This Week in Tech 526

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech! It's been a big week with IFA, lots of new phones, tablets, computers. We'll talk about those, and of course, next week, Apple's got some big announcement or something. Xeni Jardin is back to join us, along with Alex Wilhelm from Tech Crunch and Alex Lindsay from Pixel Core. It's time for TWiT: next. 

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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 526, recorded Sunday, September 6, 2015

In a Garden with Xeni

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It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. I'm so excited about this show. We have some of my favorite people on. Alex Lindsay has deigned to grace our presence. Normally here on MacBreak weekly on Tuesdays, but I'm glad to see you.

Alex Lindsay: I won't be here Tuesday.

Leo: So you're here now! MacBreak weekly will be on a different day. We'll explain why that is in just a bit. Also here, Alex Wilhelm from TechCrunch, sitting in his hall. Hello, Alex.

Alex Wilhelm: How is it going? Part of the manor. 

Leo: Your apartment looks like George Clooney's apartment up in the air. You spend 12 days a year there?

Alex W: This isn't even my house. I'm down in Sunnyvale with my family. 

Leo: Nice! I know it's Labor Day weekend and I appreciate you doing this. And we are so thrilled after a two-year absence to welcome back Xeni Jardin from BoingBoing. Xeni! She's sitting with her rescue poodle, who is so happy.

Xeni Jardin: He's a happy chappy. 

Leo: Thanks for being here on Labor Day. We all followed with interest. I don't think I'm saying anything out of school here; you were very public with your diagnosis of breast cancer. How is your health now?

Xeni: It's great. I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 on December 1. I went in to get my first mammogram.

Leo: You tweeted that. You didn't know it was going to be anything. 

Xeni: A couple of friends of mine had recently been diagnosed. I was going through some big upheaval in my life and had only recently acquired health coverage and thought health coverage would be good because I loved to bike to my yoga classes. If you're going to be a cyclist in LA, you should have health insurance because people are very irresponsible when driving in LA with cyclists. Here I am, vegan, I run and swim and do all this stuff. I can't get cancer. I went for my first mammogram, I was 41, just turned 41. Live tweeted it because I was more of an over-sharer then than I am now. I thought by de-mystifying the process I could help someone who thought it was too scary or something. At the end of the day, I had a diagnosis of breast cancer. My life changed a lot. I love talking about myself, especially my tragedy, so I could fill up this entire show with my tales of woe, but I developed a real faith in a power greater than myself which is called science and evidence based medicine. My doctors aren't Gods, and there are no guarantees in treatment, sorry for my bad camera work, I'm sitting on my porch.

Leo: I'm enjoying it.

Xeni: I now believe very strongly if you're not having fun and enjoying the fullness of life every day, you're living life wrong. There are no guarantees. Currently, my health status is very good today. I'm doing things that are fun and things that aren't fun to help ensure that. I remain in treatment, but my status is great right now. It's not holding me back from anything that I want to do, including forming complete sentences on a Sunday afternoon with you, Leo, and the handsome Alex and Alex. 

Leo: It's so great to have you, Xeni. 

Xeni: Everybody forgot what a bitch I was. 

Leo: You see? That's what happens. We're all glad to have you back in good form.

Xeni: I can't wait to talk to you about my sour kraut. 

Leo: I follow you on Instagram, so I have been keeping up with you over the last few years, and I have been watching the strange fermented objects you've been making in your home. 

Xeni: We'll get into that later. 

Leo: I was in... where was I? I was in Budapest. Apparently Hungarians love their sour kraut. We went to a market and there were many vendors selling sour kraut. Big giant bowls of fermented cabbage. It was quite pungent. Apparently it's beloved.

Alex L: Good sour kraut is. 

Xeni: If you're going to have sausages, you've got to have real kraut.

Leo: Something to cut the grease. 

Xeni: Yeah.

Leo: Enough of that. We’ve got more important things to talk about.

Xeni: What could be more important than sour kraut?

Alex: Many things are more important than sour kraut in my opinion.

Leo: I guess we should start with Wednesday. That's the big event. I don't know how Apple makes this the big event every year. You can have all sorts of events and products. Apple announces the new iPhones each year. That's the tech event of the year. 

Alex: I think it's all the manufacturers. 

Leo: They all try to beat it, right? All the announcements pre-date the Apple announcements. I don't feel like the iPhones are technologically ahead of anything else. People love them.

Alex L: I have an iPhone and a couple Androids. The issue is the iPhone is still simpler to use than the Android. The Android has a lot of features that I like better, but it's not something I would necessarily hand to my parents. My parents work hard enough on the iPhone.

Leo: So this segment will be the Apple segment and then we'll get it out of the way and move on. You can't ignore it.

Xeni: So Apple has become the brussel sprouts before chocolate pudding. 

Leo: Ha. Some might say life's short, let's have dessert first. It's up to your point of view. It's certainly true that if Apple does something it impacts the tech community. It impacts users. It's a big deal. For instance, Apple's IOS 9 when it comes out will allow ad blockers and there are a number of companies positioning themselves to be the add blocker for mobile safari and a lot of people are very worried. Xeni, on Boing Boing, you used the federated ad network when you first started running ads, right?

Xeni: One could say federated media was developed around Boing Boing as a concept. We invited John Battle to help us figure out if selling ads might help us offset our server costs. We found out the answer was yes. John went on to build a service that would answer that business problem for lots of blogs that were popping up. That's why it became federated. Currently we're with another company. The business is changing a lot and it's... I don't think I'm sharing anything exclusive in saying a lot of independent publishers are having to rethink what they do and what matters and what kinds of possibilities are out there for doing better ad based businesses.

Leo: You could argue that Boing Boing does it right. If we look at Boing Boing now, there's a banner ad at the top, there's a couple of block ads. There's three or four units on the whole page. It's not annoying, there's not a takeover. No pop ups, no pop unders. It's exactly what a reasonable ad supported page should have. Unfortunately, very few pages do it as unobtrusively any more. 

Xeni: Who knows? The wildest coincidence could happen and mere days after this show we might launch a slight upgrade design. 

Leo: Are you hinting something?

Xeni: You never know what's going to happen on Boing Boing on a day soon later this week. 

Leo: This is a relatively recent re-design already, isn't it?

Xeni: Yeah. 

Leo: We'll see what happens. Some have said if ad blockalypse happens, if it does seem that people are using ad blockers, make it an image served by boing boing that wouldn't be blocked by an ad blocker. It would be part of the page's content. The problem is that this, like most ads, come as third party ad services. 

Alex W: What makes it hard is the trajectory based advertising is that we have a profile of the user and we're going to put in whatever. 

Leo: When I buy something...

Alex L: Those types of ads may have a lot of trouble, which is more an issue for Google I think. I think when you have a specific sponsor for a specific blog or the kind of things you have here, those, there's lots of ways to vet that into what's going on. It's the random stuff that's harder to...

Leo: That may be what ends up getting fixed. The reason these are served by ad networks is because the ad network wants to know at the minimum how many people saw it, but they probably would like to know more about who saw it, so they can determine age, demographics, income, that thing, and by combining information from a variety of sites, plus information provided by users unwittingly. 

Alex L: You get more personal ads. Ever ad I see now is something I'm definitely interested in. But it's a little spooky. 

Alex W: They don't know anything about me. I don't want to see an ad and go I like that. That feels dirty. I like it when they're random so I can move along. 

Leo: I didn't do anything to encourage this vodka ad, so I'm presuming that Boing Boing doesn't know who I am. I don't find it obtrusive. I go back and forth on this. We're a free-ad supported media. I think it's important that ad supported media exists. It's Democratic, it allows anybody to look at it, if it's done tastefully and unobtrusively. I don't think there's any problem with it. I can also see why a lot of people are becoming perturbed. These pages are tripling in size, they're slowing down by a matter of tens/ sometimes half a minute. 

Alex L: I get that you have to be imaginative to keep people's attention, but what makes me want to have an ad blocker is when it takes over the page or it holds me there,. Those types of things become I want a blocker.

Leo: There are sites you cannot read because they're overwhelming with ads. Then there's the problem of malware injection because these networks are often automated and it's possible for a bad guy to buy an ad and inject malware before the ad company can catch them.

Alex: We have that problem sometimes. We use some networks and occasionally we'll get served an ad on the site that's an auto-play video or really noisy and we have to kill it, and it's so annoying. 

Leo: In some ways the advertisers have brought on the ad blockalypse. Apple is just allowing it. They're not putting one on your system. They're not encouraging you, presumably to use it, but they're making it possible. 

Alex L: I don't think it'll happen overnight, but they have a couple years before everything is blocked. 

Leo: That is not the big announcement, of course. The big announcement is the new hardware. A new iPhone, probably an iPhone 6S Plus. The latest... the rumor mill has been pretty accurate as we get close to announcements like this. Rumor mill says new camera will be 12 megapixels. Most of the other company’s phones are doing that.

Alex L: It'll be interesting to see what the resolutions are for stuff like high frame rate. All those high frame rates will be the same probably.

Leo: Does anybody do HDR video? My Note 5 does. 

Alex: I would be surprised if they're doing it for this, but you can do HDR video. It's a bit of work.

Leo: The latest rumor is that there will be, not forced touch on the new headphones but three levels of touch. Worries me a little bit. That's too much touch. Bad touch. 9 to 5 Mac, Mark German is the best of this stuff, says that there will be basic touch, which is a tap, medium touch which is a press, and there will be heavy touch, the deeper press.

Xeni: Oh my god. I already see the parody video. I hope Jonathon writes a song even before this announcement comes out. This porridge is too hot; this porridge is too cold...

Leo: Just right touch. This is bad touch. 

Xeni: Show me where the bad man touched you...

Leo: What worries me.... of course we have forced touch on the Apple watch, Some of the Apple laptops have forced touch. If I have three levels of touch, which is new, I'm going to know twice as much what's not going to happen. And, how am I going to distinguish between a medium and a hard touch? What did I just do? For instance, Mark said you can look up a point of interest in the maps application by pressing it. Do you know that's going to happen? How would you know? 

Alex W: Do you just keep pushing things harder and harder? I guess. That's going to be a lot of learning curve for people.

Alex L: I think typically what happens is you don't use it very much and then it...

Leo: I turned it off on the laptops. It bothered me. Do you use it? 

Alex L: Yeah. I use it on the laptop. I still keep tapping the laptop going I can't believe this isn't moving. 

Leo: Give me screen touch. Rose gold will be a new color, but that will be the one you can't get because everyone who wants to show off that they have the newest iPhone will order rose gold. 

Alex L: Everybody order rose gold so I can get my black one. 

Leo: You don't want rose gold?

Alex L: No.

Leo: Apple will have a new TV. Not a new set, but the Apple streaming box will be upgraded. I'm not sure. I've read conflicting stories. Some say it will be a hundred bucks, some say it will be 200 bucks. Some say there are two different Apple TV boxes. 

Alex L: The rumor is that they're going to keep selling the one they have cheaper so you can always get an Apple TV. 

Leo: They dropped it to 69 earlier this year.

Alex L: They're going to soup up the one that they have by adding things like.... it's interesting. A lot of the rumors are that they're not going to go 4k, which seems odd to have a phone that shoots 4k and have an Apple TV that won't play it...

Leo: They even have computers. They have iMacs that will do 5k. 

Alex L: It seems like an odd rumor if it turns out to be the case. I think the game changer with the Apple TV will be opening it up for app development. There are not just games, but for education, enterprise, there are so many possibilities for what you could develop with a little puck that you can add a lot of features to.

Alex W: Is this finally the Apple TV that we're going to care about? They've been updating for years and I still don't care about it. 

Leo: No. There's only two reasons you want an Apple TV. One, you buy stuff on iTunes, or because you want to do the airplay from the Apple device to your screen. That's the only thing that Apple TV does to itself. Everything else could be done on a Roku or an Amazon Fire TV or an Android TV. Apple owns that market. I have an Apple TV because I have bought stuff on iTunes.

Xeni: Leo, what do you think of Apple music in its current state?

Leo: I was going to ask you what you think of it.

Xeni: But I asked you first. 

Leo: OK. This is an example of something where I don't see that Apple innovated in any way. They just... 

Alex L: They could innovate.

Leo: We're going to have to make a decision. If you turned on the three-month trial, it will expire in a few weeks at the end of September. So I turned it on on June 29 when IOS 8 came out. That means at the end of the month, I have to decide if I want to spend ten bucks a month on if I want to keep this. I already have Spotify and Pandora. I pay for both of those. I pay for Google music. I don't see any reason to keep paying for Apple Music if you've got one of those. 

Alex L: The guys in my studio are listening to Beats One. I think that I still use Spotify. I don't see anything that Apple TV has given me that I want. There are things that I would love to see from both of these things like cross fades between songs. 

Leo: Does Spotify do a cross fade?

Alex L: It does automatic cross fades. What I want is a little curve. Let me do a little mix. What you want....

Leo: You're nuts. Nobody wants to do that! You mean for each individual Segway?

Alex L: Then you would never leave that service. I'm just telling you...

Leo: You're an ex-DJ. 

Alex L: Once you have that control you never give it up.

Leo: Xeni, I'm going to turn the tables on you. What do you think?

Xeni: What do I think about?

Leo: Apple Music. Are you going to keep it?

Xeni: No. I love so much of what Apple does. I love my iPhone and I've done work I'm proud of that wouldn't have been possible with this device. The quality wouldn't have been possible with any other device. The exact opposite is true with Apple Music. It's just chasing a product, instead of something designed with the user's experience in mind. Spotify does it well, they don't do it perfectly, but I still miss Winapp. So don't ask me. 

Leo: How about you Alex, are you an Apple Music user at this point?

Alex W: Not even slightly. I'm a big Spotify fan. I'm curious about how much room there is in the market for Beats One, Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music. How many of these are going to survive?

Leo: Well, there's a big question. They really only survive at the pressure of the music industry. The music Industry could just say any or all of these. Nice experiment. We see it already happen with some artists pulling their music from these services.

Alex W: Taylor Swift. 

Leo: The whole Industry. There's only three labels now, right? Down from five?

Alex L: There's mainly three. 

Leo: What could these guys say? We're going to get rid of this stuff. OK. We're going to pull the plug on all streaming music services.

Alex W: But where do they go for new revenue? If you do that where do you turn if you don't allow for streaming. I don't really know if there's a pathway out for them.

Leo: I think it's now accident that Spotify and others are doing this now too have turned to podcasts and other kinds of content that are not owned by the music Industry because they need stuff in case the music Industry... we've decided to make the royalty rate 8%. That's all they have to do. Most of these companies are so close to the edge anyway. Apple could keep it going because they just say we're going to lose money, but it's important to us to have the service.

Alex L: It would be important to Apple if the Industry increased their revenue. 

Leo: Didn't Apple kind of do that when it went and lobbied all the record labels to say you shouldn't let Spotify have a free tier. You shouldn't let these services have a free tier, that's a bad thing.

Xeni: Every musician I know hates Spotify. Most of all of these services. The amount the artists get back is minimal.

Leo: Less than other services?

Xeni: I'm an art major. I'm not good at math.

Alex L: Every time we see the numbers, we see the numbers with Pandora and the reason they all picked Pandora is Pandora pays almost nothing. Spotify is about a half a cent a play and if you look at an album you might have bought that you listen to a lot, you ended up paying a half a cent. 

Leo: They got nothing for radio play. The only people who got money for radio play were songwriters. There was no performance royalty and they accepted that because it was promotional value. If we can get airplay, we can sell records. That's how it used to be done. 

Alex L: Really, the bands that are making money now are focusing on tours. The money is made by performing and not necessarily selling, and they do make a lot of money doing that. 

Leo: I think the problem for Apple is that unless Apple Music is significantly head and shoulders above whatever you're using today, it's a hard sell. I'm not going to make a lateral move. It's the same price, if it's roughly the same service as Spotify. Why would I make the move? Out of loyalty to Apple? I think they also missed the boat on Android users. There I still no Apple music for Android. Here we are, one month left in the trial offer and they still haven't released Apple Music for Android. Maybe they won't at all. They said they would. 

Alex L: There's a certain inertia that Apple has. You look at the top apps that anyone uses, and no matter how much fun we make of Apple maps, it's one of the most popular... whenever you find anything on your phone, you end up in Apple maps. There's a certain level of inertia that Apple is going to get out of this that they can take advantage of and probably grow it into a medium business, but unless they grow it into something transformative, but what they have now is not transformative. It's not enough to pull people away from Spotify. 

Leo: Fortune Magazine publishes a survey from Adobe that some of called foul play on. The cable industry calls TV everywhere--that's their term for Internet television, and according to this Adobe survey, Apple dominates Internet television with 62% of the market share. 18%, the next largest chunk. In other words, according to this study from Adobe, paid authenticated streaming, not clear if that includes Netflix. It's definitely not YouTube.

Alex L: I don't think this is apples to apples. There's definitely a lot of revenue from the ad supported networks. I think Apple always has the majority of paid users.

Alex W: This is true for apps. This big a disparity isn't a surprise in the slightest.

Leo: It's just that Apple TV is still a hobby. Between it and IOS, total dominance for Apple in the paid streams. 

Alex L: I buy Apple. I have a lot of movies on my IOS slash. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I fly a lot.

Leo: You download them. You don't want to stream.

Alex L: I don't rent. Every time I rent, I never watch them in the window. 

Leo: The worst thing is to watch half a movie and then let it expire. 

Alex L: I don't go to the theater any more. That's my argument. 

Leo: We'll start our live coverage about 9:30 Wednesday morning. I won't not be here. I'm flying back east Tuesday night for the IAB upfronts. Some advertising. I don't know what it is. Actually, it's a big deal for podcasting. It's a watershed moment for podcasts. The networks have had upfront for years. They get all the new shows together, they get the stars of the new shows together, and they get them in the room with the big advertisers. They say OK. You want to buy a year's worth of ads on heros? It's going to be huge. They sell a year ahead of time. A year up front, in effect. There are the new fronts that happened with YouTube not so long ago. Same idea. I don't know how successful those were. This is as far as I know the first podcast upfront. So, I'll be there instead of at the apple event. We'll be covering it live at 9:45 and right after on MacBreak weekly. Will you be here for that?

Alex L: I'll be here for both. 

Leo: Good. Thank goodness someone will be. It's always interesting. How does Apple do that? What do you think, Alex? How does Apple get all that attention?

Alex W: I think the proper point is that the devices are just better. Apple hardware in my experience is such a superior product that we all get excited. How do you think Samsung feels every Apple event? They have to watch Apple beat them again. It's dis-spiriting for the larger Industry, but if you look at the media and you talk to them, they're nearly all iPhones still. I think that share that Apple controls...

Leo: How much of that is Inertia? I'll grant you that was true for so many years. How much of that is inertia? 

Alex L: I think some of it is inertia, but I think Apple has a lot of discipline. The issue that you have with a lot of other manufacturers is that they're releasing phones year-round. There's a thousand phones and they're a thousand different sizes and they release four at the same time and they're all slightly different. I don't understand how anyone could pick an Android phone in a Verizon store because there are so many. It will take you hours to figure out which one is the one. You have to be an expert to figure out exactly the one that you want. That's the trouble that they have. Nothing stands out. Apple does it once a year. 

Leo: Xeni, you're a self-proclaimed Apple fan. Is the attention Apple gets at these events merited?

Xeni: It's so fun covering them. 

Leo: That's the truth. 

Xeni: I use Apple products because they don't get in the way of my work and for so long they placed usability and good design above all else, and you can't fake good design. There's a reason a lot of designers find themselves oriented towards Apple hardware. It's beautifully made and it tends to work. The events are beautifully staged. They're beautiful theatre. It's the gold standard of corporate theater. I don't say that in a mocking way. They're phones and we use them every day all the time and they become our interface with the world and everything we love. Design of your phone matters. What other thing are you going to hold that much and use for that many fun things, important things, and mundane things? It's the most importantly designed thing you have. 

Alex L: I think the events have gotten better. They're a lot shorter and a lot less BS at the beginning and I feel like they move from one thing to the other. We stream a lot of corporate events. We sit in the back and I don't think anybody has any idea of what Apple does.

Leo: Apple has been rehearsing the last two weeks.

Xeni: Two weeks? Are you kidding? Months.

Alex L: In the ones that we work on, they'll be rehearsing for months. Once they get up there with all the gear, they're going over for days rehearsing it to get every last little bit. Oh the mouse was a little bit here, let's speed that up a little bit.

Leo: I'm guessing they didn't get Jimmy Iovene and Drake to the rehearsals last time.

Alex L: Every time you see the event and it's a little rough, those are the guys that didn't show up for rehearsal. 

Leo: Didn't come. No one can say to Drake, "What are you doing? You should have been here." 

Alex W: Do we still find Apple events as fun now that we know everything is going to happen there? Way back, there was a lot more mystery and intrigue to them. Now we watch them re-announce it. Do we care as much? 

Leo: For the last two years, there haven't been many surprises, have there?

Alex L: Every once in a while there's a little bit of something that went one way or the other and didn't show up. We all expected an Apple TV at WWDC and didn't see it. 

Leo: You always want that one thing. I don't think they've been as good since Steve passed. Steve was a master at this, even when he was deathly ill he was a master. I don't think Tim Cook or Phil Schiller have the same charisma and excitement to watch. I honestly feel like Apple is coasting a little on those great days.

Alex L: Last time they released an iPhone it did OK. 

Leo: People often conflate sales with innovation. It's just sales. You can make a lot of excuses as to why it's selling so well. Windows sold really well in the 90s. Didn't make Windows a great operating system. In fact it still sells pretty well. Sales are not the measure of if it's exciting or interesting or innovative. 

Xeni: Way to throw shade at Microsoft and Apple. 

Leo: I throw shade at the whole Industry.

Alex L: With Apple, it's not so much innovation. I think that what Apple does is that they say no really well. They say no to certain things. They are good at saying we're not going to do this, we are going to do this, they are good at creating something that just works that's fairly simple. There are definitely places. I think iPhone music is not that. I think it's a whole lot of yes to things I don't understand. A lot of times what they're good at, a lot of their competitors say yes to everything and they make a version of everything. For their market...

Xeni: I feel like that's why Apple Music isn't up to snuff. It appears to have been designed with the opposite thinking. Do you know what I mean?

Leo: It was a "Me to" product. It went bloated, instead of being narrowly focused and just so. That's the iTunes story from day one.

Alex W: Exactly. It's just the constant disastrous and expanding software. You think they would have learned it by now, because iTunes is now a running joke in tech circles about how bad it is. Apple Music didn't apply those same lessons, I don't feel.

Leo: Is it the case that Apple is really good at hardware and not so good at software and service? Is that what it is? We know they don't do well at services. This event is at a 7,000 seat auditorium. 

Xeni: I wasn't invited.

Leo: Neither was I. Do you usually get invited? 

Xeni: yeah.

Leo: I never get invited. It's no big deal for me.

Xeni: I think I probably just screwed my chances of ever being invited back.

Leo: No. You love Apple. Aren't you feeling pretty bad now that you didn't invite Xeni? You've got 7,000 seats. Are you saying she's 7001 in your hearts Apple?

Xeni: It's OK. At the end of the day, it's a product. I use the product so I'm biased in that respect. This isn't universal health care. It's OK they didn't invite me. I'm still going to use their product. 

Leo: I've tried to figure out what they use 7000 seats for. It may be more for Apple employees. That's one thing that's always been... I've talked to Apple. They're sad they don't get invited to these events. You don't want it to be empty. What you don't want is 500 people in the front and 6500 empty seats in the back. They'll fill it.

Xeni: Do you think they're going to give everyone an iPhone? Is that what it's about? 

Alex: It's not Oprah. 

Leo: Starting in 2017 they won't be doing this in the Apple camp. They'll fill it. This is the new drone video. They did a nice job bringing Steve Jobs presentation for this new Apple campus together with this latest drone video from the Apple campus. They're about to show where the new meeting spot will be. This is the auditorium that Apple is building. It will all be underground. This is where you'll be going in the future for iPhone, iPod events. When Apple announces its car. This is the auditorium's entrance. It'll be like the fifth avenue Apple store where there's a big glass entrance and you'll go down into this pit. Pretty cool looking. Props to the guy who has been doing these. It's fun to watch as this campus evolves.

Alex L: I have to admit, I've wrecked so many drones now that I look at these and go I can't believe he did that with these people.

Leo: You can see at the beginning of the event. Here's Steve presenting to the Cupertino council.

Steve Jobs: We bought that and some adjacent property, used to be apricot orchards and we've got a hundred...

Leo: This is one of the last public appearances Steve ever made. He was very ill. They start these drones up from outside the fences. They fly up and over the fence. I'm shocked that someone from Apple hasn't shot this drone down. Drone lazer canons would be perfect for the roof of the Apple complex. 40,000 employees will be housed in this one building. There's a four story parking structure underground, but it's not big enough to hold all the cars, so there's a four story above ground as well. I'm sorry. Two stories underground, 4 stories above ground. Pretty impressive. Let's take a break. When we come back, lots more to talk about, got Alex Wilhelm here from Tech Crunch. Great to have you. Sometime you got to come up here. You were up here last time.

Alex W: I was up here about a month ago. 

Leo: That's right. Love having you up here. If you ever want to come back and be in the studio with us, I'll make sure there's... what do you drink?

Alex W: Last time I drank tequila on the show. 

Leo: There will be tequila waiting for you. Do you like salt?

Alex W: Only if you're buying. 

Leo: Salt is on me. Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing. So great to have you. Is Chappy with you or has he moved on?

Xeni: He got bored. He's an Android user. 

Leo: Xeni is sitting out in her garden. We get a lot of people doing that lately. 

Xeni: I can't wait to show you my squash. 

Leo: Let's see your squash.

Xeni: Can I? OK. So here we are. I'm going to walk downstairs. Oh my god. I'm barefoot. Hot asphalt. Let me see if I can turn... did the camera turn around?

Leo: We're still seeing your face, oh. Now we're good. Those look like limes. What is that?

Xeni: This is Meyer lemon. Behind it is some volunteer squash. I might lose my wifi so I don't want to go too far in. Can you see? There's a lot of tiny baby kale and arugala. 

Leo: Do they allow you to do this in the environs of LA? 

Xeni: Absolutely. Can you still see? 

Leo: This is healing. Did you do this before you got ill or is this something you did after?

Xeni: A long time before I did this. Then I got way too far up my own butt thinking that work was more important than connection with nature and I find this comforting. I do lots of slow foodstuff like baking bread and fermenting sauerkraut and kambucha and stuff. It's really relaxing. I feel like it connects me with something my grandmas would have done. Can you see the tiny kales growing there?

Leo: Look at that! How do you like to do your kale?

Xeni: There's flowers growing on these squash! This is insane! 

Leo: We've never had a garden tour on TWiT before. It's about time. Tell you what? As you go up the stairs, we'll do the ad and we'll come back with more of Xeni Jardin. Alex is also here, Alex Lindsay from the Pixel core. We're talking high tech. I know Apple gets a lot of press. Apple is not the only story. Next week we'll try to bring in some Apple experts and do some analysis on what Apple announces on Wednesday. If they're true to form, they'll announce on Wednesday you'll be able to pre-order on Friday and they'll arrive on the 18th. I hope that's the case.

Alex: For the people who ordered 12:01 to 12:03? 

Leo: I overslept when the watch came out. Took me an extra 3 weeks. Then this is cool. We'll get Alex to show this. This is something that's going to put me back in the iPhone family because I want to use this lightning enabled camera from DX. We'll ask Alex about that later. Our show to you today brought to you by stamps.com! Use stamps.com instead of going to the post office. With stamps.com, you use your computer, your printer to print official US postage without a visit to the post office. It's not a postage meter. It's much better than that. No special ink. What you've got will work. You don't have to go to the post office; you get the postage you need. Always the right amount. You get a USB scale, it will automatically weigh and print the postage, whether it's for a letter, a postcard, a package, right at your own desk. You even get discounts from stamps.com, which is pretty awesome. A fraction of the cost. You save at least 50%, and no more trips to the post office. I love stamps.com We use it here. If you are in the business of mailing stuff, whether it's brochures or products, it's important that your mailers look professional! It happens all the time. I'll buy something on Etsy and it comes in a rumpled brown paper squished box with lots of stamps all over it. It doesn't give the right impression. It works, but it doesn't give the right impression. With stamps.com, all your packages look pro. Your customers will like it too, because if it's certified mail, they will get an e-mail with tracking number. Postage, insurance is discounted through stamps.com. If you have to fill out forms for certified mail or international customs, stamps.com will do it automatically right from the website. You're really not doing any data entry on this. It saves you time, it saves you money, and it looks more professional. There's no question you need to try it. Here's the deal. Go to stamps.com right now, click the microphone, it's in the upper right hand corner and use our promo code TWiT. Watch this. It said five dollars in free postage. I think we can improve on that. Just but TWiT in the promo code there. Whoa. Suddenly it's on a $110 bonus offer. You get the scale, and you get a month of stamps.com. You've got to try it today. It will change the way you look at mailing. Stamps.com! Click the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in TWiT. stamps.com, use the offer code TWiT. I really have to praise stamps.com. They're one of the early podcast advertisers. They've been so supportive. I don't know how many years we've been doing their ads on TWiT. It's a great company. I've always loved them and I'm glad they've been so supportive. So many podcasts are supported by stamps.com to be frank, including ours. Thank you stamps.com. Xeni? Oops. We lost Xeni. She wandered too far in her garden. We'll get Xeni Jardin back from boingboing.net. Alex Wilhelm from Tech Crunch. Are you going to the Apple event? Who are they sending? John Constine probably. I don't hear you. Actually didn't John Constine leave Tech Crunch to go work for Apple? I feel like he did. Alex, you're muted. There we go. Those pearls of wisdom lost.

Alex W: I was trying to answer you. Darryl left. He's doing stuff. I can't tell you what. 

Leo: So John is still there.

Alex W: Josh. Josh and his hair dangle thing. 

Leo: Is he going to the Apple event?

Alex W: I think Matthew Penzerino goes. We usually have one or two other slots. I'm not sure who we're sending. I'm just backup. 

Leo: If they need any help, Xeni and I don't have invitations. We'd be glad to go in their place.

Alex W: If there's an open one, I'm taking it. If I die between now and then, you may have it. 

Leo: We are sending a camera crew down. We did this last time. We had a better picture than Apple did. I thought that was nice. Apple will be streaming their event. What we do is watch the stream and then we snark about it. Google changed their logo. They dropped the seraph. Great article in the New Yorker about this. The article was titled Google shot the Seraph, which is perhaps the best title ever from the New Yorker. The idea is that Google wanted to start looking soft and kind and gentle. Is Seraph gone?

Alex L: It's not gone. It's not something you typically use in a display font. 

Leo: This article in the New Yorker by Sarah Larson says the thing about Seraphs is that they're old fashioned. They harken to the dark ages of publishing. 

Alex L: It's funny that she said that while you're reading Seraph font.

Leo: Their title is not Seraph. The New Yorker has been a determinedly serephied... 

Alex W: I don't think those are words, Leo.

Leo: I can make up words! She said the old Google logo were subtly authoritative. The handsome G, the stately oo, the typewriter and loveable g, the elegant l, the thoughtful e. The new logo retains the rainbow colors but sheds the grown up curly cues. It now evokes children's refrigerator magnets, McDonald's French fries, comic sans. 

Alex W: Do people care this much? She named the letters? That's not English.

Leo: I am in Sarah's camp. I like Seraphs, I cannot lie. I think Google you could say is trying to look softer, kinder, friendlier, more child-like with the new logo.

Alex L: I think it fits more into what they're doing. It is much smaller. The number of KB is like 1/5 the number. 

Leo: That's not to be depricated. Imagine all the queries. Millions of queries a second. Each little k counts. But then they do this java script. I don't know if they're about saving the k.

Alex L: I think we're all going to talk about it, and then it'll be nothing. 

Leo: If you read the Google blog post about this new logo, they spent a lot of time and a lot of money debating thinking what should we do? It's only appropriate that we do the same. Obsess about it. No?

Alex W: Verizon, my corporate overlord dropped a new logo this week that everyone hated. I stopped thinking about it 4 seconds later. This is good material to keep in mind. In a month, we'll have forgotten what the old logo looked like to begin with. Good job Google. Moving on. 

Leo: Who sees the Google logo? Nobody goes to Google.com anymore, right? 

Alex L: A lot of people.

Xeni: It's interesting the way people react to redesigns of their favorite brands. It's almost like if there's a brand you don't connect to deeply and they change their logo, it doesn't upset you too much. But if it's a tool that you use all the time every day and you have a certain kind of intimacy or identification with it, it makes you mad. It's like they moved your cheese. It's like they changed part of you!

Leo: They moved my cheese. 

Alex: Who moved my cheese?

Leo: I love John Legerd’s tweet. He's the CEO of Verizon competitor. He tweeted the new logo of Verizon with a check mark. Alex, just hide your eyes here. Screws over customers check. Data overage penalties check. Keeps all your unused data, check. Etc. Etc. This is the new logo? Verizon with a red check. Wow. Are they getting rid of red?

Alex W: The check mark is still red. It looks like a font they did. The next web did a great post on the logo. 

Leo: I might have to put a little red symbol next to my name. 

Alex L: All online brands should stop using red. What happens with red in H2 64. 

Leo: I love these. This is a logo randomizer. It's called logo generator. I have to run twit.tv through the logo generator. What are we going to get. The 2015 logo generator? We get a splat. 

Alex L: You can hit the randomize button and get another one.

Leo: I like that splat though. Maybe we should consider a re-design. Recycle. Music. Traffic cone. Twit.tv traffic cone. It just shows you how easy it is to create a logo. I got to write a check. This is good. The logo generator. Just Google logo generator. Useless URL you'll never use anyway. You did see that Lenovo likes the same E. At this point, we're going too far. Here it is. This is Vlad Sivav writing for the Verge. It turns out the E in Google is the exact same as the E in Google. Both, by the way, have decided that Sans Seraph is the way. We eliminated Seraph on the TWiT website months ago. Seraphs are so old. We use Verlog. Are you going to have Seraphs on an imaginary re-design of Boingboing.net?

Xeni: Maybe so. Nothing is official yet.

Leo: Re-designing a website is incredibly hard work.

Xeni: I'm proud to say I have never had any design authority over Boing Boing. It's been great for my quality of life. Design is such a thankless job. You could do the best job. You could do the most perfect job and your colleagues or your users or your mom...

Leo: Someone hates change. Is this on your shoulder, Xeni?

Xeni: No.

Leo: I hope Mark and Cory help out here. 

Xeni: I am probably already in trouble for saying all that I have.

Leo: That Rob guy has to do something.

Xeni: Rob and Mark are really the design team at Boing Boing. They're both obviously incredibly talented visual thinkers. Mark is a great illustrator. He designed the original Boing Boing logo. Rob has this beautiful, wry British sense of humor that comes through in these visual jokes he makes. Did you ever see...? He took a ShutterStock image of a keyboard. You know how there's a trope in news that you'll take the image of a keyboard in ShutterStock and put the word porn over the return key and that'll be a safe backer that you can use. I used to get into fights with Rob about this. He would get bored one morning and every single post that anybody put up would be accompanied by that keyboard slack art but with hamsters or hamburgers or taxes or Microsoft. He'd come up with these funny things. That's obviously a silly thing he does, but that's a genius mind at work.

Leo: I agree. And that's by the way, why Slack is so popular. Because you can do stuff like that. 

Xeni: You can do stuff like that without e-mail. Every time you send an e-mail you amplify pain in someone else’s life. That’s really just how I think of it. So even if you are replying all to show somebody a cute visual joke that you made, like I was just describing. Just by virtue of the fact that you’re telling them that by e-mail, you’re amplifying a little bit of misery. So everybody out there watching the show do a stranger a good turn today. Don’t send that e-mail.

Leo: (Laughing) I’m with you.

Xeni: Even if it’s a nice e-mail just don’t send it.

Leo: Don’t send that e-mail. Don’t press the send. You can write it. Don’t press send.

Xeni: Don’t you press it.

Leo: I was looking at your beautiful article about Oliver Sacks who passed away at the age of 82 this week. And it’s—this is the new Boing Boing layout for long form. And it looks great. I love it.

Xeni: You like it?

Leo: Yea.

Xeni: Oh good. We do too.

Leo: Yea I hope you’re not going to change that.

Xeni: No. Yea I think that works well.

Leo: Good. Yea, I think it’s really good.

Xeni: I love being able to tell stories seamlessly with other people’s, you know, tweets and Instagrams and things sort of woven into it.

Leo: Right.

Xeni: So instead of sort of using these old journalism format tricks to get other people’s voices in, we can simply copy and paste in the most transparent way and then we’ve incorporated, we’ve woven other people’s view of the world into our stories. I just, I’m so glad that this medium exists in exactly the way it exists today for us. I think it’s, there’s just never been a more interesting time to be alive.

Leo: Well actually and the word use, the word medium is interesting because this reminds me a little of Medium, Ev William’s blog platform. I’m not sure what to call it.

Alex: It’s the thought catalog for 30 year olds.

Leo: That’s it. Thought catalog for 30 year olds. But it has—it’s similar in the way it does allow you to easily incorporate other—it’s rich in that sense. And yea, this is great. I really—

Xeni: Hey, you scrolled by a little house ad that we had for Weekend of Wonder. I think at some point—can I, can I share about that now?

Leo: What is the Weekend of Wonder? Let me find the house ad first. 

Xeni: Yea, go back to the home page.

Leo: Although I keep getting stuck on this picture of Oliver Sacks taken when he was a young man.

Xeni: We’re like Oliver Sex, am I right?

Leo: Hot, hot, hot. And I interviewed Oliver in the mid 80’s when he was about my age, late 50’s early 60’s. And he had a big white beard and big red suspenders and had a really jolly demeanor. Boy if I’d seen this picture I’d have gone, “Wow. Wow.” He was a great man. And really an inspiration.

Xeni: You know I think Mark and Pesco, my 2 colleagues Mark and Pesco really followed his work much more closely. But I—a lot of what I know about him was actually through Steve Silverman. Steve did that wonderful interview with him more than 10 years ago and it was actually through Steve that I learned that Oliver was about to publish that Op Ed in the New York Times saying, “I’m dying of a cancer occurrence.” And I remember Steve told me at the time, it was like right before the book came out and he said, “You know, there is something else that he is going to be coming out about in a really big way. And that’—he’ll talk in his last book about his sexuality.” He came out as gay in his book. And I just—It’s so cool. Like Steve Silverman has talked a lot recently about how being a sexual minority and being kind of a brain minority, there are some parallels. So he has this new book out about, about autism basically. And Oliver Sacks is a big reason that we think of autism not as, without some of the, the stigma and the revulsion that people treated folks with autism in years gone by.

Leo: If you get a chance to read his first piece, one of his early pieces The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. It was later turned into a great book. But the original piece gives you a sense of what an amazing person—

Xeni: You know Steve, Steve Silverman tweeted this thing the other day. He said, “I asked Oliver Sacks why sage plants have fuzzy leaves.” And I’ve been thinking about this every day, Leo, because I’m growing sage down in that little garden—I think I saw a little pot of seedlings. And Oliver Sacks said, “They have fuzzy leaves because they like it.”

Leo: (Laughing) that sounds like the right answer. I must say. That’s wonderful. Let’s talk about The Week of Wonder. Boing Boing’s Week of Wonder in association with Baby Tattoo.

Xeni: Cool publishing company. Yes, so our Weekend of Wonder, this is our 1st ever Weekend of Wonder. And it’s—I don’t want to call it words that people usually use for gatherings of tech people. We’re going to call it an extravaganza. I mean it’s really like—it’s kind of like a cruise or a guided toure of just—

Leo: I want to go.

Xeni: That just stays in one place more or less. It’s at the Mission Inn, this beautiful historical place in Riverside, California. It’s a little bit like the Winchester Mystery House if you’ve ever been there. And we’re going to have all kinds of fun guests that you’re scrolling by right now. John Edgar Park, Michael Borys, Mark Frauenfelder. We have Martin and Olivia Olson from Adventure Time. Amazing, amazing people. Scroll down a little bit. Oh yea, the artist Coop and Andrew Main of Don’t Trust Andrew Main on A & E, Perre DiCarlo and I think there’s this really cool restaurant, husband and wife team here in Los Angeles called Starry Kitchen. And they’re like basically internet hunk chefs. They recently did this thing—they don’t have a standing restaurant right now so they did a pop-up via Uber. So everybody knows about Starry Kitchen and you can order Starry Kitchen via Uber.

Leo: Oh, that’s nice.

Xeni: There’s a video game themed restaurant down in Echo Park where they’re going to have snacks. And their big thing are these crispy tofu balls. And the guy, Nguyen Tran is his name, husband and wife Vietnamese-American duo and they always talk about, “Put my balls in your mouth.”

Leo: (Laughing).

Xeni: And so there’s going to be a lot of ball jokes and a lot of good food. Magic, there’s going to be recreational lock picking. We might teach you how to walk slack line. We’re going to lock some children in the trunk of a car and we’ll teach them—

Leo: (Laughing) no you’re not.

Xeni: Yea, why not. Maybe, maybe. We’ll also—and then they can do the recreational lock picking to figure out how to get out. And if they don’t get out, screw them. And we’re going to have show and tell.

Alex L: When is this happening?

Leo: It’s coming up on September what, 18th, 19th and 20th.

Xeni: September 18th through the 20th, wow.boingboing.net. W-O-W.boingboing.net. And really each person who comes to the event is going to be the star of the event. It’s not a hokey thing. If you could imagine Boing Boing being brought to life, isn’t what I just described to you basically Boing Boing in real life? And like this place, the Mission Inn, there’s these crazy catacombs and secret lairs and we’re going to get these wacky guided tours of half-truths, kind of like John Hodgeman does where he just makes s*** up that’s sounds so fun you believe him. Who knows? Hodgeman might even show up.

Leo: Hodgeman should show up. This is made for Hodgeman.

Xeni: And Baby Tattoo does all these cool events that involve art and like low-brow southern California hot rod art and stuff like that. All meals are going to be taken care of for you. And we’re going to basically—you know what it’s about for me? It’s about staying up all night, sitting on the roof in the beautiful Southern California weather under these stars that you can see so clearly out of Riverside doing card tricks and gossiping about YouTube.

Leo: Only 100 people will be there.

Xeni: Yea, it’s going to be small.

Leo: Very small.

Xeni: We want to do a bunch of these. This is a lot more fun than chasing down display ads.

Leo: I like, I like this idea. And yea, it’s a way of supporting of course Boing Boing.

Xeni: Yea, yea.

Leo: It’s $1,500. I want to say that up front so people don’t rush there and say, “Oh.”

Xeni: It includes your lodging; it includes a lot of your food and includes a lot of cool extras. So it’s not—There’s a lot of conferences--

Leo: For a 3 day weekend it’s pretty good, yea.

Xeni: There’s a lot of conferences where you pay that just to get in.

Leo: Yea, right.

Xeni: But you’re getting all kinds of stuff. It will be so much fun.

Leo: I don’t think that’s overpriced but I thought I’d just say it before people rush over. And only 100 people so don’ t waste too much time. Wow.boingboing.com.

Xeni: More exclusive than the Apple iPhone event.

Leo: Much more, yea.

Xeni: No 7,000 people here, bucko. And they’re not all getting iPhones because we don’t have the budget for that.

Leo: It’s kind of like, it sounds like an organized Foo Camp. Sounds like fun. Wow.

Xeni: I don’t want to compare it to anything because we’ve been to all of those events, we love them, they are exactly what they are. And I think we just want to take little bits of all the events that we wish had happened and never have yet. And that definitely includes a lot of weird crap that we’re shoving into this 3 day extravaganza of fun. If you come—

Leo: Why aren’t you, why aren’t you listed as a special guest? You’ll be there, right?

Xeni: Yea. I will be there. And you know what I’m going to show?

Leo: What?

Xeni: This is breaking news on TWiT. I’m going to be bringing a really cool book that I bought on E-bay for $70 bucks. And this book was published in 1855.

Leo: Wow.

Xeni: And it’s a pictorial guide to travels throughout California Del Norte otherwise known as what we call California now before it was separated from Mexico.

Leo: It was all Del Norte if it was north of Mexico, yea. Very cool.

Xeni: But it’s going to be fun. We’re each going to have show and tell. Yea, I might bring some of my kraut.

Leo: (Laughing) there may be sauerkraut. 

Alex W: And we’re back to the food chain.

Alex L: Now I’m coming. If there’s going to be Kraut, then I’m on my way.

Leo: And Alex is not, Alex Wilhelm says, “And I’m not going anywhere near it.”

Alex L: I’m registering right now.

Xeni: Oh, wait. I’ve got to tell you one more thing. One of the meals is at a taco shop, right? And the guy who makes the tacos also collects weird scrap metal and junk and makes these Gaudi style sculptures and he’s got this whole sculpture garden.

Leo: Wow. That’s neat.

Xeni: And so we’re going to be eating tacos that this dude makes in these crazy outsider art sculpture garden. And if that’s not Boing Boing, I don’t know what’s Boing Boing.

Leo: Sounds really great. Sounds like a lot of fun. Wow.boingboing.net.

Xeni: Yep.

Leo: Thank you for telling us about it. We’re going to get back with more of the tech news. Google has an announcement on the 29th. Apparently that’s the rumor. I could tell you a little bit about that. And a little, there’s a little controversy over the OnHub router that Google announced a couple of weeks ago. We’ll talk about that. But first if you missed anything this week on TWiT, you missed a lot. Let’s take a look.

Narrator: Previously on TWiT.

Megan Marrone: This is called the NoPhone.

Leo: You know it’s the new phone season right now.

Megan: It is. It feels good in the hands.

Leo: It’s good looking. Is it waterproof?

Megan: It is for—

Leo: It runs all operating systems the same.

Megan: Yes.

Leo: Which is not at all.

Megan: Right.

Narrator: Before You Buy.

Leo: This one’s pretty impressive. This is the brand new Galaxy Note 5. This is easily the best looking and the best usability. I would say it’s the best phone I’ve ever had.

Narrator: The New Screen Savers.

Male Guest: My question is what advice would you guys give to someone like me trying to grow their ferret channel.

Fr. Robert Ballecer: If you’ve got a camera that can either zoom out a little bit or put a wide angle lens on it, you may actually find that it gets a little less nauseating for your audience to watch.

Leo: (Laughing).

Male Guest 2: He was just jealous, that’s all.

Narrator: Tech News Today.

Mike Elgan: Researchers at the University of California at Berkley are programming a robot the old fashioned way. They’re sending it to pre-school.

Jack Clark: The robot is being taught to learn about the world and so more analogous to how children learn. But it will use the crowd to let the robots teach each other things. Which is less terrifying than it sounds.

Narrator: TWiT. It keeps going and going and going.

Leo: I don’t think you want to let the robots talk to one another. I think that’s extremely—

Alex L: That is the beginning of a bad, scary movie. And that’s all I’m saying.

Leo: Big week ahead. Mike Elgan, our news director, what’s ahead this week? I think I know.

Mike: The bit event this week is an announcement by Apple on Wednesday, September 9th in San Francisco where we are expecting new iPhones, a new Apple TV and new iPads. We’ll cover it live starting at 9:45 A.M. Pacific on Wednesday at twit.tv/live. Back to you, Leo.

Leo: Mike Elgan and Tech News Today. Monday through Friday, 10:00 A.M. Pacific, 1:00 P.M. Eastern Time, 1700 UTC. Your daily dose of tech news. Before we get back to the tech news this week with Alex Wilhelm of Techcrunch.com., Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing, and Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corps, I want to talk about Braintree. I want to talk to the mobile deveolpers out there. If you’ve been looking for some way to incorporate online payments into your website or your mobile app, you’ve got to check out Braintree. A-maz-ing. We talked to, just the other day to Juan Benitez. He’s the CTO of Braintree. And he talked a little bit about the companies they work with, the companies that use their checkout system. Listen.

Juan Benitez: We get to work with some really cool people. We get to support you know Uber, Hotel Tonight, Airbnb, GitHub, Slack. I mean these are some of the best innovators out there and also some of them like GitHub and Slack providing the platforms of innovation frankly. To have the opportunity to work with these folks and to try to delight them is a great challenge, is a great opportunity. We learn a lot from our customers and we just hope that we can return the value to them. 

Leo: If you think about it, I mean the secret sauce for Uber is the easy way to pay. You just, you get to the end of the ride, you get out of the car. That’s Braintree doing it. Braintree has made payment experience seamless, easy, magical and you can add that same experience to your app with excellent customer service, easy integration, we’re just talking 10 lines of code. And they work with every platform. PHP and Ruby and Python, you know, Node, Java Script, J-Query, Braintree gets you ready to receive payments quickly and easily. And they’ve got great support, fast payouts. So they’re prepared. You’ll be prepared as your company grows from your 1st dollar to your billionth dollar. Braintree – helping to solve the problem of mobile cart abandonment by offering the best in class mobile check out experience. You can find out more. Go to their sandbox at braintreepayments.com/twit. Play around with it. It’s a full stack payment solution. And I should really say it supports every form of pay including of course, Apple Pay, PayPal, Bitcoin, Venmo, credit cards and as new forms of payments arrive like Android Pay it will support those too. All with one easy integration. And superior fraud protection and customer service and fast payments. You’d be crazy to write this yourself. To find out more and to get your first $50,000 in transactions fee free, braintreepayments.com/twit. We thank them so much for their support. All right I really try to, I really try to stir up some anger, some angst over Google’s new logo. Nothing. Na. Nothing. How about the Nexus event? Rumor is September 29th, we’ve been waiting for a Nexus 5. It’s really interesting, I mean IFA’s been going on all week long in Berlin. Samsung had announcements. Actually Sony’s announcements were probably the most interesting. Apple’s announcements next week. For some reason Google’s decided to do the Nexus—I guess they don’t even really care if they sell them. The Nexus event, like, “Yea, we’ll do it later.”

Alex L: They’ll do it when they’re good and ready.

Leo: When they’re good and ready there’s a new Nexus 5 supposedly made by LG. That’s the rumor. A larger device, the Nexus 6 replacement built by Huawei. No idea what they’ll charge. I think one of the things that held this is up is they wanted to put the new version of Android on there, Marshmallow. Google spokesperson said, “I have no comment.” Might be the first time, I think it would be the first time you’d get a Huawei phone officially in the US, right? You’d have to go, you’d have to go to Ali Baba or somewhere to buy a Huawei phone in the US before.

Alex W: I’m so excited. I’ve been waiting for that for so long. That’s what I wanted.

Leo: Really? A Huawei?

Alex W: No, no, not at all.

Leo: How about the Moto X Pure Edition. I ordered mine on Wednesday. Are you going to get one of them?

Alex W: No.

Leo: No. Nobody cares. You’re all iPhone users. You don’t care.

Alex W: It’s true. I mean like this plugs up the media.

Leo: But thing has wood. It has leather or wood on the back. Now how much would you pay?

Alex L: Now we have a title.

Alex W: I would pay negative money for it. They would have to pay me to take that. I don’t want leather on my phone.

Leo: You don’t want a leather phone?

Alex W: I do not, or a leather wallet. Really I don’t want leather at all. I think I pass on the entire concept.

Leo: Actually, I know Xeni doesn’t, she’s a vegan.

Xeni: I was a vegan and then I was diagnosed with cancer and then I thought, “Well, that didn’t work out.”

Leo: You need some more meat. All right.

Xeni: No the truth is I still eat a plant centric diet, but I wouldn’t call myself a vegan.

Leo: All right. But you wouldn’t mind a wooden phone?

Xeni: Ah, come on.

Leo: I can’t even get you interested.

Alex W: Thank you. Thank you.

Xeni: Come out here in Homestead and find some tablets? Leo.

Leo: (Laughing) all right. How about these new Xperia phones? Actually there was a funny article in Mashable. Sony for reasons no one understands announced a 4K display on the Z5 Premium.

Alex L: It’s going to be 800 something?

Leo: 800 dots per inch, yea.

Alex L: Pixels per inch, yea. That makes totally no sense.

Leo: Makes no sense. 

Alex L: And here’s the problem with it is and the reason it makes no sense is number 1, when we think of a fine magazine, as sharp as we can think that is 300 dpi.

Leo: I remember when the Apple Laser came out. 300 dpi is like, “Oh, you can never see any dots.”

Alex L: And the issue is, and maybe a little bit more than that or whatever, but when you increase, when you have these crazy resolutions for a phone, that affects your battery, that affects your—

Leo: Hello? Go ahead.

Alex L: It effects battery life, it affects you know how much you can do with the graphics processor, it affects the kind, the way the games play. Because now every developer now has to develop for this to get it that sharp. And you know pixel bubbling, you know quadrupling or something like that. But it’s still—

Leo: Well we don’t know because it’s not out. It won’t be out until later in the year but I did read one report that said in fact most of the time it’s 1080p. It does do pixel doubling as Apple does with its high dpi displays. You only see the 4K that’s 800 whatever it is dots per inch when you’re looking at video or movies. They’re also putting Sony’s upscaler. They have a very good upscaler in the TV. Supposedly that technology will also be in the phone. So you’ll be able to look at HD or even SD content and it will look really good.

Alex L: I don’t know if I’d be able to see the difference between 4K and I can see the difference between 4K on a regular screen, between 4K and 1080p. I don’t know if I could do it on a phone.

Leo: The funniest thing, a piece by Raymond Wong in Mashable. He talked about the journalists who during the Sony event, you know they’re champing at the bit to get over that, look at that 4K phone. Before the event even ends they’re starting to rush the demo tables. They’re exclaiming. They’re looking at the demos. “Wow, isn’t that a great screen!” Sony reps are standing there. They’re nodding. He had to wait in line to get over there. He says, “I was quick and nimble and didn't even sit down. I bolted but I wasn’t quick enough. Dozens of other reporters got there first so I had to wait. Watch them go crazy over this 4K display. Except it wasn’t the 4K display. It was a 1080p display. They had the Premium in another room locked down. The Sony reps didn’t bother to correct anybody. It just shows you. I mean these guys are looking at a 1080p display saying, “Wow. That 4K really looks good.”

Alex L: And 1080p on a little phone looks amazing.

Leo: It looks good. 

Alex L: It does. It looks great.

Leo: It kind of underscores you probably can’t tell the difference. Sony had booth attendants guarding the Premium devices and no touching allowed. So you couldn’t really play with the Z5 Premium.

Alex L: Because they just barely worked. Usually when that happens when they say, “No touching allowed.” You’re like ahh—

Leo: This is too early. He went and asked a Sony rep. He said, “I thought the Z5 Premium was on the table.” The rep said, “Oh yea, there’s a Z5 on the table.” And then talked to someone else and said, “No, I’m sorry, no. There’s no premiums on the table. They’re only in that room.” So everybody was fooled. I’m not going to mock the journalists. It just shows you, you can’t tell the difference between 1080P and 4K. Nevertheless, I’ll buy one. Because I’m—

Alex L: It’s what you do.

Leo: Built that way. And it comes in gold. Not real gold, just golden.

Xeni: Rose gold?

Leo: Rose gold. No, no that’s the iPhone. Are you going to get the rose gold? Of course you are, Xeni.

Xeni: I would get gold gold.

Leo: Gold gold. It’s hard to really generate any excitement about this stuff at all. I’m trying so hard.

Alex W: Well we’re just stuck in this, we’re stuck in the Android, you know, like smart phone spec war still and so to see a 4K display is cool but I mean like it’s not out yet, it may not work that well, there’s not a lot of content for it, games aren’t ready for it. So it’s like a data point. But I’m not going to rush online now and reserve one. I think it’s cool, but yea. It’s just, you know.

Leo: Just a data point. Samsung’s Gear S2. Samsung’s sticking with Tizen which is interesting. I think they’ve done Android Wear Watches but their newest watches including the Gear S2 which looks pretty good. We had a review yesterday on the show from Slash Gear. Uses bezel instead of a knob.

Alex L: I like the bezel. I like the bezel better than the knob.

Leo: Kind of does the same thing.

Alex L: It does the same thing but I like the fact that it’s easier to get to.

Leo: Yea. It looks nice. It’s round. I like round watches. I don’t know. Do you, any of you wear an Apple Watch?

Alex L: I have an Apple Watch.

Xeni: No.

Leo: Do you like your Apple Watch?

Alex L: I’m wearing it right now.

Leo: Oh, you are.

Alex L: Yea.

Leo: What do you have it on, a rubber case?

Alex L: Yea, I got a little rubber case.

Leo: That’s cool. You’re tough on it.

Alex L: I move road cases around. I mean it’s not going to survive otherwise. But the— I couldn’t go back.

Leo: Tizen is Samsung’s own operating system and they’re, so they’re, I guess it will work with Android and iPhone. But there’s some question is there really room for a 3rd Smart Watch operating system out there?

Alex L: Well I don’t think, at least what we’ve seen so far, I don’t think that the operating system has to work very hard on the watch. I mean it’s—

Leo: They all do roughly the same thing, right?

Alex L: There are just a handful of things we need them to do. But I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick with it when I got the phone, when I got the watch, but now I don’t think I can give it up because I’m just so used to being able to look down and decide, “No, I’m not going to answer that call.” That’s mostly it. The number one reason.

Leo: That’s really it.

Alex W: It’s just notifications though? Is that really your killer use-case is just the face that—

Leo: Well you can talk to it. You can say, “Send Alex Wilhelm a text.”

Alex L: Responding on text, you know being able to respond—I wish I could pre-program my responses into the Apple. I mean like you know it comes up with a bunch of them and I wish there were 4 automatic ones like you know, screw that. You know or sue them. Or you know, whatever.

Leo: Sue them. You say that a lot.

Alex L: Sue them, sue them. No, no. But I wish like yes no was always two of the options. I don’t want the cute, I just want yes or no. The first 2 that should be the response for everything because I usually don’t like to respond with any other words.

Leo: Here’s Chris Davies’ thumb twiddling that.

Alex L: I really like that. I really do.

Leo: I think that’s a good UI.

Alex L: It’s a better UI than…

Leo: Yea. It seems more natural. All right. I don’t know why I’m bringing all this stuff up. Nobody cares. You guys didn’t even buy an Apple Watch.

Alex W: Well we’re too cool for Apple Watches.

Leo: Are you? Do you wear a wrist watch of any kind?

Alex W: I have a smart phone. Why would I need extra guidance?

Leo: That’s kind of my attitude.

Alex W: I think that if you buy the Apple Watch it means you’re less cool. So it’s the first Apple Product that might make you less fun and interesting if you have one. To presume you’re just kind of a boring Apple fan. Sorry everyone.

Leo: (Laughing).

Alex W: This is why I have so many friends. It’s all sarcasm.

Leo: All right. I thought this was going to be such a—you never know. I thought this was going to be such a jam packed week because we have all those IFA announcements. And unfortunately we have people who are just not consumers. You guys are not like just rapacious consumers. You’re thoughtful.

Xeni: That’s because we’re all too old, Leo. Why didn’t you book some millenniums on this show?

Leo: Yea. I got to have the new thing. I made a big mistake. A big error.

Xeni: I’m just at a place in my life where I’m more excited about things that I grow or ferment or write myself.

Leo: I’m kind of with you. I think we got so sucked into these shiny objects that we kind of let life pass you by. And I think maybe a brush, a brush with the grim reaper is maybe a good way to focus the tension of what really matters.

Xeni: I definitely would recommend it. Anybody who wants to figure out their priorities in life, get cancer.

Leo: Yea. 

Alex L: It’s the next thing. 

Leo: I feel like I’m in the waiting room. I feel like it’s just, I’m just waiting to get cancer. That’s what I’m doing now.

Xeni: Oh, don’t say that, Leo. I can joke about it. But don’t joke about it.

Leo: Well I don’t mean it as a joke. I feel like it’s just inevitable at some point and—

Xeni: No. No, no, no, no.

Leo: No?

Xeni: No.

Alex W: Well Leo’s like—you’re like 75, right Leo?

Leo: Yea. My prostate is the size of a grapefruit.

Xeni: TMI.

Leo: (Laughing) oh.

Xeni: This no long feels like a safe space.

Leo: I’m sorry.

Xeni: You know, for my…

Leo: I’m sorry. It is a safe space.

Xeni: You know, I feel like your patriarchy is getting a little out of control.

Leo: Oh God, no.

Xeni: I might have to retreat into my kitten room.

Leo: Not the patriarchy. Do you have a kitten room?

Xeni: Yes.

Leo: Really?

Xeni: Yes. Yes, I do. I have a room full of kittens. In fact it’s right behind this window.

Leo: Are you an evil, are you an evil genius?

Xeni: No, I’m just the queen of the internet.

Leo: (Laughing) you have a kitten room. You know, we have two kittens. That’s practically a kitten room the way they move around. 

Alex L: A kitten room, really great. If you really think about it.

Leo: How many kittens would you need to fill a kitten room?

Alex L: I think you’d need 8 to 10.

Xeni: It depends on how big they are.

Leo: 8 to 10? 8 to 10, I’m thinking hundreds. Really? Is that all? 8 to 10?

Xeni: I would love to have a room that is filled with stuffed, fluffy small toy kittens. Wouldn’t that be great? Like you could just—like a bouncy castle but it’s just full of tiny furry creatures?

Leo: I saw your Instagram of you lying naked in your squash patch. I feel like you---

Xeni: I wasn’t naked, I was wearing a dress. That’d be really, really creepy and bad. That would be a bad move.

Leo: (Laughing) I’m sorry.

Xeni: No.

Leo: It’s that patriarchy. It sneaks up on me. I can’t help it.

Xeni: It was so fun. I was just lying down there this morning with my head in the dirt and these vines crawling around my neck. It’s just so much more fun.

Leo: It’s a great picture. You look like Poison Ivy in the Batman.

Xeni: It was so much more fun than trying to figure out which new watch to buy.

Leo: Yes. I’m with you on that. Much more fun. Lie with your squash.

Xeni: Squash is forever. You know what, I don’t need to re-charge my squash.

Leo: No.

Xeni: It just not require any recharging at all.

Leo: You do not. Do you have a spiralizer?

Xeni: Oh my God, yes.

Leo: Aren’t they awesome?

Xeni: I’m the first person, I’m the first person on the internet to become crazy about spiralizers.

Alex L: Spiralizers?

Leo: Hey, my daughter told me about spiralizers.

Xeni: Darth and I on Twitter have long conversations about how great spiralizers are. You know Darth? The guy who does all the cute animal stuff?

Leo: Yea.

Xeni: I’m assuming he’s a guy but Darth might be a woman for all I know.

Leo: Now do you have one of those big spiralizers with the crank or do you just have one of the little conical spiralizers?

Xeni: Oh man, if you’re going to go, go all the way. So yea, I have a crank one.

Leo: Oh, wow.

Xeni: I make zucchini pasta with it.

Leo: That’s what I got it for because I thought it would be great for pasta. Because I make a great spaghetti sauce, a great bolognaise, but I don’t want to eat the pasta. So I thought if I could make zucchini into pasta.

Xeni: Oh, listen. Is this a food podcast, because I’m going to get real with the food. What you need to do, some people like to take the skin off so that it looks more like believable pasta, so it can pass as pasta. You just sprinkle a little bit of salt on the zucchini strips and let them sweat a little bit. And then I don’t know, after like a half an hour or something you just pat them dry and—

Leo: That’s what I have to do. So I do that with eggplant too. You put a little salt and it draws the moisture out. I need to do that because it gets kind of soggy if you don’t do that. So that’s—and there goes Xeni. She’s probably wandering down to get some zucchini to spiralizer.

Alex W: We need to get her a better Wi-Fi connection.

Leo: Let’s take a break. I don’t know. And talk more—I love my spiralizer.

Alex L: I want one now.

Leo: And I don’t have like this. I have a cheap one. It’s just a conical thing. It looks like one of those bar implements for a shot glass. And it’s got a little razor sharp edges in it and you just stick the zucchini in there. But I think this—anyway. Our show—(laughing).

Alex W: This is a weird moment on TWiT.

Leo: This is weird all around. This whole show is weird.

Alex W: Yea, I’m going to give it a weird this time. Definitely. Scoring weird points.

Leo: Ok, ok. Show today brought to you buy Audible.com. We love audio books, you know that. Don’t have to tell you twice. Except I do. Why aren’t you a member of Audible.com yet? That’s my question for you. On your way to work, on your way to school, wherever you go, don’t be a fool. Get Audible.

Alex L: Did you just make that up right now?

Leo: No, I have a jingle.

Alex L: That’s impressive.

Leo: (Laughing) 

Alex W: Can you sing it next time?

Leo: I can find it actually. I can find the Audible jingle. I have it here somewhere. Audible is a book store of 180,000 audio books, fabulous audio books. Fiction, non-fiction. I’m just a huge fan. On, I’ve got to read this. I’ve been meaning to read this. Have you read this, Ed Catmull’s book? Creativity, Inc. He’s of course the president of Pixar.

Alex L: I want to listen to that.

Leo: He was president all through the Steve Jobs era. And many agree. I just read Becoming Steve Jobs, the latest biography of Steve. And in that book they talk a lot about him. And really agree that if it weren’t for Ed Catmull, Pixar wouldn’t be the company it is. Because you need a leader at the company who supports the creatives and creatives are notoriously difficult to herd. They’re like a roomful of cats. It’s like a kitten room. And he’s apparently just brilliant at it. Anyway he’s written a book called Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand In the Way of True Inspiration. And I hear it’s wonderful. That’s going to be next on my list. Right now, my next book that I’ve already downloaded, I need to go to my Audible library and show you. Is something, maybe Xeni’s heard of this.

Xeni: Yea.

Leo: Cixin Liu is a Chinese science fiction author who is being much celebrated. He’s written a trilogy. 1st book is called The Three-Body Problem. And I’ve been dying to read this. The English translation just recently came out. Have you read it yet, Xeni?

Xeni: Nope.

Leo: I’ve heard very good things about it. Set against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project sends signals into space to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization on the brink of destruction captures the signal and plans to invade Earth. Apparently though, because they’re so distant, we have a lot of time to prepare. Like centuries.

Xeni: That sounds like a really cool story. I would read that.

Leo: Yea. This is the 1st volume. The 2nd volume has also been recorded. I think Audible is currently working on the 3rd volume Dead End. Dark Forest is the 2nd. I’ve got the 1st 2. I will give you a report as soon as I finish those. But those are—I can’t wait to read those. I’ve been reading a lot lately on Audible because I’ve been doing traveling. I don’t—when I’m on a plane I need an audio book. I put my headphones in and I relax and I listen to an audio book. I just listened to one of The Great Courses. These are great too on Audible. College lectures on pretty much every subject under the sun. And you can just you know, get these lectures, listen to them. Here’s one I bet you would like from Professor Mark. W Muesse. Practicing Mindfulness: An Introduction to Meditation. This is on my list, what-to-do list of things.

Xeni: To meditate?

Leo: Yea.

Xeni: You should meditate on that.

Leo: I should think about it. I should meditate on it. Perhaps I will act upon it. Tell you what I’m going to do right now, give you 2 books for free. Maybe this will be one of them. All you got to do is go – (laughing) Xeni’s all excited. Audible.com/twit2 you’ll sign up for the platinum plan. That’s 2 books a month. It includes the daily digest of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, which is also great to listen to as you want to catch up on your news in the car. And you can cancel any time in the 1st 30 days. Pay nothing but keep those two books. They’re yours as a little thank you. But I think really the point is to get you listening. Because I think once you start listening to Audible it’s pretty hard to stop. It’s a really good thing.

Xeni: Can I put in an unscripted, unpaid plug for Audible?

Leo: Yes you can.

Xeni: I moved here to my sofa because I was going to be cute with my dog, but then he ran off.

Leo: Oh man, Chappie.

Xeni: Maybe Chappie will come back. I’ll put a steak in my hand or something. So I really, I really like Audible. And I have listened to a number of books on Audible because when you have cancer and you’re going through treatment, this is how I first got turned on to Audible. It’s really hard to concentrate.

Leo: Yea.

Xeni: It’s really hard to concentrate long enough to finish your chapter, let alone a whole book. But having somebody read to you is really calming and there’s just a whole different part of your brain that gets used when you’re listening to somebody read to you. So I actually did listen to a lot of guided meditations.

Leo: Smart.

Xeni: Jack Kornfield is this mindfulness—

Leo: Oh, I know Jack because I go to Spirit Rock. He’s up here.

Xeni: You go to Spirit Rock?

Leo: Oh, he’s wonderful, yea.

Xeni: My cancer therapist was the 1st to turn me onto Spirit Rock and how wonderful their programs are. I’ve never been there.

Leo: Oh, it’s beautiful.

Xeni: It’s like just a really good brain exercise.

Leo: It’s nearby. It’s over here in the Costios [? 1:35:14] 

Alex L: I used to live in the Costios [? 1:35:16]. Right around the corner.

Leo: Did you? And Jack of course, I don’t know if he was the founder, but he’s there all the time and lectures there. And he’s wonderful.

Xeni: Super cool guy.

Leo: Beautiful guy, yea.

Xeni: There’s a lot, there’s a lot of BS self-help stuff out there and he teaches old school meditation. And I like it. But I download his stuff on Audible all the time.

Leo: Yea, I’ve meditated to Jack. He’s a, he’s a—it’s great. Really fun.

Xeni: I can actually imitate the audio, the Audible audio book intro. This book is brought to you by Audible.com.

Leo: (Laughing) I don’t know who that guy is, but I have to laugh each time. At the end he goes, “Thank you for listening to Audible.” I just laugh every time.

Xeni: Chappie’s back.

Leo: By the way, the only dog in your house blessed by the Dali Lama.

Xeni: Yes, it’s true. My boyfriend and my dog and I went to see his holiness, the Dali Lama. And we were in like a basement underneath the hotel with all these secret service guys and his holiness was coming in. And they opened the doors and there were all these really serious dudes and dogs and weapons and stuff. And he looked at Chappie, I was holding Chappie. And look, Chappie’s chewing my hair. And then he went right for Chappie. And like just chucked him under the chin like this. And ooo, like that and Chappie has licked him. And he came up to me and he went like that.

Leo: Aww.

Alex W: That’s pretty gutsy for someone you don’t even know. It’s like, “Hey, I’m going to pinch your cheek now.”

Leo: That’s sweet. That’s—I mean after that, Vladimir Putin and that’s it. Everybody. You’ll have (laughing).

Xeni: No, I think I could probably get along pretty good with Vladimir Putin if I was hanging out with Chappie.

Leo: Was that on the show or was that before the show? Because otherwise people are very confused.

Alex L: I think it was before the show.

Leo: There’s a whole Tumblr and I got this from Boing Boing initially dedicated to pictures of Putin posing with animals.

Xeni: Just like I am right now.

Leo: And I just feel like you and Putin have something in common (laughing).

Alex W: Yes. Just that one thing.

Leo: Vladimir Putin with animals. I mentioned that—there he is with a dwarf horse. There he is topless with a dog. Here he is—

Xeni: They prefer to be called small horses, Leo.

Leo: I’m sorry, little horses. I am again, the patriarchy reasserts itself.

Xeni: I’m feeling really unsafe. I need to return to my kitten room.

Leo: I’m so sorry.

Xeni: Did you hear anything about the raisins this week, by the way?

Leo: The California Raisins?

Xeni: No, Little People of America, midget raisins? I’m just trying to get, I’m just messing with you here.

Leo: Midget—we call them little raisins. Come one, Xeni, even I know that.

Xeni: Yea. They used to be called midget raisins but The Little People of America had a petition to change it.

Leo: Good. That’s fine.

Xeni: And the USDA changed it. I think it’s really cool.

Leo: I think that’s sensitive. The reason I brought up the Dali Lama is because he has of course many books. And has many books on Audible.com. 

Xeni: Oh and they’re great. And he’s really fun to listen to.

Leo: Yea, you get, you know, here’s his introduction on Buddhism so you can hear his voice because Martin Sheen narrates Beyond Religion. I don’t know if Martin Sheen really has the Dali Lama voice.

Xeni: Well, the guy’s alive. Listen to his voice.

Leo: So these are lectures from—

Dali Lama: Mesa Foundation

Leo: His holiness.

Xeni: Chappie. It’s your buddy. That’s your friend.

Leo: (Laughing) He chucked you under the chin. Look at that. That’s a cute, that’s a cute shot. Everybody should go to Audible.com. There are 2 books there with your name on them and there are so many choices, 180,000. And you can see just a little sampling. Science fiction, fiction, non-fiction, lectures, the latest in the millennium series, The Girl in the Spider’s Web. There’s so much great stuff. Audible.com/twit2 to get your first 2 books free.

Xeni: And the other part of their thing is “Audible.com. Wherever you are.”

Leo: (Laughing).

Xeni: “Wherever you are.”

Leo: Are they lying on their back like you are? You’re the—

Xeni: “5 million people—“

Alex L: Can we all try that?

Leo: Let’s all lie on our backs and do the show now. Let’s relax.

Xeni: It puts you in a much better mood.

Leo: We will cheer up.

Xeni: Let’s go get high right now.

Leo: You know…

Xeni: (Laughing).

Alex L: (Laughing).

Alex W: (Laughing).

Xeni: I’m not actually right now, I’m just kidding.

Leo: No, I know you’re not. That’s the funny thing. Dan Lyons. Any of you know Dan Lyons? I know Dan Lyons.

Xeni: Yea, he’s a great guy.

Leo: Love Dan Lyons. He was the fake Steve Jobs. Wrote, was a writer for was it Newsweek? I’m trying to remember. Maybe it was Time Magazine. He—I saw him a few years ago and I said, “Where are you working these days, Dan?” He was working at HubSpot. And I said, “Dan, you’re a journalist. What are you doing at HubSpot?”

Xeni: Getting paid.

Leo: Getting paid was basically the right answer. HubSpot, which is an internet marketing and sales software company. I guess he was a journalist in residence there. In any event, he left HubSpot, was for 2 weeks the editor in chief of Gawker until he realized what Gawker really was. Left there. Has been a staff writer for Silicon Valley and I credit Dan Lyons with a lot of the most accurate stuff in Silicon Valley because it’s sometimes so insider and it’s just hysterical. Well apparently all this time Lyons has been writing a book. A memoir about his life at HubSpot. The memoir says, the blub for the memoir says, “The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: Shower pods became hook-up dens; Nerf gun fights broke out at lunch; and absent bosses specialized in cryptic, jargon-filled emails. In the middle of this sat Lyons, old enough to be his coworkers' father.” So you can imagine with Dan Lyons’ wit, acidic wit, that this is going to be quite an expose of HubSpot. So much so that the HubSpot executives apparently hacked Dan and are now in trouble. Federal Law Enforcement Officials have opened a criminal investigation into attempts by former HubSpot executives to obtain a pre-publication draft of the book. And I’m reading between the lines but the FBI Cyber Crimes Task Force is working on this. The probe is at the preliminary stage. So we should say that it’s not clear whether there will be criminal charges. But the impression I got from the article about this in the Boston Globe is that they attempted to hack Dan Lyons’ computer to get the manuscript so they could find out what he was going to say about them before the book was published. The manuscript, according to the Globe, the manuscript incident involve some “fishiness and really aggressive tactics.” But they haven’t told us more than that. Lyon’s is—

Xeni: What I really want to know is how much did Dan Lyons pay these clowns to do all this?

Leo: You couldn’t have better publicity, right?

Alex L: I hadn’t heard about the book until now.

Leo: Now you have.

Alex L: Now I’m waiting until it comes out on Audible.

Leo: We’re going to get Dan on as soon as we can. He’s great. I really like Dan. He’s got the strongest Boston accent. Really there’s no excuse at this point for having an accent that strong. He’s just doing it to be ornery I’m sure. He is characterized as the victim in this federal investigation. He did not respond to the article in the Globe. Apparently the executives who were involved and are being investigated are no longer at HubSpot. And HubSpot said it’s working on a new training and certification program to reinforce its ethics code.

Xeni: Good luck with that, bro.

Alex W: Wait on that one, right? You do that before everyone screws up, not afterwards.

Leo: So I just, I wanted to tell all our employees at TWiT, please don’t hack anybody’s, no. I don’t care if they’re writing an expose. It’s ok. And good for Dan. What great publicity for the book. I think it’s due out soon. Of course, why not.

Alex L: And of course they’ll make it into a movie.

Leo: It’s got to be a movie.

Alex L: And they’ve now made it into, you know, now it’s—

Leo: But you got to figure the writers, they’re looking kind of funny at him in Silicon Valley like, “Are you writing a book about us? Is there anything we should be worried about?”

Xeni: I just want to say that that synopsis that you just read for the book?

Leo: Yea?

Xeni: It sounds like basically every start-up I ever worked at.

Leo: Yea. They’re all like that. Wait a minute. Hook ups in the shower pod?

Xeni: I just wanted to be—you know Dan, if you’re watching this. I just want to grab you by the collars and chuck you on the cheek just like the Dali Lama did. And say, “Dorothy, I’m sorry, but that’s how start-ups work.”

Leo: Yea. But I makes a great novel. Or a memoir.

Xeni: Well you haven’t read it yet. 

Leo: Yea. Yea, might make a great novel.

Xeni: I think it will. Dan’s a great writer.

Leo: Dan is so fun. He has such an acerbic wit and dry wit and very funny guy. And if you read the Fake Steve Jobs—

Xeni: That was his best work.

Alex L: It’s great.

Leo: Great stuff. And for years nobody knew it was him, right?

Alex L: Right.

Xeni: Yea.

Leo: A man arrested for parodying the mayor of Peoria, Illinois sued and won $125,000. He was arrested when his residence was raided for parodying his town's mayor on Twitter. John Daniel the operator of @peoriamayor on Twitter was accused of impersonating a public official. He was never charged. His arrest was prompted by the local mayor Jim Ardis’ concern that the tweets on the account falsely portrayed him as a drug abuser who associates with prostitutes. Tweets like, “Who stole my crack pipe?” really bugged him.

Alex W: (Laughing) that’s so awesome.

Leo: So he went after the guy. He said, “I’ll get you.” Unfortunately the Illinois law that criminalizes impersonation of a public official, it’s really more for like, walking into the Burger King and saying, “I’m the mayor. Give me a hamburger.” It does not include parody and satire which of course are protected forms of free speech. So the attorney for the fake Twitter account took him to court, sued and they won $125,000 settlement. Ok. 

Alex W: Boomerang on that one.

Leo: Whoops.

Alex W: Should have left him alone. Who would actually think those tweets were not parody, right? 

Leo: Well that’s the question. Right. That’s the question. It’s the Streisand Effect. Isn’t that what they call it?

Alex W: Exactly. Yea, yea, yea. People just do not learn that lesson. And I’m kind of glad they don’t because we get stories like this out of it. And it makes the whole world a more funny place to be in. The guy got arrested for a Twitter account. That’s amazing.

Leo: It’s a better, it’s a better place. Sad story. Pwn2Own which is a great event held every year in Vancouver and PacSec West, the security conference lost its sponsor. HP—

Alex L: Only in Japan. They just can’t sponsor it in Japan.

Leo: Oh, it’s in Japan only.

Alex L: I think so. They had just—HP had just sponsored one I think in Vancouver.

Leo: That’s the normal one, PacSec West. But then oh, I guess there’s one in Japan coming up.

Alex L: It has to do with the wife of the Wassenaar.

Leo: The Wassenaar arrangement. It sounds like a Grisham novel.

Alex L: It’s like, it’s kind of like, what we’ve all agreed to.

Leo: The Wassenaar agreement. Which apparently is something about you can’t you know, hold on to security exploits. I always thought Pwn2Own was a little sketchy in that respect. Security researchers would find flaws and then keep them secret so that they could win a free laptop or some money by hacking at the event. But HP pulled out this year.

Xeni: They should have just put a copy of Dan Lyons’ book in there.

Leo: Yea. Oh, so this only applies to—is only Japan the only signatory to the Wassenaar arrangement?

Alex L: No, no, no. I think what happened was there’s a couple interpretations of this arrangement.

Leo: I see, because in Canada—

Alex L: In Canada they are clear.

Leo: It’s not an issue.

Alex L: It’s not an issue. And it’s not clear. And HP didn’t want to get, end up being, you know, in trouble.

Alex W: HP’s already in enough trouble on its own rights. Extra problems with large corporate buyers.

Leo: Yea. I like this article and I hope you read this before you designed your website, Xeni. I mean the potential re-design of the website.

Xeni: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Leo: We don’t know what we’re talking about.

Xeni: I like Pi.

Leo: Raspberry Pi. My favorite. It’s my favorite line so far.

Xeni: Is it?

Leo: In Mr. Robot. “We all know what a Raspberry Pi is (laughing).” I like this article from Benedict Evans and his blog. Forget about the mobile internet, it’s the internet. As more and more people visit websites on mobile devices it’s silly to say there’s a mobile internet and a regular internet. It’s all the mobile internet. We saw that when we did our redesign. More than 50% of our users came to us via smaller screens on iPhones and tablets.

Alex L: I have to say what really changed for me was actually the larger iPhone. You know I didn’t think about, I didn’t really do as much surfing. And it was something about, there was just enough size difference that suddenly I have this thing in my pocket that I surf the web with all the time. I don’t think about it.

Leo: So very important. And I could tell with that format that you use, Xeni, for the long form, that’s very, that’s mobile responsive. That will look good on any size screen.

Xeni: We don’t have a mobile site. We don’t have an app. We have one site that responds smartly to whatever you are looking at.

Leo: Actually oddly enough it’s particularly true as income falls. In poorer countries and poorer users are much more likely to be using the internet on mobile than they are on a computer.

Alex L: Well I do a lot of work in Rwanda and you know, there’s only a handful of people that have computers, but everybody has them. Has a phone.

Leo: Yea. 

Xeni: That’s been my experience in Central America as well. I spend a fair amount of time down there. And there are entire generations of young people who are very, very internet literate for the internet that is available on your phone. And going to actually sit down an expensive desktop computer is something that they’ll pay a small amount per hour taxes. But that’s, I think those little businesses, those little kiosks will become less and less necessary in the developing world. And more that mobile becomes the norm. I think it’s wonderful. Because I think it really opens up this world, this digital world that we all live in to people who just are never going to have the capital to each have computers.

Leo: Yea. According Andreessen Horowitz, 2 to 3 more smartphones will be in use than PCs by 2020. So in fact if you’re designing a site for you know thinking, “Well here’s the desktop version, here’s the mobile version,” you’re really got it upside down. Basically.

Xeni: You’ve got to 2020 to figure it out though.

Leo: Yea, no. Now. That was why we did a redesign frankly, is that we wanted to look good on any size screen. We really wanted it to be mobile, mobile first.

Xeni: I hope that that makes things better for people with disabilities too. If you think about it, like if we’re designing for platforms, but we can’t predict exactly what platform it would be? Maybe the content will be more fluid. I’m talking in big, big aggregate terms. And maybe people who have visual or auditory disabilities—you know if we standardized the content and accept that there are lots of different containers that it will fit into, my hope is that this becomes more inclusive in lots of ways.

Leo: I agree with you. We’ve always thought that about what we do. We do it in audio and video.

Xeni: Awesome.

Leo: And the idea is that we put it everywhere. The idea is to make it as accessible as possible. Text is even better that way, right? In text you can put it all sorts of containers.

Xeni: I think that’s really cool. And I think it matters even if you’re thinking about a minority, you know. Not – the majority has full sight, full hearing and so on. But designing for the minority means that you’re putting inclusiveness first. And I think that’s a laudable thing.

Leo: I wish we could afford closed captioning. That’s the one thing we don’t do.

Alex L: That’s one thing that Apple—Apple actually has taken a real, I mean all of those key notes were all close captioned.

Leo: Yea, I would love, yea.

Alex L: Subtitled.

Leo: Yea, subtitled. Good close captioning still requires a human. But as computer dictation gets better and better and better and better I think we’re not far off from that.

Alex L: I’ll tell you. We worked with, we work with a lot of folks doing subtitles and it’s like magic watching those guys work. Every once and a while they’ll come on site. Most of the time we just, we give them a video feed or an audio feed and they just send us back the text that hooks into the box.

Leo: So it’s just one person. You don’t have—

Alex L: We have lots of people.

Leo: Because I would think you would need a break. That’s hard to do that.

Alex L: Yea, but they’ll do it for, I mean they can do it for hours.

Leo: Really?

Alex L: Yea but the, but the, but a lot of times we do ones that are in multiple languages and stuff like that. And then you have an interpreter who is then talking to the person doing the subtitling.

Leo: In another language?

Alex L: Yes. We got them in, we’ll put them in three languages and then you have, anyway. So the, but it’s all, all of it’s done like in the cloud. You don’t really, every once in a while they’re on set. And these guys sitting there, and the keys don’t make any sense. I mean if you look at it, it’s the craziest little keyboard.

Leo: Oh, so they have a special keyboard?

Alex L: It’s like a steno.

Leo: Steno.

Alex L: But all of them are different. They all have their own little software. All their tweaks to do it the way that they want to do it.

Leo: Wow.

Alex L: And so no one can use each other’s keyboards and it’s like we had 4 of them in for an event that were doing and you see them and they’re just sitting away and it’s just amazing. It’s like magic. I mean it really is.

Leo: That is the most beautiful picture I’ve ever seen. Xeni, do you dye your hair to match Chappie’s hair?

Xeni: It kind of worked out that way, didn’t it?

Leo: (Laughing) I love it. What do you think the 2nd most popular app in the US? It’s Facebook Messenger. What? Facebook just, not so long ago, separated messenger out of its Facebook app. According to ComScore, Facebook is number 1 and number 2 now.

Alex L: You know I thought that splitting Messenger out was crazy when they did it. 

Leo: Number 3 most popular app, this is among all smartphone users in the US, YouTube. Google Search, Google Play, Google Maps, Pandora Radio.

Xeni: Wow.

Leo: Gmail, Instagram, Yahoo Stocks. That’s the top ten. Apple Maps, Amazon Mobile, Twitter, Apple Music—Apple Music’s in there.

Xeni: That’s all the stuff I don’t.

Leo: I know. As soon as I get the phone. Take that stuff off. Hey I think you deserve a snack. If you’ve never had NatureBox by Apple Rings, you’ve got to get these. First of all, read the ingredient list. Dried pineapple. That’s all. No sugar, no sulfites. Nothing. Just dried pineapple. And I don’t know how they do it. The technology, I don’t know what. They’re perfect. They’re not too chewy, not too soft. They’re moist with—

Alex L: You need to break them out.

Leo: Would you like some?

Alex L: I want one.

Leo: Now one of the things, first of all NatureBox delivers snacks to your home, monthly boxes by mail. They have hundreds of snacks. All kinds, they have vegan, they have gluten-free, they have sweet, savory, spicy. They’re really- they’re kind of like a snack laboratory. But all the snacks are designed by nutritionists to be healthful. Never any high fructose corn syrup or trans-fat. Zero artificial colors or flavors. Just good stuff that you’d want to snack on. Oh, just take a whiff of that pineapple ring. That is so awesome. Now some of you like sweets. Alex, you look like you might like whole what chocolate chip cookie bites.

Alex W: I would indeed. It sounds excellent.

Leo: Mini Belgium waffles. Watermelon mini stars. You know I just made—it’s funny, I just made—I saw an Instructables for making Lego gummy bears. Gummy candies. Easy to do. So I want and I ordered some Star Wars ice cube trays. And I made Darth Vader gummy bears, and I made—I guess it’s not a bear. Gummy Vaders. I made R2D2. It was really fun. So I kind of know what you put in. And these are even better. Apple juice puree, apple juice, natural flavored pectin, black carrot juice concentrate for color and fiber to give it some chew. These are the watermelon mini stars. Good stuff. So your kids can eat them, you will eat them, your employees will eat them. It’s a re-sealable bag so you don’t have to eat them all up. And we’re going to get you your first box on us. You just pay $2 shipping and handling when you go to NatureBox.com/twit. 

Alex L: These are the best pineapple I’ve ever had.

Leo: Are they not? We actually, and you can do this—

Alex L: They’re always too sweet. When you get the ones that are really think and they’re—

Leo: You can pick one snack, and just have the whole box be one snack. We get 2 or 3 pineapple snacks every month. NatureBox. Flavorful snacks made with ingredients you can trust. You’re going to love them. And it’s a nice thing when your NatureBox comes. They put out new snacks every single months so you’ll never get bored. And if you don’t like a snack you can experiment. They have a smart snack guarantee. There’s never anything that you don’t love. If you find something you don’t like, just tell them and they’ll replace it in next month’s box. It’s easy, it’s satisfying, it’s delicious. And my mouth is watering. It’s NatureBox. Right now get your 1st box on them. Pay just $2 shipping. NatureBox.com/twit. Couple of—

Alex W: I cannot not eat before we do that because I’m like really hungry.

Leo: I’m so sorry. And if there were any way I could push you these snacks I would. But see if you were here, Alex, you’d have tequila and snacks.

Alex W: I promise I will come back the next time.

Alex L: All I can say is, it’s really tasty.

Leo: It’s really good.

Alex W: Thanks. Just rub that in.

Alex L: My pleasure.

Xeni: Our publisher, Justin Weisberger, Boing Boing’s publisher Justin Weisberger had a sample of those at his house one time and I think I stole most of the bag.

Leo: Yea.

Xeni: They are really good. I’m very picky about this kind of stuff.

Leo: No, it’s good.

Xeni: I never buy like fruit that has sulfur on it because I don’t like it.

Leo: Yea. They do that to preserve it. But it’s not good for you I don’t think. Anyway I wouldn’t want to eat it. There’s no sulfites, no sulfur. It’s just pineapple. I love that.

Xeni: Really yummy snacks. Not just the dried fruits but all of their snacks are super yummy.

Leo: Xeni, you should come back and do all the ads (laughing). You’re great.

Xeni: Thank you. I’m jealous of all the sponsors.

Leo: I love it. Real quickly we’ll run through a few—I know we’re going long here, I just love you guys and it’s so much fun to spend a Sunday afternoon with you. Amazon was forced to re-do their deals for E-books allowing publishers to set their own prices. What did publishers do? They jacked the prices up. What happened to E-book sales? They plummeted. E-book prices—

Alex W: The least surprising news story.

Leo: I know.

Alex W: I mean who didn’t think this was going to happen.

Leo: Yea.

Alex W: Publishers are not economists because this was the most obvious—what else was going to happen?

Leo: The 5 biggest publisher’s average cost of books in the Kindle Book Store, $10.81. All other 2015 E-books on the site average price $4.95. Once you get over 10 bucks the common wisdom is, “Nobody’s going to buy it.” Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, and I love Franzen, is called Purity. $15 for an E-book. I think people go, “But this didn’t cost anything to print.”

Alex L: I have to admit I buy, I buy technical manuals so they’re much more expensive.

Leo: The print book for Purity is $14 and—no wait a minute, I’m sorry. The hardcover—I’m sorry, I switched it around. The print book is $15.10. The E-book is $14.99. 11 cents less. It should be a little lessor than that, don’t you think?

Xeni: But Leo, the print book makes a delicious snack and you can have a snack box.

Leo: But that’s the point. If I’m going to pay $15 bucks for the book, I’m going to get the print version then. I’m not going to get the E-book version. Well, maybe not. I like books.

Alex L: No, I wouldn’t. I don’t not like, I do not like carrying things around. I think I’m so space, like I won’t even buy anything that’s on paper. I just, hmpf.

Leo: It’s funny that Xeni would write this article. Find Out When Your Name Was Popular with Baby Name Explorer.

Xeni: I’m not in there.

Leo: I’m guessing that Xeni is not in that list (laughing).

Alex L: How ironic.

Xeni: No.

Leo: No. 

Xeni: Of course I looked up Pat. Remember the SNL?

Leo: Yea. The ambiguously, yea. 1940 was really big for Pat. By the way the blue line is baby boys, the pink line’s baby girls.

Alex L: So evidently, yea, in the early 60s it was very ambiguous.

Leo: Yea, 1960 had an equal number of boys and girls named Pat.

Alex L: Very interesting.

Leo: So that explains it.

Alex L: Mine was not, mine was not anywhere near when I was—

Leo: Alex. Let’s do Alex. I think we know some people named Alex. Is it Alexander or Alex?

Alex L: Mine’s Alexander. I think they—

Alex W: Go by Alex.

Leo: Looks like 1995 was big. And it just died off. Nobody wants to be Alexander. Nobody wants to be Alex.

Xeni: Not on this show they don’t.

Leo: Z-E-N-I. Xeni. There’s no—sorry. Wow, you even get a pop-up. It’s not in the baby name database. Sorry. Xavier is. Javier. I bet Leo is in there. Leo was really popular in the 20s (laughing). But it’s coming back. We’re coming back, baby.

Alex L: It’s all you. It’s all you.

Leo: Leo peaked in 1918.

Alex L: Look at it. It’s spiking.

Leo: And then plummeted to its low in 1990. But it is spiking. It’s now .1% of all baby names are named Leo.

Alex L: It interesting that since you’ve been on TV it’s spiking.

Leo: You think they’re naming them after me?

Alex L: I think so.

Xeni: Obviously.

Leo: I reconnected with my 1st girlfriend on Facebook. That’s one of the thing Facebook is good for, right? 1st girlfriend ever. Kathy. And we were high school sweethearts. And I found out that her son was named Leo.

Xeni: Ew.

Leo: And I thought, “Oh, dear.” (laughing). But she swears that that has nothing to do with me.

Alex L: Awkward.

Leo: Awkward.

Alex W: Yea, just a little bit.

Leo: Don’t tell your husband. Awkward. Snapchat is now—Snapchat video has gone through the roof. Any of you use Snapchat?

Xeni: Too old.

Leo: Yep. Too old.

Alex W: I’m not cool enough, so.

Leo: I think you could Snapchat that picture of you lying in what appears to be naked in your squash.

Xeni: Every person young enough to be using Snapchat would go aahhh!

Leo: I tried to use Snapchat. Nick Bilton and Baratunde Thurston are all in on Snapchat, right?

Alex L: I don’t understand.

Xeni: Yea.

Leo: And they came on the show and said, “You got to use Snapchat. It’s the biggest thing.” And this was actually when they just launched the new discover feature of Snapchat. And I said, “But look, if I put work into you know, this big production, you know, my big Snapchat story, I want it to be preserved.” But after a day, it’s gone.

Xeni: What’s the app that tweens and teens that are too cool to be using Snapchat are using?

Alex L: Cyber Dust.

Leo: Cyber Dust? Oh, that’s the one where nobody knows you exist. That’s Mark Cuban’s app.

Alex L: Yea, it just appears and disappears.

Leo: Doesn’t that make it not interesting immediately?

Alex L: He posts interesting thing on there.

Leo: Mark Cuban?

Alex L: Yea, it’s there’s actually some good stuff that just appears and then it disappears.

Leo: I’m just jealous because he invented internet on the radio. I mean radio on the internet. Actually, wait a minute, we can do internet on the radio. It’s not too late.

Xeni: You know if you’re going to have a loud mouthed rich guy run for president, how come it couldn’t be Mark Cuban?

Leo: Yea. There’s a good point.

Alex L: Now that would be fun. It would be fun to have Mark Cuban debating—

Leo: Donald Trump.

Alex L: Donald Trump. That would be awesome.

Leo: Oh my God. Let’s start a draft Cuban movement.

Alex W: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I can’t take that. Our poor country can’t take that.

Leo: Oh my God, it would just, it would be, we’d fall off the edge of the earth. So who’s still posting on Snapchat? Snapatunde. Baratunde’s right up there. But here’s the point. News story, 4 billion daily video views in April. That’s double what it was getting at the end of 2014. 4 billion every day. And these brands that are spending money like Comedy Central, People, Vice, ESPN apparently are doing great. Deals with Major League Baseball, Live Nation. Now there’s of course that question, because Facebook counts a view after like a second. There’s some question whether Snapchat is, how they’re counting it. They wouldn’t say.

Alex W: Facebook changed its video algorithm I want to say a month ago or so, and really cut down on the number of reported views. Because it was insane. It hurt my ego because I saw my video views decline by a lot. But that was actually accurate.

Leo: But that was after the piece calling Facebook a liar by a video tube star named, I can’t remember his name.

Xeni: Video Tube.

Alex W: Video Tube.

Leo: Yea and he, but he also pointed out that Facebook wasn’t doing all it should to prevent pirated videos on Facebook. And they’ve responded to that as well. They’re now doing a content ID think on Facebook, so I think they listen anyway. And if they’re going to get video creators to move from YouTube they’ve got to. Very important. I think we can wrap it up. I’ll just, one quick note. I like to mention these technology pioneers. I think they’re not well remembered. James L. Flanagan passed away at the age of 89 this week. He would, day before his 90th birthday. Why do you care? He was at Bell Labs, wrote a seminal article which unfortunately is still behind a pay wall, in 1976, Computers That Talk and Listen. Man Machine Communication. If you like Siri, if you like Google Now, if you like Cortana, you can thank James L. Flanagan whose research really made it possible for computers to listen and respond to what we say. And also for MP3s, efficient digital transmission of human voice and a lot more. Dr. Flanagan passed away this week at the age of 89.

Alex L: It always, it always does come down to some person who thought this would be a good idea. And gets everybody going.

Leo: To think of that in you know the 60s and kind of come up with a basic research that then—of course it takes decades for it to make it to the market. He, there is another note to his fame. Is he was one of 6 acoustical experts who examined the 18.5 minutes of missing audio from the Nixon tapes during Watergate and determined that they must have been erased on purpose. So he had a little bit of a footnote in history as well. That’s when Rosemary Woods—

Alex W: Pretty little cool claim to fame actually.

Leo: Yea, it’s pretty cool.

Alex W: I would like to do something that cool in my life.

Leo: Well wait. You’re young. Time is not over. You may have a chance.

Alex W: I feel like it’s over. Ok, well, we’ll see.

Leo: And as Alex pointed out, and I think this is a good thing, the judgement on the Silicon Valley No-Poaching agreements that Apple, Google and many others had made. This is a violation of trust law, anti-trust law. You’re not supposed to because it’s bad for the employees if you say, “Well I won’t hire anybody from your team if you don’t hire anybody from my team.” 415 million dollar settlement.

Alex W: Which is not that much money.

Leo: Not when you divide it amongst 64,000 workers.

Alex W: Yea, it’s like $6500 apiece. And given the scale of the suit and how many people it affected for how long, I mean they’re getting away with murder here. And these companies, Apple, Google and so forth have essentially endless money. And to see them walk with really less than a tap on the wrist from a dollar perspective I think is a disappointment. But it’s over now. 

Leo: It’s done.

Alex W: Yea, it’s over.

Leo: And as you pointed out, Facebook not on that list. They did not agree to do that.

Alex W: Yea. I think back then when this was going on, Facebook was so hot, they didn’t want to disarm. I think they wanted the capability to poach because they could. Because they were growing so quickly.

Leo: Right.

Alex L: And they need to. I think that was a pure need issue. They didn’t, they didn’t have a choice. They had to steal people away from all those companies to grow, to get—there’s only a, I know we talk about bringing you know, like people in, we have enough programmers here in the United States, but there’s really a small number of people, I mean in the millions, but a small number of people that can do quality code. I mean it just takes a lot of time and effort and to learn it well enough to do structure.

Leo: All right. I am, I feel like the school master who is waiting for the bell to ring. I’m going to release you all. Poor Xeni has already fallen asleep along with Chappie.

Xeni: No, it’s just my chill out day.

Leo: It’s so cute. Oh my God. What are going to do for, what are you doing for Labor Day, Xeni?

Xeni: Hanging out with my dog and my sweetie and playing on the beach.

Leo: Nice. We love you so much. I am so glad that you’re still with us. Still making us smile, think, laugh, cry. You’re just the greatest. Boingboing.net. Wow.boingboing.net if you want to go to The World of Wonder.

Xeni: Chappie will be there.

Leo: Chappie will be there. So will Xeni. So nice to see you again.

Xeni: Thank you. Thank you.

Leo: I feel like it’s been ages and ages.

Xeni: I hope that you’ll have me back and I’ll have a puppy cam rigged up a little more stable.

Leo: We will. Speaking for the white male patriarchy (laughing) which I do. I don’t know if you know that but actually I am in charge. I thank you for your service. You’re so cute.

Xeni: (Laughing).

Leo: Alex Wilhelm, you’re not so bad yourself there. Alex—

Alex W: I’m not going to touch that.

Leo: No, I wish you would. Alex is at Techcrunch.com. Help me, save me. And joins us from time to time. He’s a very frequent contributor on TNT as well where we love having him. Great to see you once again.

Alex W: Good to be here.

Leo: The tequila is waiting next time.

Alex W: It is. And dinner. So.

Leo: Tequila, dinner, pineapple rings, whatever you want.

Alex W: There we go.

Leo: Mr. Alex Lindsay, pixelcorp.com. We didn’t get a chance to talk about the DxO but I think you talked about it on MacBreak Weekly if people want to know more.

Alex L: I didn’t talk about it on MacBreak Weekly.

Leo: You didn’t?

Alex L: But Andy did.

Leo: Andy did. Well, next time you’re on maybe you can give us little demo.

Alex L: Yea, no that’s great.

Leo: This is a $600 camera that is an accessory for you’re what? Your iPhone has a lightning cable port. You plug it into your phone and it goes—I actually ordered one after you talked about it. 

Alex L: It’s so good.

Leo: I now have to get an iPhone, but. Tuesday. I think I’ll be—well, Friday, I’ll be, I’ll set the alarm.

Alex L: I pretty much don’t go anywhere without it.

Leo: I’ll be back east which means I’ll have to get up at 3 in the morning. Oh, you want to stand in line for me? On September 18th? All right. We’ll see. This is really cool.

Alex L: And we made the video.

Leo: And you’ll hear Alex’s dulcet tones.

Alex L: It was supposed to be a scratch track,

Leo: On the video at DxO.com

Alex L: And ended up being the whole thing.

Leo: Thank you all for being here. We do This Week in Tech every Saturday [2:12:05] afternoon at 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Eastern Time, 2200 UTC on Twit.tv. We’d love it if you watched live. If you’d like to be in the studio audience we’d love it if you would stop by. Thank you all for being here. Just email tickets@twit.tv. We’ll put out a chair for you. As you can see, many more chairs then there were people.

Alex L: What happened?

Leo: What happened?

Alex L: Well, it’s Labor Day.

Leo: That family that was here—oh, it’s Labor Day. That family that was here left. They said, “Oh, it’s going to be that show?” And they just took off. They ran as fast as they could. 

Alex: This is Windows Weekly.

Leo: We love to have you here. If you can’t be here live, don’t worry. On demand audio and video’s always available. For all of our shows at the website, twit.tv, now mobile friendly. And wherever you get your podcasts on the internet, iTunes, your favorite app on your mobile device. Thanks for being here; we’ll see you next time! Another TWiT is in the can. Bye-bye.