This Week in Tech 611

Leo Laporte:  It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech.  Jason Hiner from Tech Republic joins us, Serenity Caldwell from iMore, and Ohdoctah.  We're going to talk about Uber.  Yes, more bad news.  What is the future of Uber?  And United, and we'll talk about the Samsung Galaxy S8, the first Samsung phone not to explode since the Note 7.  We've got the latest from Apple augmented reality, from Facebook, and Insight on what Steve Ballmer has been up to since leaving Microsoft.  It's all coming up next, on TWiT.

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Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 611, recorded Sunday, April 23, 2017.

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It's time for TWiT:  This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the latest tech news.  Jason Hiner is here.  You went back home.  You were out here this week. 

Jason Hiner:  Sorry about that.  Yes. 

Leo:  For the F8 developer's conference.  CBS interactive.  I see jasonhiner.ocm now on the thing there.  Jason is my Bozwell.  Not only did he make me President of the Internet many years ago on Tech Republic through a duel process election, but he wrote a great book, and I'm a chapter in that book.  I haven't had the nerve to read that chapter yet.

Jason:  Chapter 9.  You haven't read it yet?  Wow.  I didn't know that.

Leo:  I'm nervous about reading it.  I do have, though...

Jason:  I may never come back on this show once you read it. 

Leo:  I clicked follow the geeks and it says the website has expired. 

Jason:  More people were going to the... we haven't done followthegeeksbook.com which we did when we launched it.  We send everybody to Amazon now, because we found that is where they go anyway.  And when they go to the website, they end up not going there. 

Leo:  As I learned to my bitter dismay, you make more money from Amazon associate fees than you do from the royalties of the book.  Little tip for the future authors of the world.  Anyway, great deal. 

Jason:  Being an author is brutal.  Writing a book is not a way to make money.  Don't ever go into it thinking you'll make money.  5%, 4% of people actually make money on it.  It's a terrible way.  It's a fun thing to do.  It's a labor of love.

Leo: We're putting out a warning to the naive among us.  Welcoming also Serenity Caldwell from imore.com.  But don't do a book, Serenity.  Are you considering?

Serenity Caldwell:  No.  I won't say never, but the book that I would do has nothing to do with technology, and would probably just be for my own personal satisfaction. 

Leo:  You'd do a novel?

Serenity:  I would do a novel/graphic novel, but it is very much in progress.  I've been working on it for ten years.  Passion projects!

Leo:  You're a great artist.  I remember you were the first one who showed what you could do with an iPad Pro and an Apple pencil.  You did a whole article on iMore.com. 

Serenity:  I did. 

Leo:  Which I loved! 

Serenity:  How else are you going to review a stylus than by showing how it writes and draws? 

Leo:  The Apple pencil drawing review. I would read your graphic novel.  It's awesome. 

Serenity:  We'll see if I ever get the time to actually draw it.  It's a coming of age little kid's story. 

Leo:  This little Serenity.  It's so great.  I love it.  Also here: Ohdoctah.  What's the matter, Owen JJ Stone?

Owen JJ Stone:  I've been spending the last three months writing a novel.  I'm halfway through it.  You're telling me I ain't going to get no money.  Now I have to rethink my life, and I don't even know how to read! 

Leo:  We're talking about computer books.  We're not talking about novels. 

Owen:  This is fiction.  This is amazing.  I'll give you a secret tip.  It's from a dream that I had while I was Jesus. 

Jason:  The book is about Stefan Marberry, isn't it?

Owen:  It sure is. 

Leo:  Or Wardell Curie. 

Owen:  You see my shirt, Uncle Leo?  Read it.

Leo:  Incognegro. 

Owen:  That's how I roll. 

Leo:  You've used that phrase on our show before. 

Owen:  I decided to put on the shirt, and if somebody wants to buy one, I can sell a billion of them and give up on this book idea. 

Leo:  Where can people go to buy an incognegro T shirt?  Should I wear one?  Or would that be inappropriate?

Owen:  Let's do an experiment.  Next time I come around, I'm going to give you one and go to a fancy restaurant, and I'm going to wear a suit, and if you wear this T shirt, and I just want to see what people say. 

Leo:  Rachel Dolezol of Petaluma.  We should send one to Rachel.  Get her done.  Ladies and gentlemen, we did not get together to talk about all of this Fol de rol.  We got here to talk about Tech.  But frankly, sometimes with the tech business, it's fun to talk about novels and t shirts than it is to talk about tech.  Jason, you were at Facebook's developer's conference.  F8 was this week.  We talked yesterday to a cheerleader for AR, Robert Scoble.  Maybe the best known AR cheerleader in the world.  He was very excited about what Facebook is planning with AR.  In fact, what Facebook said was that they're introducing a new platform.  Facebook loves platforms.  Last year, the platform was the bots.  This year, it's the camera in the Facebook app.  He says it will be the first AR platform.  What does that mean, and what do you think?

Jason:  mark Zuckerberg even said we know we're a little slow on this.  But we're all in.  that was a paraphrase. 

Leo:  What he should have said was, "We know we're stealing this all from Snapchat, but we're all in." 

Jason:  Exactly.  To be honest, I thought, and I anticipated.  I said earlier this year, I did an article in February.  The two biggest moves Facebook could make for its future are AR and Cloud.  Amazon AWS stuff where they take all they've learned from building data centers and Cloud and offer it to the world.  Facebook is incredible at that stuff.

Leo:  They're the kings of scale. 

Jason: In the same way Amazon is.  They could give Amazon a run for its money in a way other venders aren't, long term.  Anyway.  They're not talking about that yet, but they are.  We didn't go five minutes into the keynote before Mark Zuckerberg was talking about AR.  But I do think, I'm split mind on this.  One of the CTO, the people there who talked about what they're doing in AR, they really understand this stuff deeply.  They understand all the technical parts that you have to do to make this happen.  They understand how hard it is, and they make it so it works on a phone, whereas just a few years ago, you needed a super computer to run it, or at least a lot of cloud power.  So they did that.  But then their answer to AR right now is putting stickers on photos.  That does not impress me at all.  There's a picture I posted on Twitter where I'm sitting there, went to their AR designer and it's a thing that is put stickers all over your face, so I put that on and put the Future is here with AR.  I did something somewhat snarky.  I was not super impressed with that.  Most of the money that is being invested in AR with our big bets are companies... are people who are making investments.  That's when AR is the stuff that can really be useful.  Right?  Training?  Surgeons sharing stuff through surgery.  Even down to the consumer level of you've seen Pokemon Go, but Pokemon go also was a service that was getting people to move around and make friends.  It was a great opportunity for places to get more foot traffic, which if you're a retail organization of any kind, it's the number one thing that you want.  It's a huge opportunity for Facebook to take advantage of that, because they knew more about people, they knew more about events, they know more about businesses than anybody.  They have more of a yellow page and white pages listing than anybody.  But they didn't talk about any of that stuff.  Either that part is still embryonic, and they don't want to play their hand yet, but I was not impressed with them going "Look!"  We'll let you put stickers," We'll let you take this selfie, and you can fill the room up with balls behind you in virtual... or water.  That didn't impress me much at all.  I think that this shows that they're really early in this.  They wanted to do something that was a little bit flashy and looked good in a keynote.  But I wonder how serious they are about the things with AR that are going to make a difference . 

Leo:  Serenity, of course Apple is supposedly also running on AR.  The only company doing AR right now is Microsoft with the Hololens.  But we don't know what Apple is up to.  Do you think this is the year of Apple and AR. 

Serenity:  I'm still hesitant on whether or not Apple's AR project is going to come to fruition this year or if it's more of a long game.  I think it makes sense for any company who is interested in doing technology to focus on AR and just in general finding ways to make the layer between real life and what we can do with the Internet more seamless.  The wearable technology is one step of this, and AR is the next step.  How do we allow people to interface with their tech and exist in the real world.  That brings up all kinds of ethical questions in terms of is it OK if I'm pretending to look at you, but my contacts are showing me emails.  There's societal questions, but we already do that, it's just more obvious now.  If I'm ignoring you to read Twitter, it looks like this. 

Leo:  You can tell even if you can't see somebody.  Everybody has had this experience, you're talking to somebody on the phone, and it's really obvious that they're reading their Twitter feed.  We've all experienced that. 

Serenity:  I just don't see anyone coming up with the right solution, short of talking about the plan to put chips in brains.  There's not a good wearable solution right now for AR.  I think that Apple has to conquer that and the technology problem.  The Hololens is a great idea in theory, but the Hololens is still in prototype phase.  Like, Yes.  The future is existing in a compact way that I can take wherever I go.  Until we get that down, we have failed attempts like Google glass.  I don't see Apple coming out with AR until they're ready to have the right product. 

Leo:  I'm playing right now with what Facebook claims is their wildly innovative AR... it's Snapchat.

Owen:  Can we stop with this junk?  Jason, I love you man.  That was a long soliloquy of potential great escapes to get back to this is still junk and it doesn't matter.  Until we do that, until you can show me that functionality, this is basically I'm trying to be Snapchat.  I'm trying to have some cookie cutter filters.  Who gives a hoot?  The only thing I appreciate about this stuff is it pushes technology forward so maybe in 30 years we can have some futuristic wearables and AR that matters.  You got a cat on your face. 

Leo:  Look!  Zoom in on this.  This is awesome.  Watch.  I'm chewing a carrot.  A virtual carrot.

Owen:  I used to have my daughter have rabbit ears.  I can just put ears on my head.  It's not that serious.  I do that.  I do that doofy stuff. 

Leo:  I see you using that Snapchat.  I see you using it. 

Owen:  It's not anything important.  It's frivolous stuff.  When you show me a doctor doing a surgery or looking at--

Leo:  That's what Jason was saying.  that's what Serenity was saying. 

Owen: when you see somebody do that, then I could believe that.

Leo:  I have two different takes. On the one hand, Facebook is like the old Microsoft predatory monopoly.  When they were threatened by Instagram, they bought them for a billion dollars.  When they were threatened by WhatsApp, a messaging app, they bought them for 24 billion dollars.  They tried to buy Snapchat.  They couldn't buy Snapchat. So what do they do?  Their response, just like Microsoft, is we'll put all the features of Snapchat in Messenger and Instagram and kill them.  Eat them alive.  That's the cynical point of view.  This big announcement on AR is not really that.  It's just a cover up, icing on the cake of let's clobber Snapchat.  I also would say, as long as I'm going to be in the negative side.  If you're a developer at this point, to trust Facebook as a platform, that's a shaky ass platform.  How many people built games for Facebook and got clobbered?  How many people built bots for Facebook?  Bots aren't the new thing, now it's filters.  I would be very nervous about going all in. Facebook is where the people are, so people are going to do it.  But look at all the publishers who have abandoned instant articles.  The Guardian has joined the New York Times and said we're not going to publish to Facebook's instant articles any more.  Cuz there's no way to monetize it.  Facebook isn't sharing their revenue.  I feel like that's the negative.  On the positive side, I do feel like augmented reality is going to be a world changing technology, and a lot of times, when technologies are new, they are the game room. They are silly.  They are trivial. 

Jason:  They look a little terrible.

Leo:  They don't work well, because they're brand new.

Owen:  Again, Laying the ground work for the future.  But I'm saying whatever. 

Leo:  Whatevs.  Yeah.  So Apple is watching this very closely, I would guess.  Saying, let's see what the reaction is to the market. 

Jason:  I would like to see some vision from them.  Like here's our vision of what AR is going to do.  If Apple does it, that's what we're going to see. They're going to hold the big shiny thing up and say this is the amazing world changing thing, and some of it will be based on fiction, some will be based on smoke and mirrors.  But they'll show us something.  I think Facebook was like AR is going to change the world, and I...

Leo:  Part of it is the limitation of the hardware right now.  I suspect if Apple does announce something this year, Serenity, it will be based on the new iPhone and the camera.  It will end up being like what Snapchat and Facebook are doing. 

Owen:  You're a lot of credit to a company who hasn't done a lot of magic or innovation in the last four years, Jason. 

Leo:  But Owen, we Apple believers have faith.  We know Steve Jobs is going to get up out of that grave and he's going to transform the world and say "ONE MORE THING!" 

Owen:  No headphone jack, iPhone 7 is just an iPhone six plus, you have faith in an iMac Pro consumer box that isn't a pro unit any more.  What kind of faith do you have?!?  These people better come up with something, because Apple is just bleh right now. 

Jason:  I have faith that they will tell a better story about it.  Catface is not a good story to me.  All of the stickers was not a good story.  We're a rip off of snapchat.  They already rolled this out on Instagram months ago, and Instagram has been doing great.  It felt like OK.  We know none of you over 30 people are into either of those apps, so we're going to deliver it to you on Facebook.  That did not feel like a great AR vision.  Their two scientists who on day two, where they do their big vision and their two scientists poured cold water on this and said, "Look."  For there to be affordable glasses where you're not putting the computer on your face, where they just look like glasses, they have storage, they're high res, they have great imagery, it's at least five years.  We're not going to see good hardware AR glasses for at least five years. 

Leo:  That's what Microsoft says.  They say 2019.  Yesterday on the New Screensavers, they had Metavision on.  They had a developer edition that's 1/3 the cost of Hololens.  Even though that's mature and I like it.  It's full of 90 degree view instead of 45 degree view.  They say it's 3 or more years off.  So this... I have to.  Let me be positive.  We've been in a bit of a doldrum for the last few years.  Technology, the Smartphone is as good as it's going to get.  It's fins from now on and Chrome bumpers.  Something to get people buying it.  It's good.  It's done.  PCs, ditto.  Technology, we're at a plateau, as a technology buff, and maybe as a journalist, I'm excited about how machine learning and augmented reality are going to change things.  They're going to get us out of the doldrums. 

Serenity:  You can already see that happening with the VR sets that have been coming out over the last couple of years.  The HTC 5, the Playstation VR, the Oculus Rift.  None of those are at the point where you're going to get Jo Schmo walking in and buying them off the street.  I love my VR headset!  they're still wired, they're heavy, but they have the promise and the potential.  I think everybody on this call has tried one or two.  There's a game called Super Hot on the  HTC Vive that completely mind bends the idea of what a first person shooter can look like and plays with time and movement.  Those are the kind of games and simulations that get me excited about people are peering into the window.

Leo:  I want to play that Super hot. 

Serenity:  Super hot!  So much fun.

Owen:  I like the fact that this is going to push technology forward, and we're going to get things out of this.  Same thing with the Playstation or VR.  It's cool to be in that realm. At the same time, when you're in it for a long period of time, it's different than playing a video game and playing it the regular way you're playing it.  You're already in an immersive world.  You're not disconnected.  We're sitting in a chair, you can't move around, yes there's some places where you can run through a foam obstacle thing, that's cool.  But progressing the technology forward.  As far as looking at, having the stations where people look like cartoons, so we're going to do second life on Facebook now, and I'm supposed to be excited?  That was 10/12 years ago!  What am I supposed to be excited for looking at that?  Second life! 

Leo:  This is the Facebook spaces they've released.  In order to do this... everybody...

Jason:  Second life was the first thing I thought of.  So we're doing second life in...

Leo:  You need a 1500 computer, a 700 dollar Oculus Rift plus touch, another hundred, a great Internet connection...

Owen:  You need a 300 dollar computer and an old boot up for second life.  That's all you need.

Leo:  It looks really nerdy.  They've got Mark in there with Yugo Bara.  Part of my problem with it is you're going to feel constrained.  Let me paint.  Real life is so fluid, you're going to feel like you're in this weird partial life. 

Serenity:  What really annoys me about Facebook's announcements is that there are things you can showcase as here's where we think it's going to go, and here's a platform.  One of the things I think will change with AR and VR in the next five years is learning and education, especially in places where... obviously no kid in Africa is going to be able to get a $1700 computer and an Oculus VR, but as those things go down in price, I can see your community library having a headset and you can go on it for a couple hours and learn these specific skills.  The concept of going to college or even med school, learning classes about neurology and being able to go inside the brain and pull it apart and being able to physically move these models.  These are all amazing aspects.  It's one of the reasons why Microsoft's Hololens pitch felt more solid.  Yeah, Ok.  You can play Minecraft in AR, but also, let's talk about how it's going to change people's lives, and like you said, Jason, where Apple is strong, it's not that they tell a better story. I think they're genuinely committed, maybe not with the iPhone, but you look at the iPad Pro and the stories they're starting to tell there.  But specifically, the Apple Watch, the investment they put into the health and research team.  They're not just doing... that's not the kind of stuff that makes every day money.  That's the kind of stuff that can hugely effect somebody's life.  And maybe make a little money while you're at it.  But studies how we move the human race forward, not how you come out with bundles of cash. 

Leo:  If you're talking about a product today in the earliest stages, it might just be Facebook filters and virtual reality.  By the way, Owen, the chatroom says you haven't been in second life recently.  I thought I'd show you this trailer.  This is Second Life 2017.  It's not your Grandpa's second life. 

Owen:  You know what song just played in my mind during this commercial?  "Baby come back." 

Leo:  It needs a little player.  Here's the music second life put behind this trailer. 

Serenity:  This is a three minute trailer. 

Leo:  Yeah. 

Serenity:  Dear lord. 

Leo:  Countries are putting their embassies in second life.  They're putting their brands in second life. 

Owen:  I used to make money on second life. 

Leo:  Were you one of those people?  A second life realtor? 

Owen:  I was making clothes, then I started flipping into real estate.  My buddy got catfished on second life.  It was crazy. 

Leo:  I didn't know that you were a second lifer. 

Owen:  Incognegro!  I was a big fan of second life, I just found you could make money on there, I was like ooh.  Let me go for that. 

Leo:  Let's play your song here while we watch the second life trailer.  I think this is going to work better than the music that they offered.  Turn off the second life music.  This is so much better.    I'm feeling it now.  It's almost as if, they probably made this with that music, and then they realize they couldn't release it that way. 

Owen:  This is so much better. 

Leo:  It's perfect!  It matches.  If you aren't watching the video of TWiT today, you got to.  I might do a remix.  So 80's, baby.  Here we go.  Baby come back.  Oh my god.  It fits perfectly.  They're even dancing to it. 

Jason:  This shows how genius human beings can be.

Owen:  Genius would be Ohdoctah. 

Leo:  The genius is Ohdoctah.  Bravo!  It kind of works just right.  We're going to take a break.  When we come back, Microsoft is having a hardware event.  It's actually interesting.  This is a continuation of what they did with their Windows anniversary event last year where they started talking about 3D holographics, they want kids in schools to start learning these skills.  I think Microsoft sees augmented reality as the future of Windows.  IOS, Facebook, camera.  It's all changing.  I want to be positive.  In five years or ten years we're going to be looking back and saying maybe.  This really did happen.

Jason:  I think we will, Leo.  I think you're right.  My colleague says that when you look at it, the cynics sound more logical.  It's true.  We do a lot.  All of us here do it, and it's part of our job, to look at things with a critical eye.  And that.  But that said, I've seen some pretty good examples of augmented reality that give me a taste of where it could be.  Companies like Epson and ODG that have done some really interesting things already in the commercial space and Industrial space.  I've seen a taste of what it could do.  They're too big and clunky and heavy and slow, and all of that right now.  But you can see it.

Leo:  It's coming.  Thanks to Mashable, they have the hot new technology for gamers today.  It's not augmented, it's not virtual.  It's the Wipe designed for gamers who like to eat while they play, they can wipe their Cheeto fingers off on a little mop that sits next to their computer.  #thisisthefutureoftechnology.  The wipe!  Our show to you today not brought to you by the wipe or second life.  Or Facebook spaces, but by Audible!  We love audio books.  I know Jason, you're a big audio book fan.  I'm going to tell you a little secret.  Jason is kicking my ass in words with friends.  I think it's because you read a lot. 

Jason: Maybe.  Might be a lucky streak. 

Leo:  I have five more letters left.  I'm trying to figure out a way I can make 200 points with a five letter play, and I haven't found that yet.  It's over man.  I should show you the game.  It's the second time he's kicked my butt.  I came back at the en.  UFW.  Nothing.  I can't do anything. 

Serenity:  Layered boards.   That's how you do it. 

Leo:  Look how it started.  65 points his first word.  28 points.  20.  45 points.  It was terrible.  Anyway.  Our show to you today brought to you by Audible.  If you read more books, you'll play better Scrabble.  Right?  Go to Audible and sign up for our Gold Plus one plan, and sign up for two books to get a 30 day free trial.  If you go to audible.com/twit2.  I went on a bit of an audible binge yesterday, because we're going to be traveling.  So I went out and I bought books about the places we're going.  This is one of the things I really like about Audible.  Of course I read fiction and nonfiction.  I read science fiction and stuff like that.  But Audible, before I go traveling, I will get books on Audible about the places I'm going to go.  I'm going to Machu Pichu and the Galapagos.  Somebody said if you're going to the Galapagos, you've got to read Kurt Vonnegut's sci-fi novel written from a million years in the future called Galapagos.  This is one of the things you do that's just awesome.  Audible, by the way is re-recording all of Kurt Vonnegut.  The Audible studios brought in some of the best readers to take all of his books and re-record them.  If you're a fan of Vonnegut, if you haven't read any Vonnegut, you've got to.  Some of the best stuff ever.  What are you reading, Jason?  I know you had a lot of flying and travel lately.  What are you reading?

Jason:  My Audible recommendation is this book called California: A history.  I come to California all the time, and realize that I know very little about it, and I was looking for something this last time when I was traveling last week, and it was one of those where I listened to the sample, and I was like this could be very boring, especially when you look at the cover and the title.

Leo:  But it's not! 

Jason:  I hit play and listened to the sample, and it got to the end of the sample, and I was like Oh!  I want more.  That's the one to buy.

Leo:  Every book on Audible you can listen ahead of time. You can also read and review, which I find very useful to find out whether this will be a great book, whether you like the reader.  They have such a great selection.  It's basically the bookstore.  Look at this.  Lewis Black has a new comedy series on Audible.  That's interesting.  I didn't know they did that kind of thing.  The Rant is due.  I like that.  It's an unlimited supply of great audio entertainment.  The new Neil Gaimon, Norse mythology, read by Neil himself.  He really is good.  He's a great reader.  I'll tell you what.  We're going to get you two books.  All you have to do is go to Audible.com/twit2, you get two free audio books.  You get two credits, and a book credit per month.  It's kind of a nice way to start.  You get two right up front and another credit every month, plus you also get the daily digest of the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal.  This offer is good in the US or Canada.  But if you're listening to our shows in other countries, not many of you do, Audible is everywhere.  Just check out the Audible in your country, see what offers they have.  audible.com/twit2.  Audio books are a blessing for anybody who spends...  How coul I forget your book is on Audible?

Jason:  I read it too.  That may be a plus or a minus, but it is there.  Leo is chapter number nine.  Leo is the sample chapter, so if you listen to the sample chapter. 

Leo:  Let's hear it!

Jason:  Dug deep into Leo Laporte's arm as she yanked him to a halt in a parking lot in Las Vegas. 

Leo:  I'll never forget that moment, but you're going to have to listen to find out what happened next.  How about William Shatner talking about Leonard Nimoy? 

William Shatner:  Often it's simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time.  Having some often...

Leo:  He pauses the same way!  Don't you want to have Shatner in your car as you commute?  I love it.  Audible.com/twit2.  We've been an Audible podcast since the beginning, I think.  Other things Facebook announced.  Apple music and Spotify coming to Facebook messenger.  Serenity, you've got to explain this one to me. 

Serenity:  So from what I understand, it's very similar to what Apple currently has put into messages.  If you put a link in, it will expand it so you can actually play it from Facebook messages.

Leo:  So you're not going to have a conversation saying Hey Facebook, what's a great song for a good time. 

Serenity:  I think Apple might have the monopoly on that with Siri.  They might get pretty angry about that.  No.  I think it's going to be Widgets.  Like the Spotify widget.  Leo, if I'm like, you've got to hear this amazing Song by the Who, it's called the Seeker have you heard it, you can play it.

Leo:  I get it.  So I should have read this more carefully.  This isn't a bot.  I thought it was going to be an Apple music bot or a Spotify Bot where you talk to it.  It's what they call chat extensions.  I think you nailed it.  It's just like in Apple's messages. 

Jason: They are doing some cool stuff with the bots, to give them credit.  I talked to a couple developers.  They have a video on tech Republic, a couple developers who help people develop shopping bots.  These two developers talk about the fact that they work on all the big platforms for bots, and they said Facebook is really ahead of the other ones that they work with in terms of the tech they've enabled. The APIs and all of that.  They developed this bot for example that launched the day that they announced this with a retailer, Rue 21.  This is a shopping bot where you have a picture, and you say I want to get a dress like this.  The demo these guys showed me was a prom dress.  We can show the demo if you want.  It's one of those things where you can text your friends and say look.  I'm thinking about this dress or this dress. Vote.  Then your friends can vote on which one send it back to you, and the bot can go out and find the places you can buy that and can suggest accessories that might go with it.  It's a fashion advisor or that kind of thing. 

Leo:  That makes sense.  Then it's social  The bot is a part of a larger conversation. 

Jason:  The bot is filling in the gaps for you.  You're not talking to the bot.  The bot is doing the hard stuff where you're not having to jump into URLs and pace them and that kind of stuff.

Leo:  That makes sense.  A bot to help you buy something is less efficient than going to the website and clicking a link, that I don't understand the value of it.  I thought they're trying to get millennials, because they're more comfortable with using chat apps, they live in Snapchat or Facebook messenger.  That was a better interface for them. It's not that.  It's still chatting with people, it's still social.  But this bot is contributing between a conversation between humans. 

Owen:  So what is Apple doing?  I know Spotify has a free service, so when somebody sends me a song I can listen to the song on Spotify.  Apple doesn't have that.  What are they going to get?  A snippet?  30 seconds of the song? 

Serenity:  I wonder if they'll do the 90 seconds that they do with the iTunes store. 

Leo:  90 seconds is more than enough for most songs. 

Owen:  Sometimes it's about you want to hear the song.  I understand.  If they don't have... if somebody sends me Spotify, I know if I click it, 99% of the time I can just listen to the song.  Now I got to listen to the song, decide if I might like it, and figure out if I'm paying for it.  That's the thing Apple still annoys me with. 

Leo: the useful thing would be to say I see you're not an Apple music subscriber, but you do have Spotify.  Here's the song on Spotify.  Now that would be cool. 

Owen:  Or they say we see you playing this song on Spotify for free, come and pay us money. 

Jason:  If Apple was smart, they'd say you get five songs for free a month, the way some of these paywalls and stuff do, and then after that, you have to pay.  But they'll let you get a listen in.

Owen:  You get five songs that will play and you don't have to worry about it.  Or if your friends are really smart, they'll just send you to YouTube. 

Leo: Let me ask you though, because, Leia may not be old enough, but my daughter, when she was roughly junior high school, she would listen to the radio.  She couldn't listen for more than 30 seconds to any song.  She would change it every 30 seconds.  I noticed her friends did the same thing.  They don't listen to the whole song. 

Owen:  When I play music in my car, I got five kids in my car, and we play all the songs, and the only thing they do is request songs they love me talking to Siri to bring on a song.  We get in a car, and they're like I bet your dad has this song!  Play this song!  I'm like, Siri play this song.  And they're like, "Your Dad is amazing!" 

Leo:  Wow.  Siri, is there anything you can't do?  What are they listening to these days?

Owen: They listen to a song called Rolex.  and I love embarrassing my daughter because they have those music dances, and the song says I want to roly rolly with a dab of ranch. 

Leo:  All right! 

Owen: They listen to the music 90 times in a row and drive me up a wall.  That's the ADD thing they do do.  They listen to clips of something for 15 seconds a thousand times over and over.  They listen to their songs. 

Leo:  That was AO and Tao.  And Roly Roly Rolex.  With a dab of ranch.  When they say dab are they talking about the dance? 

Owen:  Dabbing, yes.  That's why I embarrass my children. 

Leo: Windows had a dab? 

Owen:  I do it on purpose.

Leo:  OK.  Let's wrap up F8.  Oh, you know. this is on a more serious note.  Of course, about the worst thing that could happen to a brand had just happened to Facebook.  It happened as we were doing TWiT last week. The Facebook killer, very sad story.  Was on live video, a guy posted a murder he committed and posted a live video talking about it.  Of course he was apprehended later.  But Facebook has released the timeline of this.  They've gotten some heat... I don't see how Facebook prevents this.  They've gotten some heat about the timing.  The video was uploaded at 11:09 AM and not reported.  Maybe he didn't have a lot of followers.  A couple minutes later he did another video.  First video was saying I'm going to kill somebody, second video was him killing somebody.  Horrible.  11 minutes after that he did a Facebook live stream of him saying I did it.  Still not reported.  The first report according to Facebook was 11:27.  So 20 minutes later.  I'm sorry.  The live video was reported, but the video of the shooting was reported until 1 in the afternoon.  Almost two hours later. Then 23 minutes later, Facebook disables the account and pulls down the videos.  I have to say, given the scale of what Facebook is up to, that doesn't seem unreasonable.  Does it to you?

Owen:  I instantly was angry, and I was like, stop it.  No matter what, your knee jerk reaction is you should do better than that.  But I think to myself, how many people were following him, and how many people felt that this wasn't real.  That's the other issue.  Somebody sent me a video and I'm like that's not real, that's fake.  You don't know what is going on per say, and I'm fully understanding in the process of the time period that went on, and also...

Leo:  Everybody is vulnerable to this.  Google is, Twitter is, the Internet is a big place.  Because somebody can do this doesn't mean Facebook is endorsing it. 

Owen: To be honest a small group of friends, whatever he had, might not have realized to report, because people don't report a video ever.  Sometimes when you ask somebody to report a video, they go how do you do that?  Where do I go to report it?  It's a whole thing to do.  I'm understanding of that two hour process and Lord knows how many videos get uploaded to Facebook.  Unless it has copyright music in the back, they're not going to look at it forever.

Leo:  The only critique you could make is at 11:09 he said I'm going to kill somebody, and two minutes later he did. 

Owen: But did he write that in a caption?  What are they supposed to do with that?

Leo:  Facebook did say they got additional reports since this press release, but none of the reports came in before the events.  I don't know how they would prevent it.  I don't feel like Facebook has done worse than they could do, although they did say we're taking this seriously and we're going to do more here.  It seemed appropriate what Mark said and did.  He did some Dad jokes about fast and Furious first...

Jason:  I think he did that to lighten things up.  Then he did acknowledge.  I didn't expect him to acknowledge it to be honest.  I tip my hat to them.  He said the right things.

Leo:  If you're a brand, you can't ignore it.  I think he did the right thing.  Everybody is vulnerable to this.  This is what happens when you do live video.  Facebook is learning, as we all are, you can celebrate what the Internet brings to Democracy, but they're bad people and it also gives them a voice.  You can't have one without the other.  I don't want to...

Owen: There's no way to fix that. We've seen assassinations live on TV. 

Leo:  It's horrible. 

Owen: Things happen.  They're doing the best they can.  I'll accept that from Facebook on this one. 

Jason:  There's no growth negligence here.  Which is what we don't want!  We don't want to see any gross negligence where they don't care or they treat their customers badly, and are callous to it.  We're not talking about Uber.  I'm sorry.

Leo:  We could talk about Uber!  It seems like every week there's a new revelation on Uber.  It never stops.  This morning, this afternoon on Tech Meme, Mike Isaac for the New York Times talks about Uber's CEO plays with fire, this is something that has been in the works for a while.  A description of his early years and how at one point Tim Cook said I heard you've been breaking some of our rules.  Stop the trickery, he demanded, or Uber's app would be kicked out of Apple's app store.  So apparently what had been happening was Kalanek had been telling Uber employees to hide the retailing out from Apple's engineers so Apple would not find out that Uber had been secretly identifying and tagging iPhones even after its app had been deleted and devices erased.  This is in early 2015. 

Owen:  Can we just say Uber is the worst?  It really is the worst.  It's the service of the devil.  It promises you goodness that you kind of need, but at the same time, you're selling your soul and you're going to end up in hell for using the service in the first place.  I hate Uber.  I hate everything about Uber.  I got so many friends who have invested in Uber, and they're trying to save Uber's life.  But Uber delete is a thing.  Every step they take.  I feel like they don't have a colored person on their board.  They don't have a woman on their board.  All they got is red dudes in suits with horns on their head making all these stupid decisions, and it's retarded.  for Pete's sake!  Hire me for a week to follow you around the office, Uber.  I'll make sure everything's OK.

Leo:  Haven't they done that? 

Owen: No they haven't!  They hire other monkeys doing dumb stuff too.  Nobody can check.  They're all yes men.  They get in there, and they look at these dudes. 

Leo:  They hired Eric Holder, the former attorney general to investigate, right? 

Serenity:  Investigate is not the same as change, right?  They can make all the assurances, we're going to get to the bottom of this.  It's great.  They can get to the bottom of this.  What HR people are reporting harassment and various other things.  At the end of the day, what happens from there?  Eric Holder can come to Uber and basically be like you're company is toxic!  You need to fire these people and restructure these things, and they go Great Eric Holder, thanks.  here's some money, and they don't do anything with this information.  I'm not saying that's actually what happens.

Owen:  It sounds legit to me.  I'll cosign on that.  Talk about the slave labor of the people working for Uber.  This toxic society, week to week, their car is falling apart because they're doing all this stuff that comes down to pay, and then they won't let them take tips.  Lord knows Lyft is not great at all, but at least they have decent human beings.    I hate Uber.

Leo:  I think I got that. 

Jason:  They're so rotten to the core.  They are completely amoral.

Leo:  And yet... This is a product everybody wants and users.  I know there was a big delete Uber movement, but... I don't think they're going to suffer long-term damage from this. 

Owen:  Uber is a big deal.  They sent a bunch of I'm sorry, baby come back emails.  They feel it.  They try every time it happens. The problem is it keeps happening.  At some point, the line will gets laid as soon as we get a better substitute.  At this point, they can't make a right decision, and that's not good for business in general.  You can be the evil underlord all you want to, but that is going to come through at some point for Uber.  There's too much money tied up into it, too much backing from powerhouse people that sit there.  Good people.  Uber sucks. 

Leo:  I take it you deleted Uber.

Owen:  I deleted Uber. 

Leo:  So this reminds me of what happened after the United kerfuffle last week.  Maybe what happened after Samsung's Note 7 debacle.  There's three companies.  Samsung, United, and Uber.  They've all had active protests and boycotts.  Somebody pointed out to me that the minute you need to take United airlines, and the minute you're stranded downtown in NYC and you have to take an Uber, the minute the Samsung Galaxy S8 comes out, all will be forgotten and forgiven.  The people are going to always go for convenience.  They're not going to hold this against you. 

Owen:  How is Uber working out in Austin?

Leo:  I'll tell you, the people who were down there were mad that there was no Uber in Austin.

Owen:  Guess what?  They still didn't have it. 

Leo:  They had to use the local ride sharing services, which don't work perfectly.

Owen:  Dancing with the devil.  You want to do it, you got to do it, but you don't feel good about it. 

Leo:  Somebody in the chatroom says I drive for Uber every day.  Extra $1000 a month.  Game changer. 

Jason:  Whenever I take an Uber or Lyft, there are times I do have to use it because it's either the only option or by far the best option.  I tend to use Lyft more.  But I always talk to the drivers and I ask them how long have you been driving?  How much money do you make?  Do you do this full time?  Do you do this part time?  I ask them about it.  I've been fascinated by the whole thing.  It is interesting, the way it has changed the economics of this, both for people who are getting rides and getting this new opportunity for some other people who find this is one of the options they have now that they didn't have before.  That can be a good thing.  A lot of them talk positively about it with clear exceptions.  They don't want to badmouth it or take it back to the company.  They're incentivized not to air their dirty laundry. 

Leo:  We live in an era now where everybody is wired, everybody is watching Twitter.  Outrage comes in big waves.  We're much more aware of them than we were before because of social media.  I wonder as a result if we were impacted by them in a long run.  If Samsung and United and Uber in a year... we're desensitized. 

Owen: Well, there's also different levels to it, ok? So, Samsung makes a bad phone. Has anybody ever made a mistake and have something bad happen to them? Yes. You accept that, that this is a large multi company. They made a mistake. Now, as far as United's concerned, has anybody ever bashed anybody over the head and dragged them down the aisle out of a seat they paid for? No. There's different levels to how you feel and associate with a product, ok? So, when you say, "They made mistakes." No. There are certain levels and distinctions. Again, Uber is evil. And the general consensus is that everybody knows that. Of course, if you ask the driver, he's not going to tell you.

Leo: I set my mom up. She's 84 and she lives in Rhode Island and she needs to get to the doctor. And sometimes she doesn't want to call my sister who lives nearby to do it. So, I said, "Mom, I'm going to put Uber on your phone." This was a while ago. "I'm going to load it on your phone." And then I've asked her, like I've said, "Have you used Uber?" She says, "No. They rob you." And I don't know where she got that from. I said, "Mom, no, no."

Owen: It was on the news one day where a driver either got robbed or robbed someone. It was one time so for the rest of her life, Uber robs people. So, there you go.

Leo: So, she won't do it. And it's hard for me. So, there is this impact at some point with all the negative press that people start to be skeptical of something. I think Samsung's going to sell plenty of Samsung Galaxy S8s.

Owen: It's a great phone. It's a great looking phone. It's a nice feeling phone. It looks good.

Leo: Are you using it?

Owen: The only problem is, I can't. I'm cracked out on Apple, so.

Leo: You're a Crapple guy.

Owen: The only thing is the fingerprint reader on the back. They should just do what Google did and put the camera up in the corner.

Leo: Oh, it's terrible.

Owen: That is the dumbest.

Leo: It's in the worst possible place. I hit it wrong every time.

Owen: That's the worst thing about the phone. But everything else.

Leo: Well, then the Bixby Assistant. See this button? You push this button and you get Bixby. Except you don't.

Owen: Can you stop talking about that? Can we stop talking about that?

Leo: I'm pressing the Bixby button and nothing's happening. In a minute or two, Bixby will wake up and go, "Uh, you wanted me? Uh, what?"

Serenity: It's not fully functional yet, either, right?

Leo: No, it doesn't do voice recognition. But, it doesn't even do—you push the button and I launch. There. Finally. How long did that take? How long did that take? A long time. That's not useful.

Jason: Sometimes I hit the power button and I see the Bixby come up. And I'm like why did that happen? It is confusing. Although, some of the Bixby features do work. Like if you've done some of the Google Knowledge kind of stuff, right?

Leo: If you have an Amazon phone, I mean an Verizon phone, they turned off the shopping assistant on Bixby.

Owen: I'm looking at the manual and the manual says, "We're moving on."

Leo: (Laughing).

Owen: The first rule of Bixby is you don't talk about Bixby until it's fully functional.

Leo: Actually, I talked to somebody yesterday. Remember, Samsung bought—the guys who did Siri left after Apple bought them and didn't do much with Sire and the guy started something called Viv, V-I-V, that AI. And not so long ago, a few months ago, maybe more than that, 6 months ago, Samsung bought them. So I talked to somebody who knows the guy at Viv and he says, "Watch." This is not—Bixby's not Viv. Bixby is clearly—

Serenity: Bixby is not Viv.

Leo: It's not Viv. And it's clearly not baked. I wonder if Samsung's working on getting Viv in there. Then it would be interesting.

Serenity: For sure.

Leo: Yea.

Serenity: So, yea, I had a friend that worked at Viv and the demoes, you know, that I've seen. Of course, I mean, they showed it off publicly at Tech Crunch last year I believe before they got bought up by Samsung. And Viv's overall idea of basically we are making an assistant that actually learns and can basically write rudimentary programs itself as it learns how these pathways connect together sounds a little bit Skynet. But also, they have a really, really interesting overarching plan in terms of integrating with everything. And I can imagine Samsung being like, "Well, we see the potential in this and we need the time to actually layer it up." Because we can see with Bixby, you know, launching a voice assistant from scratch is not the easiest thing in the world.

Leo: Yea, no kidding.

Jason: So true. I feel like, I reviewed it. I had it early. And my review went live on Tuesday. And there's a lot I like about this. I was at the launch event, too. I was really impressed with it when I saw it there. I just think the thing—my biggest complaint with it was what you guys already touched on.

Leo: The fingerprint?

Jason: The fingerprint scanner doesn't work. The iris scanner also is kind of lame. Those were big disappointments. The only other beef, the biggest problem I had with it is Samsung is still trying to duplicate all these services that Google already does well and it's just a no-win solution for them. I'd rather see them take Bixby and do something like—there's bits of it that are interesting. Some augmented reality stuff that really Google has not worked on for a while where you take pictures of products and images and places and it's going to give you some augmented reality kind of information on it. Great. Go ahead and work on that. Find other things that Samsung can do uniquely well. Make it work with televisions, you know, their televisions. Maybe even other televisions. I don't know. Like they've done in the past where—

Leo: Talk to the CIA about that. I think they figured that out. I think they can make that work.

Owen: The big problem why they're doing that is to differentiate from the Google phone now which is a very sexy phone. Can we get back and talk about good stuff about this S8? This phone is sexy. This phone done went out to the Apple dress store and said, "Look what I'm wearing, baby." This is a sexy phone. I mean, the iPhone 7 is ugly.

Leo: It's tall. It's weird and tall but it feels good, yea. Beautiful screen.

Owen: Look at this little ugly girl. Look at this thing. This thing? Ew. Who would want to date this? Nobody. I tell you what I'd do with that S8. I can't put it on TWiT. This is a family show. But that's a good looking phone right there, brother.

Leo: You can lick it.

Jason: My review I put a picture of it next to—

Leo: My American Express card pops up.

Jason: That's hilarious. When you lick it. That's an augmented reality feature right there. Lick the phone and American Express comes up.

Leo: What are you trying to tell me?

Owen: Licking that S8 ain't free. That's what it said. You've got to pay to play. So, there you go.

Leo: Wait a minute. I've discovered a new gesture. Look at that.

Jason: There you have it.

Serenity: Oh, dear.

Jason: It just came up again.

Leo: It's a new gesture.

Jason: You did that. What did you do?

Leo: No, I didn't. I swear to God.

Jason: It's going to do it again. Oh my, God, it did it again.

Leo: (Laughing).

Serenity: That is wrong on so many levels. So many levels!

Owen: You wipe the phone on it and start charging up stuff.

Leo: It's Bixby saying, "Will that be cash or credit?" What is Bixby saying?

Jason: Oh, my goodness.

Leo: Anyway, I do think it's a great phone. It's interesting that Samsung stumbled with such basic things as Bixby and this fingerprint reader. But it is a gorgeous screen. What I really think is, Owen, you're not going to feel bad for too long. This is a forbearer of things to come. Apple's iPhone is going to have a giant screen.

Owen: A fool can dream.

Leo: And it's going to be OLED. I think that's pretty clear. They're buying a hundred million screens from Samsung. It's going to be hard to get that. That will be the top of the line new Apple iPhone, according to all the rumors. Mark Gurman had a great roll up of all the rumors in Bloomberg this week. So, my take on this and I feel bad for Google because the Pixel is the best Android phone. But it's butt ugly next to this. I mean, it really is.

Jason: Yea, it looks like it's two generations back.

Leo: It feels like the 50s. Two generations? It's like the phone Fonzie used on Happy Days compared to this. I mean. It's—

Jason: I put a picture of three of them next to each other, the iPhone 7 Plus—

Leo: Which is gorgeous! The iPhone 7 is gorgeous.

Jason: It is.

Owen: The iPhone 7 is the iPhone 6s. What are you talking about?

Jason: And this one in the middle. And I put the Galaxy, you know, the S8 in the middle and it makes the two of them look—I mean my point was that it makes the two of them look like really kind of outdated and you know, clunky next to this one with 83% of the bezels.

Leo: Well, I think this what's going to happen. In the future, what you're going to see is all phones. This is the new generation, right? This is what's going to happen is that bezel's are gone and if you buy a new phone you should—they'll all be bezel free in a year.

Owen: Bezel come back.

Leo: Bezel come back (laughing).

Jason: It used to be that Apple would do this. Apple would release a phone and then you knew like, ok, every phone's going to look like this. And so that's where it is significant, right? Where Samsung has finally kind of beaten them to the punch. Now, Samsung's releasing the phone and probably every phone after this is going to look like that, even though Apple has already been working on it obviously. They're not copying Samsung but they've been working on something similar. But the fact that Samsung got to the market first with something like this is significant.

Owen: I don't know that. I don't know they're not copying Samsung. They could have somebody working at Samsung and Samsung put it out a whole year ahead of them. I don't know that they're not copying. All I know is Apple is falling behind in every aspect of life. Again, MacBook Pro consumer laptop with a touchscreen on the top that nobody touches. Your C-Port is messed up. And you have the nerve to tell is that the iPhone 7 looks good. You are a delusional man. You're getting up in age and you need more vacations if you're going to tell me that this is a good-looking phone. I'd take that Plus of Google over this.

Leo: No, no, no, no. You've got to come over and see my iPhone 7 Plus in jet black, no case, is a very lovely phone.

Jason: It's beautiful yea.

Owen: Don't try to pitch me on blackness. You know I like black phones.

Leo: By the way, I have a picture of Fonzie with his phone and it does look just like the Pixel, doesn't it? Actually, Google gets to answer before Apple does. Google will probably do it's Pixel 2 before Apple does its 10 iPhone. And I suspect Google will also—this is the new design language. I think Google's Pixel, all the rumors we're hearing about the Pixel will be also—

Owen: And the Pixel's fingerprint reader has already got it dead to rights on good design.

Leo: Much better. Much better. This fingerprint reader—that's where you're spoiled.

Jason: Yea, it works much, much better.

Leo: Much better.

Owen: I bet it's not lickable.

Serenity: Probably not. I mean, that is a bug of bugly standards.

Jason: Yea, that's weird. That's weird.

Serenity: I mean, you know—

Leo: It's not a bug. I can explain it, but go ahead.

Serenity: No, what I was going to say is that you know that like all of these companies have been working on edge to edge designs for at least three to four years because—

Leo: This doesn't come out of nowhere.

Jason: Yea, oh yea.

Serenity: No, exactly. But the big thing is and I mean this is the big compromise in the S8, right, where the fingerprint sensor and their pseudo home button isn't ideal. It isn't ideal in the least in any sense. But unfortunately, because fingerprint sensors have, they use camera based technology and there's only so much room you can put camera sensors in the phone, they're like, "Oh, well we'll kill two birds with one stone and we'll have like a whole little camera unit that also has the fingerprint sensor." I honestly think that the main reason why Apple didn't do it with the 7 is that they basically were like, "Well, if we did this, we would have to compromise and put the fingerprint sensor in a less than ideal place." And we've seen the potential schematics, like—

Owen: But Google did it right. And the Google camera is amazing, though. The Google camera is a really nice camera and it's up in the corner and the fingerprint in in the middle.

Serenity: Yea, it's a nice camera. I mean, yea, Google did—

Owen: I hear what you're saying but these are smart people. And apparently the Google people are smart enough to make the design work?

Leo: Oh no. She's fallen over.

Serenity: No, I'm looking for my Pixel because it's—oh, it's sitting right here. Yea. I like this phone.

Leo: It's not an attractive phone but it's a great phone.

Owen: But you're still saying they put the camera up in the corner. All you had to do, all Apple had to do, they made their tactic physical button that when the phone dies it drives me crazy because I click it like a tart card over and over again, forgetting that it's not a real button. It's not a real button on the phone.

Serenity: But then you know that it's off. Then you know it's not just—you know, then you know it's legitimately—oh, the battery died and not like, "Why is this screen not turning on? What's wrong?"

Leo: Did you call it a tart card?

Owen: I called myself a tart card. I would never disrespect an Apple product.

Leo: What's a tart card?

Owen: It's me when I'm dumb enough to click the button.

Leo: And by the way, I don't want this perception to continue, so it's a fingerprint reader gesture. You can sweep up on the fingerprint reader.

Owen: But why is it reading, reacting to your tongue? Your tongue has its own dots and pixilation's to it that shouldn't be your finger but it is.

Leo: I don't know if it's secure. I don't think it's supposed to be secure. I think it's just a swipe up to—if you swipe down you pull down the notifications. It's just—that's all it is.

Jason: Yea.

Leo: It's not magic.

Owen: Ok.

Leo: Although, I like pretending it's magic.

Jason: I'm so relieved. I'm so relieved to hear that. I mean—

Owen:  You were going to be sneaking into peoples' bedrooms, like I said—

Leo: It's a good trick, though. It's a good trick. I'll have to remember that. Hey, next time I'm in a store, I'll go, "Oh, let me charge that," and lick the phone. Right (laughing)? It's going to work great.

Owen: Leo. Leo.

Serenity:  You're going to freak some people out. You're going to freak some people out.

Leo: I'll try it at McDonald's when I see their dystopian uniforms. Did you see these new uniforms by McDonald's? This is so fun.

Serenity: Oh, goodness.

Leo: There's been a whole Twitter thread on this. This is—they got Waraire Boswell to design, he's a designer, to design new gray uniforms. Waraire used to work at McDonald's when he was a kid and he said, "I was always embarrassed. I had to take off my party colored uniform, my Ronald McDonald yellow uniform before I left the building because I didn't want anybody to see me in it." But of course, it looks so dystopian, immediately Gizmodo says, "Oh, it's going to usher in the Logan's Run dystopia we've all been waiting for." And then somebody else calls it McGattaca and posts a picture of the Hunger Games District 10. It's the District 10 uniform. Notice, their logo is a bull with carving knives. Yikes. Storm Trooper.

Owen: You know the crazy thing about McDonald's? Listen. Are you listening?

Leo: Yea.

Owen: When you want to get a McDonald's, the best thing to do when you get a McDonald's is to buy the property and then build your McDonald's on it so you own the property too. Maybe you should tell us something about property and buying and loans and mortgages.

Leo: Oh, you're so good. How did you know? How did you know that?

Owen: Maybe let us know something about that. Help us out.

Leo: How did you know that? You're so impressive. So impressive.

Owen: We got to make this money somehow.

Jason: You watched that documentary. You watched that Ray Kroc documentary, didn't you?

Leo: It wasn't a documentary. It was a—yea.

Jason: Oh, sorry, it was Michael Keaton. It was a dramatization.

Leo: It was good, though. And you know, I used to work at McDonald's so I knew the history and it was exactly right.

Jason: Yes.

Leo: Yea, it was really right on.

Jason: Yes.

Leo: And I like my McDonald's uniform so much, I still have it. And I'll wear it next time on this show.

Jason: I was going to say, do you still wear it?

Leo: Yea. With my little trainee hat.

Serenity: Oh, my goodness.

Leo: (Laughing).

Jason: This story is in my book, by the way. The McDonald's story is in the book.

Leo: Is it? You used everything in there. Wow.

Jason: Yes, yes it is. I used it all. Well, not really. You have a very full life that could fill its own book, Leo, but I took the highlights. I took the highlights.

Leo: Thank you. Thank you. Follow the Geeks available everywhere including Audible.com.

Leo: Our show today brought to you by Rocket Mortgage. Thank you, OhDoctah, you're exactly right. If it's time to buy a house or re-fi your existing home, you want to go to a lender that's A, that's good, that you trust, that makes the process easy and transparent and Quicken Loans is that lender. They are the most high tech lender out there, one of the biggest lenders in the country. I think that they are number 2 right now and you wouldn't want to go with number one. Trust me, I know who they are. They're revitalizing Detroit. They're very techy. They're very into this stuff. And they are very good. If you go to quickenloans.com/twit2 you'll see all those J.D. Power Customer Satisfaction Awards, number 1 for the last 7 years running in mortgage origination, number 1 in mortgage servicing. They really are the best. And now they're the best geek choice because they've created a new mortgage approval process. They call it Rocket Mortgage. It's completely online. So, you don't have to go to the lender. You don't have to bring in paperwork. You submit everything you need with the touch of a button. And by the way, you can do it on your phone. You can do it on your tablet. You can do it on your PC. You can even do it at an open house. You can play with the rate and the length of your loan in real time. And do this all in minutes. Get approved almost instantly, in minutes for a mortgage that's tailored to your exact financial situation. I mean, if you've ever gone through this process, this is so much—last time we bought a house, which was 3 or 4 years ago, it took months literally. We went on vacation. We thought, "This will be—yea, we can do this now. We'll be done before the time we go on vacation." We went on vacation. We were faxing documents from a cruise ship. It was crazy. So, next time, believe me. When it comes time to buy or re-fi, quickenloans.com/twit2 for Rocket Mortgage. Equal Housing lender. Licensed in all 50 states. NMLSconsumeraccess.org number 3030. Rocket Mortgage from Quicken Loans.

Leo: We had a fun week this week. We've got a little promotional video to show you that will help you find out. Karsten, I can tell you've been working to get this thing up because I jumped to it very early.

Narrator: Previously on TWiT.

Leo: This is Robert's face. He had himself scanned.

Robert Scoble: They made me a 3D model.

Leo: That's creepy as hell.

Robert: It is creepy, isn't it?

Narrator: Windows Weekly.

Mary Jo Foley: Rich Turner's official title is Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, but he's best known as for being Mr. Bash.

Rich Turner: I don't know how we managed to keep this thing under wraps, but there were very, very few leaks.

Leo: I'll tell you now. Nobody could possibly believe that you were doing it. Even if you heard the rumor they went, "Oh, that's insane."

Narrator: The New Screen Savers.

Leo: We're going to see Meta in a brand new augmented reality platform. You can do more with this than Microsoft's doing with the HoloLens.

Ryan Pamplin: 90 degree field of view. So immersive that you don't really see the edges. So, it's almost like virtual reality on top of the real world.

Narrator: TWiT. It's where you brain and tech meet.

Leo: You know what's interesting, is when you first held that up, it felt like an augmented reality of him.

Florence Ion: Oh, did it?

Leo: Yea.

Robert: I have small space so they made me two of them.

Leo: (Laughing).

Owen: Too many Scobles.

Leo: Too many Scobles! Megan Morrone,

Owen: Too many Scobles.

Leo: What's coming up in the week ahead?

Megan Morrone: Here is a look at just a few of the stories we'll be watching in the week ahead. Lots of quarterly earnings reports this week including Google, Amazon, PayPal, Sony, Intel, GoPro and Microsoft. And speaking of Microsoft, this week on April 25^th, the company will begin rolling out Windows 10 Creators Update to Windows Phone. But the company says that only a subset of Windows Phone handsets will get the update. And say goodbye to Google Hangouts as we know it. Google shut down Google Hangouts API back in January, but as of this week on April 25^th, the company will shut off existing apps. And hoping to give us a shot of good Uber news, the ride hailing company plans to live stream its first Elevate VTOL Summit this week from April 25^th – April 27^th. So, get ready for your flying car.

Leo: Oh, no.

Megan: That's a few of the things we'll be tracking in the coming week. Join Jason Howell and me on Tech News Today every week at 4:00PM Pacific, 7:00 PM Eastern here on TWiT.tv.

Leo: Thank you, Megan. I think I broke it. I can't unlock it now (laughing). I shouldn't have licked it so many times.

Owen: You licked it too much. You got it all wet.

Leo: Isn't it waterproof?

Serenity: No. Water resistant. 6 7, right? IP 6 7?

Owen: I think I need to go talk to Scoble. I need a mini-me.

Serenity: Salt.

Leo: You want a mini-you? That was cool, wasn't it?

Owen: A mini-me would be cool.

Leo: I literally cannot—I think I—don't lick. So, I have a bad record with Samsung. The Note 7 I put the pen in upside down and it broke it. Oh, good.

Owen: That sounds like a whole lot of not my problem.

Leo: (Laughing).

Owen: You put the thing in it upside down.

Leo: Let's talk about Apple.

Serenity: Putting the pen in upside down is better—yea.

Leo: Let's talk about Apple. Apple has an employee who specializes in making fake human sweat.

Owen: Synthetic sweat.

Serenity: I like that you chose that, that lead.

Leo: Well, now you understand how important it is that you test things like fingerprint readers and so forth. It's extremely—(laughing).

Owen: I met a guy who his job was he made synthetic urine.

Leo: And what was—

Owen: He sold it to companies that would do drug tests and other things like that and they need just urine to sample things with and he was making synthetic urine.

Leo: Wow.

Owen: And I was like, that's the craziest job I've ever heard.

Leo: So, Apple released, believe it or not, an Earth Day video about, well, why Apple makes its own sweat.

Rob Guzzo: I actually ended up creating a whole section of my team that's just focused on skin safety. Really, what they're trying to do is to make sure that our products won't harm human health or the environment.

Leo: Can they test it if you lick it?

Rob: Picture a material, let's say an Apple Watch band. Immerse it into something like artificial sweat.

Art Fong: This is the funny part. We use fake human sweat. We want to mimic actual use conditions. We're not going to go around collecting sweat from our employees.

Rob: Our lab was like, "We can do this a lot better if we just make our own sweat." And so, every day, they make up a new batch of sweat. And there's one guy in our lab—

Leo: All right, this is way too much about Apple then I want to know (laughing). Actually, these are great. These are their Earth Day videos. I think they're actually—

Serenity: They're super cute.

Leo: It's very cute.

Owen: I can actually respect their Earth Day videos because they finally did something that I harp about all the time. When Apple says all the great things they do for the world, they're going to start using recyclables instead of destroying the planet to get minerals.

Leo: They say no more mining. No more mining. I love that.

Serenity: That is a long-term goal for them but they have been working towards it for a very long time. Like, this is not just something where out of the blue they're like, "You know what, guys? Now we're going to start being responsible." Apple has been on this track for about 20 years. And I mean you can see it in all of the things that they've done pretty much since 1999 onward. But, this is a much more public stand. Lisa Jackson was on John Gruber's Daring Fireball this weekend. Lisa Jackson, who is of course the SVP of Environmental Technologies and I mean the fact that they're willing to talk so publicly about this, not only what their plans are in the future which is a very un-Apple thing, but also let's tell you all of the ways that we're doing this, to me shows that Apple's committed not only to making this for their own products, but kind of being a guiding host for the rest of the technology world, basically saying, "Hey, guys. We know that you don't like us because we make our products so that they're not necessarily user repairable, but we have a reason for that and we're going to try and still use all of those parts and make sure that those parts don't end up in a landfill somewhere."

Leo: Apple can obviously control its Foxconn, the people assembling the phone, but it's been notoriously difficult for them to control the supply chain. And so, there are parts in all smartphones that use rare and exotic minerals that are mined by children in the Congo for instance. So, and Apple to their credit, has done everything they can, I know, to go up that supply chain and make sure that everything's done as responsibly as possible. But, there's only so much they can control. So, I think this is—and it's the right thing to do. I mean, I have to say, the trend among not just Apple but all of these phones—you know, Apple's phones aren't recyclable by any normal recycler nor is this S8. I mean, they're glued together. Everything's very tightly—you can't just grind it up and burn it. You really need, as Apple did, it built a robot, Liam, to disassemble its iPhone. I doubt Liam's in widespread use but that illustrated how difficult it would be to recycle its stuff. So, this is good news, yea.

Owen: I don't want it to sound like it's an Apple, just an Apple thing. It is a multi-corporation thing. And I just appreciate them coming out and saying it out loud and more forward. Because at the same time, they're still a company that does what they do and how they need to do it to get it done. So, for 20 years of them "being" recyclable and the things are less taken apart, I like the fact that they've actually made this statement and they're moving forward in a more aggressive manner than the ho-hum, hey we're trying to save the earth approach that they slide under the radar.

Leo: Well, as long as it's not lip service. Yea, as long as they're genuinely going to do this, I agree. Yea.

Serenity: Yea.

Jason: If they do, it will put pressure on others, right, to do the same.

Owen: Exactly.

Serenity: Exactly.

Jason: That's what we've seen. We did an award-winning story in 2014 on, we had people on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo that looked at what was really happening, and beyond. That's when the story was kind of hot with conflict minerals and looked at the real consequences, human consequences to the ways that these things are, not only mined but also recyclable. Because a lot of this stuff gets sent backed their and burned and shipped and you know, separated and all of that. And human consequences are real. And that story becomes a lot closer to home when you understand that and you understand that these things that I buy, you know, end up harming people and consequences, have consequences that you never intended. So, hats off to them. It's overdue not just for them but for the industry. And it is good to see them taking a leadership position. And I think it will affect others.

Owen: Again, like that's the best part of it is that they're going to put pressure on other companies. Again, coming out and being more public about it because I understand that they have to have these materials and they have to come from somewhere, but as they progress to making—especially Apple leading the way of making devices un-swappable, un-changeable. You can't swap out batteries. You can't swap out and put a SD card in it. Like, Apple products are starting to have a one and done shelf-life. And they do have a lot of places you can drop stuff off, at Best Buy vis-à-vis or something like that. But again, a lot of things don't end up in the places that they need to be to get recycled. So, them making a statement just puts more force on other people and that is something I'm really excited about because it's something we always looked over. Oh, solar is the next big thing. Where are they getting all the materials for the solar panels again? Oh, yea. They're blowing up holes in the ground and disturbing water and lakes and streams, but it's cool. We need the solar because we're all about clean energy. So, I mean, it's always a tit for tat as far as the planet is concerned. So, any effort is a great effort to me.

Leo: They do. I mean, the new Apple Park Spaceship Campus is solar. The whole roof is solar.

Serenity: That's incredible.

Owen: I think that thing's just going to fly off one day. I feel like aliens are going to come and invade, and Apple's going to be like, "All right. Time to go." And that thing's going to be gone. Like that's the spaceship that's just going to leave us all behind. And they just tell you that it's an office building.

Leo: They're moving in. They're starting to move in this month. Here's—

Jason: I really wanted to sneak in there when I was in San Jose this week. I was like, is there any way I can sneak in there? It's like no, no.

Leo: You need a drone. There's two people. There's Duncan and that other guy who do these drone videos. So, we've been able to watch this process. And Apple must know that they've got these drones flying over shooting video.

Serenity: There's not much they can do. They can't post an AK-47 at the (laughing)—

Leo: I guess not. I don't know.

Jason: I don't think they mind all that much. It's creating lots of—it's like free demand for them.

Serenity: It's hype.

Leo: Yea.

Jason: And hype and publicity. They kind of love that stuff to a degree, right? Partially they're so secretive so that people will spend more time anticipating it, right.

Leo: Look inside. Oh. Pretty.

Owen; Did you see that guy in China who made his office building look like the Enterprise from Star Trek?

Leo: (Laughing).

Owen: Have you seen that building?

Jason: No.

Owen: Somebody Google that. Find it real quick.

Serenity: It's amazing.

Owen: It's pretty awesome. I want to make sure that was real and I'm not making that up in my mind. I dreamed that. I'm almost positive.

Leo: It feels like you might have dreamt that. I'm just saying.

Owen: No. Somebody in the chatroom—

Jason: If you did, it's a good dream. It's a good dream if you did.

Owen: The power of the internet, China, Asian business guy Star Trek office building.

Leo: I'll find it, but this footage is interesting because it shows they're working at night which means they're working really fast and hard to try to get this ready for occupancy which starts, as I said, this month on the Apple campus. So, all right. I'm going to Google Starship—there it is.

Jason: Wow.

Owen: See?

Leo: The $100-million dollar building that looks like the Starship Enterprise.

Serenity: That's awesome.

Owen: And you think I don't know what's going on in the world.

Leo: I wonder how Paramount feels about this. They're very protective of the Star Trek IP.

Owen: Well, how would you feel if they threw photon torpedoes in your face?

Leo: (Laughing).

Owen: I'm sure that thing comes equipped with some like photon torpedoes. How dope is that? Like how—I want to work for that dude. I saw that. I was like, "This is the coolest dude on the planet." I probably can't breathe over there, but I want to work in that building. I just want to do it.

Leo: You can't even see the building most days of the year.

Owen: Uncle Leo, let's go to his office. Let's go.

Leo: So, more kudos to Apple. Apparently, I didn't know this, before he died, Steve Jobs founded a super-secret initiative to develop sensors that can non-invasively and continuously monitor blood sugar levels to treat diabetes. This is a story. CNBC got the scoop here. Apparently, they've been conducting feasibility trials at clinical sites across the Bay Area. Google's talked about making contact lenses that can measure the blood sugar through your tears. This, I don't think this is a contact lens. I'm not sure exactly—well, they say optical sensors. It apparently shines a light through the skin that measures your glucose.

Serenity: Yea, it's the same way the Apple Heart Rate Sensor works. It's currently, the heart rate sensor uses oximeter technology which is the same thing as Fitbit and most of the others. And the glucose monitoring system would be something somewhat similar. I'm not surprised at all by this, especially, again, going back to the thing where Apple's main core passions when it comes to human interests are the environment and learning, like teaching and to health. And health especially, I mean I don't want to say the catalyst was Steve Jobs getting sick or anything like that, but I do think that it's something that's a big part of Tim Cook's Apple and something that he cares very deeply about and that Jobs certainly cared very much about. I would not be surprised if the holy grail for treating diabetes was one tier of what eventually became the Apple Watch.

Leo: Well, imagine, if you could wear an Apple Watch and have continuous blood sugar measurements. That—there's 30-million diabetics. They'd sell 30-million Apple Watches.

Owen: Remember when Phil was on, Phil Libin was on, and he had that unit that stuck into his arm?

Leo: Right.

Owen: That gave him his current—

Leo: But that was invasive. That wasn't non-invasive.

Serenity: Yea, non-invasive.

Leo: That was pricking his skin.

Owen: But, again, I'm just saying that technology is moving towards that in a very fast manner, especially overseas. And so, Apple's like, "Look. The rest of the world is working on this. We need to find a way that we can get this in our devices so we can make it." So, again, it is about money at the end of the day because what you just said is a fact. If someone says, "Oh, I could just have this and not be pricking my finger 32 times a day? I need that watch."

Leo: It's the best of all possible worlds. It's a product. It's a business, but it would also be huge for health. This is—and you know, we talk about virtual reality and augmented reality, this is something simple and real that could change a lot of people's lives.

Owen: That's the stuff that I like to hear, Uncle Leo. That's why I've been down on all this VR and spaceships. I saw Lawnmower Man 30 years ago. I'm still waiting. So, until we get to something that's like super sexy and functional, I will bash it in the head and let you guys be the positive ways of the world. But that Apple's doing because they have a clear path to making things work and making a crap ton of money.

Leo: Apple, by the way, is apparently, I heard rumors, struggling to get a fingerprint reader in the next generation iPhone because I guess they don't want to put one on the back. They want to put one under the screen, and it's been the rumor. But apparently, according to some supply sources, they're having difficulty making that work. That will be very—

Serenity: (Laughing) They will never make a fingerprint dongle. That is ridiculous.

Leo: This is a story from the Verge (laughing).

Serenity: Ridiculous.

Leo: Yep, and that's what they say, too.

Serenity: This is someone—yea. This is someone's who's like, "All right. Let's run with this crazy rumor because it's insane." But no joke! Let me talk about this for a sec because I think it's absolutely silly. Like, of course Apple—Apple has probably been testing a fingerprint sensor on the rear casing for again, 2 years, probably since they started developing an OLED option for their iPhone.

Leo: Right.

Serenity: An edge to edge, because you cannot due edge to edge screen technology with the current generation of finger sensors. It's going to be very, very difficult. And there's only so much room in which to put all of this technology while improving the camera, while improving the screed, adding wide color and the P3 color gamut and all of this nonsense. You've got to pick and choose your battles. So, I believe that Apple is currently weighing like, ok, do we try and—we can't get 100% QA on fingerprint sensor on the front and we may have some problems? Or do we go with—do we have to compromise and put the fingerprint sensor on the back for a year when we go to this edge to edge display? So, I'm not surprised that we're seeing these different models come up. I'm sure they've been around in testing for a while. The real question is, are they going to actually ship one or the other of these? Like, we're not really going to know until we get much, much closer.

Leo: This is all speculation.

Owen: Serenity. Serenity. There's tea in this cup and you seem to be real sensitive about those dongles. Apple brought that joke upon themselves, Serenity. It's just a joke. Nobody really believes they're going to have a fingerprint dongle button. That's Apple's fault, bringing in dongles. I'm going to sip on this tea.

Leo: They did do a few dongles, yes, they did.

Jason: They did. I do think whatever they've done is already decided. These links are a little like Serenity says, I'm sure there's lots of prototypes. I'm sure they tried lots of different ways. I obviously, based on the patents and stuff that they filed, they would love to keep it on the front, not make there be any sort of obvious circle or anything. Maybe you have a place that's similar to where the fingerprint sensor is now but you know that you put your finger there or maybe something lights up and shows you to put your finger there when you put your finger over it or something. I think that that's the ideal for them based on the patents they've filed, but it may not be technologically possible yet. And so, I think Serenity's theory's a good one. They may have to have a bridge between where they'd like to be and the fact that they're probably going to go with this bezel-less display similar to the S8. And it may have to go on the back. If they do, I hope they put it in the middle like Google has done and not to the side of the camera like the S8 which is kind of a disaster.

Owen: They wouldn't do it because Apple's used to putting their cameras in the top corner also. Samsung's always put their cameras in the middle, so, their design is generally already set up for that. Obviously, things might change, but yea.

Leo: According to comScore, Apple has more iPhone users in the US than at any point in history. Get this. 85.8 million iPhone owners 13 and up. 85.8 million people using iPhones.

Jason: I mean, if you're a kid now, you would get—look at kids. Like none of them want to be caught without an iPhone. It's almost like—and a lot of it's the iMessage thing, right? Like if you're a green bubble and not a blue bubble, it's like oh. And so, and that's real. And that's for whatever reason can change. Taste—it's almost like a taste in fashion thing and those things can change. But I do think that's powering a lot and it's going to continue to have implications for Apple over the next several years. That doesn't mean something couldn't change it. I don't see a whole lot of people jumping to S8s.

Owen: Can you pull up that chart again? Is that an iOS thing versus Android thing or is that an iPhone thing versus a Galaxy thing?

Leo: So, this chart is for iPhones, but if you look at this, this is the chart of smartphone platforms. The blue at the bottom is Android. iOS is the light blue. The dark blue is Android. And it's funny because it goes back to 2005 when there was no Android or iPhone. At that point it was Microsoft, Blackberry, Symbian and Palm. Palm, the purple one, shrank away to nothing.

Owen: Because what I was about to say way—

Leo: Blackberry shrunk away to nothing.

Owen: Kids just want a phone. And I see more kids and when I pick up my kid from school with Androids then I do iPhones, because most people can't afford it.

Leo: That's exactly right.

Owen: You can get your kid that's a hundred bucks. An Android phone, you can get them a One Plus or anything over an iPhone. I mean of course people like me are stupid.

Leo: iPhone is seen as the phone of privilege by a lot of people.

Owen: It is. It is. But as far as affordability for a child, to give it to a 14-year-old that you can't trust.

Leo: Android is 53%. The problem is Android, that's a bunch of manufacturers. iPhone is one manufacturer. That's the difference.

Owen: I'm just saying is that it's still multiple devices. When you just say, "Everybody's got an iPhone." I'm just trying to put it into perspective.

Leo: I bet you—I bet you, this is from comScore and I don't see the number of Samsung, but I bet you Samsung is not far off that mark of $85 million because for most people when they say Android, they mean Samsung.

Owen: Again, that's why I wanted to see a different kind of chart because when you just say those things—everything Apple sounds woohoo but in reality, the way the world works, everybody can't afford an iPhone. Nobody wants the old ones, the bumpety bumps, and they can go get a solid Android device that works for them, especially when you're giving it to children.

Jason: That's funny. I see kids using—the funny thing is I see kids using like these, carrying around these old iPhones, 5s.

Leo: iPhones 4s, the little one.

Jason: And stuff where they're like hand-me-downs from like a parent or an uncle or a cousin or whatever. And it's like, oh yea, just give them that. Throw a SIM in there. Throw them on the family plan for $20-bucks a month or whatever.

Owen: Leiyah's got an iPhone 6 Plus S.

Leo: She's a fancy girl, yea.

Jason: Wow.

Leo: Yea.

Jason: Yea.

Leo: So, we're going to take a break. When we come back, hell will freeze over. That's a teaser. But first, a word from Carbonite. Are you reading my mind? Get out of my head, Owen J.J. Stone, OhDoctah. Yea.

Owen: Got to get this bank. Got to get this money.

Leo: Carbonite online backup. You got it. You nailed it.

Owen: You've got to back it up to get it back.

Leo: Thank you. You know, I invented that slogan. They don't actually use it. I just say it (laughing). But it's true.

Owen: It's the truth.

Leo: And with ransomware rampant in the world, you know, Carbonite is a really important solution, not just from home users but for businesses because one employee opens one bad email. You know, it's always from the boss. Smithers, here's this spreadsheet. Open it. And he opens it and it's ransomware and your entire system is now corrupted and you can't do business. You don't have access to your customer list, your supplier list, your accounts receivable. You've got nothing. That's when you'll be glad you have Carbonite. Carbonite online backup, for home, for office, for Mac, for PC, protects your most valuable asset, your data. And, by the way, they do it right. They do it automatically, continuously. You don't have to remember it. They have backup for individual computers, as little as $59.00-dollars a year for everything on a PC or a Mac. They have server backups. They even have this E-vault which is local hard drive backup plus Carbonite Cloud Backup together, so you have instant access to your data. It's locally stored and it's backed up on Carbonite's Cloud where it just cannot be lost. And that's really important. And because they support versioning, even if you do get bit by ransomware, Carbonite can save your tookus. Go to the business section. Read the resources page. Ransomware mitigation, lots of great information there. They can send you a hard drive to backup. They can send you a hard drive to recover too, so you can get back up and running even if you've got terabytes of data stored in the cloud. You don't have to download it. They'll send you—they'll FedEx you a hard drive. Just go there. Try it. Find out more. Free trials for all the different plans. Do use our offer code TWiT so you get 2 bonus months if you decide to buy. Carbonite.com. Offer code TWiT for 2 free bonus months. You don't need to give them a credit card. Just please do use that offer code. And now we say you've got to back it up to get it back. Do it right with Carbonite.

Owen: Yes, sir.

Leo: Hell freezing over because, according to The Wall Street Journal, Google is planning to put an ad blocker in Chrome. Google, whose business is selling online ads, is planning to put an ad blocker in Chrome. Now, I'm guessing it's not going to strip out Google ads.

Owen: I was about to say. Excellent. Excellent.

Serenity: Let me take away my competition.

Leo: They're going to use—go ahead. Go ahead, Serenity.

Serenity: I'm amused by the deck on that article where it's like Google plans to strip out bad ads and as someone who's site uses Google Ads from time to time and we have been absolutely smothered with these awful Google ads that hijack the browser and try and like send you to App Store stuff. That amuses me. I'm like, "Google, fix your own darn ad problem before you try and destroy other ads."

Leo: Well, I would submit in Google's defense that this is exactly what Google's doing. They've tried a number of things because the worst-case scenario for Google is that everybody starts using ad blockers and then nobody sees ads, Google's or anybody else's. And then, by the way, that's a bad thing for iMore and for Tech Republic and a lot of sites that rely on banner ads. That's how you monetize the site and if more and more people, and I'm sure the trend is, are using ad blockers, Google's got to do something. They started AMP, the AMP initiative for mobile, the idea being that AMP would make pages load much more quickly on mobile. They got a lot of publishers to use it. It still has ads but it has much more limited ads. Java Script is very much constrained. You can't have audio. I mean, there's a lot of things. And that's I think kind of what they're doing here. They say they will block offensive ads, ads that have popups or auto-playing video or what we call prestitial ads which you have to watch before you can see the content. So, we don't know the details yet of what Google will or will not block, but I think this makes sense. If you're Google, better to do this than go in a world where every ad is blocked. Better to at least meet users halfway. And what—you know, I use a browser called Brave which is based on Google's Chrome Browser that has a contribute button in it. And what you do is you turn it on, you set up an automatic payment into an account, and then Brave blocks all ads and pays out publishers who sign up so that they make up the difference, right? I'm in effect paying for an ad free internet. I think that's a really good solution.

Owen: How much are they nickel and diming you on that?

Leo: You can start—

Owen: With the Brave amount you're going to get nickeled and dimed.

Leo: It's up to you. You can—I think the lowest is a buck a month. You can choose to do $5-bucks a month which is kind of the default. You can do more and then they'll just divvy—this is a really cool browser. It has LastPass built in. It has ad blocking built in. And it has a way to support publishers. And you even decide which publishers get contributions.

Owen: Ok. I can back Brave on that. That all sounds good. That instantly mitigated a multitude of things.

Leo: Best of both worlds, right?

Owen: Yes, I can accept that. That sounds like a Brave new world.

Leo: (Laughing).

Owen: A Brave new world.

Serenity: That was some serious Dad joking right there.

Owen: Cheesy.

Leo: Yea, he's a dad. And incidentally, what Brave does the other side as well, which is if you're a publisher like Tech Republic or iMore, you go to their website and you get verified and you say, "I want to be in this." And you can get involved. And you will get—you know, you're automatically included in this micropayment system. I think this is really interesting. I really like this idea. This is the kind of thing Google should do. And incidentally, Brave is around because Google open sources its browser. Chromium Open Source so this is just a fork of Chromium. So, it's using the Chromium Blink Engine and all of that. So, it works well. The only thing I don't like about Brave, and it works on all platforms, it's a little ugly. It's not super elegant. But, hey, you know what? Built in LastPass and built in ad blocking, that sounds pretty good to me.

Jason: I think the Google thing is—the thing about Google is, Google owns DoubleClick which is one of the biggest ad broker platforms.

Leo: Right. Right.

Jason: In the world. They bought it a number of years ago. It kind of runs in the background. So, it's not that Google's going to block like—it's not going to touch Ad Words at all. But they could hurt themselves, right, with ad block. I assume, you have to assume anything that runs on their sites is not going to get blocked, that runs on their platform is not going to get blocked. But it is an interesting—it is an interesting thought experiment because I sort of have my doubts about this. I saw this story too and I just kind of can't see them doing it. But, Google also does some strange things that you wouldn't expect sometimes. They'll hold fiber networks and spend billions of dollars and then realize this is too expensive. So, you just kind of never know with them. They go out there and try weird things. But I can't see, I just can't—I just have my doubts about this. Even if they do this, how effective they'll be at it because they're going to come across as super critical. They're going to try to let their own stuff through to keep making money because this is where so much of their revenue comes from. They have not found another trick yet to making money other than the ads. And so, I just don't know. Even if they do do this, I don't know how good it's going to be or how much of a difference it will make.

Leo: Well, it just depends on how much pressure they're under in a way. I mean I think if they—I mean, they know better than anybody how many ads are being blocked. I mean the other alternative—do you do this? Do you guys do this? Is to have a pop-up that says, "Hey, I see you're using an ad blocker. Can you knock it off?" Or "Would you like to give us money?" Sometimes they even prevent you from visiting the site.

Jason: Right. We don't do that but we do replace it with our own sort of in house text ad. We don't make all of our money off of—you know, Tech Republic doesn't you know, make all its money on display ads. We have other lines of business. So, we have our own sort of match making service between Enterprise vendors and Enterprise users.

Leo: That's smart. That's smart.

Jason: So, if they block the ad then we just surface our little in-house kind of texty ads which are more like Google Ad Words.

Leo: Can't be blocked because they're first party ads, so they can't be blocked.

Jason: Right. Right.

Leo: Although I've seen ad blockers now really getting aggressive about blocking the request not to use an ad blocker. I mean—

Serenity: Oh, dear, well it makes sense.

Leo: I guess. It seems unethical to me. So, what does iMore? Mobile Nation's entirely relies on—well, maybe not entirely. You have conferences and stuff.

Serenity: No, we have several revenue streams but our primary source for the website at least is advertising revenue. We generally, we have an occasional popup that will hit I think about 10% of users using ad blockers that's not—it's just an interstitial ad.

Leo: Testing it out.

Serenity: Yea, it's basically just a hey. Just an FYI, like we make—help support us. Yea, exactly. But we're also, I mean we're testing with the idea of people who are already members of our site, you know, removing some of the ads or giving them a better experience as an incentive to become part of our community. Because the site really is, and especially the new design, it's so nice without ads. It really is.

Leo: I love it. Well, you see, I do use an ad blocker. But there's—I use it on the shows because, you know—

Serenity: You never know when it pops up.

Leo: I don't—yea, I don't want to give those ads air on our air. But let me disable the ad blocker and refresh and you'll see—not that many. Wait a minute. Here come some ads. But you see, part of it is this load time. These ads are still loading. It really makes a difference. Now, I want to support iMore. If I could give you $5-bucks and not see ads, I would do it.

Serenity: We're working on something like that, believe me.

Leo: That's why I think the Brave micropayments thing, and Google had a thing like that called Google Contributor. They're pausing it. They said, "We're going to come back with something better." That may be tied into what Google's going to do. Maybe they're looking at Brave and saying, "What if we put in an ad blocker that had Google Contributor at the back end so people could support."

Jason: All these big sites, like us, we looked at this for years too, right? All big sites and small sites and publishers of all kinds have looked at this idea. You look and you see what is the average cost that we get, the average revenue we get per user, right? And if it's whatever you just take your thing and round it up, you know, by 5-10% until it comes to an even number and you say, "Great. Maybe we'll just offer a Pro subscription that says just pay us that a year and away you go." And that number tends not to be, especially when you have sites with millions of users, that number is not that big. And it would be an interesting test over the next few years to see how many sites actually do that, right? Offer this sort of paid tier where you can say, "You do this, you see no ads. You get an ad-free experience that's going to be much faster. Maybe we'll even throw in a few incentives, extra things." Will users want to pay for stuff they can get for free somewhere else and see some ads? Because readers told us no.

Leo: Well, that's the question. I like this contributor thing. I'm the kind of guy who feels guilty about running an ad blocker, but wants to run an ad blocker. Give me a way that gives the site some money. If everybody's happy, I'm much happier. But, you're right. I don't know if the majority would do that.

Jason: Yea.

Leo: You're right. History tells us no. I think you could skip this ad. Actually, you could. One of the problems with podcasts is we can't guarantee that the ad, I shouldn't say this out loud, but I think advertisers aren't dumb. Just like a newspaper. If you're reading a newspaper, there's no promise that somebody's going to see your ad. It's there. But they might go right by. They may not even open that page. Same thing with a podcast or any TV show. People know how to fast forward. I think—

Owen: The podcast is kind of not as easy as that because if you skip past it, then you've got to get back to the part where they're talking about, and somebody says something amusing and you want to get back to it.

Leo: Exactly.

Owen: So, you just deal with it when I tell Uncle Leo it's time to read an ad and we just go on about our day. So, don't shortchange yourself.

Leo: We only read one ad every half hour. We try to make them products you would be interested in.

Owen: Or the first hour and 17 minutes until I bring it up and force feed it because we've got to get this.

Leo: All right. Let's do an ad. Let's do an ad.

Serenity: We've got to check off our boxes.

Leo: Perfect example. This is an ad for a company that we use, we like, we've known for years and we think some of you would like. And what we try to do with the ads, is tell you about a product that you might think is useful like Drobo.

Owen: Drobo?

Leo: Drobo. The founders started it. He had a hard drive crash. He had a RAID array. Everybody was using RAID. But it failed. And he said, "Well, wait. I thought I was protected." So, he said, "I want to make a better redundant storage solution." Drobo stands for Data Robot I think is what it stands for. They invented a new kind of RAID called BeyondRAID which has a lot of benefits including the ability to mix drive sizes in on Drobo. So, I do that all the time. I put in whatever hard drives I have lying around in my Drobo. I have a couple of Drobos. I have a Drobo mini at home and I have a 5N. But when it starts to fill up, it tells you. It's got these great lights on the front. It tells you exactly what's going on. One of them goes orange because it's running out of room, no problem. I don't even have to turn it off. I just get a bigger drive, put it in, and I've increased the capacity because you don't have to match the sizes. Plus, they've got a variety of different ways to back- you know, have redundant data. So, you really are backed up. They've got battery backed cache so if the power goes out you don't have to worry. It prevents write failure or data corruption. Couldn't be easier to use. These panels on the front, they're magnetically attached. No screwdriver needed. You add a drive without a screwdriver. You slide it in. It's so easy to do. The status lights tell you exactly what's going on, rebuilding, getting low, drive fail, whatever. They've just introduced a new Drobo, you see this one? The 5N2. It's the next era of simplified network attached storage for your connected home or small office. High performance, upgraded processor. They do port bonding which means if you have multiple internet service providers you can bond their data together to give you higher speed connection. And on the back, not 1 gigabit, but 2 gigabit ethernet ports. So, you put one in each port, two different providers, you've got incredible throughput. SSD compatibility. They have a mSATA accelerator bay. I use the mSATA accelerator bay to speed up writes. It's really fantastic. Of course, secure backup, remote data access and sharing, disaster recovery. I mean true piece of mind. And the Drobo apps are available for the 5N2. They're really taking advantage of the new processor. Drobo Pics gives you photo backup. Plex? Yes. They've got cloud apps for backups and data syncing, developer tools for programs and websites. You can put a full LAMP stack on there. Node.js. You can run your WordPress site right there or your clients if you're a web developer. This is a great way to do client sites so that they can see what you're doing. App developers can use C and GO and Pearl and Python and Ruby. There's even a Git Client. So, the new 5N2 is a power tool. Go to drobostore.com to learn more. Check out their complete line of products. And the prices? They're better than ever. They've lowered prices on almost the entire line, plus you're going to save 10% at drobostore.com when you use the code TWiT10 and that includes the brand-new 5N2. Drobostore.com, the offer code TWiT10 for 10% off at the Drobo store. Learn more about how they work. I think you'll be very impressed. Drobo.

Owen: Drobo's one of those best products. It's sexy and simple.

Leo: Sexy and simple.

Owen: I like Drobo.

Leo: Just like you, OhDoctah. Sexy and Simple.

Owen: Hey, hey. You never lie.

Jason: This is like the data show. I love it.

Leo: It is. Well, we do geek stuff. I want to do geek products. Occasionally we're going to get, for Father's Day we're going to get kind of more cosmetics and things but if we can do the geek products, I like to do that.

Jason: It does remind me though of—just one more thing on the conversation we were just finishing on advertising. The thing is you know, the old joke in advertising is that I know 50% of my advertising doesn't work. I just don't know which 50 it is, right? And so that's why they have to do what they do and spend so much money. Those days are going to end soon.

Leo: They are.

Jason: We're becoming part of a world where you know, we are going to be able to measure and manage everything. Like even your show, even audio shows—there's going to come some service that's going to use a percentage or something and they're going to be able to tell every one of your advertisers, "Here's the percentage of people who listen to your ad or acted upon it." They'll do some omni channel thing where they'll connect buyers and their habits. And then your advertisers will come to you and they'll say something like, "Oh, well now we have to be—we're going to advertise with you, but we have to be the first ad in the show because we see that that has 27% more likelihood of a purchase transaction." And so, then you're going to have to start saying, "Oh, we're going to charge you more if you want to be the first one in the slot. That's a higher premium." Or whatever. But it's going to be all based on data and so, this world is changing considerably and I do think that some of what were seeing with ad blockers and these things, it's sort of this very—what's driving this is because there's all this high volume, low value inventory on the web and it's driven by the fact that people just you know, shove out as much money and impressions of everything as they can because they can't measure well and they don't know and they don't have sophisticated tools. But that is destined to change as the web changes, as big data changes, as we become smarter about those things. And just pure scale will matter less and less. And so, that's a little bit optimistic view but there's going to be less value around just blasting out this message to so many people and a lot more value in I'm interested in people who are you know, interested in these 4 things that we can match up with our buyers.

Leo: That's because we're competing with Facebook who can tell—you can sell it down to the last slice. And we're competing with Google. And frankly, I'm not sure I'm going to do very well in that era because one thing our audience doesn't want us to do, and I don't want to do, is collect data about them. I don't want to give our advertisers big data.

Owen: The one thing that you have going—

Leo: You pick us because you know we're targeted at geeks.

Serenity: Yes.

Owen: Well, the other thing that works in your favor or in the favor of listening to an ad from a chunk of sources, so, you know, I as a technology person, I get people asking me stuff. "I want to start doing my stocks on my own. I want to use one of these. Which one should I use?" What happens to me? I don't use it but I've heard it because I've been on the show and I watch the show enough, I say, "Oh, Wealthfront. Oh, use the code TWiT."

Leo: Exactly.

Owen: And you might not have mentioned them in 6 months.

Leo: We talk to influencers. That's right.

Owen: You see what I'm saying? But again, it gets stuck in your mind is what I'm saying.

Leo: I believe in what we're doing. I just worry that advertisers are going to get that message that Jason's talking about and say, "But I want all these numbers. I want to know. I want to target that guy." And I'm not going to ever do that. I'm not going to do that.

Owen: You also give numbers because you get people to use the code that you provide for them, too. So, you have—

Leo: But, let me tell you, I mean, again, this is a little inside baseball, but that's a very imperfect system. We only do that because advertisers want to do that. And a lot of times they want to break it up by show. And the problem is that most people just do TWiT because they know it's TWiT. And they don't—MacBreak Weekly? I don't know. And a lot of times advertisers, some, we'll usually talk them out of this, but they might have a variety of strange offer codes because they're—remember Draft Kings? Draft Kings would advertise on NFL Football.

Owen: But that doesn't work.

Leo: Every ad had a different offer code. Clearly, they were trying to figure out, "Well, did you see the 12:10 ad or the 12:30 ad?" Dopey.

Jason: Exactly. But this is going to work for you, Leo, because then it's going to be less imperfect system, right, than people who—there are people who listen to your ads because they trust you and they buy it but they never put in the code. I think I've bought, I can honestly say probably more than anything I've ever, any other site, I've probably—or tech publisher, I've bought stuff from this show more than anybody else.

Leo: Me too. It's very expensive (laughing).

Jason: Because it's targeted though. Your advertisers know based on your content—

Leo: They kind of know who they're going to get, yea.

Jason: On the kinds of people who listen that they are—and the way that you deliver it. And so where data will help you is it's going to show up more often and the imperfect code system will become less and less important. Because of omni channel data based on people who listen to your show and you know, they'll know. Facebook already knows. Facebook is really on top of this.

Leo: That's what scares me, is that's how Facebook sells, right?

Jason: But we're looking at helping other vendors. So, Facebook may actually be able to help you in this way because they are connecting the dots to Amazon and other.

Leo: I'm never giving Facebook—no, see.

Owen: Facebook wants to help people outside of Facebook? Come on, Jason.

Leo: I'm never giving Facebook any information about our users. I don't know anything about our users and I don't want to know anything about our users.

Jason: The thing is, they know even if you don't want them to know.

Leo: Son of a—

Jason: Like, they know that somebody listened to TWiT.

Leo: Yea, they kind of do.

Jason: They're logged into Facebook.

Leo: Scary.

Jason: And they went to Amazon and they bought that thing that was on your show within 20 minutes of that ad running on TWiT.

Leo: So, they'll be telling advertisers about us. Not us. They will. Yea, you're probably right. And ISPs, right, who can sell user data now. Your ISP—

Serenity: They can pledge not to, but.

Leo: Yea, well, we'll see about that. Not publicly. They won't do it publicly.

Jason: It's like saying, "We have this gold that's sitting in the back room of our headquarters. We're not going to access that because it's just—we don't really want to do that. And we know people don't like it that we have all of this money." Of course they're going to do it.

Owen: That's why I spend so much of my time lying to the internet. I'm currently 65-years-old. I'm a Caucasian man living in the Alps.

Leo: Yea, that's my advice to everybody, yea.

Jason: But it's because you are super smart and informed about this. You are not the average citizen.

Owen: I know. I know.

Leo: Ok, couple of quickies and then we're going to let you all go to your husbands and children.

Owen: FBI can't hire hackers because of 420.

Leo: (Laughing) So, the FBI was very worried because they have a rule that says if you have smoked marijuana in the last, what, 3 years you can't be a FBI agent. And so, the problem was the FBI's trying to find hackers. Well, the FBI is proud to say it can finally find hackers who don't smoke weed. They just drink.

Owen: I don't believe it.

Leo: I don't believe it for a moment.

Owen: I think that they didn't smoke for a month and just said, "They don't smoke." They wait until it gets out of their system and they hire people anyway because it's a stressful job. Everybody smokes weed. Leo's smoking weed right now.

Leo: It's legal. It's legal in many states. It's legal here.

Owen: There it is.

Serenity: You know, there's also the way of getting around it by going contractor route, right, where you're not an employee of the FBI. Wink, wink.

Owen: There you go. That's a good one.

Jason: There's a lot of that going on.

Leo: Well, anyway. I'm glad to know I can finally get an FBI job. So, that's what I would like.

Owen: There you go.

Leo: HTC. I bought their phone. Now they're going to do a new one. Come on. The Ocean will be unveiled with a, what? Touch sensitive frame? On May 16.

Serenity: Oh, boy.

Leo: What?

Serenity: Can I just say that the squeeze for that is not the shape that it really should be for advertisements. That reminds me of—yea.

Leo: Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Let me watch this and you can tell me. Wait a minute.

Jason: Remember when Airbnb's ad came out, or Airbnb's new logo came out and everybody was like, "Oh."

Leo: What are you saying? What's weird about that? Oh, that.

Serenity: That.

Leo: (Laughing) This is the invitation.

Serenity: That's Kotex right there (laughing).

Leo: It does. It looks like the poster that a lot of people were using in the March for Women.

Owen: If you need to take a phone through a turnstile or something, why do I need to squeeze my phone? What is it doing to me?

Leo: Because it's fun.

Owen: Oh, my God.

Leo: According to HTC.

Serenity: I mean, don't get me wrong. I really enjoy the little brain, like the plastic brain that I have on my desk that I squeeze for like tension relief.

Owen: Oh, stress phone? You need a stress phone.

Jason: Let's see it. Let's see it.

Serenity: We're going to attach my plastic brain.

Leo: What happens when I lick it I wonder? Oh.

Owen: Yea, see? There you go. I want to do that to my phone. Like, what is wrong with people?

Serenity: Stick it on the phone and—

Leo: Well, I already took the—

Serenity: I'm giving it CPR right now.

Leo: I already preformed brain surgery on my HTC U Ultra and put it in the Samsung Galaxy S8, so, anyway, it doesn't matter that it's dead. Intel, weird. Intel had booked downtown San Francisco for the 20^th Intel Developer's – actually the 17^th Intel Developer's Forum and cancelled it this week just out of hand.

Jason: This was a bummer. That was actually a good event.

Leo: You used to go to it. I know, yea.

Jason: I'd go. I'd go every few years. I go to a lot of these and I tend not to go every year because you tend to hear the same story a lot of the time. So, typically I'll skip a year or two in between. But that's a good event.

Leo: The still have Moscone West booked but they canceled it.

Jason: Yea, yea. And mostly because that one was nice because I guess they're not pushing, you know, they don't have a product that they're pushing to people, right? So, it was a nice industry overview. You got a sense from them what was happening.

Leo: This is from Ryan Smith and Ian Cutress of AnandTech. They write, "I just got off the phone with Intel, about why IDF is being cancelled." Here's what Intel says. Intel has been changing rapidly over the last two-to-three years, as they are go from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company. What? They're not going to make chips? What does that mean?

Jason: Na, it's all that data center. It's just that they're going to sell their—they're going to make all their money on data center.

Leo: People aren't buying PCs but they are certainly building data centers. Ok.

Jason: The power of the cloud. They lost mobile. They knew mobile was coming. That's funny. I remember IDF like 2008, 2009, they were like, "Mobile's about the steamroll everything." And they're like, "We've got to switch to mobile." They still couldn't do it right. They knew it was coming and they still couldn't adjust and do it.

Leo: The innovators dilemma. Kodak knew that digital was coming. They even bought companies that put out the first digital cameras. Still didn't save them.

Jason: It's kind of over for them on that, but where they can win is in two places. Data center because obviously data centers aren't going away. People are going to build more of them. And they're going to need bigger and faster ones to handle all of this data. So, that's where they're making all their money right now.

Leo: But, the processor in this Samsung Galaxy S8, the Snapdragon 835, an ARM chip is designed for not just phones but data centers. Microsoft is rumored will release its first ARM based PC in the first quarter. Qualcomm, which makes ARM chips, says that.

Jason: The ARM thing is—they want to be in the data center but.

Leo: It's low power. It's fast. I don't know.

Owen: How fast is it, Leo? Like, what are you really going to do on that thing?

Jason: Is that smart enough? Yea, it's not smart enough to handle the—

Owen: I mean come on. You're over there. Let's see you run the show with that instead of that spaceship you have on your desk.

Leo: You don't think that's a desktop processor or at least a server class processor inside this?

Owen: Again, look down in front of your face at the $3,000-dollar unit right now and put that phone down.

Leo: It's got an Intel i5 in it.

Serenity: At least $1,000-dollars of that is the display.

Leo: Oh, almost all of it. In fact, the real knock—this is the Surface Studio. The real knock on this is that it's kind of a crappy laptop grade CPU. It's all about the screen. But I don't mind. I love the screen, don't you?

Owen: I do.

Serenity: The screen is beautiful.

Owen: I like that wheel. I wish I could use something like that.

Leo: I can do this. I can do this.

Serenity: You know what? I'm with Jason Snell here. I don't wish for an iMac that can do something like that. I wish for an iPad that could be a—well, a giant iPad that could be a second screen for a desktop. Or connect like—

Owen: That sounds like a whole lot of not real power.

Serenity: Are you kidding? For an artist?

Leo: My point exactly on the ARM, though, is that power is less important as we—I mean—

Owen: I don't draw. I do photography and videos. I need more power. For drawing, no, not more power.

Leo: We're not going much faster.

Serenity: Well, the thing is, it's not—again, I mean you make a great point in that it's not about how speedy one single processor is. It's about averaging out in multiple processors. If you're working in video, if you're working in animation, you basically need a heavy-duty graphics card, like one of NVidia's series or their CUDA tech or you know, multiple cores to help process and pass out all of that information.

Owen: That's what I want.

Serenity: If you're doing high-end stuff.

Leo: As Apple has clearly observed, that's a small part of the market, almost an irrelevant part of the market.

Owen: They don't have a Pro market anymore. There are no Pros.

Leo: Everyone talk at once (laughing). Start, Serenity, first.

Jason: Serenity, yea.

Serenity: I was going to say, it's a small part of the market but it is a vital part in a couple of significant ways. One, it's the part that develops their applications, so they kind of need to support, again, a good computer that supports multiple processing. Two, some of their, again, maybe not the customers that are going to slough off the cash for them, but the customers that are going to help innovate in the space from a graphics point of view, from a health point of view, they want—I'm sure that people making fake sweat, the people who are number crunching the algorithm to make this stuff in a lab, they're not going to want to come to Apple and be like, "Yea, we used a high-end Windows PC to do that because your Pro isn't good enough."

Leo: Yea, but they might be. They might be.

Owen: They're probably out there using the Resin right now, or Resin, however people say it. You're right. I fully understand what you are saying about art and you don't need that. But I need that so bad I'm about to make something that works.

Leo: Serenity, if you came here and you started playing with Photoshop or—

Serenity: Oh, I've played with it.

Leo: I mean, this thing is mind bogglingly good. The pen is good. The knob is good.

Owen: And I'm an Apple lover. I want Apple just to make one.

Leo: The only thing wrong with this, is it's running Widows and I—you know what? Windows 10 is not that bad and I think people are going to go, well, you know, I can live with Windows 10. But—

Serenity: But I've got to admit, I really have to admit, on the Surface Studio. I went in and tried one because when I saw it announced I was like, "Oh, my God. This is like that computer that I've been wanting."

Leo: What did you think?

Serenity: And I went in. Well, so, ok, first thing I did was I picked up the pen and I started drawing stuff. And I'm like, "All right. This is like the Surface Pro 3/4 Pen. It's like it's not bad." I'm totally spoiled by the Apple Pencil because it's probably one of the best styluses I've ever used.

Leo: This is not quite as good, you're right.

Serenity: No, it's not. But it's still a very good stylus and I like the beautiful screen, and I'm ok. And then I go on like the knob thing's cool. And I take the knob and I put it on the screen. And it immediately slides off in the Microsoft Store and slides across the floor and like hits the battery case. And the whole battery case falls out.

Leo: You had a bad—somebody had been licking your knob. It's not—oh, God, I can't believe I said that. Because this sits very nicely. It stays on the thing. It doesn't slide. I use it.

Serenity: Well, you have it at a much more angled position.

Leo: Oh, yea, you don't want to have it like this. Of course, it's going to fall off. But that's not how you use this.

Owen: That's not how you're supposed to use it. That sounds like a setup.

Leo: You use it as a drafting table.

Owen: That sounds like that was a setup situation. You set that up to have that story to tell.

Serenity: Well, not intentionally. No, not intentionally at all. I want to like it. Just like I wanted to like the Surface before the iPad Pro came out. It's like I have wanted nothing more since I was about 13 than to have a portable computer that I could very easily like draw on and sketch on and then immediately take those concepts and put them into action, you know, either bring them back to my Mac or start something on a portable computer and then bring it to desktop. But, like there just really hadn't been—I don't know. There's always like—

Leo: Look what I'm doing. Look what I'm doing here. This is awesome. I'm doing 3D models. I'm drawing a 3D model. I'm making, I'm making, I can rotate—look.

Owen: You're the wrong person to advertise anything right now. I love Apple but I just want more power. I want innovation. I want new, sexy stuff. And I haven't had that since Steve left and I just want it. I want Apple to be Apple and they're not. And when I see stuff like that from Microsoft, I'm like, "Oh, she's so pretty."

Leo: This is sexy. Watch this. Watch this. I'm going to draw a woman right now. Look at that. There she is.

Serenity: Very nice.

Leo: I just drew a woman. I am so good. I am an artist.

Jason: Can you put stickers on top of that?

Leo: Yea. In fact—

Owen: Go on Facebook and map the face.

Leo: They have a whole website full of these models.

Serenity: There you go.

Leo: This is Paint 3D that came out with Microsoft's Creator's Edition. And of course—

Serenity: I wish I had my iPad Pro nearby because I have uMake and uMake will do that too.

Leo: Well, yea, but this is a full PC. This is not an iPad.

Owen: Yea, if you want to do it on 27".

Serenity: Yea, but you know—

Leo: Look, I've put an alien in my project. Look at that. And now he's waving, he's waving at the lady.

Owen: You're not helping this argument, Leo. Stop talking.

Leo: What? Isn't this good?

Owen: You've made it worse.

Serenity: Oh, man.

Leo: Welcome to my cube credit. Look at that. Anyway, so Microsoft is having an event May 2^nd. It's an education event, at least according to the invitation. But what they are probably going to announce, it's been leaked out now, is the new Windows Cloud version which is their attempt to get back in schools which they've been using ground to the Chromebooks. So, they'll be inexpensive, I hope they're not netbooks, but inexpensive computers. And I think that with the Creator's Edition that just came out and you know, the push towards holographic, they're really interested in getting kids doing 3D design. I think that they have a very, I think, forward looking point of view about what they're going to do with their hardware. I wouldn't rule them out just yet. And I think this is an excellent drawing and you guys suck. So, there. Mocking my drawing (laughing).

Jason: Speaking of the cloud, I think Microsoft knows—the Microsoft Cloud, they're going to somehow use Cloud with this laptop to try to get to the Chromebook kind of thing because they are losing.

Leo: It's a Chromebook I think. Yea, Windows Chromebook.

Jason: But, to get back to the cloud though, that is—we we're talking a little bit about GPU, sorry, we were talking about CPU and ARM versus Intel. But the GPU is part of it as well, right? This is where Intel and GPUs and those kind of things are the reason that ARM just is not going to compete and isn't yet anyway competing. The demand for all that stuff, to run all this cloud stuff is huge. And the compute, the demand for compute power to run big data, to run what's going to be things like this cloud computer that Windows is going to do, the Windows Lite version, I still don't have a whole lot of confidence that they can make this thing as lean and minimal as a Chromebook, but we'll see. It's just not a core competency of Microsoft to be lean and minimal. And so, we'll see. But I think where Microsoft is doing really well and they have a lot of mojo is in cloud with Azure. When I was there last year in February, I spent a few days in meetings at Microsoft, and not one person the whole time I was there said the word Windows. Not one person.

Leo: Wow.

Jason: This really weirded me out because that's—they're always all about Windows everywhere and that was the cash cow. Everything went back to that. But I heard Azure more times than I could count on two hands, right? It was all that they wanted to talk about. They've really and smartly hitched their wagon to that.

Leo: To the cloud.

Jason: I think that's where all the R&D's going. I think that's where all their internal goals are about. And they really are putting all of their chips there. And that's really smart because the Windows brand I think is still a bit tarnished from all of the years of security issues and malware and also the bugginess of different things as well as the failure of Vista, the failure of Windows 8. Windows 10 is much better, but—

Owen: Windows still runs the world. The world runs on Windows.

Jason: It does. But it's one of those things that it is less and less relevant or important, or maybe not relevant but central to you know, business computing, everyday computing, everyday people's computing than it used to be. I think Microsoft is increasingly OK with that and they've smartly said we're about sort of the back end. We're about Cloud. We're about also apps which is still front end and we'll run our apps everywhere on our platform as well as others. And they are kind of winning with that strategy. And that's a much smarter, much different Microsoft than the one that we've seen in the past. But that does make me wonder about the whole—because their Chromebook competitor, can they really deliver something useful and interesting with that? It will be interesting to see.

Leo: Well, I just want you to know that in the time you've been talking I put a cookie in the alien's hand and a clock on the wall. And now I can enter the scene. It's a 3D scene.

Owen: Can we pull up Serenity's little graphic novel cartoon that she made when she was in the 3^rd grade.

Leo: Ok, I'm not an artist. I'm not an artist (laughing).

Owen: Can we pull that up and will you—look, like I said, you're killing my argument. I had her on my team and then you start with these alien cookies and—

Leo: Look what Leo can do. Look what Leo can do. I mean this is pretty impressive.

Owen: That's all it is. Purple Scoble.

Leo: Look, I just put a little silver chipmunk in it, too.

Serenity: Oh, my gosh. Just don't make them start singing. Oh, God, he's red and—

Leo: Look at this clock is so realistic. It even has a battery on the back. I mean this is, this is—

Owen: Look at the shine of the green from the alien on the silver chipmunk.

Leo: Uh huh. Uh huh. Yea, move him away. Is there green on it anymore? Yea, there is. But anyway, don't pay too much attention to that. That's ok.

Owen: You messed it up. Why did you move it? I had a good thing going again and you—

Leo: Can you do this? Whoo! All right.

Serenity: Yea, but I can do it with my hands instead of with the little mouse pointer.

Leo: I can do it with my hands. You think I can't do it with a hand? I can do it with my hands. Everything I can do. This is a touchscreen. I can do it. It's even easier with my hands.

Serenity: Look at that lag. Ew.

Leo: There's lag because it's complex. Oh, now what happened? 3D complex. It's a complex—

Serenity: Yea, very complex.

Owen: Something else. Change the subject.

Jason: Can we look at this on Second Life? Can we share this on Second Life?

Leo: This is my Second Life chipmunk. Anyway.

Serenity: Oh, that explains so much.

Leo: You know, thank you very much. You guys are great. I was going to mention Steve Ballmer's new website but nobody cares, so. USAfacts.org.

Serenity:  Actually, no, I clicked on this on Friday. I was really impressed by this. There were some really interesting statistics. I'm a big numbers geek for roller derby but not really outside of that and this was a good excuse to kind of dive back into statistics. No, I'm glad somebody's doing this. I think it's worthwhile to have numbers and facts available to people who aren't powered by a lobbyist firm.

Leo: Well, God knows Steve's got the money. This has been a secret project he's been putting money into. You thought he was just running the LA Clippers. He's got other stuff going on and actually, you're right, Serenity. I shouldn't mock it because it is kind of cool. It is USAfacts.org. You can browse it. It's basically everything you would like to know about federal, state and local government from 70 different sources. And it's all visualized and yea. This is kind of—for people who want this kind of thing, you know, clearly you can see Steve Ballmer and his heritage here. He's a numbers guy, right? He wants to see the spreadsheet. He wants to see. So, you know, that's kind of what it is. But it is interactive. It allows you to explore it. I think it's kind of fun. So.

Serenity: You know what's really fun, Leo? If you pull up, I think it's births, deaths and population, there are some really, there are some fun spikes where deaths go way up every time there's a war, births also goes way up the next year, every time there's a war.

Leo: Yep. It's called homeostasis. We're trying to be – this is kind of cool. So you can add, I can add more lines to this. That's neat. That's really cool. You know, it's a little Wolfram Alpha for me, but you know.

Jason: Is that good or bad?

Leo: No, I like Wolfram Alpha. But it's one of those things—go ahead.

Serenity: Not as nerdy. It's not as nerdy as Wolfram Alpha. It's nerdy from the perspective of there are a lot of numbers, but I think USA Facts is doing it in a way that's very clear for the average person to understand without trying to push too much meaning on what it is. It's basically just giving you, this is the date, this is what's going on and here are the factors that you can control. And then you can go as nerdy or as base level as you want.

Leo: Interesting, yea. Yay. Yay, USA. Go to USAfacts.org. OhDoctah, Owen JJ Stone. You'll find more of him at iqmz.com.

Owen: Oh, is this the part where I get to talk about myself and fun stuff? Oh, I like this part. So, first of all I do a show on Wednesdays. It's called Random Drinking where I get drunk and watch funny videos that I found on the internet. It's live on Wednesdays followed by Twitter. You'll find it. On Mondays I do a sports show, like I'm watching this. I was paying attention to this show, trust me. But I'm watching the playoffs right now. And we talk about sports every Monday night live and then I have a show called Doc Tales. That's my baby. You can go check it out. I had Phil Libin on last and then I had Becky Worley on.

Leo: Thanks to you I know Georgia Dow's real name.

Owen: Georgia Dow's real name. Uncle Leo's been on it. I got tentatively Kevin Rose is coming up. Padre is coming up.

Leo: Nice.

Owen: I'm probably going to con Jason into doing it and Serenity's already got to do it. She says yes or no, I'm going to corner her and then get her on the show. It's a full podcast. You should listen to me sometimes when I'm not on here yelling at Uncle Leo about making this, because I love you all, especially in the chatroom.

Leo: No, it's a great podcast and I was honored to be on it and Lisa listens to it all the time and tells me all the gossip.

Owen: Because that's what we do. I find the deepest, darkest secrets.

Leo: I like it. Doc Tales. Iqmz.com. Serenity Caldwell, you'll find her at iMore and on the roller derby rink. I understand you had a good practice today.

Serenity: We had a tournament this weekend in good old Rhode Island.

Leo: How did you do?

Serenity: We won our game against Carolina on Saturday and we unfortunately lost to D.C. today but it was a hard fought—actually, I have a clip reel of myself that I finally made. This is not from this tournament. This is from our tournament in Dallas. I just sent it via the Skype chat.

Leo: Oh, don't do it by Skype Chat. Paste it into the reel doc. I don't have access to the Skype chat.

Serenity: Oh, Google Doc. Ok, I got it, I got it. I'll make it happen. Yes.

Leo: So, what is the name of your team?

Serenity: I play for the Rhode Island Riveters of Providence Roller Derby.

Leo: And you are, as I remember, R2-D2nator.

Serenity: Yea, Artoo Detoonate.

Owen: What? That is an awesome name.

Leo: Isn't a great name?

Owen: That is an awesome name.

Leo: And how about these teams, the team you beat, what was its name?

Serenity: It was the Carolina All-Stars, but their B team is the Carolina Bootleggers, which is pretty great.

Leo: Nice, nice.

Serenity: And the DC National Maulers, M-A-U-L-E-R-S.

Leo: (Laughing) I love it.

Serenity: I love—DC has the best team names. One of their home teams is called Scare Force 1 and it makes me so happy.

Owen: See, I need that on a t-shirt, Scare Force 1.

Leo: Scare Force 1.

Serenity: It's pretty great.

Owen: I'll get a jersey with Detoonater on the back. We've got to talk about this. I've got to get one of those.

Leo: I'm actually—

Serenity: I'd love it.

Leo: I'm thrilled that roller derby's back. I'm grew up watching the Bay Area Bombers and it was crazy and fun and I think it's become a big sport, right?

Serenity: It's really awesome.

Owen: It's a cult sport. It's gangster.

Leo: Can you get me the URL?

Serenity: Yea, I only have view access. I just requested edit access.

Leo: Oh, come on. Come on.

Serenity: It's so sad.

Leo: Can you just give me the URL? Go ahead, I'll type it.

Serenity: Yea. I'll give it to you live on Skype. Ok, so it's YouTube.com.

Leo: Ok, that I can handle, yes?

Serenity:  YouTube.com and watch. I'm going to give you some letters. Oh, boy. I don't know if I can do this.

Leo: Just give me the title. Just give me the title of the video.

Serenity: Ok. Here, you know what? Go to my channel and I'll make it—go to—

Leo: Yea, what's your channel?

Serenity: Why don't you go to my channel. I believe it's just user Wistern. W-oops, No. Why is—

Owen: She is showing off all her technology skills right now.

Serenity:  I know.

Leo: Oh, we'll edit all this out. This will never appear in the show.

Serenity: We're all failing. Ok, so what you—what you're going to do is just Google Serenity Caldwell on YouTube. Get my channel.

Leo: Yes, yes. All I need is Google. I don't enter any URLs anymore. All I need is Google. There's 12 videos on it. And which one should I—

Serenity: Yes, go to the videos. So, go to the videos tab.

Leo: Ok.

Serenity: And it's the most recent one.

Leo: Silliness on Skates? Ladies and gentlemen, Silliness on Skates.

Owen: We'll get it. We'll do it live. We'll do it live.

Serenity: This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous.

Leo: Is that you in the blue?

Serenity: That is me in the blue with the star on.

Leo: That means you're the—the star is the what, the bomb? What do they call her?

Serenity: The jammer.

Leo: Jammer. That's the word. She's being the jammer.

Serenity: So, I have to pass members of the opposing team, in this case in white, to score points.

Leo: My favorite move, the Bay Area Bombers used to do this, they take the jammer and they'd just hold her arms on either side and sling her forward.

Jason: Sling her.

Serenity: Yea, the whip.

Leo: The whip. They still do the whip? Look at your top.

Serenity: They do still do the whip.

Leo: You are tough. Don't mess with Artoo Detonate. She's going to mess you up.

Serenity: It's a really, really fun sport. It's changed my life absolutely. And I get to go hang out with my Team Canada friends this weekend for Beast of the East which is great. I'm on the National Canadian Team and hopefully we will play at the World Cup next February.

Leo: Wait a minute. You're not from Canada.

Serenity: I'm Canadian. I'm Canadian and American.

Leo: Are you?

Serenity: Yea. I'm a dual citizen.

Leo: I didn't know that.

Serenity: Yea.

Leo: So, you could play for the—

Serenity: Couldn't you tell by the way I say sorry?

Leo: Sorry. Sorry. Eh.

Owen: Couldn't you tell by how nice she was that she was part Canadian? You can tell. How do you not know that, Leo?

Leo: It explains a lot, I've got to admit it. It explains a lot. Yea. Thank you, Serenity. Thank you so much for being here. You're just the greatest.

Serenity: Yea, thanks for having me.

Leo: Yea. And thanks, Jason Hiner for beating me at Scrabble.

Jason: Yes, sir.

Leo: But—

Jason: Sorry about that.

Leo: It's ok. I'll get you next time. Can we make it 3 out of 5 (laughing)?

Jason: Absolutely.

Leo: Jasonhiner.com, he's at Tech Republic. Don't forget Follow the Geeks.

Jason: Yea, Tech Republic and ZDNet.

Leo: ZDNet.

Jason: Yea, Tech Republic and ZDNet, that's—you know, we do stuff for people who do tech for a living, developers, IT Managers, CIOs. Yea. And lots of long form on Tech Republic. Lots of how-to and tips and ZDNet of course is the best place for business tech news.

Leo: Global Long Form Editor. I did not know that was your title. I like it.

Jason: Of ZDNet, yea. I'm the Global Long Form Editor of ZDNet and then the Global Editor in Chief of Tech Republic, so. Keeps me busy.

Leo: Wow, that's nice. And you've got a great family too. I know. I see the pictures. Jason, thank you so much for being here. Thank you to all of you for joining us.

Owen: Uncle Leo, before you close out, can I say something else?

Leo: OhDoctah.

Owen: So, bonus time. Three weeks ago, one of my best friends, a guy who I started doing these shows and internet with 8 years ago, passed away in his sleep. He was 41-years-old. Apparently, he had a heart condition he didn't know about. He never got checked out. Rode a bike 20 miles a day. Ran track with his daughter. He left behind a 14-year-old and a 7-year-old and as I'm putting together his stuff for his memorial, a lot of the content he has video wise is us being together. So, I'd like to remind every and anybody that has a cell phone, go talk to your parents, go talk to your grandparents. Ask them where they grew up, where they live, what they're doing. For all the other stupid cat videos that we're posting and looking at, there's so many people around you in your world that you care about. Take time and interview them and take notes or make videos with your kids because Lord knows how important that stuff is when you're gone. Whether you live to be 1,000 or you pass out tomorrow, you know, take the time to document that stuff and get it down. Because we have the technology and the power to do it. And I know AR's coming. I know VR is coming. But for right now, we've got the real world. And give somebody a hug and tell them you love them. And then record a conversation and tell a joke and/or story. I just want you to go do that.

Leo: I couldn't agree with you more and I have video of you doing it right here.

Owen: Yes.

Leo: (Laughing)

Owen: Embarrassing my child like a grown man should. That's how I do it.

Leo: That's how he rolls, ladies and gentlemen.

Serenity: Oh, that's perfect.

Leo: Owen JJ, thank you as always for ending the note in a deep and meaningful way, ending this show in a deep and meaningful way. I appreciate it.

Owen: Go and eat something.

Leo: Yep, yep. All of this stuff doesn't mean anything if you don't have the people in your life that you love.

Jason: The Story Corp app is good thing to do that with, too. Story Corp app, if you do it on their app, it gets archived in the national archives of the United States. So, you can record it on that app and submit it right there if you want to. If not, you can also—you don't have to submit it.

Leo: I've got to do this. It's Story Corps, C-O-R-P-S, Storycorps.org. Wow. So, you can record it, put it up here and become part of the archives.

Jason: Yes. It becomes part of the human record, right?

Leo: Yea, this is great.

Owen: My dad, I had planned on interviewing him once a year around his birthday, and the one time I did it, he passed away the next year. So, we got to ask him who was his first prom date, what was his first job, when did he go to the military. You know, I actually was in the process of doing it and then the next year he was gone. So, at least I have that. So, yes.

Leo: You know, I just did that with my mom. We were out in Rhode Island about 3 months ago and I sat her down and I said, "Tell me who this person is, this person? Tell me this story." And I finally got a lot of her stories that I've heard all my life on tape. Tape? On hard drive.

Jason: I did this with my 90-year-old grandmother too just this year. And I've heard some incredible stories that like blew my mind. Had no idea. And it's just amazing.

Leo: So, can they be audio on this site? Does it matter?

Jason: Story Corps? I just use the app. But yea, it's just an audio—it has an audio on it.

Leo: So, I could upload audio to it, or oh, just do this with the Story Corps app. Nice.

Jason: Yea, the Story Corps app is—I've never actually seen the site honestly. I just use the Story Corp app which is, again, it's connected to this project. I think it's a partnership with NPR and you can upload it to the National Archives. They're trying to keep as many as they can. You also hear these on NPR. NPR does snippets of them once in a while.

Leo: Oh, neat. Oh, neat.

Jason: They take snippets and play them on there.

Leo: The Corporation for Broadcasting and NPR, Ford Foundation, KNight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts and others. That's nice.

Owen: Awesome. I love that and we need to all do that. And thanks, chatroom. I love you guys. Thanks for the condolences. Jay Glock was just a great guy, a good guy.

Leo: I'm so sorry. How's his family doing? Is there a—

Owen: It's one of those things where it's rough because he was 41-years-old. And that's the other thing too.

Leo: Yea, totally unexpected.

Owen: I'm calling everybody and saying, "Hell, get the full check-up." Because this guy was in shape and healthy! But he had a condition and just didn't know about it, so. And me, I'm over here checking out the doctor all the time. I'll tell you later on. I was in the hospital two weeks ago because I was just--

Leo: I saw that picture. Are you ok? I was worried about you. What happened?

Owen: I had—like I said, I had that going on. Then I had another stressful situation going on. And I just ended up in the hospital for 12 hours to calm down. So, like I said, take time to tell people you love them because you never know how things turn out. But I just had a round week and it just got to me. But I'm good now. I'm straight.

Leo: We're glad you're ok. And as Jason Hiner's tweet says on his feed, "Tomorrow's not promised. But make plans anyway (laughing)."

Owen: There you go.

Leo: Make plans to be here next week. 3:00 PM every Sunday, that's Pacific. 6:00 PM Eastern, 2200 UTC. We love having you here. We're glad you can be part of the TWiT family. If you can make it live and join us in the chatroom at irc.twit.tv that's great. If you want to be in the studio, we love having a studio audience. Email tickets@twit.tv but of course we always make on demand audio and video of everything we do available at our website at twit.tv or YouTube or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. In fact, please do me a favor. We're pushing everybody to subscribe because we want to make sure you don't miss an episode. It's always nice. You know, you've got a commute, you've got a plane ride you've got some time to kill, to know you've got something great to listen to on your phone. So, if you subscribe, you'd do me a great honor. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another TWiT is in the can. Bye-bye. That was cool!