This Week in Tech 965 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for twit. This week in tech. This show has an unusual ending. You're gonna see it in just a bit, but in a moment we'll go to the studio where Wesley Faulkner will join us. Georgia Dow, lisa Schmeiser Lots to talk about their thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro Headset coming up. We'll also talk about AI in the workplace, why so many people are getting laid off and where all those tech workers are going, and why next time you get invited to a zoom call With the CFO and all your financial friends from your office, you might want to think twice about sending them 25 million dollars. Didn't look out so well. Twit is next.

00:42 - WOT promo (Announcement)
Podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit.

00:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is twit this week in tech, episode 965, recorded Sunday, february 4th, 2024. Babies first layoff this week at tech is brought to you by rocket money. If I asked you how many Subscriptions you have, would you be able to list them all and how much you're paying? I couldn't. But let me tell you something. As soon as I started using rocket money, I found them and I have saved so much money since.

01:22
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02:01
Dot com slash twit. That's rocket money. Dot com slash twit. Rocket money, dot com slash twit. It's time for twit this week in tech show where we talk about the week stick news. I am so happy to welcome our panel here today. Some of my favorite people. Lisa Schmeiser was gonna come down, I guess over, but the rivers are a little high right now. She decided to stay home. No, jitter comm is the website. She's editor in chief there. Hi, lisa, good to see you.

02:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's so good to see you. I'm sorry I can't see you in person. I was really looking forward to it.

02:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You. You know weather's bad everywhere. This is not a good time and we are in the middle of I have learned a mid-latitude cyclone, so that doesn't sound like something you'd want to want to drive to or through. Anyway, great to have you. That's why zoom is so cool. Also here from Montreal, where I bet it's a little chilly right now Georgia Dao, hello Georgia.

03:03 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Hey, how are you doing?

03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am well. Oh, we're in your art room now. This is good. This is good. Do you do your art here?

03:12 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I do. I do like a whole bunch of stuff in this room. It's like my, my little room. I like everything there, but I do a lot of art here.

03:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so nice to see you. Georgia is a psychotherapist so we like to check in with her from time to time. She is at Westmount therapy. In fact, her emails Georgia at Westmount therapy and you can also follow her. She does so many great YouTube videos. A Therapist reacts videos to all sorts of things at youtubecom. Slash Georgia Dao. Do you know W? Let's see what's the latest one. Stop being afraid latest.

03:45 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
The latest ones are on. The hair is the, the Green Eyed samurai, which was pretty awesome, yeah, and now I'm doing has been hotel has been hotel.

03:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is? I don't even know what that is.

03:58 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
So so that's kind of like a cult phenomenon, like they. It's like pretty much pushed by people, and it's just a really cute story. It has a lot of psychological kind of aspects to it, which makes it really nice, because they're in hell and trying to rehabilitate hell oh, so they can get to heaven. There's like a lot of psychology into it and there's a lot of songs that are exceptionally catchy. So it looks kind of cutesy, but it has a lot of really deep, meaningful themes. So we kind of go into it, though the next one will be on like sexual abuse. It's gonna be like this really cute, little, cutesy looking videos, but the topics gonna be Really very deep and heavy but that's what's cool about your idea, because you can talk about real things.

04:39
But when you use pop culture as the backdrop, it makes it okay, right, makes it accessible and it makes it more fun and I think that when it's something that you enjoy, you're gonna pay more attention to it so.

04:51
I think that it's a nice way to learn, like we should be learning all these things in school Right, like this should be part of our learning is about ourselves and why do we do things and how to set boundaries, and negative self-talk. So we do it through a medium that people already enjoy, and so I think that it catches more people that way than just basic psychology, which can seem dry and preachy nice.

05:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you still have those glasses that you wore in the who betrayed me zoo episode? Because I think you really do?

05:17 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
They're actually just sitting next to me, I know quite cute in those. Yeah, it was that. Yeah, it's a lot I and I just like to dress up. I'll be honest, I'm just like it's just any reason to dress up. For me it's like yes.

05:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also here. I haven't seen him in a while. He's now in Roanoke and I like that, and so does Lisa Schmeiser will explain that in a bit. Wesley Fockner is back in the studio. Hi, wesley.

05:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's so glad. I'm so, it's so good and I'm so glad to be back. It's it's been the thing that I felt like it's been missing in my life, so I'm really happy.

05:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were the thing that was missing in my life, so it's perfect, it's great to have you back. We really did miss you, and you've settled in Roanoke. You said Before the show that you you said your wife and you realized suddenly, oh, we could live anywhere. And so you chose. This wasn't a job, chose it for you, you chose it.

06:13 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, we were like we move around too much. Where's the place that we're gonna like settle? And we've thought of a lot of things and we actually tried to use chat GBT. It did not work, oh really.

06:26 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Find out where you're gonna live.

06:28 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, Statistics and stuff like that, but no, it didn't work so. But my wife is a researcher so it was able to To take on that duty nice.

06:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wonderful. And you brought the kids you didn't leave. You didn't leave them in the Midwest. So that's good, that's yes, and it turns out Schmeiser went to Virginia Tech just down the road.

06:51 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yes, yes, yes. The minute Wesley said Roanoke, I said Please tell me you're going.

07:01
You said Roanoke's the big city it was the big city when I was there. I'm not gonna mention when I went to Virginia Tech, but back back when I went, roanoke was the big city in. Blacksburg was Just up 81, 81 away. It's Southwestern Virginia is so beautiful and it's got so much to offer in so many ways. Mountains are amazing and the rivers are phenomenal. The New River is one of the oldest rivers in the world. You're right near the New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia.

07:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kind of a misnomer then and the the climate right too right.

07:34 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, it's called Goldilocks climate. Yeah, yeah, it's a root. It's not too hot, not too cold, it's great.

07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why I like that, elaine. I have a talk at.

07:41 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Virginia Tech next month, and so oh.

07:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are you gonna talk about?

07:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I have to look it up. I was just asked. Just like guiding people who are like graduating from university into tech as a career, with things to look out for oh, that's perfect. Waste of navigating.

08:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wesley hosts a podcast called radical respect with Kim Scott. It's about her, her book, which is coming out in May, about respect at work. Which boy that would be nice. Yes.

08:22 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There has to be a book about it.

08:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a good idea. It's like a given, seems like a good idea. I don't know, I'm just call me crazy. So I know none of you and, by the way, this will probably be the last show on the twin network where this is true Are wearing a vision pro headset. Now I'm surprised, georgia, because I know you're a big VR fanatic are you gonna buy a?

08:42 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
VP oh, um, maybe, like me, like it's, like, it's in the like it would be one that the one that I was missing, right? So, like, do I just get it to get all the set? It doesn't hot, it doesn't pull me the same way that the sets of VR do, just because there's not really much gaming in it. Right, so do I really want a are? Right, like, how does this enhance my life?

09:11 - WOT promo (Announcement)
Yeah it's not.

09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me say something right up front, and I've only had about a few minutes with it because we Mike, a sergeant ball one and I played with a little bit on Friday when he got it.

09:21 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Where is it?

09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It isn't it isn't a are. Yes, there's a knob you can see pass through, but it's no more a are than the, than the meta quest 3 or the meta quest pro. You're really in a VR experience. They call it spatial computing, but it's really a VR headset. Most of the stuff that you're doing Is VR with a background. Yeah, now here's somebody here's somebody doing something for you, leo, okay since you had some experience with this.

09:54 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
One of the reasons, like Apple products tend to go because they managed to define a problem people didn't realize they had but pervasively had, and they managed to solve that problem, like the iPhone solved the problem of I want to communicate with people, but I also want my digital world at my fingertips. It really did that like this the camera plus the phone, it. It identified the need to be social and the need to also take your, your information sphere with you, and the Apple watch effectively solved the problem. I don't want to have to look at my phone all the time, but I do need something that will help me sift and alert me to information, whether it's maps or communication or time or whether what have you. And the question they have for you is what problem do you think Apple has identified or is or is trying to frame and solve with that, with the headset, like anybody? What will people get out of this?

10:56 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Are you calling a friend on this one?

10:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean my answer is gonna be somewhat facetious, although Genuine, which is it solves the problem of other people, because it is. I mean, already we got a problem with people in their smartphones spending more time looking at this screen than at the world around them. Vision Pro just amplifies, amps that up. When you're wearing that, you are in your own little world. I think Apple knew this was a problem. That's why they put the it turns out didn't work very well eyes in the front, so you can supposedly see the person's eyes. That does not work. I should say it's a very it's a poor experience. I think that was them saying yeah, this is you know. The problem with this is you're kind of in your own little world here. I think it may well be a hundred years from now.

11:42
People look back at Apple and don't remember all the Great things they did, but remember the fact that they ruined the site, the lives of a entire generation, by making them completely isolated from their fellow man. I look at the. Here's a video of Casey Neistat who who says it's saying it's it's the best Technology he's ever used. He's skateboarding down the streets of New York Wearing a vision pro. That is moronic. I mean he's obviously doing it for YouTube hits. There's his avatar. All of these look awful. Uncanny Valley creepy.

12:21 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Are you about to take the polar express to your meeting?

12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, it's very polar express. Actually, it's not even as good as a polar express. He even rode the subway in this thing, it seems to me. Look, I'm not gonna knock the technology. I think Apple did as good as a good a VR headset as you could possibly do, but it doesn't answer the question that you just asked, which is why would somebody want to strap a computer on their head? What in your life does it change? Now Let me ask Georgia, because you're a psychologist and you're a VR fanatic. Hey, answer. Answer Lisa's question what? What does this give people that they don't already have? What is this? What problem does it solve?

13:02 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
well. I think that that's that's actually the problem that I think that they're gonna have with selling it is that it doesn't do any. The thing that I like about VR Is that I can live an experience that I cannot live in real life. I can be a fighter, I can visit, move, I can go inside of the pyramids and it's realistic of what they look like. So I can. I could do brain surgery. They can take a look at how to put pieces together and actually do it, and they that VR does that better than anything that can do it besides real life, and so I could do an exposure for like spider fear and it's exceptionally affected if you've ever done like the plank experience.

13:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I terrifying. The plank is amazing. I did that in the meta quest, actually in the quest pro yeah you, yeah you're. You take an elevator up to the 30th floor it's all VR, imaginary and the elevator doors opens up and there's oh my god, there's a street 30 floors down and there's a plank that goes out and they say go ahead and walk out. And it's really hard to trick your body even though you know perfectly well you're not gonna fall. You're on the floor in your house.

14:06 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
It's terrifying and the wonderful, cool part about that is that when I'm doing exposure therapy like I can't simulate I can go to bridge, where we usually drive to a heavy bridge and we lean over. We Fly inside of a plane to deal with airplane phobia. That's exceptionally expensive, like you're paying for my time or paying for a plane. It's really difficult, but the R can do that, and it can do that better than anything else. And as the last part you don't start with that at the beginning, but as the last part of therapy that works really well. But Apple's pro. It does not really solve any problem that we already have and it doesn't do anything Better than what is already there. They don't have a real killer game that you're gonna be able to deal with. They don't really have an interface. That is you know, the minority report cool, where you can move everything around, and so, though you can do things in it, it's more of a hindrance than it is a benefit, and I'm not saying it's not even exceptionally light, which Another piece that bothers me about the headsets is that they are really heavy and eventually you get kind of tired of wearing them, but it also carries this barrier to being with other people, because the eyes don't really work, we're missing part of the face. It is really obvious that you're wearing it and what you're doing when you're in it, and so it also Creates this isolation from other people, and so it doesn't really enhance Communication or being able to connect with people while you're wearing this, and so the inside world I don't find is that great that you would want to be in it. It's not that cool or exhilarating or makes Things easier, and so I think that Lisa's question, I think it's like the perfect question because I don't actually think that it solves anything. There's no pull. And I love, I Love VR.

15:51
Like I am the person that is there for VR and I'm look at this and I go Meh. Like I have a computer screen, I like leaving it. I don't want to carry my computer screen with me everywhere. That is not a benefit, that's a hindrance. I like to disconnect it when I'm disconnected. I want to be disconnected and I don't have that terminator experience where everything is given labels and weight so that, like you know, whatever I I pour out a cup of like a Bit of flour and it already tells me the weight and grams of the flour.

16:20
So I know my ingredients. Like that would be cool for me if it was like this assistant that was like oh, you need more flour, that's not gonna work. Or go check the oven because you've put it on for too long, or you know your handwriting, you've you've misspelled this word while I was actually writing it. Like that would be like if I had a Virtual assistant that would like be there to be able to help me through life and I'd be like, hmm, this is interesting on the business sense of it. So what's interesting?

16:45 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
George, about what you said is your identifying computing in a way where it would be both ambient and contextual, where you wouldn't be in virtual reality. You'd basically be kind of averting the experience so that your Assistant pops on in a contextually appropriate way. I Think about this with my Apple Watch. Is one of my favorite functions, for it is when I'm in a new city and I tap out direction somewhere. I Don't look like an obvious tourist because I can just check my watch discreetly and go. You're not there and it's. It's.

17:16
It's ambient, augmented computing, and that to me seems to be where the most effective, effective use cases are. It was the same way with the phone. You can argue it's the same way with the iPad, because the iPad is a productivity tool, but it's when you can pick up and take to different contexts with you. Like I see it at the farmers market when people are Ringing things up. I see people doing homework on it. I see people playing games it's a multimedia device, things like that. Leo's already alluded to the social isolation you're imposing on yourself when you stick this thing on your face and you've talked about that too and I just keep asking what problem? What did they identify? Where they're like yes, this is where the future of computing is, because it seems almost like a palm pilot, where it's halfway to where you want to be, but it's missing some element.

18:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The biggest problem is that they are selling this for everyone. They are saying this is for sale and anyone can buy it. If they had restricted it, saying hey, if you're locked in a place like solitary confinement or this is a way to get some therapeutic escape it reminds me of the time or the vision of like EPCOT, where you'd go there and you'd see the future and they would say all of these scenarios are ways that the world will be, technology will help the world and this is the way that everyone will live. They haven't done that with the Vision Pro. They haven't said this is our part of the pun vision for how it should be used. I understand it's. To me it's a chicken and egg problem where they have to have the hardware, so the software that can be developed to take advantage of these. But the marketing is most of the problem. They haven't marketed to the right people because they haven't said who the right people are.

19:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They may not know. Aren't they trying to find out?

19:16 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's the problem. If they don't know now of who is there, I can understand that. They can say we meant this for this demographic, but these other demographics are finding some use for it as well. But they didn't do that. They didn't even say who this is for and then allow people to buy it, just in general, because I can say like I'm the smartest black person on this podcast and that's a fact, and they could do the same thing. We're saying this is the best thing for and make a very narrow scope and still be true and be right, and so that is part of the marketing that they just said everyone should buy it and everyone should not buy it because they haven't set the appropriate expectations.

19:57 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
And they've put a lot of their time and efforts into building, making a whole bunch of little things that are good, but nothing that's great, nothing that's life changing, nothing that's life enhancing. Like if it had its translator in, and so when I went to a grocery store that had everything in a different language, it was all for me translated so I could read everything as I went and it was like this is going to change the way that you you're going to hear every word that someone speaks in a different language in your language. Like that would be something where I'm like oh, this reaches out and it enhances my life, though I would probably be just asking for it to get stolen if I'm walking around in a strange place where I don't know where I'm going. But they haven't really figured out any problem that I think that will make people want this. And the way that VR is already used it doesn't do, and it doesn't do it at all Like not that Apple has ever been a pioneer of gaming besides, like pocket gaming, which I'm totally fine too Like if you could find a really cool way to be able to deal with that, or mobility issues, or, but I don't know, I don't know why I would want this.

21:04
I want it just because I'm like I'd like to try it out, because it's new. But do I actually want it? Because I think this is something that I will use and it will make my life better in any way, shape or form. I don't.

21:15 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I have the same feeling about the humane pin. They did not dial in the right person. I mean the right person that they think will say thank God they made this, because this will save me a lot of hassle. What about?

21:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the R1?. Did you look at the little $200 R1?

21:31 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It's nice. I mean it's cheaper. It's the same thing. What does this allowing me to do that I haven't been able to do?

21:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's a really interesting question, Lisa.

21:39 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And for whom? Right? Not everyone should buy this, and they should just say who it's for.

21:43 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
No, I don't know if anyone can buy this.

21:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What if somebody people have told?

21:48 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
me. The battery power is two hours. What is up with?

21:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that. Well, you could plug it in while you're using it, if you don't mind being tethered.

21:53 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah but then what's the if you're tethered in? What's the use in having a system that is like standalone on its head if you have to be hooked up to a wire in the first place?

22:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's the world's most ridiculous conference call.

22:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People pointed out that the Apple watch didn't really have a necessarily have an audience at first, like Apple put it out, and then over time it evolved into something that had an audience.

22:17 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
But it still did, being able to answer your calls and get your messages in a way that was was like quiet and you wouldn't know and other people wouldn't know. Which I think Lisa mentioned, it's that you could end up doing that if I was in a meeting and I ended up getting a message of someone's going to be late or there's an emergency, I knew that without having to disrupt anything, and so that allowed our communication with people to be less disruptive, and I think that that was a huge benefit. That the watch brought is that it was like your mini phone to be able to keep you hooked up, and it was not this huge honking phone that everyone knows that you're taking a look at and being rude and be in contextual computing.

22:53 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The other thing that I thought was really interesting about the watch is it had multiple different constituencies, because I knew a lot of people who are metrics driven with fitness and the watch was. The watch is great for that. We all have read or heard stories of people who were alerted to health issues because their heart rate spikes suddenly or the watch beeped an indicator. So you've got a health conscious audience.

23:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're never going to see an ad for vision pro that said I was dying, but the vision pro saved my life.

23:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's not going to.

23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, here's a picture of somebody who, probably the vision pro, risked their life. She's driving a cyber truck in autonomous mode while using the vision pro. Thanks, I hate it. This is, by the way, you know who the vision pros. Good for YouTubers, marquez.

23:42
Brown less than a day had 4.2 million views on his review. People on YouTube are getting a lot of Casey Neistat same thing are getting a lot of mileage out of it. Well, let me ask, though, real quickly, georgia, as a therapist, you know we talk a lot about a mental health crisis, especially for teenage girls, for young people. You know the Senate this week tried to blame Facebook and Snapchat and tick tock for that. I, you know. The one thing I think they're not far off, though, is I don't blame those platforms, but the fact that I see a lot of people not just young women, but everybody staring at their phone all the time seems really problematic for me in the long term, for psychology, and I think this is even worse. Is that this? Am I off base here? Is that our? Is that cause for concern?

24:33 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I think that it is cause for concern. I think that our ability our ability to read other people and engage with other people is by practicing right being able to read micro expressions. The amount of how good we are at interpreting other people's behavior and how they feel is going down because we're not practicing the same amount of time, cause if you're staring at an interface, you're not getting that amount of micro expressions and, interestingly enough, if you're looking at someone else's avatar, you're not getting them at all Right. It's missing out on all those micro expressions that are feeding us information that is not given usually, and so we're actually getting much worse at being able to read people's interaction, and anxiety levels and depression goes up the longer that we spend on social media, not because we're looking at a phone and not looking at people, but one.

25:18
Interactions that are positive with people causes us a lot of dopamine, which makes us feel safe and good. They're positive interactions, of course, and good people, but we're missing that because most of what's on social media is fake and airbrushed and we only share the amazing things about it. So the good part is that I don't think that the vision pro is going to be that popular, so I don't see teenage girls going around, running around wearing it. Why? Because they care about and this is wrong, but they care about how they look and it looks, you know, like I don't look the coolest when I'm wearing any of my headsets. I have to be honest about that. Like I'm not, like you know, like in my audience.

25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why you do it alone in your home Right right when no one's in the show when no one's in the show.

26:01 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
When no one's in the show when no one's in the show.

26:02 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, when no one would know. Because if I was mowing my lawn which not saying that I do, but if I was mowing my lawn and wearing it like everyone would be like this is ridiculous.

26:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Joanna Stern, listening to your interests actually wore it to cook, and again Apple tells you not to do this. But there is a recipe program and she was able to, for instance, chop onions without crying. There's one used right there, lisa, that's fine.

26:29 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
But I can do that for $10. I use the nice day to gobbles Skick. Goggles would do it yeah.

26:35 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
All you have to do is cut the onions in half, place them cut side down on the measuring on your cutting board for a minute. Here's another one I liked. Look, she's putting the timer.

26:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Watch this she's putting the timer over the thing that it's timing, so she knows what her timer is. But this seems like a lot of money to pay for that convenience and a lot of inconvenience on top, and boy, I sure wouldn't want to be doing this.

26:57 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I just like the was it perfect no.

26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

27:01 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Well, why would I pay $3,500?

27:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
for it yeah.

27:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Part of my issue with a lot of this is this is, by the way, for credit, joanna Stern in the Wall Street Journal doing her review of Vision Pro, which I'm sure also got millions and millions of views in the first 24 hours, and there's a lot of interest in this Commerce is a personal stuff, just ask things, yeah Less than that $500 an hour.

27:21
There you go, so you get a couple of meals anyway, yeah, I, it's a. You know it's a really interesting question. I mean, there is a legitimate question to be asked, and you, I think you make a good point, wesley. Maybe they should have just offered this, even just for developers. Instead, it's like Google did with Google Glass. This is a developer edition. They have sold 200,000 on their way to.

27:45
It's believed they can make 800,000 a year. That's Sony's limitation. They make the screens, so they're going to. They're going to lose money on it, I'm sure, but they're going to make billions of dollars in revenue anyway. I'm one of my guesses. I've heard a number of theories. Jason Snell of sixcolorscom and MacBrick Weekly says that Apple's got to have a successor to the iPhone. You know that's why they work on the Apple car, that's why they're working on this, and you don't know where this is going to go until you release it to the public at great expense and put it out there and let the public and developers play with it, and that may be a 10 year process on the way to something you want, lisa, which is spectacles that are just normal glasses but that would give you that information that you were asking for at a convenient time, without isolating you from the world, unless you wanted to be, et cetera.

28:39 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But that technology doesn't exist and you can't actually compute it.

28:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

28:42 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But that doesn't exist yet.

28:44
So one of the things I think Microsoft did right was, with the HoloLens, they reached out and partnered with partnered with companies and organizations to build use cases that were really highly specific but had demonstrable value.

28:58
For example, they teamed up with Lowe's to put together virtual showrooms and walk you through the experience of remodeling and selecting different finishes for your kitchen and playing with different layouts and things like that.

29:12
And this is the case study I love to share with people is they teamed up with NASA and ran through space station repair drills to demonstrate the value of augmented reality and instructional content when you're restrained by geographical limitations or expertise limitations, because, as we all know, with spaceflight and space missions, typically you have to have a lot of people who know a lot about a whole lot of things, because it's not like you can just have somebody take an Uber and zip up to fix the plumbing on the space station, but with something like augmented reality, you could feasibly have somebody who is a mission specialist in one area but still able to pinch hit with somebody talking them through a repair on the other end.

30:00
It was smart because when they did that with the HoloLens, they were demonstrating really specific use cases, where this is where you want augmented reality, where you can play with your environment, or this is where you want real-time, assistive augmented information while you're working on something, so somebody can see what you're looking at and they can walk you through the repair. Apple's rollout kind of mystifies me, because it's basically we gave this headset to lots of people who will write a lot of words about it and we have a lot of YouTube clips, but by the way.

30:33
How did that work out for Microsoft?

30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How is?

30:35 - WOT promo (Announcement)
that HoloLens been working out. I mean, they're trying to go for volume, yeah, yeah they were looking for volume.

30:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That was. One of their issues is that they're trying to find big pockets to put in. They're trying to take chunks of them all at once.

30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the other theory that I think is a reasonable theory, which is that Tim Cook had spent so much money on this, and remember that to do this, you have to start about eight years ago. Eight years ago, it was reasonable to look at Metta and say, oh, look, what they're doing with the Oculus Rift, which they had purchased. Look at Microsoft oh, look, what they're doing with the HoloLens and say you know, this is the next frontier in computing, or at least as a good chance of being it, we should start spending money on this, which they did Apple. We don't know how much, but I'm going to guess there are many tens of billions of dollars in on this.

31:23
Tim Cook, who has not had a product under his own name? This would be the first, I think. Is it ego, or is it just he felt like we put a lot of money into this and we won't know if it's an Xbox thing until we release it? I'm going to say, though, that there's going to be a clock ticking, because the board of directors and the stakeholders the shareholders at some point going to say well, how much more money can we lose on this thing?

31:51 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I mean, isn't it? I think it's obvious that their secrecy has caused their issue, because they couldn't dog food this internally.

32:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're dog floating it now. And we're the dogs, we're the dogs.

32:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
But during the development process, if they had released it to different areas of their own company to help figure out what use cases makes sense, they would have a big, big, big, bigger sample size to say you know, we design processors. It'd be great if we could explode the processors. If we get one back from the fab and there was a problem, we can have a visualization, turn it around and do some collaboration about it and then, once you start doing that, then you're able to say, okay, we're really missing this feature of a laser pointer so that everyone could see how we're all talking about the same thing, even though we can all see it. Those are things that, as you dog food it, you got to figure out who has 35 K to spin on something like this and then what kind of problems do they need to solve? And doing this internally? I mean, come on, they get paid. People who work at Apple get paid fairly well, so this would have been a really good dog food program.

33:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If they were able to do it, apple will sell everyone they can make. How many will they will get returned? Oh, that's an interesting question you do have and then there is a two week.

33:09 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
How are they collecting feedback?

33:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's an interesting question. We will never know. Are they going to buy upgrades?

33:15 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, Are they? Because I also keep thinking of the Palm Pilot, which was a very it was, but is anyone buying Palm Pine Blitz now? It got superseded by tech that said, hey, not only do you have a handheld device that you can play games on and take notes on and have little reminders and a calendar, it also takes photos and it also calls people, and it's a joy to use. So what I'm wondering with VR in general is if this is going to be another one of those technological dead ends where they've identified some of the benefits and use cases and real talk. Over the course of this conversation, Georgia Dow has done more to persuade me of the value of VR than anything else I've ever heard. This might be one of those technological dead ends where it's about 75% of the way there and then somebody somewhere is going to come along and it will be the ubiquitous contextual augmented experience where it was like oh, this is why it works. Oh, I don't look like a complete dork when I put this on.

34:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Metas.

34:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh, it's yeah.

34:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you used Metas Ray Bands? Because that's kind of what Metas Ray Bands are doing.

34:24 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I have not had the pleasure yet, but as a longtime Ray Bands wearer, I I I like that part, mike Elkin was a big almost.

34:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He got me hovering my finger over the buy button. So they have very good speakers in the temples. They have decent battery life. They're standalone. They're not connected to a battery on your hip. They have a camera. They've added the. They have AI built into it so you can query it, just as you explained. They also have a camera that can take a picture of something, and this they recently added you can. The AI will then tell you, Google lens style, what it is. I think that they're actually closer to what you're talking about than Apple.

34:59 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I love that when you're hiking, because you can be like what is that plant?

35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I got that with my phone actually.

35:05
Yeah, no, I love that, georgia. If there were a great game, so we're going to have. In our review of this, microsargeant is reviewing it. He's going to show you this, but he was telling me about this. I haven't seen it yet, but angry birds on this is, I'm sorry, fruit Ninja on this is pretty amazing, so it is immersive.

35:22
It's VR. You're doing hand slashes, so you're you're not using the kind of tiny gestures that the rest of the vision pro requires, that you're doing hand slashes. You can also put your palm out and do Ninja stars like this. He described the fact that there's a pig that you can feed and play with, and the pig will jump up on surfaces in your house because it's got very good surface recognition. So the pig will jump up on your table. You can feed it, you can play fetch with it, you could throw a stick and it'll go and get it, and so it's and that's, by the way, a VR game. There's. There's, that is an immersive game. But is what if it were something like that, a game that you really wanted to play with, that convinced you, george?

36:05 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I think that that would be a benefit, but probably it's not going to be better than the systems that are already there, and so I think that's cute.

36:13
If you already have it, you're like okay, I'll play this cute little, you know pocket game where I'm getting at least a little bit of exercise, but it's not really pushed as to being exercise, and so when I usually play pocket games I just want to decompress, Like I want to calm down and relax. I don't want to be sitting up and doing stuff. When I play VR it's kind of exhausting, and so I'm like you have to be kind of up for it to be able to, like, fight out a zombie for it. You're exhausted by the end of it.

36:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's an important point you're making. This is not something this is exhausting. This is something that's draining on your mental and visual resources and emotions. And so it's not something you want to wear all day, every day.

36:56 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
No, and it's not just that it's heavy and so it's not great for your neck because they are quite heavy and this one's made of metal and glass, so it's quite heavy, but also, like that, emotional. You're having to process all of this right and so you're doing a lot of processing power, so it's emotionally also relatively draining to be able to be in VR, even when it's a really wonderful, pleasant experience. And so because of that, like my worry is every time that someone puts out a failed VR project, like my fears always like they're going to kill off VR, like people are going to be like this doesn't work, I don't get it, there's no real use case for it. And so, like I blame a certain amount Meta I'm sorry, I just am, I'm going to have to call it as I am I blame them for, like throwing out the system that was looked so horrible. It's just this sort of professional setting you and your little tiny app you didn't look cool, doesn't look good, and it's not professional.

37:49
And this one, it's so real but not real enough that it's actually creepy. You get that creepy effect when the avatar like they look pretty good, it looks like you, ish, but like your creepy doppelganger that's going to kill you in the middle of the night. Like it's not that good and so because of that it bothers me. Like if they had a great game, though that was an actual game, not really just a pocket game, because pocket games I played were chill, not to get exercise, but then but I still 300. Like it has to be a really killer game. For $3,500, like no one's going to be buying it for Fruit Ninja.

38:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And let's, I think, point out that it might not be able to play those triple A titles because I don't know if it has enough horsepower to do that, but I think that every life is going to be a concern, so I think more and more this looks like Wesley. You're right. This was a product that Apple probably could have released as a developer product or as a specialty product and let it grow organically. At what point does this become something you want?

38:53 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was able to bring in, like that little pig that you mentioned that could jump on tables If it was a virtual assistant and knew what I was looking at. Summarize the spreadsheet. Read this email for the flight of this AI. It's an AI tool yes, exactly Just a real personal assistant that not only is able to give me advice, but also knows the context and where I can give direction and then get a response that's in context as well. So that I would pay $3,500 for that.

39:21 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
That B-Series is what you're saying, because she does not do any of those things.

39:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the rumors are that Apple at WWDC in June will announce iOS 18 and a bunch of AI initiatives. Apple and Tim Cook and the quarterly results call this week said I can't talk about it, but later this year we're going to really announce, make some big AI announcements. I think it's very possible. Apple is internally doing something. That's power. It's not that hard, frankly, and the technologies are well known. It's not they're not secret to make a smart LLM that maybe could be Siri or something subsequent to Siri. I don't know. I mean, like somebody's saying in the discord and they're not wrong that this is a product he said Denmos says folks are so negative about this. If it's not right for you, no one's forcing your hand. Those with use cases will buy it as it is today, and that's. We're not saying that. I guess what we're trying to do is understand what's the point of it. Yeah, exactly.

40:21 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You might just try it and say, oh wow, it doesn't actually work. The issue is not that, but you don't say who it's for. That's what I was going back to. If you don't know it's for you, then you'll just buy it because it's advertised to the general audience Like it's going to be useful for everyone. That's who's buying it. That is the major problem.

40:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to be this Casey Neistat guy going into a store wearing it. He's playing in counter dinosaurs in a store. People are staring at him like he's a nitwit.

40:53 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's bad enough when people are doing TikTok, when people are filming their little TikToks, or doing their social media stuff.

41:01 - WOT promo (Announcement)
Influencers in the wild, oh my.

41:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
God, we are influencers to be even worse.

41:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right. Well, we have to talk about it because Apple's making a lot of noise about it and you're seeing a lot of attention paid to it, and I guess the thing to ask is is this a device that we're all going to want some day? Or, and what is it going to need to get there? And what is Apple thinking with this? And, honestly, I'm of the opinion that Apple's done an amazing piece of work. I mean, this is incredible, and I am very doubtful and skeptical about the idea of wearing a headworn computer at any time, unless it's a lot lighter and a lot less obtrusive, and I just don't see strapping a computer to your face as being something most people will ever want to do. I don't know what you could come up with. It would make people want to do this.

41:53
By the way, here's a join us turn posted. There's a real uncanny valley effect to the avatar that you create for use in FaceTime, and we'll see this on Tuesday, because half of our panel will be joining us wearing these weird avatar. She asked others to post theirs and they are uniformly kind of scary. That one's really scary, but that's just a like, rest in peace yeah.

42:20 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
And then from like the 1900s, when they also look, sad if you put them in black and white, that would be amazing. They all look so sad, like soap opera mode. Yeah, like he looked like he was about to go through the ring into the volcano Brodo.

42:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Brodo, one of the things that I think hurts it is the only part of your faces and focus is the front of it. The rest of it fades out completely, and I think that that does not. It's not flattering. Oh my gosh, that's not Rushmore.

43:00 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, well, this guy obviously is going for that.

43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, look at what he really looks like and you'll see the problem here. I don't know.

43:10 - WOT promo (Announcement)
I think it would be fine if it made me look like you know, prettier, oh God that would be fine If you're going to go for something.

43:15 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
No, it wasn't actually the picture.

43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ian Vieira is saying. This is on Twitter. Everybody's kind of looking like this, and that's, of course, the hand fixed painting in the church where the lady decided to fix it.

43:28 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They should have just made a deal with, like Animal Crossing and like pick the adorable animal avatar. That's the question.

43:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple has Memojis. I don't know why they didn't use Memojis. They have that. Yeah, these are not. These are not good, and I think this is part of the problem Apple's going to face is that it's going to be death by 1000 cuts. People are going to say, well, that is and that, and then, and then and then. And very few people are going to say, like Casey Neistat, this is the best thing I've ever used in my life, and I think Apple's going to have a problem justifying a continued work on this in the long run. And I think they should. I think Wesley you, you nailed it they should not have released this as a something for the general population. This should have been a developer.

44:12 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
They even said that this was the beta and like let's go through, see what you can do with it, See what you like.

44:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
People would have loved that because they would have loved to feel like they're part of shaping the product, and it would have also rewarded the Apple fandom People still have.

44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's kind of what's happening. I love branding, yeah, I mean, that's what's happening?

44:32 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Is it is it. Is it the Oscars or the Grammys? Grammys or the Marnys? I wonder if it's going to be in a swag bag somewhere and they're going to start.

44:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a pretty nice swag bag. But it's also yeah, that's a good point, wesley.

44:45 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So are they trying to? They could, they could have made this a status symbol. They did that with the watch. That way too, by the way.

44:52 - WOT promo (Announcement)
Remember they had $25,000 solid gold.

44:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Watch that everybody got in their goodie bag.

44:56 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Tie in with Apple TV plus and Apple music would be a big deal. Oh, that's it.

45:00 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Oh that's a smart one. Well, next Sunday at this time, we will be watching the Super Bowl.

45:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Super Bowl halftime show is brought to you by Apple, and I expect this is where we're going to see Apple's answer to your question, Wesley, and all of our questions. This is where Apple gets the biggest stage in the world to say this is what we think the Vision Pro is and what we think why we think you should buy it.

45:30 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Taylor Swift is where I want it all over. All they have to do is do a shot of Taylor Swift on or, if you could watch it on the Vision Pro and you could actually like play ball with your favorite teammates.

45:42 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Well, they're going to do that.

45:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The NBA has released an app that a number of people are really crazy about Brian Tong talked about it on his review of it where you can watch four games at once and see the stats and see Twitter and you know if you're really a red zone and just, oh my God, I would want to be able to throw a football with someone like I want more than what I do. You can do that with a meta quest. You could do that with the quest. This is what.

46:08 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
This is what Apple should do so that you can be with your favorite people, and they could be like giving you tips on, like how to have the perfect, so like one of the reasons Twitter is still holding on and still has an effective mind, sure is it's still a really great place to go to have a communal sports experience Like this is.

46:23 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I know people who are like I would set that app on fire and throw it to the sea if I could, but all of my friends who follow the same sports, I follow her on it. If you could use this headset to do what you just described, where you've got a Twitter stream going, you can chat with your friends while you're watching your four NFL games and maybe running your fantasy football league in real time, it solves that social impulse issue for the user and the dopamine hits and the entertainment and things like that. As opposed to I have a phone, I have a TV that's streaming something at the same time that, like you'll be condensing the multi screen experience back down to one. So maybe that's a use case where oh look, apple has given us a new, a new vector for bread and circuses.

47:06 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I don't know if this replace the surface tablets on the sideline, and the coaches had these on. They could do plays, they can see brilliant, they can do analysis, they can see the stats up there real time, because what if you had the 3D modeling where you'd have to really blank at the stadium with drone cameras so you could get it from every angle. They could they do that already? Right, Jesus Christ. The past hour in the connectivity Wow Cisco.

47:29 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I think somebody from Cisco listens to this and is on the phone right now screaming let's get the stadium contracts, let's do it Like it's amazing Everywhere. I think you nailed it.

47:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think there's five full time dedicated top level PR professionals hammering Taylor Swift's people. They've they're bombarding her with vision pros begging her to wear one on Sunday in the box.

47:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And that check has a blank space.

47:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, it has a blank.

47:59 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
And they'll write her name. She doesn't need the money, so it better.

48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but if somebody comes to you and says I will give you, the Taylor Swift song there too. If somebody says, I will give you half a billion, dollars to wear the vision pro in the box for two minutes. You're going to take that. I don't care how rich you are, right.

48:20 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Right, this is how you get to be the billionaire.

48:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sunday. Let's watch. We'll watch for it. I think it's an interesting prediction. She's going to have to have nerves of steel not to do that. She's going to have to be like really tough. That'll be interesting.

48:34 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
If they didn't think of it, they shouldn't.

48:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh God, I'm sure they have. In a way, taylor Swift is probably regretting this relationship with Travis Kelsey, the Casey superstar football player. It's a beautiful thing, in fact, when the chiefs won their championship game and she came out on the field and they kissed, it was beautiful, it was so sweet. But the attention and the energy being spent on this and on all I mean it must be very difficult. Maybe she's used to it, maybe Travis is used to it, I don't know. I feel bad for those.

49:08
You know Star Cross, young lovers, those sweethearts. That's when you want to wear the headset Right. All right, let's take a break. We're going to come back. We were done, we had to do it, we had to talk about it, and I think it's an interesting conversation. It's not often you get a company with this, worth nearly $3 trillion, launching a completely new product in a new category for them and attempting to advance a category that has been somewhat laggard and really put all their might behind it. We don't see that very often, so it's a very I mean from a business point of view at least, certainly from a technology point of view. It's a very interesting story and I want to know how it's going to end, I could tell you one thing I ain't going to end with me wearing one, that's for sure.

49:58 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
When she was worrying.

50:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, she think Christina is going to get it. No, she's not?

50:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, she's not, and that's what that's the point If you can't convince her to buy something she doesn't need.

50:09 - WOT promo (Announcement)
No, you're right.

50:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They used to say that about me. All right, I love this panel. Wesley Faulkner is great to have you back. We missed you. Dude, nice to have you. His new podcast, the radical respect podcast, at radicalrespectbookcom. It's also a book coming out in May. Also, lisa Schmeiser, good to have you. Editor in chief of no jitter. What's no jitter?

50:35 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's an old school telecom term. It refers to the goal that folks who used to, who basically wired America for telecom. They had the goal of making sure data got from point A to point B and you could hear a perfect signal and there was no jitter and no skips and no dropping. And we've kept it, as the scope of our site has since expanded to unified communications and collaboration and basically all of the technological tools that allow people to connect and exchange information.

51:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this is great. Look at this editor in chief. It's great to have you and my personal internet psychologist, georgia Dow. She's keeping an eye on me. Youtubecom slash Georgia Dow, I also had you on because you are the VR princess and I was very curious. I thought maybe you would have run out and bought one, but no, I guess not. You're right. If Christina Warren and Georgia Dow don't buy one, that's not good for Apple. We'll have more in just a bit. Thank you for being here. All three of you are.

51:39
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53:13
The Senate Judiciary Committee heard from Tick tock Facebook. In fact, mark Zuckerberg had this. Just a humiliating experience. Discord, linda Yacarino, ceo of X, all testified on Wednesday about COSA, the kids online safety bill, which is a reprehensible, horrible bill that's my personal opinion introduced to Congress in a completely cross across the aisle Richard Blumenthal, democratic Connecticut, and Marsha Blackburn, republican of Tennessee. Cosa requires digital platforms to take quote, reasonable measures that being a very nebulous term to prevent harms to children, specifically enumerating sexual exploitation, mental health, substance abuse and suicide as the harms. It would also require companies to enable their strongest privacy and safety settings for kids by default seems fair. Provide parents with greater control over their children's account settings. All of you are parents, as am I, so we can ask I'll ask you about that and force companies to regularly audit their products for potential risks. It has twice advanced at a committee, has broad support. In fact it's back now by nearly half the Senate.

54:38
The Senate hearing. At the hearing, among other things, josh Hawley made it's actually a horrible moment Mark Zuckerberg stand up, turn around and apologize to the parents of children who had been harmed. He said by Facebook. It was the worst kind of political stagecraft and it didn't solve anything. But what's wrong with COSA? Anybody want to say anything about that? I?

55:11 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
will say that the biggest.

55:14 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'll go second, okay.

55:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, the immediate, the most immediate and obvious problem with it is you're going to be cutting off kids from information that could make their lives better. If you're queer, for example, but you're living in a household where that's not something that your parents would have hoped for you or even think is a morally acceptable choice you would, then, if this bill passes, you wouldn't be able to connect with other queer teens online. You wouldn't be able to read anything that helps you realize that no, no, you're completely normal, this is fine. You'd be deprived of a sense of community. You'd be deprived information, and that goes for a lot of other types of content that's out there, because anytime you start restricting information this dramatically, people are going to use it to censor things, and the truth of the matter is you're never going to be able to censor the internet and you're never going to be able to censor people's access to it.

56:19
What you really have to do is bring the behaviors and the regulations in-house and deal with it on a hey, you're not quite hey, this is what happens when you're on social media. Or hey, when you see this, we need to talk about it. Or hey, so long as you are here, the presumption of privacy is really small. We're going to be negotiating this back and forth and when I ask to see your browser history, let's not make a thing of it. It's a bad bill precisely because it's trying to regulate morality and parenting and behavior, and those types of legislation never work out for the better. They're just in the parming people.

56:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wesley, tell me everything that's wrong with Cousins.

57:05 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, Well, part of it is a different philosophy about how to raise kids. I think that there is just a different perspective as a person who grew up with 90s movies and was exposed to so much inappropriate stuff growing up and look how you turned out. Yeah, I mean, come on, they had RoboCop on lunchboxes. You should be watching RoboCop, come on. Oh, you're right. You're right. There's a vision. At least it was saying is that the world is a huge place and if your job is trying to shut it out, that is an impossible task. But if you then turn your charge as a parent inward so that your kids are able to go into the world with the tools that they need to be able to understand what to do in certain situations or who to ask questions to, and to feel safe with bringing concerns or something is inappropriate, that they can talk to you, and that's kind of the world in which there's a different role of parents. If the parent says if someone says drag show, oh my gosh, how dare you say that to my kid Is that your reaction is more of like that's the censorship that is just trying to remove the exposure, but knowing that gay people may exist and people who dress and drag may exist and your kid will eventually possibly run into someone who may look differently than they've seen and being able to prepare for them. For that is, I think, where the disconnect happens.

58:43
I tried to do the ladder camp. So if my kid goes to play at their friend's house and then they see a gun, they know not to touch it and not to play with it because they understand dangers and things that they don't know about and how it could really be harmful, especially in that sort of danger. So they understand those practical dangers and what kind of repercussions could happen if they decided to do or play with those things. They understand body boundaries, they understand sticking up for themselves and being able to like, not do things just because it's cool or someone else says it's cool. And I'm not saying that COSA is overstepping, but I'm saying that if you rely too much on the first camp where you're just trying to censor the world, then it seems highly appropriate.

59:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're a good parent you know some of this, pat, by the way lets the state's attorney general, attorneys generals, decide what's good parenting and what's not. And especially, this is especially something that Texas and Florida's AGs are very fond of. Let me read to you Hold on a second.

59:56
I'm going to read to you something, and then and then, and then we can continue. Shoshana Weissman will be on the show in a couple of weeks. He's been on the show many times, works for the right. Leaning R street think tank, rstreetorg R street joined 90 human rights organizations, lbtq plus and free market groups in their opposition to COSA, for four reasons. Cosa would result in the collection of more sensitive danger data of children and oh, by the way, adults, because you have to prove whether you're an adult or a child, that you're of age, which means that that that information would be handed off to people like, well, to everybody you, you, you know YouTube, facebook and porn hub COSA. Secondly and this is kind of I think what you were alluding to, lisa COSA violates the first amendment rights of children and adults. Third, cosa's legal mandates are unenforceable, which is an interesting point of view. And fourth, cosa would limit the ability and this is really what you were saying of for children to access and benefit from the internet.

01:01:04
And this is. This is not some you know left wing organization. This is our street. Go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I just wanted to give you these points from this. Yeah.

01:01:17 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
The other thing I'd add is if, if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about the impact of social media on children in any way, shape or form, they would have started by setting up regulations to protect the privacy and well being of children, who are props in their in in their influencer parents videos. You've got tons of parenting, of parenting influencers on YouTube and Instagram and TikTok who are always putting their kids on camera. Who are we pranked our kids by taking their Halloween candy let's watch the reaction or they're sharing that. They're basically raising these kids on camera. They're monetizing parenthood. These kids have no protection when it comes to privacy. They're not getting paid for the work that they do for their family.

01:02:05
If you really wanted to address these kids and these kids are exposed to to adults, where, again, they have no control over this because they've been online since they were babies and before they can consent If you wanted to address children's well being, you could start there. I mean, we have the Jackie Coogan laws in place and we have lots of labor laws in place for child actors and child performers. I don't understand why we haven't done the same for child influencers, because if you're going to break out this for the children business. Start with the content mills that rely on children's unpaid labor and exploiting children, the parasocial relationships with children, before you start worrying about what kids themselves are watching. Like it, just it's amazing that that like. Oh, if it's capitalism, it's fine to put the kids online, but, having for fun, kids themselves should go and look for information.

01:02:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, talking to TikTok CEO Sho Jichu, repeatedly asked about his ties to China, he says have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party, to which-.

01:03:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Isn't he Singaporean?

01:03:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's what Sho said. He said Senator, I'm Singaporean. No, cotton, apparently not even listening, then said have you been associated or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party? To which Sho said no, senator, again, I'm Singaporean. To then he asked I mean, it just goes on and on and it's purely racist. Well, you look like you're Chinese buddy Unbelievable, unbelievable. But what it shows is this is really grandstanding on the part of senators and they're not listening to what we're saying, to what those 90 organizations are saying, to what our streets saying, to what EFF is saying. They are hell bent to pass COSA and that scares me because it's not good. It's not good law, the ability to misuse and abuse.

01:03:58 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
this is great, and they just want their moment to be able to have their little tiny few seconds of humiliating someone, to say that they've actually done something when they don't actually really want to do something.

01:04:10
Because the first thing, if they really wanted to protect children from the internet because having the government in your house like, let's just say it, no one wants the government in their house but if they say that they're doing this and they humiliate some people, so they get their little tiny moment, so they can get their bit of fame, then they're happy with that.

01:04:28
Because if they really cared, they'd be dealing with media literacy and that would happen in the school system and it would happen from kindergarten on, so that children could be aware of what is the internet.

01:04:38
What should they do, what shouldn't they do, instead of trying to cut out all the things that they don't want. Because, let's be honest, this is kind of driven by, you know, racism, misogyny, trying to be able to control what people think, and it really has nothing to do with protecting people, because your job as parents is not just to protect your children from the world, it is to prepare them for the world that they have to live in, and so to have them have no knowledge of what the internet is, the good and the bad, and how to handle it, and then suddenly, when they're adults, they will not have those skills and do something that they shouldn't, and then they're going to have the same issues and problems. But what they're hoping to do is be able to control what people think, what people feel is okay and right, and because there's more mainstream thought that are not as closed minded as some people would like it to be, they want to kind of close that down. Yeah.

01:05:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And which children from what?

01:05:32 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Yeah, which are?

01:05:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I just going to say that the Utah just passed a law eliminating all DEI from schools that are state funded and government programs. And you eliminate, and this is the same like a general.

01:05:45 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Sorry, what is the DEI? Diversity equity inclusion?

01:05:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Okay, yeah, and saying that that's diversity is good, equity is good and inclusion is good.

01:05:55 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
And so moving. So they're saying inequality is good, yes, diversity is bad, yes.

01:06:01 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's a lot, and excluding people is necessary for the social order in America. That is absolutely Wow. Well, I was going to say my daughter's quiet part out loud. Yeah, my daughter's school system does media literacy from kindergarten on, because by the time that my daughter was upper elementary school, she and her friends could discourse pretty knowledgeable and they would talk about the online tale. That was the way that they were taught was.

01:06:24
every time you go online, a little piece of data gets added to your tail, so be very, very careful about how you build your tail and listening to I have a middle schooler and listening to the middle schoolers talk now about how their peers are using social media and how they see it complicated in their lives, and every year they do have media literacy courses where it talks about here's here's how you assess primary sources and secondary sources. Here's how you check out whether or not a source is legitimate. Here's how your online activities can impact your mental health. We have that. We're also in a school district that does do DEI and we're in a school district that does social emotional learning.

01:06:59
So it seems like this is part of a larger dialogue on whether this is a part larger dialogue on what tools do you want to give your children and for what and for what aim? And this is where I tend to get a little ranty too, because I don't think it would be. I don't think it's fair to kids across the country who don't like it to have these tools. It's better to know how to read and think critically and how to engage with ideas that confuse you or upset you or challenge you than it would be to simply pretend that they don't exist.

01:07:32 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I'll say something that might get me a lot of backlash. But, like, people that are not educated and not given tools are easier to control. They're easier to have fear-based thinking, alter their votes and what they do, they're easier to believe whatever might be the biggest, most charismatic or loudest talking head says to you, and they're less likely to be able to rise up and ask for more or demand more and change the way that the system is, and so a lot of more autocratic governments really enjoy being able to control the information that people get and the tools that they have, so that they don't end up causing problems to the system.

01:08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's tempting to say, well, they're very cynical and this is an attempt to assert political control and essentially on the road to an authoritarian government. But isn't it also possible just to say, well, they're just trying to do the best to protect kids and then maybe they don't understand the consequences.

01:08:31 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
But then they would listen right, they would educate, they would listen.

01:08:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think they know what they're doing.

01:08:36 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Of course they do. Of course they know what they're doing. They know what they're doing. They're fear based. They see the way that people are changing. They know that the new generations are highly political, highly educated, much more leaning towards being open minded, wanting to give power back to the people, more into unions, more dealing with being able to have their own rights and they will fight for it. And that is terrifying to an old system, right? So the dinosaurs. That is a terrifying change, because they know that there is only one way to get those votes. And the newer generations are pretty proactive. They understand the media, they know what they're doing, and so how else do you change that?

01:09:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good way to get votes, to scare people about their kids and to find a boogeyman. You got to find a boogeyman. The big tech is a great boogeyman right now for everybody. It may be just as short-sighted as well. How do I get elected? Or how do I get through my primary in a month? And how do I get elected in a year than anything else.

01:09:40 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
And the thing is, though, is a lot of online participation is still tremendously voluntary. No one is making a child go on social media and at some point, if you're the parent, you shouldn't be relying on either the government or even on other companies to do the parenting for you. It's on you to have the conversations with your kid where you're like no, I don't care that you're 13, you're not going on Instagram because that whole thing is a factory for creating discontent, or no, you're not going on TikTok because I don't agree with the data collection policies, and here's why. Or, if you do YouTube, we reserve the right to review your viewing history to make sure that you're not, you know, to see if we have to have a discussion with you about what you want to watch. There has to be some of that, and, again, if it comes down to harm reduction with children, a really easy way to start with harm reduction for children online would be to go after the industries that are exploiting kids for money, like influencers, like. Start there.

01:10:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you could also maybe do something about gun control, but I don't want to get political on this. Oh, keep in mind number one. There's a incentive.

01:10:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There's guns, but there's an incentive to make a good sounding bill Be really crappy. Because if it is, then the people who can say like we did something to try to help kids, the people who read the bill saying we're not voting for that, and then the people who are putting the bill says these people don't care about it, you don't want to, they voted against.

01:11:17 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yes, exactly that's why they make it such a trendy term, because then they can say well, these people voted against parental rights and parental safety and child safety, so they don't care about kids, and so they make the name really like biting and slashes. But if you read the bill, it's really kind of terrifying and kind of like dystopian. But the thing is, is that that's the way that it works, right? Is that then they can kind of they don't? You know they care and they'll take whatever power is given to them right, which all governments do. And I believe in parental rights and I believe that you should be able to know what your children are doing, not just on the internet, not in life, and be able to prepare them for that. And so it's not really about that.

01:11:54
But the thing is is when they use fear mongering to be able to target a populace or to be able to target something that is a boogeyman that no one really complained about before, when people are afraid, when people are fearing for the thing and what we care about most is often our progeny, our children are the people that we care for. What happens to our brain is that the limbic part, our fight or flight, if activated enough, will actually shut down the thinking part of our brain. We will become stupider because we chemically have the thinking part of our brain when we're really scared and bothered by something. That's why they keep on repeating it right and they find a scapegoat is because that's the fastest way that we will give up our rights and freedoms, and we've seen it happen throughout history. It's highly effective and if we can demonize and dehumanize whatever it is that we're fighting against, then it seems like we're doing the right thing because we're keeping things safe and we'll just sign on the dotted line, and so it's highly effective.

01:12:53 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, the truth is, it's a real pain in the backside to actually parent your kids through the internet.

01:12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I believe it. I'm so glad my kids are adults, because I don't know what I would do.

01:13:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I mean, let me, let me just share a recent let me. When my daughter was at a slumber party, the person she was having the sleepover with had had been like oh, my latest thing are mommy influencers from Utah and I love watching their McMansion and these. It's very, very different than what these kids are growing up with and so, just like it's like it's like a foreign culture.

01:13:25
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so these kids were watching all sorts of videos and it was things like how are they spending $2,000 a pop at Sephora? And look at the size of their minivan, and so I find out that. So so again, my daughter's national geographic right.

01:13:44
Well, they're watching this and the thing is, is you listen? But you listen to the pitter powder that goes on in the back and it's things like I'm so glad I have a provider who can you know afford, and I'm home with my kids all the time, and this is the way it's supposed to be. The kids are so sick and it's propaganda.

01:14:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's direction.

01:14:04 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So what I ended up doing is I was watching a couple of these with her and I was like all right, what are you, what are you thinking about when you see this? What are you reacting to? And she was chattering about it. And then I got her the book Mom Fluenced by Sarah Peterson, which is a reported look at mommy influencer culture, like the history. And here's how I've got monetized and here's what drives it. Here's what's lucrative and here's what's not.

01:14:26
And then Stephanie McNeil had written a really good book called Swipe Up for More, which is about what it takes to be an influencer, what it's like behind the curtain, and my kid has has just dived into both of those because she loves the behind the scenes look. And now when she and her friends, when I'm purple in them, she and her friends begin to talk about the influencers, and my daughter's like, well, this is what's really going on. And the other kids are like, oh boy, dude. But my point is it took work. It took like a couple weeks to to to bottom out what was so attractive about this and what are these videos really saying and how can I get information into your hands and into your brain in a way that you're open to, and that's it's. People don't always have time for that. It's a lot of work.

01:15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're. You're particularly active and informed, well informed parent, and also willing to do this. I think the bottom line on COSA that I would say people who are listening should pay attention to and perhaps write your Congress critters about comes from Evan Greer, as a director of Fight for the Future, who says don't be fooled, this is not a protect the children bill, this is a censorship bill. This is about various constituencies in Congress wanting to be able to censor the internet and censor social media. They're trying to fight this fight on many, many fronts, including in front of the Supreme Court, and we're going to hear about that case in June. And don't be fooled, this is has nothing to do with children. They use children as a paper tiger, because who's going to vote against something to protect children? And really this is about we need to be able to censor what's on the internet, and if you are somebody watching this show, I think you probably feel pretty strongly that we don't want government censoring the internet. That that is. That is probably a bad idea. Government, not not just federal government, but this would give the power to states individually to do the same, and I can only think that it would be very bad for the future of the internet in general.

01:16:32
Let's take a little break. More to come, but we want to pause for a moment. Our guests it's great to have you, georgia Dow, from beautiful Montreal, where Canada has its own child protection laws that are almost equally exciting. We could talk about those someday. Georgia at Westmounttherapycom from nojittercom, lisa Schmeiser and Wesley Faulkner, who I met in Austin at South by many, many years ago. Stacy Higginbotham introduced us.

01:17:02 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'll be speaking this year. Are you Awesome?

01:17:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, one of the future.

01:17:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
What are you going to talk about?

01:17:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is a you know from the yes, this is for the radical, this is the radical respect panel, so we'll be talking oh good, oh, you're going to do a panel Wonderful South, by coming up next month, right March 8th through 6th.

01:17:25
Second week of March. Yeah, fun, we miss going to South by and it'll be fun to go. Well, tickets are still available. Jack Conti will be the keynote death of the follower and the future of creativity on the web. Of course he's a creator of Patreon, but he's been on our Amy Webb. Amy Webb will be there. Amy Webb was always there. She loves doing her her thing there. Jack, of course, was one of the part, one of the two people in Pamplimus, and we used to have them on performing, but now he's way too famous and we can't get them on anymore. Let's take a pause, the pause that refreshes On. We go with the show.

01:18:09
This was a story, holy cow. If you're worried about deep fakes, sure you can worry about poor Taylor Swift, but this has a little bit more impact. This from CNN this morning A finance worker paid out $25 million to fraudsters after having a call with a deep fake CFO. They don't name the multinational firm, but fraudsters duped the worker into attending a video call with what he thought were other members of the staff. He recognized their voices and their faces. All of them were deep fake recreations, according to Hong Kong police. In the multi-person video conference, it turns out everyone he saw was fake. He grew suspicious after he received a message. It was purportedly from the company's UK based chief financial officer. He thought this is a, this is phony, this is a phishing mail. But then he was invited to the video call, saw the CFO, saw his coworkers. He said, well, okay, I guess you need this $25 million and executed the transfer. Now that's a problem. Now we're. Now I'm starting to worry about deep fakes.

01:19:27 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
They're getting good.

01:19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow.

01:19:29 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's like, it's like oceans 14. Oh my God.

01:19:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, can you imagine, can you imagine?

01:19:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That's a lot of work, but $25 million is a lot. It's worth it.

01:19:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, I don't know how you do a deep fake zoom call. Maybe you guys are all fake, maybe I'm just imagining this show, I don't know.

01:19:49 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
That's what's gonna happen. You're gonna have us and we won't actually be there, and you won't have to worry about getting people. Just have a whole bunch of deep fakes and chat. Cbt will be talking about all of the different things, and who's to say we'll boost this.

01:20:00 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Like once we're all in the headsets, you're like I don't even know who I'm having a meeting with because we're all like a little perfect little avatar.

01:20:07 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah, that they can just deal now.

01:20:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And who's to say I'm real. I mean, I might be a deep fake. You know, you wouldn't know that the scam involving the fake CFO was only discovered and the employer later checked with the head office. You know, next time do that first, Okay, and they Hong Kong police would not reveal the name or details of the company. So we don't know who it was. But that's a lot of money.

01:20:30 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
That means that all of those people probably have some sort of online like presence in order to recreate them virtually even.

01:20:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you only need a minute or two of audio, right? So if you record, like the analyst call, and get the pictures of the people, I mean it's amazing what they can do now.

01:20:51 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
This is also like a stunning lack of process, like they. They're like if you don't, if you can remove.

01:20:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should need another signature at least, shouldn't you?

01:21:02 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, Maybe maybe possible, think about it.

01:21:06 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There used to be a type of phishing call. You would get a phone call where the goal was to try to get you to say yes on the phone call. So that's why they could use it as verbal ascent for later. And this, this honestly seems like it's more of the same.

01:21:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, these guys are good at using the modern technologies.

01:21:26
Amazon was going to buy iRobot, the makers of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. That deal is off. Thanks to regulators, who, basically, have put up so many stumbling blocks, Amazon's given up Now. Now you might say, well, that's all right, Cause iRobot got a $94 million breakup fee Apparently not enough. They laid off 350 people, 31% of their workforce. Their stock has tumbled to the lowest level since 2009. Maybe, maybe Amazon's breathing a sigh of relief at this point. I don't know, but the deal is off to.

01:22:05
Some people were worried I wasn't that the Roomba makes a map of your home that's part of its you know job in order to vacuum, and that map might go off to Amazon where they might use it. I don't know what they would use it for, but anyway, you don't have to worry about that anymore. And now you have to worry about whether your robot vacuum cleaner will be will be homeless soon. Amazon decided not to offer remedies to the regulators whose concerns were that Amazon might demote other robot vacuum cleaners and promote its own products. Amazon said well, you know we wouldn't do that, but we're not going to give you any you know assurances of that.

01:22:48 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
So anyway, I don't, I don't. They haven't done that before.

01:22:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, right, I don't know if that matters. Hey, we got some numbers. Historically, youtube never reveals much about its operation, but a research firm has done a lot of a lot of kind of finicky work to figure out how many videos there are on YouTube. This is a team of researchers at University of Massachusetts, at Amherst. It took them a year. They basically kind of created a random number generator that would go through all of the YouTube IDs. Basically they called it dialing for videos, inspired by the random digit dialing used in polling. It took a cluster, sophisticated cluster of powerful computers at the University of Massachusetts months to collect a representative sample. We spent another few months analyzing the videos. We now can say we believe that there are a total of get this 14 billion videos on YouTube. That's one and a half for every person on the planet. So some of you are just not working hard enough. Get to work.

01:24:02 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I'm doing what I can. I'm doing what I can here.

01:24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're, you're, you're overachieving, aren't you Actually?

01:24:07 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I'm trying. I'm trying.

01:24:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm trying to be responsible for a few videos as well. Videos with 10,000 or more views account for 94% of the site's traffic, but less than 4% of the uploads. Most videos obviously have very few views. Some about 5% have no views at all. I have a few of those, so I made some of those nearly three quarters.

01:24:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
There's also private private videos as well.

01:24:31 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That's right, that's true Good point I wonder if the videos could be a way you could use YouTube as a as a storage site.

01:24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, people do that. I do that Lots of people do that.

01:24:41 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah, yeah.

01:24:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just for family, and you make them unlisted and you just put stuff there. It's free. Here's the most important finding, though Popularity is almost entirely algorithmic. Now you'll be interested in this, georgia. We found little correlation between subscribers and views. You know, however, youtube are saying hit just subscribe, hit the bell, do other like and subscribe.

01:25:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Hit like and subscribe.

01:25:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apparently, according to these researchers, YouTube recommendations and not subscriptions of the primary drivers of traffic on the site.

01:25:14 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
It definitely is for me.

01:25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People follow the recommendation engine. They don't.

01:25:18 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah, well, you, I, like some of my people, will come, but like it's such a small percentage of the amount of people that you have subscribed, like subscribers more like an ego hit for yourself, like it feels good to say it to other people. It feels really good, but if, if I'm doing a video on something that's popular, it's just the algorithmic algorithm is going to feed my video to more people and there's more chance that people will see it, because if you don't click it right away, like it's gone right.

01:25:42
Like there's other videos. They're like oh, they didn't really like that, no attention span With everything else that someone has subscribed to, and so mine might be their third favorite. Well, that means that I might not be shown the next time they click back to their own.

01:25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have videos with more than a million views, and, in fact, your most viewed videos are, for some reason, about a thing called arcane, which is a game.

01:26:05 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
No, it yes, it's a. It's a show that's on a game, legal legends. It's a video game, but the the, the show is actually really, really good, and even if you've never played League of Legends it would make zero difference to it, but it's quite. It's quite good, Like quite well done.

01:26:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But what it tells me is that the YouTube algorithm upranked those because it said arcane.

01:26:25 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yes, well, and more people clicked it. And if more people click it, then you too want to self-reinforcing Right. So you know the it's like how do you survive and do well at YouTube is be popular at YouTube, like it's almost like the snake eating the tail Right.

01:26:40 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, my son might know which advertisers pay the most amount of money, and so you probably want to sear people to the content where they'll ads are going to be you say YouTube based on that and if it's towards you and it's as a revenue.

01:26:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would guess so.

01:26:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
If like how many? Times have you been steered to an ad that has no ad. I mean, I mean a video that has no ad. Oh yeah, right. And there are two views, I mean.

01:27:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There's the one where they have the in video. Sponsorship to this pop up a lot more on our recommendations feeds than the ones that have no sponsorship.

01:27:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is interesting because my son, who has like two and a half million followers on TikTok and on Instagram, he's a chef. When he had a sponsor for it, you know when, when Helman's mayonnaise sponsored his video, those would get very low views and I don't think it's because people didn't click them, I think it's because the algorithm didn't promote it. He is was, as everybody wants to succeed at this carefully watching what the algorithm promoted and tuning his content to the algorithm, just as Mr Beast did famously. I mean, that's how Mr Beast's got famous, is. He paid a lot of attention to what the algorithm was doing and catered not to the audience but to the algorithm. I mean, they go hand in hand. Obviously, he's always been sensitive to what people are watching and people are sensitive to the algorithm, but Henry was very careful. He said that was why he only makes sandwiches. He says the only thing people want to see is sandwiches. Now, I don't know if that's true, but that's what the algorithm tells him, right? I think that's kind of interesting.

01:28:14
Yeah, and then, and then let me ask you this Do you have to have a facial expression in, like a weird expression in the thumbnail? Is that?

01:28:24 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah. So here we go to this. This bloody facial expression, I'm not. I'm expressive, like I'm an expressive person by nature. But yeah, if you look shocked, crying, freaking out or angry, you you're fighting. Yeah, you're fighting like this a little tiny square, and if you look like there's an emote, like you want to make someone feel or think something that will make them interested and want to click and some people do it in different ways, but remember, this is like your deal. You're fighting for real estate. You want yours to be punchier than someone else's. I admit it's also fighting to be as punchy as possible.

01:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When I see your face on your I'm looking at your thumbnails I want to click. Stop being afraid, because that right, right, more than how to choose a therapist. I want to click. Stop being afraid. Yeah, all right, let's do an experiment. I want to get good views on this show, so if you would all just make a horrified expression, we'll all do it all at once Give us a countdown you gotta do the whole wide screen now, okay, ready.

01:29:26
Three, two, one. All right, we have our show thumbnail. Let's just see. Oh, wait a minute, I got to put on my vision. Hold on, now let's do it. Wait, okay, okay, okay, I think that's going to work, we'll see. We'll compare that to previous episodes.

01:29:45 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
We'll find out, but you have to have a clicky set of words too, like you know, this shocking, the terrified, the whole thing, like you know clicky, weird words please, kevin.

01:29:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, kevin's got to do that. Our editor Kevin's going to come up with that. He does the thumbnails. What?

01:30:05 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
you give us an example. Make a difference.

01:30:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Psychologist, give us an example.

01:30:10 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
We want things that are yeah.

01:30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How about this? There's a serial killer in your basement, but we know how to get rid of them.

01:30:16 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah, you know what fear based things of how to protect yourself and secret knowledge, right the the best tricks that no one knows.

01:30:24 - WOT promo (Announcement)
Who killed.

01:30:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
JFK find out.

01:30:27 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Right on Twitter. Finally happened. Leo offended everyone on the panel.

01:30:33 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
There we go, there we go. That's a good one. What did Leo say? Everyone, if you would all hang up.

01:30:39 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Leo has ever said Perfect.

01:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What did Leo say that made everybody hang up? Yeah.

01:30:48 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Have you ever offended someone, leo, so much they hung up.

01:30:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, are you kidding? Oh yeah.

01:30:54 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
One of the hosts.

01:30:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I'm sure I have. Oh, I want to know the story you see.

01:31:00 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
now I want to know, I want to know the biggest beef.

01:31:03 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
The biggest beefs on Tweet. Now I'm interested.

01:31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've, I've, I've hung up on. So the most famous one was what it was years ago with Mike Errington, who at the time was Tech Crunch, and he offended me mightily for nothing and I hung up on him.

01:31:19 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Did you on air?

01:31:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, I stopped the show. I said that's it, we're not doing the show anymore. I actually canceled the show. I'm down here.

01:31:26 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Really Wow, that's impressive. See, that would be a show to have the top five, dad, I should have.

01:31:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is pre YouTube. I think I should have. Yeah, I think it's on YouTube right now actually.

01:31:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Unreleased episode.

01:31:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think actually, wait a minute, let me see. Can we get taken down for me showing a video from our own show.

01:31:46 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, if you take it down yourself, you're going to copyright yourself.

01:31:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Mike Errington might ask me to take it down. This was actually.

01:31:54 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Well, let's put it up anyways One show.

01:31:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Mike Errington requested to be removed.

01:31:58 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
This is like Errington doesn't want you to see this here, here Now I want to see it Now we're going to air it.

01:32:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was. We were at the time simultaneously simulcasting the Gilmore gang with Steve Gilmore. That's, Kevin Marks and Mike Errington in a t-shirt. See, if you get my audio. I have a pre. I don't care. Are you happy with it? Love it? Ok. So this was so long ago. I was reviewing the Palm Pre phone, OK.

01:32:25 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Oh my gosh Wow.

01:32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I said you heard me say I love it. It's why it's quite impressive. Well, you know, I thought that maybe hold on.

01:32:34 - WOT promo (Announcement)
Hold on. Did you pay for the pre Like? Let's get the disclosures out of the way right away?

01:32:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a one week review unit. I couldn't get one and unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to get. I was going to go out and get one this afternoon.

01:32:43 - WOT promo (Announcement)
So you got a free pre. You're one of the very few people that got a free. Not at all, I think there are quite a few viewers here You're going to be on Scobal House.

01:32:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm Mike, that's BS and I'm really pissed off that you would imply that in some way that this free quote, free pre, that I send back in seven days would in any way predispose me Screw you?

01:32:59 - WOT promo (Announcement)
What are you going to do about it?

01:33:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike, you are such a troll. Screw you.

01:33:03 - WOT promo (Announcement)
I'm not kidding, I'm not watching the video and then I'm not.

01:33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't even. It's too painful. I hung up on him, I hung up on them. I canceled the show.

01:33:10 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
You can't show it because it's so. It brings you back Some emotional trauma going through it.

01:33:15 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's painful.

01:33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Help me, I'm so nervous for this for this, for this episode.

01:33:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Georgia traumatizes Leo and then we all just go.

01:33:22 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
oh, I re-traumatized him. Actually, he was already traumatized the first time. Oh my God, oh my God, oh, wow, you know that's going to shoot up in views. Now you have to put that up on your own channel, because it's going to shoot up in views Everyone now is going to want to see because you didn't show it.

01:33:37 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You know it's perfect because Hems is a sponsor and you say screw you. So it sounds like it's a great tie in.

01:33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike, do you have ED? All right? Honestly, I kind of think that this is a problem because it incents people. This is why we're going to see all these weird Vision Pro videos of people walking off cliffs and stuff. It incents people to get outrageous in order to get views on YouTube, and I think it's a perverse incentive, right? I think it's a bad thing personally, yeah, yeah, I don't know.

01:34:14 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
It absolutely pushes people to be more and more extreme and do more and more things, because what is our barrier, our mainstay? Our average of what is normal or entertaining is grows higher and higher every time because we see so much Someone just walking into a wall is no longer that entertaining, right Like I want them to walk into the wall, fall down and a goat pees on them. That's like oh, now.

01:34:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm entertained but I need. Can we get that goat out we have in the back room there?

01:34:41 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I want the wall to fall down.

01:34:44 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Greatest video of all time. That's an actual video.

01:34:49 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
No.

01:34:49 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
OK, go ahead.

01:34:51 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
I wouldn't know, you'll see it. There's there. There's there the screaming goats.

01:34:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like the screaming goats. Those are good. That was a good video.

01:34:58 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, one of my favorite weird John I wouldn't call it a weird genre on YouTube, but one of the things that I found surprisingly riveting was Norway's slow television, where they would have nine hour long videos of a train just winding its way up the Norwegian border.

01:35:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been on that train. By the way, it's the most boring trip in history. It's so long it goes.

01:35:19 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
See, some of the scenery looks amazing and then some of it is very beautiful, but it just we.

01:35:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My wife will never let me forgive me for it. We were on the West Coast of Norway, in Christensen, for a photography conference and the organizer said you could fly back to Oslo and go home or you could take the train from Christensen to Wait to Tromsø. Oh no.

01:35:44
What we did is we? First we took the Hurtagruten, which is a boat that goes in all the fjords, all the way down to Bergen, and then Bergen to Oslo, which was an all day, and I thought it was great, but I was the only one Places said we could have been in Oslo yesterday having a great time instead. But look honey, that's, that's where the planet thought was filmed, the ice planet out there, right there. She wasn't, she wasn't impressed.

01:36:13 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, Bergen is where the Trolls movie was made right.

01:36:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bergen is beautiful. I love Bergen. I really do. It's quite beautiful and a very nice train station. Elon Musk has announced that the first human has received the neural link brain chip. Speaking of Trolls.

01:36:33 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Well, his companies have a history of always putting the safety culture first.

01:36:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think anything Elon did not say anything about. Now they they got FDA approval some months ago. The theory was that this chip would be put into somebody who had severe disabilities they couldn't move or they couldn't see or you know and that this would be. They volunteer for it in hopes of regaining some functionality. Now Elon is not saying who it was. All he says is that the experimental surgery went well and the patient is recovering well. Of course, neuralink has been accused of animal cruelty. They've killed hundreds of apes and chimpanzees in order to do this research. The other thing that scared me a little bit I did not volunteer for this is that you get a surgeon to the first thing that happens. A human surgeon cuts a small hole in your skull and then and this is what scares me a seven foot tall robot named R1, then does the ultra delicate procedure of suturing the electrified wires from the implant directly into your brain.

01:37:39 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah.

01:37:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to do that. But on the other hand, you know, if it weren't Elon, I would say this is great because this could someday transform somebody's life right. This could be a huge. If you're quadriplegic, you know this could be huge.

01:37:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The issue go for your touch, Oda Sure.

01:38:01 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah, no, the issue with it is that there's a lack of transparency, right, Like what they share about their entire process is really, really minimal. And it is an actual intra brain, like the electrodes are going into your brain, where a lot of the other types of Neuralinks are just on top right. They're just reading off the electrical impulses that they can. Are they less effective? Yes, there would be potentially less effective at the moment where the technology is now, but with it being Elon Musk, with it being that the trial is not registered at the governmentalclinicaltrialsgov, and so you're like why? Why would that be? If they have FDA approval and they've gone through the necessary and proper procedures, Are they not registered? Like, where is this being done? Is this being done somewhere where you know the US government would not be that?

01:38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting, that is happening yeah.

01:38:53 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
And they have not given much feedback on the process, on what's happening. And there's a lot of electrodes which you know again if it wasn't Elon Musk, it would be great but like a thousand electrodes are inside of your brain at different parts. It's quite an invasive procedure. And what do the effects of these electrodes have? Do they erode? What are they doing with it? You know, it could be absolutely amazing for people that are paraplegic or disabled or you know, not being able to, you know, converse or even talk to people. But yeah, it's. Whenever there's a lack of transparency, there's a reason why they don't want to share the information.

01:39:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I just wanted to point out that even if this was perfect, it worked flawlessly and it does exactly what they say it does. There's been a history of these types of implants that go inside of a person. That means that you're not just making sure it works, you're not making sure, just making sure that it's doing the thing it says, but you're making sure that it happens that it works flawlessly or, if it's not flawless, that you're able to fix it for the life of the person that has this in their body. And they have to be responsible. So it could be a decade, two decades, three decades from now.

01:40:15
Are they still going to be able to service it? Are they still going to be able to find replacement parts for it? Are they going to have the expertise? Or is it like all the other Elon Musk companies where they say that's old technology, we're going to move on to the next thing, and they may be not maintain that same type of level of direction or refinements? Are they still going to be able to maintain the level of degradation that's naturally going to happen when you have anything in a human body for the life of a person? And that's the important thing. Even if this works? Are they building in a plan to make sure that it's working for the rest of the life of the person who has it in their body?

01:40:57 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
I'm not sure I want to move fast and break things. Culture anywhere near my human brain? Yeah.

01:41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good point.

01:41:03 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
Yeah, it just reminds me of the Black Mirror episode where the implant gets updated and they end up changing what you get to see and how you experience things.

01:41:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our terms of service have changed. Please read the follow.

01:41:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Tesla drivers have complained about inconvenient software updates and the driving experience changing when the software gets pushed out without their notification, consent, permission. And given the managerial culture around Elon Musk's companies, do you really want something in your brain where the company is going to push out a firmware update without notice, consent or troubleshooting?

01:41:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, ironically Tesla has just been ordered to recall almost every vehicle it's ever sold, because the silliest little thing, the warning lights you know for the blinkers there's. Apparently the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has a rule for the size of the warning lights they have to be big enough that you can readily see it immediately and he made them too small. So Nitsa has said, I mean, they could fix it with an over the air software update, you don't have to go back to the service center. But still that's the kind of slap dash like every other car manufacturer in the world reads the rules and says, ok, it has to be so big, make it that big. You could totally see Elon saying well, you know, don't, you don't have to make it that big, and not doing it. And so that kind of slap dash, attention to detail would make me a little nervous.

01:42:41 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
You may not want that in your brain.

01:42:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'm just saying All right, let's see, let's take a little pause. That refreshes. You're watching our fabulous this Week in Tech episode with George Hedau and Lisa Schmeiser and the wonderful Wesley Faulkner. Just a little plug at this point. I think for our listeners and viewers who are not yet a member of Club Twit, that means you, because you're seeing this. If you join Club Twit, I can't beg you anymore to join Club Twit because you're already in Club Twit.

01:43:18
We cut that part out. We cut the ads out. You get all the ads taken out. You also get access to the Club Twit Discord and the Club Twit Feed, where we have lots of stuff that we don't put out in public, including Home Theater Geeks with Scott Wilkinson, hands on Macintosh, hands on Windows, the iOS Today Show with Rosemary Orchard and Micah Sargent.

01:43:37
We have fun events. We've got a big event coming up Thursday. Stacey Higginbotham stops by for Stacey's Book Club. That's always fun. I'll be hosting that with Stacey. The book this week is the Water Knife by Paulo Bacicalupi, which is kind of a noir science fiction story. In the near future, when water is scarce and most of the thievery and corruption is all around water. It's fascinating. We'll be talking about that, 3 PM Pacific on February 8th this coming Thursday.

01:44:09
You get all sorts of things on Club Twit and a $7 a month that's all it costs. More importantly, it really helps us keep doing what we I think we do better than anybody else. We're not here to get your clicks. We're not trying to generate a phony controversy. We're really interested in the future of technology and technology as it applies to you, and if you value that, I would appreciate it if you'd show us by joining Club Twit. Twittv slash club twit and I thank you in advance. We do have a little video we can show yes to for everybody so they can see what they missed last week on Twit Watch. Oh my god, jason, you're the ugliest version of you.

01:44:57 - WOT promo (Announcement)
I am a robot zombie from the future. Previously on Twit, hands on deck. I woke up this morning to pick up the Apple Vision Pro headset Uh-oh.

01:45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here comes Tyrannosaurus Rex. Oh, she came out of the screen. Windows Weekly All right. So Microsoft's earnings came out. Microsoft kept warning us and warning us that they were going to have a tough year in 23. That's why they were laying off and that's why they're doing the cutbacks, and all they've had is record year over year. Well, that's everybody in the tech industry. And they've already, oh boy, in this month alone 25,000 tech jobs up in smoke. Security now.

01:45:43 - WOT promo (Announcement)
If you were wondering whether you would ever have an actual need for that 15 terabyte hard drive you purchased recently, well, yes, there would be three terabytes left over after you transferred the Moab breach, the largest collection of stolen user data ever discovered this week in Google.

01:46:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon has put a chip in somebody's brain. This is actually scary A seven foot tall robot named R1. Why is it?

01:46:16 - WOT promo (Announcement)
seven feet tall, got to be big.

01:46:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why does it have a name?

01:46:19 - WOT promo (Announcement)
That was the size of the one that went after my prostate. I walked into the operating room and then looked up and just said be nice to me, this is your brain. This is your brain on Twitter.

01:46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Any questions. That is a terrifying thought. Thank you for putting that in my head. Google OK, I'm a little disappointed. Google has announced it's abandoning. One more thing that Google's giving up.

01:46:50
Do you ever, when you look for a Google search and you see that the website is gone but there is a cache? I use that all the time. Google is retiring the cache link. They are no longer going to save, even though they're looking at all these pages. They're no longer going to save. The previous page for cache Cache is working now, but it will stop working.

01:47:15
You're going to see it go away in the near future, according to Danny Sullivan, who is now the spokesperson for Google. He writes on Twitter yes, it's been removed. I know it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features, but it was meant for helping people access pages way back when and you couldn't always get a page to load. These days, things have greatly improved, so it was decided to retire it. It was decided by somebody. We don't know who. We just some imaginary person at Google who doesn't have a name. Danny says maybe someday we'll add links to the internet archive. Oh sure, just put it on. Just put it on BrewsterKale, Just let him do all the hard work in the heavy lifting. What do you think, Wes, you were smart move. You're smart move, yeah, why.

01:48:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, thinking about all the regulations we just talk about Copa, right, they literally were housing the data that's there and so that makes them liable for what is actually on their own servers. So they can't point and say well, we're just an index, yes, but they're an index that's now making copies and then they're servicing that copy and so if there's a fending information in that copy it's on their server. So for liability reasons, it makes sense to me.

01:48:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That makes more sense than oh, we're losing money on this, we have to stop doing it. It's risky to do it. Yeah, that makes a lot more sense. Let the Internet Archive get sued. Exactly, okay.

01:48:52 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I love the colonists. I mean it's for us. I mean it's I love like being able to. It's very. I mean they're still going to have the data. They're not going to servicing anyone, right.

01:49:01 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
They're just not going to share it with us.

01:49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, Exactly. Most recently, this was valuable when Cox Media Group remember they put out a page that said hey, advertisers, wouldn't you love to know what people are talking about when in their private conversations? Well, we know and we can sell that to you because we listen in on TVs, cars and Alexa. And as soon as the world got ahold of that, the Cox Media Group took it down immediately, but Google had cached the page so people could see it and know that they said that. For that reason alone, this is very valuable to keep to hold people accountable for stuff they put up on the Internet Newspapers and publications as well. Anyway, they're a private company, you can't make them. What about this thing that we were talking about, though, on the promo? 25,000 layoffs in January alone this year, hundreds of thousands of layoffs last year, and yet tech is doing really, really well.

01:50:01 - WOT promo (Announcement)
Is this a way to readjust.

01:50:03 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's a way to readjust wages, but that actually, although Google.

01:50:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It costs them a lot of money. They spent billions to fire all those people.

01:50:13 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Somebody ran the numbers. Look, remember when all these companies got into trouble with salary fixing a couple of years ago and the judge is like don't do that. And all the companies that were very, very sorry we won't do it. And then the pandemic hit and tech went crazy for a while. What's happening now is when these companies do the layoffs and do their hiring in strategic ways, you've got this very talented workforce and after a couple of months they begin to get nervous and they'll take a lower paying job someplace else. So this is a way for companies to gently reset wage expectations without people overtly realizing this is what's going on.

01:50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Labor was getting too powerful. Yes exactly, Prices were going up 100%. You got to break the back of labor. Google's layoff expenses according to their quarterly results. This week it spent $2.1 billion in severance and related employee charges in 2023. They're going to spend another $700 million in the first quarter of this year.

01:51:16 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
How does that compare to how much they're spending in salary, though?

01:51:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:51:22 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Because if you're going to do the delta and find out that, oh, they're spending X amount in layoff costs but they're saving X plus one in payroll costs over the next 12 months, that's going to make investors super happy and it puts the fear into all of the kids in tech where this is baby's first layoff.

01:51:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope it doesn't hurt your feelings if I say this, Wesley, but you've been there.

01:51:49 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I still think that the RTO returns to office is akin to the same thing. It's a power struggle to bring back dominance. But there are also some other factors, as having a conversation earlier today about this that right now the pandemic funds for retaining workers is being spent. They spent all that, so they were getting a little kickback from the government for everyone they didn't fire and now those are going out the window. And also at the same time with RTO, they're able to say now you need to come back to the office and if someone says no, then now they are violating policy and now they can let those people go for cause, which means their severance packages aren't needed for that, and they're still getting some of the same effect.

01:52:44
And for the RTO just buttoning that up, that's tied into taxes, is that a lot of companies that have offices in a lot of different cities. They get tax breaks and those tax breaks are contingent on saying we're going to bring this many jobs or we're going to be supporting all the neighboring businesses around our office because they're going to be eating there and all the stuff. And they can't make that same argument if that worker is remote. So if they say so they want people in the office buildings so they can still claim and still gather those tax breaks for bringing people into the office. And of course older workers aren't able to make that move as younger workers are.

01:53:24 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So it's also getting rid of the older workforce in order to hey the ones who have kids and are, like I said, the ones that have kids. I settled my kids in Disco district. I'm not going to up and relocate. That's a good point.

01:53:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:53:36 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
It's soft layoffs without layoffs. That's how you shake out that segment. It's also and this is this is very dark and very dreadful. But remember, remote work was really really good for differently abled workers. It's a quick, it was great for queer workers, it was great for non-white workers, it was great for working mothers because they were able to decouple productivity from presence and show that like no, the productivity numbers were still super high. People still really produced when they were in 100% remote environment, and the populations I mentioned didn't have to deal with the additional burden of microaggressions or navigating social exclusion of the office. Instead, they were able to prove that they're valuable contributors. But once you go back to oh, you have to be in the office. What you're doing is you're effectively saying you have to go back to this environment that overtly privileges some classes of worker and overtly disadvantages other classes of worker. But if you don't go back, you just won't have a job.

01:54:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If more people would listen to the radical respect podcast. They could be happier in their work. I'm just saying, and you wouldn't- have to.

01:54:42
Yeah, so a lot of employers. I think we're kind of in that boat too. We brought everybody back in the office. We're concerned that productivity would go down. I think the real fear as a boss is oh, they're just eating potato chips and watching TV and pretending to work. Now I have to say I do know some tech where I have a friend who's a tech, a tech worker, who has three full time jobs. She's not working 120 hours a week, but she can. She can satisfy each of those full time jobs working at home. They don't know how many hours she's putting in, and so she's working three jobs, even though she's not giving them each 40 hours, I bet you, that's she giving them a hundred percent deliverable, deliverables.

01:55:24
I guess she is, or she wouldn't have the job right.

01:55:26 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Because that's, that's. That's the thing is. Again, when I said you decouple productivity from presence the, the idea of a four-hour work week was revolutionary when it happened because it was a big shift from we own you, which was the the the prevalent from there.

01:55:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I remember. I remember I think it was in the Gilded Age when they were trying to do the union busting, and it's a TV show, but I think it's probably fairly, fairly accurate where they where the manager said people don't need a private life. What are you talking about? They don't need to. They don't need to go home and spend time with their family. They can work 14 hour days. What's wrong with that?

01:56:02 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
But you've you've seen this move in the workplace towards, towards okay, ours and towards all of these things that are measurable and quantifiable. Why should that be 40?

01:56:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
hours yeah.

01:56:14 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Exactly. If you can turn it out in 10 hours a week, good for you. Viac and deos, enjoy the beach. But and if it takes you fifth, dare as well.

01:56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's look at how you're working. We feel that way. I mean, we're actually looking at how we could have editors work at home more, and as long as they finish the show and it's done well and it's done professionally and competently, we don't care if it took them 10 hours or two hours, it does.

01:56:38 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
That shouldn't mean if the task that you're paying somebody for explicitly requires full attention or full presence. That's one yeah.

01:56:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're, if you're Homer Simpson in a nuclear power plant, you got to watch the meters. Okay, fine.

01:56:51 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Or if you're a teacher, for example. If you're somebody where your job is to manage a classroom, you're obviously not, you're not going to be working as a teacher at two separate school districts and zooming into classes. It's not, that's, that's not sustainable and that's not you executing your job to the best of your abilities and to the best of students. But if you're, say, a software developer and you manage to pick up parallel gigs, as long as you can deliver, why not, you know? Or if you're, or I would say even let's say you're a staff writer, let's say your job is to is to turn out SEO content and if, if it only takes you 25 hours a week to do that, why shouldn't you pick up another job where you're doing something similar for somebody else?

01:57:33 - Georgia Dow (Guest)
One of the things, that the infrastructure is all built upon us going, driving cars, paying for buildings, eating at the place they were at and spending copious amounts of time that are dealing with our jobs. We found out that when people spend time at home, they start to think, they start to demand things, they start to want things, they start to question things and so, similar to like gladiatorial arenas to keep people busy and occupied and doing things, the entire infrastructure is fed upon us giving this random amount of time. The 40 hours which was, you know, thanks to unions, was actually much less than what it says is Lisa was mentioning. But now people are like you know what? Why should I have to give my entire one third of my life and the other one third is to sleep? So really you don't have that much time to be able to deal with things.

01:58:23
And after COVID, people realized that it was all kind of predicated on a lie to be able to feed the big system, to be able to feed the governments, and that's why, you know, everyone wants us to go back to work, even though we now know from the data that it isn't necessary, it doesn't help, and then people can ask for much more pay. They get much more free time, they have much more money, but then people can do stuff that might, you know, again rebel rouse the entire system as we know it.

01:58:49 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
We're just reported that employees who return to the office are spending an average of five hundred and sixty one dollars a month on related return to office expenses. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the equivalent of the average grocery bill for a two person household for a month. And what George also mentioned there when she talks about well, it comes down to where you're spending money and things like that. There's this huge narrative oh, san Francisco is in a doom spiral, it's dying, and I will cop. If you're walking through South of Market or you're on parts of Market Street or the financial district, you're like oh, the energy is just super different. But if you go to the Richmond district, the sunset, chinatown, north Beach, the mission, any of the places where there's a mix of those places are past.

01:59:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We went to Japan town a couple of days ago for Lisa's birthday. It was wonderful, we had so much fun and it was jammed, whereas it's a funny thing because the same kids who jammed Japan town now, which is up in the avenues, used to go to the Metrion downtown, and the Metrion is a is is looks like a disaster.

01:59:54 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
So you could go bowling, yeah, yeah. Well, it's even the same thing in the small East Bay. In the small East Bay city I live in, um, you can't get a table at coffee shops during a weekday. Between 9am and 4pm there are always people just holding down tables. There's people walking their dogs, the people who came to their kids from school. Like the rhythm of daily life for a certain class of worker where presence and productivity are divorced. Like that rhythm is completely changed and I understood. Like it's gonna be really hard to read.

02:00:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should see what it's like in Roanoke. I mean it's, it's incredible, it's just a happening happening. What's the name of that coffee shop? Wesley.

02:00:35 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Mill Mountain, mill Mountain Coffee. Oh my God, I love them so much.

02:00:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Washington Post. Such fun this week. Us economy is booming, so why are tech companies laying off workers? And one of the things they're saying is a lot of these tech workers after their second, third, fourth layoff aren't going back to tech, they're retraining, they're getting into a different sector. They say if I have had it enough, I don't. I don't really blame them.

02:01:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I know and like some, are just changing industries within tech. Like I know, I'm in I'm a develop and developer relations where we we do a lot of outreach, we go to a lot of conferences but a lot of people are just leaving and going into software gigs because they said it's more stable. So the, the, the and I heard that Dell's like reach factoring their marketing. I think that they removed a whole bunch of people from marketing and there's a lot of that. Where there's vulnerable jobs within tech that people are are shifting to more, to jobs that are either more transferable, like being a developer or things that are just less risky in general, or getting a. Maybe they're becoming actors, something a little bit more stable.

02:01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me take a quick break and then we're going to say goodbye to an old friend. I like to save the obituaries to the end of the show. This one's not so sad. You're watching.

02:01:57
This week in tech, japan is saying goodbye to the floppy disk. That's the end of the line for the three and a half inch floppy, apparently until now a required medium for submitting documents to the government 1900 different official documents. They had to be submitted on floppy. Last week, the ministry of economy, trade and industry in Japan announced confirmed plans to revise the law, saying under the current law, there are many provisions stipulating the use of specific recording media, such as floppy disk recording applications. Regarding applications and notification methods, here we are 2024. The rules have now been amended to delete mention of physical media like floppy disks and CD roms, as well as more abstract categories like electronic recording media. However, there are a few people still behind it.

02:03:05
Sony stopped making floppies in 2011,. By the way, tom Persky runs floppy diskcom, which is probably the last place in the US you can buy floppy disks. He says I can't buy them anymore. But what I do? I remember reading this interview with him. What I do is I go into people's deposits, companies that are shutting down and find surplus floppy disks which I then can sell back, probably mostly to the Japanese government. So if you're looking wow, for 100 pack of Sony brand, remember they stopped making these 2011, 13 years ago. 100 pack of Sony brand black with metal shutter, double-sided HD IBM format, 1.44 megabyte. Yes, that's right, megabyte diskettes only a buck each. Kids, if you need them, add them to the cart, or you want them multiple colors? You can get them that way too. Sorted brands Persky says we continue to recycle and resell disks, but the majority of our business is acquiring and selling old news stock. There are an unbelievable number of warehouses across the world with a palette of floppy disks lost in the back. That's pretty funny.

02:04:22
Reality show Pardon me what. A reality show.

02:04:25 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, that'd be awesome. I'd watch it. I'd like to see the person in the back room who receives all these floppy disks for the Japanese government and how they maintain this and the size of that warehouse. But it'd be also cool if they, instead of just saying, okay, no more floppy disks, we're going to update our standards, they need to be on ZipDisk. That would be hilarious as well.

02:04:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ZipDisk, make them buy this ZipDisk. So thanks to Brandon Villarro Viralho of the register for that great reminder of the good old days, the floppy disk. It may be over for the floppy disk. Hey, good news if you believe in Peak TV. I remember at the last Emmy Awards it was widely agreed oh, peak TV's over. This is it? Succession's done. We've seen all the best shows. We're not going to see any more good shows. Succession's content spending rose 14% last year, spending $19 billion. There's Jack Reacher, good looking fella On new content for Amazon. That's kind of amazing. It's not just Amazon, netflix, apple still spending billions in creating content. Some of that money from Amazon was Thursday Night Football, by the way. It's been a lot of money on Thursday Night Football.

02:05:45 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Leo, did the argument break down how that money was spent?

02:05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I shall see here. Let's see.

02:05:51 - Lisa Schmeiser (Guest)
Because what I'm super curious about is if that increase in spending was because the NFL is very, very good at extracting money Well they are. That increase has to come to buying intellectual property, or if it's in casting, because if you look at some of their high-marquet projects, they've got really big names, those guys cost money.

02:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, amazon's paying a billion a year to the NFL for one game a week for 18 weeks. That's a lot of money. I don't know. Do the math. What's a billion divided by 18? However, andy Jassy, ceo of Amazon, in their call, their earnings call, said Thursday Night Football has been quote, a rousing success by all accounts. What about your account, andy? The overall viewers increased 24.

02:06:41
Wow, I don't know what happened. I think the power went out. I know the power went out. It got very dark in the studio, so I've run home to wrap this up. Fortunately, we had pretty much finished the show. I only had, I think, one or two stories more to do. So let me just thank our great guests Wesley Faulkner from the Radical Respect podcast it's always great to see Wesley George Adow, westmount Therapy and, of course, youtubecom slash George Adow and Lisa Schmeiser, editor-in-chief at no Jitter. They were great. You were great. I appreciate your listening. Thanks to all our club TWIT members who make this show possible. They keep paying the power bill so this doesn't happen again.

02:07:26
I'm Leo LaPorte. I hope you'll join us next week. It's Super Bowl Sunday, so we're going to get started right at two o'clock Eastern. It's twit-clock Pacific, that's five Eastern, 2200 UTC, and we'll get out of the show as quick as we can so you can watch the big game. You can watch us do this live at youtubecom slash TWIT. After the fact, you can get copies of the show at our website, twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in a tech, and, of course, the best thing you could do is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. That way, you'll get it automatically the minute we're done. I'm Leo LaPorte. Thanks for joining us, and I think this has to be the weirdest ending ever, but another twit is in the can. We'll see you next week.