Recording someone without their prior knowledge is a big no-no right.

01:43:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting because and Joe in our Discord is mentioning this nowadays, if you're hiring people, you're just going to have to assume that there are pictures of them drunk on Facebook, right? I mean it's just it's no longer disqualified.

01:43:33 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
You don't have to assume In some cases yeah, I mean in some cases- but it's not disqualifying you don't have to assume In some cases it's going to be checked.

01:43:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean in some cases, but it's not disqualifying. Good luck hiring somebody who hasn't done that Well.

01:43:43 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
A drunk picture is one thing, Any of a number of unfortunate behaviors Like wearing a kilt. Yeah.

01:43:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody wants to know if you're wearing a kilt right now, Patrick.

01:43:54 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I am not wearing a kilt right now.

01:44:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you right now, patrick.

01:44:01 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I am not wearing a kilt right now have you worn a kilt since the screensavers absolutely yes, oh, but you know I'm on a wooden chair.

01:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's uncomfortable utility kilts yeah but we did an episode, didn't we do an episode where we all wore kilts, everyone more kills.

01:44:13 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
That was, uh, that was our, that was our going away present from a certain vp of content that was our going-away president, from a certain VP of content who, as his going-away president, told us to put everyone in kilts as his FU to the company that had bought us at the time.

01:44:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wasn't David Pogue one of the guests on that day? I don't think so. I think it might be.

01:44:39 - TechTV (Announcement)
I'm just going to look, but I bet you it's on youtube tonight. Tom hanks and ron howard, bring apollo 13.

01:44:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Music in january. No, this is not this savers logo, your desktop and it's actually uh, right here on the screensavers if you scroll down. This is not the uh kilt episode. Let me see if I I can.

01:44:57 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
There's a lot of kilts, but there's one where it was all kilts.

01:45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maximum kiltage is what it's called. The only thing I remember from that episode is you can't spin in a kilt, because it goes right up like that.

01:45:15 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
You can.

01:45:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You may immediately regret the experience I want to see, if I can find it. Don't take anything you plug into a wall Video of that.

01:45:27 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
It's maximum kilting on.

01:45:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
YouTube Camera with the Kodak identifier. Look how young we were.

01:45:34 - Kevin Rose (Caller)
Patrick.

01:45:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Eight-digit serial number. I had air. Contact your dealer.

01:45:37 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I'll tell you what.

01:45:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you own one of these cameras, go to the screensaverscom. We've got a link to you. Look, exactly the same, patrick. You have changed, not a bit.

01:45:47 - Robert Heron (Guest)
It's because I'm wearing a hat and that is the uh.

01:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is the temporary uh tech tv. Uh, what was it? Tech live news set that we were on there. Let me see if I can find the. I really don't know. I've seen this.

01:46:03 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
There's a crazy picture with the entire basically all of our producers and on-air talent In kilts, all wearing the kilts yeah, yeah, I know.

01:46:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, here it is the Maximum Kiltage episode.

01:46:17 - TechTV (Announcement)
Coming up tonight. Enter the future with the author of Exit Strategy, douglas.

01:46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ruchoff. That's again Martin Sargent, who I think is wearing a kilt.

01:46:27 - TechTV (Announcement)
To create a visual graph of results? And should a man be allowed to wear a kilt on national television Live from the Tech TV studios in san francisco?

01:46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's the screensaver I'm gonna skip this part, because we've all seen this. Here we are there's kevin in a kilt, megan in the kilt, chafing.

01:46:48 - TechTV (Announcement)
There's martin in the kilt. Darcy, do you mind if we what?

01:46:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about the guy darcy and the kilt she's got the hip hugger kilt. No, I'm talking all the camera, guys.

01:46:58 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Oh, javier, this is really going up?

01:47:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, steve Porter is not wearing a kilt, he's got pants on. Are you a weirdo? Steve Porter at dignity the reason we're doing this is Patrick, as you know, is known for his kilt and stopped wearing them, and we got lots of letters. There was a whole campaign Get that camera off the ground.

01:47:21 - TechTV (Announcement)
I am not working. Get back. There was a whole campaign. Now I know why girls cross their legs. There was a whole campaign.

01:47:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do believe later on I spin and I think that they might have caught a little bit of something as I went out the rest of you links for making money on selling kilts yeah, did we ever get ads for utility kilts?

01:47:49 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
no, of course not no, they didn't have enough money to buy ads uh, so you still, you still wear it sales ads.

01:47:59 - David Prager (Guest)
That's why I said affiliate sales.

01:48:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get Brad on the line. Will you See what he could do? Get some.

01:48:05 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Affiliate sales don't really start until Wirecutter. You could argue that Wirecutter's success with affiliate sales is what made Google search so horrendous in the last few years.

01:48:15 - David Prager (Guest)
You're talking about when you click that link, link, they get a percentage of the sale price yeah, before, before drones were popular, we we had these like tiny little 30 remote control helicopters and we did an episode of dignation where we're trying to land them on the top of a beer can and I created an amazon affiliate link and I think we sold like 20 000 little helicopters. It was ridiculous holy cow yeah, I mean at 13 each. I think we got, like you know, a dollar each, but a dollar times 20 000 bucks, there you go yeah that ain't bad, covers the rent yeah um.

01:48:52
Going back to what you said about the, the um, the ai, facial recognition, I mean, I, I, I kind of like the fact that in general in a big city, that cctv covers most square blocks, so like if something bad happens generally going to be available on camera. But I think on the facial recognition it's. It's really scary, but the cat is unfortunately out of the bag. Those databases persist and you're not gonna be able to hide them. Yeah, and it's just that you're gonna have to. You're not as anonymous you, you're gonna, as you used to be able to be, and that's by the way I'm.

01:49:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm looking on wikipedia and it turns out we did, of the screensavers in san francisco, 1 375 episodes, patrick. So this one thousandth twit, no big at all, but that was five days a week, that's true, yeah, and overall 1483 episodes. They only did 107 in los angeles, but then they changed the name to attack of the show.

01:49:51 - David Prager (Guest)
So you talk about kevin pereira and interviewing roger right, yeah, you're talking about interviewing him. He and Gavin Purcell, who's actually kind of my boss at G4 for a hot minute. They have a show called AI for Humans and it's actually quite good.

01:50:05 - Roger Chang (Guest)
They just go over everything with a little bit of a comedic bent and I mean, I'll be honest, if I just scroll through their show notes, I generally have a decent idea of what's going on in the industry he was talking about, like they do have an AI-generated co-host, slash, contributor to that show, which is hilarious, but they often go over some of the new technologies and some of the new AI services for creators, and so you know, it's definitely, definitely, you know, a double-edged sword. You know, for some people, yeah, I, I no longer will be able to make money doing this bit, uh. But if you're you're a creator, you need some music and you want it in certain like a show tune. You hit up udio right like I want a, I want a theme song that sounds like chef, but maybe not exactly like Shaft, and it will generate. You throw in your lyrics, you get something pretty good. There's one for Dune, the musical, which is hilarious.

01:51:08 - David Prager (Guest)
Also, when you listen to a lot of this stuff I don't know if someone coined the term, but I always hear people referencing it that's as bad as it'll ever be. If you use a tool and you're like it's only going to get better term, but I always hear people referencing it. That's as bad as it'll ever be like if you, if you use a tool and you're like when it's only going to get better will smith eating spaghetti, and it was a hilarious joke.

01:51:25
Terrible at first, yeah, but if you look at it, I mean that, but that's as bad as it'll ever be. And if you look at someone trying to recreate that now, you can't tell if it's a real video. Will smith eating spaghetti or not?

01:51:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the only real question is will it continue to get better at the same rate, or is it going to plateau off?

01:51:40 - Roger Chang (Guest)
And that's where the power generation comes in right, Because a lot of these AI models require a lot of computational power.

01:51:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And money. Sam Altman says $7 trillion to build the next generation of chips needed to make super intelligence.

01:51:55 - Roger Chang (Guest)
We talked about this on Friday's DTNS with Molly Wood and she was talking about how, at Climate Week in New York City, one of the big conversations that everyone was having was how big tech companies were kind of planning out power stations, power generation, to power their data centers, because the needs are just going to keep growing exponentially unless generative AI doesn't take off, and it's a huge boondoggle to power their data centers because the needs are just going to keep growing exponentially unless, like AI doesn't, generative AI doesn't take off and it's a huge boondoggle which is highly unlikely.

01:52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I noticed that Kevin is doing this show on YouTube. Is that if you were going to create a new screensavers, you would probably do it there, right, you wouldn't do it on a television network anymore, it would be one, I would-.

01:52:40 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I mean, you can't really do a screensavers on YouTube, because YouTube only wants a single subject per segment it hates covering multiple things. The SEO is a nightmare. Ask me how I know the SEO for multiple subjects in a single segment is problematic.

01:52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember, patrick, you were on it. We did the new screen savers on on twit, but yeah, it didn't do very well, yeah I mean it's, it is better to make short content that is focused onto one particular subject terrible at that and all along.

01:53:12 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I mean there's see that influencing content creators too, yeah yeah, yeah, no, I mean I have. I have friends who no longer do any long form comment content and it's all shorts, because they can generate the same amount of revenue for, you know, a two minute video that they can for a 15 minute do people not want other cases. It's stuff anymore, so there's a ton of long stuff we would have killed these seem to be getting longer I think I mean youtube.

01:53:35
There's tons of 30, 40 minutes. There's even a whole segment of YouTube where people talk for like three and a half hours straight on one subject.

01:53:43 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think I mean, I think part of it is a lot of the creators I followed no longer rely on their YouTube channels as a prime source of revenue. They use it. They use it as a way to coach their content, a way to grab eyeballs. But they to grab eyeballs, but they direct people to their Patreon or whatever else that they're using to make up a majority of their. You still need YouTube because it is a free seat and it's a free movie theater for people to go watch your content.

01:54:12 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
But do not expect to make the kind. Almost 3 billion people are on YouTube.

01:54:15 - Roger Chang (Guest)
But do not expect it to be the kind of cash cow it was even five years ago, because that boat has long since sailed away. But it is an important aggregator of eyeballs and from there you can direct hey, support you, love our content. You see this at least in all the shows I watch or channels I watch. Love our content, support us on Patreon. And they give out their address. So even if you have a 10% conversion on that and you get like 100,000 views, that's still a decent what? 10,000 people? That's still a decent chunk of people that you convert, even if they're like a dollar a month. Subscribers to our supporters on on patron. That helps out a lot. And if you can get them to, you know, raise awareness of your content to their friends and family. You know, it's really just. I mean, they hate this, hate this word so much because it's overused, but you kind of have to hustle to get to get that audience in as many places as you can.

01:55:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But is that what you do at DTNS? What is the secret? Because Tom's done very well with DTNS, obviously.

01:55:23 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean DTNS is. I mean we're on Twitch, we're on YouTube, we have our Patreon feeds, we're on Acast. We try to be in as many places that make sense for us.

01:55:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And all the revenue, though, is from listener support right.

01:55:40 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Well, I would say a majority of our support comes. Do you have ads? Our Patreon level is clear of ads. We do do Acast, which inserts it, but that's free. That is the free tier.

01:55:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, somebody told me we do direct ad insertion as well through libsyn, and uh, they said that's the best reason to join the club, because the inserted ads are so awful that I want to join the club to get the ad free version. That's not our intent, by the way. We're not trying to. It's a nice side effect.

01:56:13 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Make it awful well, the key is to make it available to as many people who want to listen or watch I like the idea of not of having a free tier.

01:56:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do.

01:56:23 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I really think that's important and you know I mean patrick, and I know this trying to build an audience is like trying to trying to juggle jello right you're just gonna constantly like it's gonna run through your free. Well it is. I got a great insight from our producer benito, who's listening right now, who said if you're gonna start something today, just gonna constantly like it's gonna run through your free.

01:56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it is. I got a great insight from our producer benita, who's listening right now, who said if you're going to start something today, you better start it somewhere it can go viral, somewhere where there is an algorithm that you can catch, because that that's the only you know. Twit only exists because we we we were on tech tv right and we got promoted there and we were able to catch that wave a little bit. My son, you know you could make cooking videos till the cows come home, but because TikTok picked up the videos and started promoting them, he was able to build an audience there. Then take that on Instagram and on and on. If you're going to start something today, you better have it out there. Better be an algorithm and it better promote you right. Otherwise just there is no discovery. There's too many channels.

01:57:23 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
There's too many, yeah I mean, I mean the part of the there's, oh no part of it there's been a. One of the most fascinating things to watch over the pandemic was how many people started a podcast, started a video video, started doing TikTok videos and the amount of advertising there's. Basically the reason all these websites have died and been bought up by holding companies is because banner ads died and the amount of money being invested in podcast is both, if you're not a very special interest podcast that has advertising interest.

01:57:59
It's much thinner and it's spread much farther. There's, there's, there's less advertising being done. It's being spread much thinner. And yeah, you know Benito's right, right, you need something that's going to multiply you. Then you need to figure out how to get it and then you need to figure out a way to monetize it, because you know the henry never made any money off tick tock yeah, that's. I mean that's huge right, but you're not going to monetize there is, you know I mean.

01:58:28
But I mean it's like you know it's not as bad as facebook where, you know, 90 of the revenue, ad revenue that came into facebook stayed inside of facebook, at least in the case of youtube. It was like half the revenue ad revenue that came into facebook stayed inside of Facebook, at least in the case of YouTube. It was like half the revenue ad revenue that came into Facebook stayed inside of Facebook or YouTube. I mean, but TikTok, there's never been a huge amount of revenue.

01:58:46 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean the elephant in the room is this the ad market is drastically changed than what it was four or five years ago pre-pandemic, and you knowandemic. And a lot of creators have realized that what worked five years ago does not work if you want to stay in business, and so you cannot rely solely on a single channel. You can't rely solely on TikTok. You can't rely solely on YouTube. Shorts Can't rely solely on real. You have to be in as many places TikTok. You can't rely solely on YouTube. Short can't rely solely on real. You you have to be in as many places as you can, because your audience is all in in so many of those different places. I would be great if you could kind of just kind of narrow down to to the one platform. Everyone's on YouTube. Let's just do YouTube only, um, but unfortunately that's that's not the reality.

01:59:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break. When we come back, I'm going to ask you guys about your current tech situation. We have the originals, the guys who are on episode zero and episodes one of this now 1,000 episode show this Week in Tech. It's great to see you all again Roger Chang and David Prager, robert Herron, patrick Norton and thanks to all of you who are watching today. We appreciate it live and after the fact.

02:00:04
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02:04:00
Bitwardencom slash twit. Bitwardencom slash twit. This is one I can very happily recommend and encourage you to use. Steve gibson switched. I switched. Uh. We've been using bitwarden for several years now. Very, very happy. Thank you, bitwarden, for your support. Wizardling in our discord says it's the most worthwhile subscription I pay, which is the more impressive given how little it costs. Yeah, you don't have to pay anything. I pay for a premium plan. It's 10 bucks a year, but I do that mostly because I just want to support them. We're talking to uh the uh the uh ogs, the original twits, patrick Norton, robert Heron, david Prager, roger Chang. So what's technology you guys excited about? Patrick? What are you excited about these days? Do you even still have the same passion for technology you did back in the screensavers days?

02:05:02 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
screensavers days. Uh, yes, slash, it's different. Um, you know, I'm still blown away I. One of the things that continues to blow me away is the quality of the cameras that are in phones. And you know, every couple years and I'm like I can't get that much better, something comes out and I'm just like, wow, it got that much better and when you have kids, it's really nice to have a great camera always with you right? Yeah, I take entirely too many photos of my kids.

02:05:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They got to the point, as my kids did, where they go, Dad, stop, stop, no. I am fairly trepidatious about it. Most of my pictures after a certain age they're awful because they're going. No, no, no, no.

02:05:35 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
But most of the time it's pretty. Most of the time it's pretty chill. Occasionally I'll get that, but yeah, watching like low light performance on camera still gets me really excited. The quality of audio gear for fundamentally no money is amazing.

02:05:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've replaced a hugely expensive studio with basically consumer gear and it looks better than the old studio stuff did well, I think roger and I were talking like I've got a black magic, a tim, you know mini me too right here yeah you know I'm sitting there, and not only is it, you know I'd be right, because it was like five million dollars to build a the tech tv studio.

02:06:15 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
It was like $5 million to build the tech TV studio. It was like $50,000 and another 50 grand in cameras to build the DLTV studio. Although it was like a $5,000 box right, it was at the core of that. What did you use for that? The original TriCaster yeah.

02:06:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In beta.

02:06:33 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
We helped them diagnose the problems of the initial series of boards.

02:06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We never stopped helping them. Do that, by the way.

02:06:43 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Well, once they got the BGA I think it was BGA basically the sockets weren't, the chips weren't properly soldered on the board. But once that was sorted it was pretty reliable. But I laugh because if it crashed it was like an eight-minute reboot.

02:06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a.

02:06:55 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Windows 8 mini Pro. Yeah, the ATEM mini Pro or the ATEM mini ISO. Like it crashes a yank the power out of the back.

02:07:02 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Plug it back in, just every boots in like 18 seconds. Yeah, the TriCaster I think would have worked better if they had not used a shuttle style PC case, because it those things get super hot inside yeah, the later ones were massive, big well they, they moved into the same market, that grass valley, uh, edius and a few other, uh, you know uh video switch switchers.

02:07:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am blown away, though, by what consumer level. I've got a roadcaster mixer that can do more than any mixer I've ever used. I've got the 810. I have the mini extreme, so it's an eight camera switcher. We're using a zoom ISO for this and e-cam I mean consumer grade software and we're doing stuff, yeah, we can only dream about on tech TV.

02:07:51 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean in many ways. I mean in many ways it's kind of like the way desktop publishing and laser printers kind of just made.

02:08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why there's so much content. Do you think that's why there's so much content? Anybody can do it.

02:08:04 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean yeah. But you know at the same time, all content's not the same quality, right, I have seen some really well shot 35 minute. You know just. You know a great way to kill a few hours and other ones that are just like unwatchable. But they used a lot of great equipment and drone shots because they spent money on it and have to show you that they can swoop through someone's house.

02:08:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is something to be said for talent. Not that I have any, but there is something to be said for talent. The people who are really good at it are. It will work, regardless of the quality of their gear. Gear does not.

02:08:41 - David Prager (Guest)
That's true with photography too right, patrick was talking about the quality of the phone cameras and I find I don't have an apple vision pro, but if my daughter's doing something exceptionally interesting, like when she started walking, she was walking on the beach and I shoot it in spatial video oh smart because I'm afraid that maybe if I don't shoot in spatial video, I won't have it in that kind of quality 20 years from now I should go dad you shot that in 2d.

02:09:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's wrong with you, dad?

02:09:09 - David Prager (Guest)
yeah but but I'm consciously not an owner of an apple vision pro. I'm impressed with it and I think there's gonna be a place for some of that type of uh, uh, heads up display stuff. But I I kind of feel, feel like I'm gonna get to get in on like version three or four I've been the number one skeptic for it because I, having owned every one of those vr headsets right up to that point, including buying a vision pro and returning it.

02:09:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think people want to strap a computer to their phone. That's, and that's the big kind of friction point, right.

02:09:36 - Roger Chang (Guest)
do you want to strap a computer to their face? And that's the big kind of friction point, right Do you want to wear something on your head in a way. I'll be honest, even if it was like strapping a down pillow to your head, you still got to strap it to your head and there is a physical kind of disconnect that people just might not be into. People want the holodeck from Star Trek. They want to walk into a room and it look like Yosemite Valley or Disney.

02:10:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet Robert would agree with me. I think you have pretty good VR If you have a nice big screen. I have a 77-inch Samsung QD OLED with a great surround system. I'm sitting six feet away from it, so it's virtually immersion. It's not strapped to my face but I'm immersed and I'm watching a great Blu-ray, a UHD DVD. That's VR and it's damn fine. I think it looks great and, yeah, it doesn't go with my face when I turn my head, but I don't want it to.

02:10:38 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I agree with the devices themselves not being the best in terms of foreign factors. It would be great if it were something like contact lenses or eye caps. Someday that'll happen, but that's way off, right. But when we start, when this show started, uh, even going back a few years prior to that at Tech tv, it was 42 inch plasma displays, and today we have stuff like your 77 inch quantum dot oled that is 10 times brighter has more realistic color is a thinner display and more energy efficient and doesn't burn in.

02:11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And do you remember we bought? You can burn any 42 inch plasmas for for the studio for hawthorne right no, that was 17 grand reception desk or more yeah, and it was ten thousand dollars and it was burned in in the first six months, right totally so that's all changed quite a bit.

02:11:28 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Uh, home theater is, you know, one of my specialties, so I focus a lot on display systems and seeing where that's going in the next few years still excites me. I am still thrilled. And going to trade shows like society of information displays uh, and seeing the people who are working on the next gen tech that gets me going you know what's interesting, though?

02:11:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
movies just don't work anymore because people have good theater systems at home, right?

02:11:52 - Robert Heron (Guest)
there is something to be said, though, for dolby vision cinemas, or dolby cinema period, and uh imax display systems I went to see oppenheimer and imax just because I wanted to, but you know what that is a spectacle it is.

02:12:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem.

02:12:06 - Robert Heron (Guest)
It distracts from the actual content because it's a spectacle however, if the maybe the budget in your life doesn't, can't afford the latest and greatest in home theater gear, going to a dolby cinema theater, though, is going to present you with state-of-the-art, twin quarter million dollar laser projectors, amazing contrast and color performance that exceeds pretty much everything you can do in the home right now, in addition to just amazing audio.

02:12:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, dude does everybody here still go to movies? I haven't been to a movie.

02:12:36 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I have not been to one since I say that and, yeah, I'm more, more of the homebody on that.

02:12:41 - David Prager (Guest)
The last one I went to was Oppenheimer as well, in the IMAX.

02:12:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the last one I went to, just because I wanted to see that. And actually I liked it better at home.

02:12:50 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I think the last one I watched was Godzilla the King of the Monsters, because I wanted the whole boom, boom with the noise. But after that I was like, yeah, I mean to be honest, when you had kids you can either watch the movie really early before everyone's awake, or you watch it really late after everyone's asleep.

02:13:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And neither option is really. That's what Vision Pro is good for. By the way, the people I know who actually still use and like their Vision Pro, they watch movies in bed at night so they don't wake up their spouse.

02:13:17 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
But they could have bought something that costs an order of magnitude less and had 98% of the same experience.

02:13:32 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I mean more expensive devices that are doing impressive VR experiences, but with even larger things you have to strap onto your head.

02:13:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think a good movie or a good display is VR. The music arouses your emotions. The pictures arouse, get your brain engaged. A good movie you're immersed in it, aren't you?

02:13:51 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Yes, and unfortunately the precious few movies that have come out that really engage me in that level of verisimilitude, where you're like totally in wrap most of the time. I'm not gonna lie, I just fast forward.

02:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like exposition, exposition, obvious plot point character watching the new uh george clooney, brad pitt, uh vehicle no star vehicles.

02:14:16
I am so sick of star vehicles and Apple TV, spent $100 million and they were going to put this in theaters and they realized this is going to be egg on our face when this bombs in the theater because so many movies are bombing. No, it's not a bad movie. Although Lisa and I started watching last night, about an hour in we went to bed. But that's the difference, we know. We can watch the rest of it tonight if we wanted to.

02:14:43 - Roger Chang (Guest)
But the same compelling reason people used to go to the movie theater. I wrote about this a while back Going to the movie theater with friends, or after dinner with a date or whatever. It's kind of like the same reason why you used to go to the bowling alley, like on Thursday nights with co-workers, like that whole thing.

02:15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like the, the people's tastes have changed. It's not the same appeal as it was.

02:15:06 - TechTV (Announcement)
We still have one bowling alley in petaluma, if you ever want to go.

02:15:07 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I'm in a bowling league I used to hit the uh before it became amoebas. Uh, uh, the bowling alley over on Haight.

02:15:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, Rock and bowl yeah.

02:15:19 - Roger Chang (Guest)
And then after a while, people were like I'm at a different stage in my life. They'd play loud rock music and they'd have fluorescent pins and black lights and you could bowl as much as you want for like $10.

02:15:31 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I do want effective VR, though, for experiences like with Microsoft's flight simulator that provides almost photorealistic quality nowadays, and to be able just to move your head around rather than have to use a mouse to move that might be one, because you want to look out, get a paraglider totally yourself to a shoot and to have a motor on your back and you'll see it in real life.

02:15:50 - Roger Chang (Guest)
There you go.

02:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not saying that it doesn't work. I we had the um. I bought stupidly, bought the metaest Pro the $1,400, which they've since discontinued. But there's a game where you have a plank you go up an elevator and you're in a building and there's a plank that's out over the street and you're 100 feet up and it is damn hard to walk out that door over that plank over the street. I mean, it's like your body thinks you're about to die.

02:16:16 - Roger Chang (Guest)
That's good. That means that part of your brain still works right. If you were fearless and you did it, you'd be a great trapeze artist.

02:16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, this is why I love you, Roger.

02:16:26 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I mean there are certain attributes to the human psyche that exist for a reason right. We're afraid of snakes, we're afraid of heights and we're afraid of things that burn directly from us.

02:16:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, keeps us alive and we're afraid of things that burn directly from us. Yeah, keeps us alive. So what about you, david Prager? What technology are you in love with, or have you lost your desire?

02:16:46 - David Prager (Guest)
Well, I was going to say, before we even started the show, I was going to say that you know, I spent a large part of my career one, yes, as just a producer, but also just as a tech journalist and a pundit and I was about to say, coming on here, like I wonder how rusty I am, because I keep up with everything but I'm not in the business of discourse around it, and so it was always going to give me a, give myself a caveat, almost like imposter syndrome of am I going to be able to have worthwhile cutting edge commentary based on the things that we're covering, although I kind of feel like yes, because I'm just immersed in it and I'd say what, if anything, what I try to keep up with the most is just really AI trends, and that's almost like just fear of falling behind.

02:17:26
I want to make sure I know everything I can do to make me as productive as possible, but it's also, you know, at times it makes you. It's not. I don't know. I'm a fan again of all the AI tools and what we can do, but at the same time, I don't know if it keeps me up at night. But I want to make sure I have a clear understanding of everything that's possible.

02:17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm with you. In fact, I feel like AI could be not necessarily will be, but could be the next huge revolution and I don't want to miss it. At the same time, I think there's also a good chance that ai could be a complete flop, and then we'll look back on this and go yeah, we got sold another.

02:18:04 - David Prager (Guest)
Like crypto, I don't think, like you kept talking about this a singularity, I I can tell that at least my naive thought is that I don't think we're going to get any kind of sentience, but we still run the risk of worrying about the paperclip experiment.

02:18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, Everything becomes.

02:18:24 - David Prager (Guest)
And that's not because the robots want to take over the world. It's like you programmed it so well to be so good at one task.

02:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It followed the rules.

02:18:29 - David Prager (Guest)
It followed the rule, and if the humans are getting in the way of making paperclips, then we might as well eliminate you know, that hurdle.

02:18:39 - Roger Chang (Guest)
That's the existential threat, that giving it nuclear weapons roger, go ahead. Well, I mean I'm. There are undoubtedly going to be jobs that spring out of generative ai industries. One of them is fact checking ai to make sure it's not giving you weird, bogus information. Yeah, um. And then I've again, I've, I've I've said this before I've had to fact check, uh ai, because sometimes it really good, but you know what? Not factually correct. The other one is that it's going to free up people to do other things. But and here's the huge but you're going to have to go through this kind of churn where before it was people moving from off the farms, off agriculture, into factories and then from factories into offices and then offices at work at home, and there's a disconnect. And I think one of the things that needs to be addressed is how do you make that transition less painful for people who might have been? You know, I've been a copy editor for 40 years of my life. Now, what am I going to do?

02:19:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What does your wife think about the future of copy editing?

02:19:39 - Roger Chang (Guest)
She. She's both amazed, but she's also like some of this is garbage right. Some of this, like these edits, don't work.

02:19:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very few publications still have copy editors.

02:19:50 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I mean, that's a luxury very few publications exist anymore, and the ones that do they and the ones that do are one of two. They're all gone. Nontech is gone. Imore just folded its doors, but there's very few. Having watched like magazines are the one thing I wanted to do when I was a kid. I wanted to write for magazines. I've loved magazines my entire life, but that industry, what's?

02:20:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a magazine daddy?

02:20:14 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Oh God, Don't even start. What's the Berlin Wall, daddy? What?

02:20:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was life before the internet dinosaurs. I want to read the atlantic online. I want to read the new republic online. I want to read these magazines online.

02:20:25 - Roger Chang (Guest)
They insist on sending you a paper copy like because the the infrastructure is already there, probably don't kill trees.

02:20:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want. I will read this online. I'm never going to read the paper.

02:20:38 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Maybe I I suspect there may be advertising sales advantages to killing trees in other cases. There's not right, because the, the and the other thing is like every organization is flinging every possible revenue generating idea against the wall in order to stay around, right that's right but I know we are.

02:20:57
Yeah, you know, that's just the nature of the beast right now, but but the whole it's. You know we're in this huge transitional phase. But going back to what you know you, roger, were talking about, it's amazing what grammarly can do. It's also really hysterical when grammarly is wrong, or you know, I I know roger's seen it where I remember like somebody put something together and they asked me to read it and I was like this is fantastic, it's tight, it's authoritative, the copy moves and it's 100% factually wrong, you know.

02:21:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know, if you think about it, humans are also often factually wrong.

02:21:35 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Why would?

02:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we expect. Ais to be better.

02:21:38 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Well, I mean. Unfortunately, a lot of people often factually wrong. Why would you expect ais to be better? Well, I mean the, the.

02:21:42 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Unfortunately, they have the entire internet to work for. Uh-oh or work from.

02:21:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, I do not, and I bet you guys are the same. I will not ask some unknown person on the street for directions somewhere, because I know half the time they're going to send me the wrong way.

02:21:56 - Robert Heron (Guest)
Oh, yeah, oh but, I will ask an ai a difference between like using ways or google maps. Yeah, it's like. Ways is great for certain things, google maps is.

02:22:05 - Roger Chang (Guest)
If I need to get to this address, yeah, yeah I just need yeah, I just need to know where the address is relative to my location and nobody has a thompson guide in their back seat that they can flip through to find address anymore some of us still carry paper maps patrick I mean there's also.

02:22:22 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
I mean because, like the lorem, gazettes, like you know, gazetteers there's, there's parts of the country where you know you can't get a cell phone signal or you can't get decent directions, many others.

02:22:33
You get far enough off the off the reservation. You know there is no nobody. There's no one to ask, there's no cell phone signal and if you need to find something or if you need to get back to a highway, if you don't have a paper map, you're going to have a wonderful experience turning right over and over again until you find something.

02:22:49 - Roger Chang (Guest)
That's where the Starlink ad slowly plays, but you're not catching your maps before you get too rustic you go before you get too rustic.

02:23:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I you know, we all remember. And a tip of the hat to james kim, who did follow a uh, a I don't know if it was google maps or some other map off the road and lost his life.

02:23:08 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Uh, one of our lab rats I mean, I will say it's always good to have a passive backup, right? Paper's not gonna really put you out in terms of space and when you need it. You don't need batteries, right, you just need a source of light. And you need to be actual maps in your car, roger, I used to carry one for the state of california. Ever since my car got, uh, pilfered, I think the guy who took, who took my, my, my old, my old tomtom gps device also took the paper map.

02:23:38
But maybe because it was in the same compartment where they were both stored. Then they just grabbed the whole thing. Hey, what's this? This looks interesting, it's an artifact. You know what, when it's a smash and grab, they just take everything and they sort it out later.

02:23:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What technologies are you excited about, Roger?

02:23:54 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Generative AI is one of them, but also refurbed equipment. I, uh, I, ever since, ever since I found out that you can get like relatively, you know, decent spec equipment that was like you know like uh, enterprise hardware or or workstation hardware for like 400 bucks and it still has a 90-day warranty on it awesome. I go to like. I use dell refurbished. I got this 24 inch 4k monitor for like 100 something bucks five, six years ago. Uh, it's, I don't know. There's something about a deal that I that doesn't go away from me as I get older.

02:24:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The king of refurb, roger chang. Ladies and gentlemen, an open box, I mean robert. Robert heron, you got to be excited about something going on video, or maybe not. What technology excites you these days?

02:24:44 - Robert Heron (Guest)
For me it's just getting my head and keeping up with the things that are most useful for me, and right now so you still have a passion for it, you think I do for technology in general, but especially for things that can improve the life or the quality of a learning experience.

02:24:59
Or, uh, I even think of, like my current phone service that I use. It's uh, it's a Google phone on a Google phone service plan and it's assistant AI for call screening has a voice and a cadence to it. That is remarkably real and it fools most people that call me and don't have like the direct access. And it asks followup questions. And it fools most people that call me and don't have like the direct access and it asks follow-up questions and it it does a fantastic job. And lately for me, I actually subscribed to chat gpt.

02:25:28
Now, uh, that was just something I did in the last month after using the free service for quite a while. And as a research tool, it actually it it automatically provides all the links to everywhere it found that data, allowing you and to alleviate some of and as a research tool, it actually it automatically provides all the links to everywhere it found that data, allowing you to alleviate some of the concerns about where did this information come from and can you double check it, and I think for a lot of people, that's a good place to start. There's so much change going on in the world, but just for the learning capabilities and the ability to do your own research and like having somebody with the knowledge of Wikipedia in your pocket that you can now talk to and have conversations with there's a lot going on there.

02:26:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really amazing. All right, we're going to take one more break, one last break, and then I'm going to let you guys go. I appreciate it. You're sticking around for Roger. I emailed Roger. He said it's for three hours. I said yeah, it's three. He said really no, we're gonna get out of here podcast.

02:26:24 - David Prager (Guest)
He gives like five hours he must have buns of steel or something, and joe rogan.

02:26:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I look at these people and I go how do they get people to listen to all five hours? I?

02:26:36 - Roger Chang (Guest)
know joe rogan's. Joe rogan's uh, uh. Technique is this you do the do the long podcast and you chop everything up into the little sound bites and then you release those separately.

02:26:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've been doing that lately, yeah, yeah I listen to podcasts.

02:26:50 - David Prager (Guest)
I've been. I listen to so many hours of podcasts a week and almost all of it is at 1.5, where I listen to npr in the car, occasionally like why are they talking so slow?

02:27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we used to have people come to the studio. They say you sound drunk and say, well, that's because you listen to one and a half, don't you? And they said yeah, uh, anyway, uh, let's take a little break and we'll have a final thought with our wonderful crew for our thousandth episode. And you know, I really owe thank you to all of you who listen to the shows and have listened many of you do all 1 000 episodes. We couldn't do it without you. So thank you so much, uh, for for listening for all this time. I think we all feel very lucky to be able to do what we do our show today brought to you by NetSuite. So we've been asking the question what is the future hold from our panelists this week. What is the future hold for business? You ask nine experts, you're gonna get ten answers. Rates are gonna go up, rates are gonna go down, inflation is gonna go up, inflation is gonna go down. Can somebody please invent a crystal ball, some way of of knowing? Until then, over 38,000 businesses have done one thing to future-proof their business with NetSuite by Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, hr all into one fluid platform. That's nice when it's all there in one unified business management suite. There's one source of truth. You've got the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions. It's all there, right in front of you, with real-time insights and forecasting. You've got a crystal ball. You're peering into the future with actionable data. And when you're closing books in days, not weeks when you're closing books in days, not weeks when you're spending less time looking backwards and more time on what's next, if I had needed this product, it's what I'd use. You know what it makes me want to use it. I think you should be using it. We don't really we don't really need an ERP solution here and we're kind of too small for that, but I bet you could use it. By the way, speaking of opportunity, even for that, but I bet you could use it. By the way, speaking of opportunity, even if you can't, I think you might want to download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. We've been talking about that during the show. I know everybody's got lots of questions. There are some very specific questions for businesses. The CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning is available right now.

02:29:15
Netsuitecom slash Twit. It's absolutely free, so check it out. Check out NetSuite while you're there, get the free publication. It's NetSuitecom slash Twit. We thank NetSuite so much. They've been a big supporter of our shows for years now. We thank you for supporting us by going to that address letting them know you heard it here, netsuitecom. Thank you, netsuite. And a big thank you uh to our wonderful group, uh, people I've known now for 20 years, more than 20 years in many cases. When did you, when did you start at tech tv or zd tv?

02:29:53
robert heron, you were you in the lab to begin with, or were you an intern also?

02:29:57 - Robert Heron (Guest)
I was a PA on your show call for help. That's where I got my start. Henry Kaiser brought me on uh and through through a friend uh, jeff Nickerson. He was the one who put in the good work for me and these guys.

02:30:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to go to this picnic.

02:30:12 - Robert Heron (Guest)
It's Saturday yes, I, I'm almost 100 sure it's Saturday, not Sunday. I will check it out. If it's sunday, I'm from like 11 to 6 pm. Apparently they're going to be doing up weenies and hot dogs and in the bay area in golden gate park, nice. I'll send you. I'll send you a link. Would you send me a link please?

02:30:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I would like to see you. I'd like to give you a hug. Robert, it's been a pleasure working with you for all these years. I loved doing Call for Help. That was so much fun, it was awesome. It was so weird.

02:30:42
Because they asked me. They said, well, at first they weren't interested in me and then they realized, good Lord, we're gonna have to fill 24 hours with content. And they said, leo, how long is your radio show? I said, well, it's three hours. They said do you think you could do two shows a day? I said, absolutely, it's just a radio show, and and so. But we had to distinguish the two, because we was doing the screensavers with Patrick and I wore shirts like this kind of crazy shirts, and then I would put on a, a, a button-down shirt and a sweater vest for call for help, the idea being it's two different people. It's two different people. It's it's it's conservative leo and it's crazy leo. But it was so much fun getting to do those shows and it was funny because I know wonderful time and place I know the zdtv.

02:31:32
People thought we're just going to do this until we get enough content, then we're going to get rid of this clown. They thought you know internet tonight. They thought that's going to be the hit. We got a comic, we got writers. It's going to be a huge hit. And what do people want to see? They wanted to see me and Patrick answering questions, putting Linux on a machine, patrick using a sledgehammer.

02:31:54 - Robert Heron (Guest)
You will always be remembered for that sledgehammer, patrick always, you guys anchored a bunch of wonderful content reasonable and I'll never forget Patrick, the first time you appeared it was on call for help.

02:32:07 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
You were terrified the first time I was recorded was discussing Windows 98 before, like a spring comdex or something. Oh my god, I was physically shaking. You were. I could see you like a leaf trembling. It was terrifying. The only thing less natural than making television is dating. It's about as bad, isn't it? You know, but you know.

02:32:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You got very comfortable the first thousand hours is hard.

02:32:34 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
After that it's easy.

02:32:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you got beloved. I must say Such a nice thing to see you. All my, all my love to your family. Do you still have the rv in the backyard? Not in the backyard, but we still have the rv so you could take off at any time if I wanted to be divorced, sure well. Blessings to you both, uh, and it's great to see you and to your beautiful children. Same to you, david prager, two-year-old. Prager, nice, I know I'm so happy for I saw you got married to a beautiful woman.

02:33:07 - David Prager (Guest)
She's norwegian she's norwegian, she's a documentary filmmaker and but she's got entrepreneurial aspirations. She's. She's going start a, build a community around tinned fish and do importing of seafood and other Scandinavian food. It's all the rage. You come up here to Petaluma.

02:33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we've got a seafood restaurant called the Shuckery and they call it conservas and it's tinned seafood and they serve it with like little crackers and stuff and it's like $30, and it's tinned seafood and they serve it with like little crackers and stuff and it's like 30 dollars and it's incredible and it's nor it's a lot of it's from norway. It's incredible that this is a whole menu item for these guys.

02:33:49 - David Prager (Guest)
She's gonna, yeah, so she's, yeah, she's gonna start this. Uh, start to build a community around just distributing content about sustainability, about the food itself, about how to get where to get it, and then my segue into consumer package goes. But depends on how well we build the community and we kind of kind of do it all out in the open.

02:34:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like building your startup or building your, your company, in in the, in the public realm, public domain I'll see in the grocery store because my son has convinced me to be his backer, his, his chief investor in his pickle company, and so I will see you. I'll probably be right next to the tinned fish. Uh, I will see you in the grocery store, david, it's great to see you. What's? What's your daughter's name? Yeah what's your daughter's name?

02:34:33 - David Prager (Guest)
Amelia with an E. Oh oh, it's Amelia with an E. Yep yeah, oh well's.

02:34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amelia with an E. Yeah, yeah, oh well, give Amelia a big smooch and thank her for letting us have daddy for a couple of hours. I really appreciate it. Yeah, really nice, thanks.

02:34:47 - David Prager (Guest)
Roger Chang.

02:34:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's nice to see you, roger Chang, same. You guys are doing so great at DTNS you and Sarah and Tom and Molly and and the whole gang. I'm really proud of you just doing great work and uh, and I'm glad to see you gainfully employed with an actual family.

02:35:06 - Roger Chang (Guest)
I would have never thought it yes, my family is also very, very proud.

02:35:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love to tease you, roger, and you know what the name of this show is going to be your Drunk Uncle Coach.

02:35:19 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Oh huh, so you get to name the show that sounds like it.

02:35:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I think that's a good idea.

02:35:34 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Love you, Roger, it's great to see you. Of course you started at Call for Help as well. I started as an intern for both shows. I did Screensavers and Call for Help. For both shows I did screensavers and a call for help. And then, uh, Renee Riccio hired me after the summer of 1998 and I became the official PA for both shows Nice.

02:35:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, David, how did you? You were a producer at screensavers I.

02:35:50 - David Prager (Guest)
So Roger got promoted and then, um, so I decided I wanted to work for ZDTV and I I could have made a mistake, but I sent a letter to most of the executives saying here's who I am, here's what I can do, here's what I love about the network, and if you don't hire me, you'll be missing out on these skill sets that I have this skill set that I have and, for some reason, that it worked.

02:36:10
Ironically, jim Lauterbach thought it was good and he sent it to ken marcus and then I flew out, did a couple interviews and started down november 3rd 1999.

02:36:22 - Roger Chang (Guest)
So wow, it was. It was a weird time. I got interviewed by lucia first for the wed team, but she was very skeptical of me. But ken marcus sat right across from her, said you want to work for me? I said sure, and I did a three-month intern stint and then a spot opened up and Renee said can you feel the spots like sure?

02:36:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
did he ask you to keep the chapstick handy for?

02:36:44 - Roger Chang (Guest)
no, all I remember most from Ken was at the time he was very fond of that little oatmeal puck and apple juice in the morning that's when, by the way, I knew the tech TV was gonna be sold is when they stopped putting oatmeal in this in the snack room I lived on that for two months and the lifted soup, the little yeah, and they st and they said for some weird cost cutting maneuver they said no more oatmeal for you.

02:37:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought this is not good. They're trying to. They're trying to turn a profit some.

02:37:16 - David Prager (Guest)
They're trying to convince somebody to buy them well, I remember when paul allen was coming through the office and we were doing a we used to do a geek library and it was a movie about revenge of the nerd. No, it wasn't, it was a book, it was a movie that he was in and I was going through clips of the movie that we revenge of the nerds.

02:37:33 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Okay what was that?

02:37:33 - David Prager (Guest)
yeah, and I was looking through clips for the show to run on the geek library segment on the screensavers when he, paul allen, walks by and I for some reason didn't know what to say to him other than nice beard triumph of the nerds.

02:37:45 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Yeah, and then I remember beard.

02:37:47 - David Prager (Guest)
You said nice beard. Yeah, nice beard. Here's why I was looking at him on the screen. He was watching me watch him and I looked at that and he had this huge beard. I looked at him and he had it. I'm like nice beard. I thought it was funny, but also I didn't know what else to say. And he did one of those handshakes I have no disrespect upon. But he did one of those handshakes where it's the limp hand.

02:38:09 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
It was it was the limpest, wettest. I get that the man was like in social anxiety and any number of other things, but it was one of the most surreal experiences I ever had, where it was like one of the execs, the president, the founding president was introducing him to me and I'm like, okay, I'm the dog in the dog and pony show. And it was like the held two fingers didn't look me in the eye and I was just like, wow, I feel really part of the team here, and it was a couple of years before I realized it had nothing to do with me. It was just how the man interacted with people.

02:38:46 - David Prager (Guest)
I think this is right before Paulin bought the network and then right before he sold it. I remember Joe Gillespie telling the story about him holding his wallet up and said it's not getting any thicker.

02:39:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He lost almost half a billion dollars on tech TV.

02:39:06 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Having talked to a bunch of execs after the whole thing, tech TV was actually on a pretty good trajectory-wise. It's just you had to appreciate how cable networks worked, so you weren't alarmed by what was happening worked, so you weren't alarmed by what was happening.

02:39:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a I mean, there's a famous anecdote uh, when, uh, after um, uh, who was this? Our first program director left. Uh, the hipster. I can't remember his name trebin. Yeah, greg drebin left, and then greg came and then we got the other, greg came oh yeah, no greg yeah, no, greg Brandon, he was great he was.

02:39:40
He was awesome, sweet guy, not super competent. Anyway, he, drebin, was brilliant programmer, but Brandon he was kind of just, uh, I think he was just. It was a holding pattern right until they could sell the thing. But he got called up to Seattle with the other executives to meet with, uh, paul allen. And paul allen asked brandon, when are you going to do a show for people like me? And brandon said never. And that's I convinced that was when it was the end, because they, they did a show for him, yeah, it was called tech live.

02:40:14
It was the music show, no, the music well tech live. There was a lot of money he wanted to do that.

02:40:19 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Yeah, but that was, that was a direct, at least from my understanding. Yeah, direct like I want something like this on our yeah well, the he was.

02:40:27 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
He was told that msnbc was the most profitable part of nbc, so they built four and a half hours of programming today, a day, a million dollars audience five minutes before the entire dot com.

02:40:38 - David Prager (Guest)
But they also wanted to cover the stock market Sorry they covered the stock market, but only the tech stocks, which is obviously the cornerstone of the market value right now. But you've got to cover all of it. So that was kind of a weird. I mean, yes, we were tech TV, but they carved out a niche even in the finance world which didn't make sense to me anyway.

02:40:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't brilliant, but on the other hand it's tough to do a cable network. Now it's. It was tough then. I had a good time for six years I do love that.

02:41:05 - David Prager (Guest)
What the screen savers became, which is the tag of the show joshua brintano, you gotta give him huge credit. The very very last thing, but the last thing that happened on the last episode of that show was you guys you, patrick and leo waking up from a bad dream and then taking off with your rocket packs the bob newhart episode yeah, it was all right.

02:41:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's a suitable thing to end with I, yeah, god bless joshua for putting that in there. Uh, let me see if I can find that, because I'm pretty sure that is on youtube. Um, and, and maybe that'd be a good thing to end with. I am so grateful. Final episode maybe I don't know. Yeah, yeah.

02:41:44 - David Prager (Guest)
I think if you put in put last AOTS episode screen time.

02:41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, the twist ending to the AOTS.

02:41:55 - David Prager (Guest)
And it got taken down a few times, but maybe you'll find the right one.

02:41:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the thing is, is nobody really owns this? Um, well, actually, I guess comcast technically owns it, right, but they don't care and they don't want it. We tried to buy we tried to buy episodes from them, uh, and never were able to. Let me see if I can. I have a link from the nerdist. Let me see if I can get to this. Yeah, here it is, I am gonna. Oh. Video unavailable. This video contains content from g4, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.

02:42:30 - Patrick Norton (Guest)
Oh, you've got. It's been pulled a couple times. Find it on the way that way back machine if I play it, they will take us out.

02:42:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh, I see. But yeah, that was fun. Patrick, remember that we went to a little coffee shop. We strapped on our backpacks and flew out. I think I said something about hot dogs. I smell hot dogs, I don't know, I didn't watch the attack of the show, but it was now olivia munn's, a superstar. So there you go. Patrick norton, bless you. So nice to see you again. Robert heron david, thank you so much.

02:43:05
Love you guys uh pleasure, of course my erstwhile son, roger chang, my nephew sure it is great fun. It's funny how, 20 later, you still have the habits and the patterns of those.

02:43:22 - Roger Chang (Guest)
Most people say I look remarkably unchanged for 20 years having you have not aged one wit. No, gray hair. Well, I have a few strands, but most of the gray is on my facial hair.

02:43:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to see you all. Thank you for being here. I appreciate it and we continue on episode 1001 next week. We do them every sunday, 2 to 5 pm pacific, that's 5 to 8 pm eastern 2100 utc. As I mentioned, we stream on seven different platforms, including youtube and twitch and, of course, for our club twit members in the discord. I hope you can watch live, but if you can't, you can always download the shows from the website twittv, including our very first episode if you want to listen to that, because there's no video.

02:44:05
Twittv. Twit one no space, just twit one, the first episode. I think twit zero is also there, uh, but this show, uh, will be available, uh, after the fact, on the website, also on our YouTube channel, and there's video and audio available for you to subscribe to in your favorite podcast client. I hope you will. I hope you support us in our club, because that helps us keep doing these things Twittv, slash, club Twit and, as I've said, now for 1,000 episodes for almost 20 years. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye guys.