This Week in Tech Episode 874 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.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWIT this week at tech. We've got a great show for you. Brianna Wu is here from the big technology podcast and newsletter Alex camp. Witz we will talk a little bit about Elon and TWITtter, but there's a lot more to talk about, including why tech stocks are crashing and burning by Bitcoin and NFTs are losing steam. How 10 last 10 years of American life has been uniquely stupid. We'll talk about protecting your privacy online. Yeah. And which browser does it best? Plus some big fines for some big companies. Our new, this is fine segment. It's all coming up next on TWIT Podcasts. You love

TWiT Intro (00:00:43):
From people you trust. This

Leo Laporte (00:00:47):
Is TWIT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:55):
This is TWIT this week at tech episode 874 recorded May 8th, 2022. Malicious compliance. This episode of this week@techisbroughttoyoubyuserway.org user way is the world's number one accessibility solution. And it's committed to enabling the fundamental human right of digital accessibility for everyone. When you're ready to make your site compliant. Deciding which solution to use is an easy choice to make, go to user way.org/TWIT for 30% off user ways, AI powered accessibility solution and by worldwide technology and Cisco with an innovative culture, thousands of it, engineers, application developers, unmatched labs and integration centers for testing and deploying technology at scale WWT helps customers bridge the gap between strategy and execution to learn more about WWT, visit wwt.com/TWIT and by mint mobile, those big wireless providers forget that families come in all shapes and sizes. That's why mint mobile decided to shake up the wireless industry with their brand new modern family plan to get your new wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month, including the modern family plan, go to mint, mobile.com/TWIT and by policy genius. If someone relies on your financial support, whether it's child aging, parent, or even a business partner, you need life insurance, head to policy genius.com/to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save.

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
It's time for TWIT this week in tech, the show we cover were the latest tech news. We had too many people in the show last week. So this week we're gonna have too few. No, I think this is gonna be just rip Brianna. Wu is here. Hello, Brianna Wu. From the rebellion pack gaming designer, a woman about town, former

Brianna Wu (00:03:07):
Marathoner, Porsche collector.

Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
Wait minute marathoner. You take your pick. Is that new long marathons short

Brianna Wu (00:03:13):
Marathon? Oh no. I have a like, you know, actually Leo, I hope this isn't too personal to share, but I was looking at the calendar this week and I've spent 20 years sober and a big reason of how I got sober was learning to run every single day. Nice

Leo Laporte (00:03:27):
Was you're running away from your demons.

Brianna Wu (00:03:30):
That's anti it's. It keeps you healthy, right? It just keeps me on balance. Hey, that's

Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
Great.

Brianna Wu (00:03:36):
Yep. I've been doing that for a long time.

Leo Laporte (00:03:37):
And congratulations on that. Thank you. On the 20 year chip, also with this Alex kreitz Mr. Big tech he's the newsletter's big technology SubT stack.com. He does the big technology podcast. Always. Great to see you, Alex. Thank you for being here.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:03:53):
You great to be here. It's awesome to be here. Thank you

Leo Laporte (00:03:56):
For look about Amazon always day one on finer news stands everywhere.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:04:02):
I don't. Yeah, we got all the all the tech giants in there, but mostly Amazon. But yeah, if you're, if you're a Microsoft person, then pick it up anyway. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:04:10):
That's right. It all counts. It all matters.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:04:14):
They've gone from day two to day one. So credit to

Leo Laporte (00:04:16):
Them. I know I can feel it, that there are people in the audience going, please. Don't let 'em talk about Elon, please. Don't let 'em talk about Elon. This has been for the last three weeks. That's all. Oh, and we're all sick of it. I completely understand. The only news here is that Elon is going around trying to raise the money. His stake in, in buying TWITtter of the 44 billion is 21 billion, which even though he's, and this is an important lesson for all you youngsters, even though he's the most, the richest man in the world with an estimated net worth of 270 billion, he doesn't have two nickels to rub together. So he is going to bankers to, I think he's got like 7 billion, you know, just a few billion. So he is gonna bankers to get the rest of it. And so he is got a deck, you know, a PowerPoint, although with Elon and I doubt it's a PowerPoint, he's probably using something Spacey like prey, but he's got something that he's going around saying, let me explain to you why I would be, you know, you should give me money for TWITtter.

Leo Laporte (00:05:20):
And

Brianna Wu (00:05:20):
Have you seen these slide chat Leo, because they are crazy. There was one that came out today showing Elon's forecast for TWITtter and future

Leo Laporte (00:05:28):
Insane,

Brianna Wu (00:05:29):
Like crazy pads. There's no way he's gonna quadruple the number of people on TWITtter. And I know venture capitalists are used to seeing optimistic projections, but this is not like someone working out their college dorms. This is Elon Musk. So

Leo Laporte (00:05:46):
A Paragon of yes, strict financial accuracy. Perhaps you wrote a, a great piece. Alex based on Alex redder, who once ran TWITtter engineering on evaluating Elon's plans to fix TWITtter, it's probably good to ask somebody who's actually at TWITtter, what they think and what did, what did that Alex think?

Alex Kantrowitz (00:06:15):
It was interesting. So we did it as a podcast on big technology podcast and they wrote up in the newsletter. My voice was totally shot. I had probably COVID light or whatever it was. But anyway, it was really interesting to speak to someone who had run engineering at TWITtter and then asked them what their perspective is on all these ideas that Elon's been bringing up. There are some good ones in there. I think the idea to authenticate every human is really interesting. Twittter. Hasn't done that previously because it's a public company and it has to show user growth. And if they were gonna say, if you wanna be on TWITtter, you gotta use a phone number or an email address to be here. They would lose lots of people. So they just never did it. And so having a private you know, having private ownership actually gives 'em the ability to do this without the scrutiny and the disaster to the stock that wall street would bring. So, so

Leo Laporte (00:07:00):
Eff has said very clearly that anonymity which is often offered you know as a panacea for social networks to eliminate anonymity has a never succeeded and B poses, all sorts of issues for people who have good reason to want to communicate without giving away their true identity. So I think on the surface authentication sounds reasonable. Brianna, you have an opinion on that. I would imagine you do.

Brianna Wu (00:07:30):
I have an opinion on everything in your piece, Alex. And a lot of this is actually informed from my own experience, working with TWITtter. You know, when this was announced, I did interviews with New York times, you know 

Leo Laporte (00:07:44):
For people who don't know NBC

Brianna Wu (00:07:46):
Nightly knows everybody like

Leo Laporte (00:07:47):
This <laugh> so yeah, wait a minute. NBC nightly nose. I have,

Brianna Wu (00:07:51):
EMBI sorry,

Leo Laporte (00:07:51):
Missing that one. I wanna have to watch my

Brianna Wu (00:07:53):
Base flooded last night. I've had about four hours to

Leo Laporte (00:07:56):
Sleep. No, no, it's good. I like the nightly nose and I'd like to watch it. No, but you have been the target of horrific trolling on TWITtter. Sure. You were forced to move out of your house during gamer gate. So people should know that, you know, a little bit about how bad it could be.

Brianna Wu (00:08:11):
So more specifically than Leo something I did was I developed a, I finally disclosed this about three weeks ago that I've, I've actually worked very closely with TWITtters, I trust and safety team over most of the things in your article, Alex. So you know, when Elon is saying, I wanna fix this, you know, the reality is there's actually a huge long history of TWITtter working to fix this from behind the scenes. So kinda starting at the top of this, like making sure people are real. This is something TWITtter actually spent quite a bit of time working on from 20 14 to about 2018. Because the problem was someone would do a death threat account. It would get suspended. And then all these four Chan eight Chan sock puppets, which is ER, the site over and over again, creating new accounts. So TWITtter actually did a ton of work locking down IP addresses and actually requiring you after a certain point to start giving a phone number, if the same IP address was trying to register another TWITtter account. I want to note that those restrictions have been largely lifted at TWITtter in the last three years. Oh so I agree with this, but I think Elon doing that would be reinstating a policy that frankly the board took down, I assume because it impeded growth at the company.

Leo Laporte (00:09:36):
Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:09:37):
Right. And that's the, that's the advantage, right? Is that he doesn't have to show growth. The board has was accountable to shareholders. Elon will be the number one person making decision. Of course he'll have investors and he'll, he wants to take it public again. But I think there are some things

Leo Laporte (00:09:51):
He's gonna make it public again, that's I honestly think that's part of the deck just cuz he's not, nobody's gonna lend him money if there's, if there's not a clear path to profitability, TWITtter has been 15 years trying to make money and failed, failed, failed in every respect. So I understand why he put that in. It's kinda like Michael Dell, he took Dell private. We talked about this last week and then a few years later went public and it's worth a hell of a lot more now. So that's a reasonable thing. Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:10:18):
And the whole appeal of investing with Elon is he turns your stock into a meme stock because there are online hoards of people that want to invest with it. Right. And actually I was surprised would

Leo Laporte (00:10:27):
You put money if Elon came to you and let's say you had a hundred million lying around, would you give 'em a hundred million and say, yeah, I, you, you can, you can double my money

Alex Kantrowitz (00:10:37):
On TWITtter. No. On other things, for sure. Not on TWITtter.

Leo Laporte (00:10:40):
<Laugh> that's the they're in lies a problem. Twittter's tough. Twittter's tough.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:10:45):
But yeah, I mean the guy just said, the guy just said, I, I don't care about the economics of this business. That's what's interesting. Asked me for a hundred million, no way am I getting, but

Leo Laporte (00:10:55):
That's, what's interesting ordering

Alex Kantrowitz (00:10:57):
The money on, on something that he cares about the economics of,

Leo Laporte (00:11:01):
Well now all of a sudden he kind of cares about the economics cuz this, this deck he's going around showing is showing how the road to profitability cuz no one's gonna lend the money. So suddenly he does care cuz he can't RA he has to raise this money. Right. So it's, that's what part of the problem with Elon is it's impossible to know what is, what is actually,

Alex Kantrowitz (00:11:19):
You know, he, of course he has the deck because he wants the money, but I tend to listen to the guy, you know, in his own words, he said it in multiple times.

Leo Laporte (00:11:26):
So you would not let,

Alex Kantrowitz (00:11:26):
This is not about a business, not on TWITtter, on SpaceX and Tesla, you know? Absolutely. But, but not on TWITtter, you know, I would sooner lend Elon money to dig tunnels in LA than I would to have him run TWITtter. Yeah. Not to say he's gonna do a bad job. I just think

Leo Laporte (00:11:39):
So it'd be foolish from

Alex Kantrowitz (00:11:40):
A business perspective is wrong and it certainly Is not, is a bad investment. It's

Leo Laporte (00:11:44):
It's TWITtter's right. To enforce authentication and, and it would certainly make it a better place. And there are other places people who need anonymity can go. So yeah. I mean, if you don't care about making money, if you don't care about losing people he says free speech, free speech, free speech, but spam is not is a free speech. I mean, spam is protected

Alex Kantrowitz (00:12:06):
Speech and this is one of the things that I spoke with Alex redder about. Yeah. What basically said you can what, okay, so if you, one of Elon's number one things he wants to do is build a, a, is to get rid of the spam box to do that. You build a classifier that says, okay, there are a spam here. There's no spam there. So let's do what we can to wipe out the spam on the site. Right? The thing is that like you turn a dial so you can make it like a weak classifi fire and basically, or the classifi fire, you could, you could turn it weak and say, you know, we'll, we'll allow for complete as close, free speech as we can. And we're gonna get a couple of bots or you're gonna say we wanna nuke the bot, but then you're gonna get humans you, because the classifi fire is gonna be like, oh, looks kind of bot like that same

Leo Laporte (00:12:46):
Problem, spam email. Right. Which we have not yet

Alex Kantrowitz (00:12:49):
Professed for sure. Yeah. So

Brianna Wu (00:12:51):
If I could

Alex Kantrowitz (00:12:52):
Personal fucking book of mine, spam email with a newsletter man, it's tough. Yep. Go ahead.

Brianna Wu (00:12:57):
If, if I could just add something here. First of all, I just wanna pause and say, I think we're following in like agreeing the Elon wants free speech here. I, I don't agree with that assessment here. He wants to roll back anti harassment policies and that I think curtails speech for a lot of people. So I just wanna say, I don't agree with that framing coming back to the bot issue again, this is something I've very specifically worked with TWITtter on for years, I would say throughout 2016 to 2017, I probably did between 50 and a hundred hours of work compiling bots that were actually dedicated for harassment of various people online and collating this information, sending over to TWITtter to try to get their engineers to cut down on this harassment pot. I know that TWIT as an organization has dealt with a lot of these harassment pots.

Brianna Wu (00:13:52):
It did get better for a while, but again, the money men stuck stepped in and kind of TWITsted those dials in a way because they wanted they wanted more engagement, something. I noted in a lot of the, the interviews I did over the last few weeks was what happened is from 2014 to about 2017. These policies had a lot of support from Jack and TWITtter as a whole, but then once Trump was elected, many of these policies became another stupid right versus left screaming match. So it wasn't normal professionals versus the trolls. It was the right versus left. And from my experience, I saw a lot of the will to really address these things at TWITtter start to go away. And I've personally seen a lot of those safeguards against bots really get rolled backwards. Coming back to one additional point yet you're talking about making TWITtter, private and how that can have good things. Something I think is really under discussed is no one goes to work at a major tech company without stock options. And my own husband is in biotech. Stock options are a non-trivial part of how people in that industry are paid or Microsoft or, or Google or apple. And if this is a private company, I think it's a real open question, how you're going to continue to attract talent. If that is not a steady part of your compensation,

Leo Laporte (00:15:16):
That's a confusing thing that Elon's done, which has said I'm gonna fire a bunch of people so that we can improve expenses. And then I'm gonna hire a bunch more people <laugh>, he's planning to really expand the number of employees at TWITtter. And that's gonna be hard to do without stock options without compensation. Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:15:37):
Isn't it gonna be interesting when Elon gets in there and he's faced with some of these contradictions, like he's gonna be the one that's faced with, do you take the spambots down or do you allow for basically people to say whatever they want on the platform? I do think, you know, in terms of stock, I don't think Elon's can have any issue, getting people to work for him. A there's like just the Elon halo that a lot of people working in tech would like to be around and B he's basically gonna make it into, if he's planning to go, it's true. It's true. You know, whether I'm, he's

Leo Laporte (00:16:03):
Such a polarizing figure, it's so interesting. You love him, you hate him. I will,

Alex Kantrowitz (00:16:08):
Him.

Leo Laporte (00:16:08):
There is a bunch of people that love him that will do it.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:16:11):
And then, and then, you know, he's essentially gonna turn TWITtter. I mean, we'll see what he can do with options and stuff like that, but he's essentially gonna turn TWITtter into like one of the most high profile files, startups that we have, you know, in the tech world, he's, it's gonna be three, four years. Bring it public again. You know, maybe people working on the private version of TWITtter, then have an optionality, a

Leo Laporte (00:16:30):
Buy in.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:16:31):
Yeah. The second IPO. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:32):
If he, I have to give, he's gonna quintuple revenue 500.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:16:37):
Well, that's not gonna happen. I have

Brianna Wu (00:16:39):
To disagree with that though. What makes TWITtter a, what makes this is why I don't agree with you? I think that's right. If you wanna attract white male engineers in the field, I a hundred percent agree with you. There are a ton of Elon Musk cults out there that hang on as every word and would love to go work for what I am personally seeing with women and people of color. And L G B T. People that I know that work in Silicon valley is there's more of a stigma to working with him than Zuckerberg. And that's a non-trivial bar. And I think this affects the end product in a lot of ways, if you're talking about something like Coinbase and attracting a very certain kind of person there, ultimately it's more of a financial product. I believe TWITtter will live or die based on the harassment policies.

Brianna Wu (00:17:27):
And there are a lot of people that leave TWITtter cuz they just throw up their hands and say, I can't deal with the death threats, the rape threats, the harassment, the doxing, the, the armies of sock puppets calling me names anymore. And you know, it's not the Musk Cultus that are going to be able to address that it is women. It is people of color. It is L G B T people that care about these issues. So if you're subtly showing them the door, I just don't agree with you that TWITtter's gonna be able to find the people that needs to solve those problems.

Leo Laporte (00:17:59):
Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:18:00):
Well I think me, look, I, I don't think that that, that you're gonna find disagreement with me on that one. I do, I do think that there's a good chance that TWITtter ends up becoming worse because of this. However, like he is gonna be able to find, you know, people to work. It's, TWITtter's going in a different direction right now. And, and I definitely don't think that there's gonna be a lot of Democrats or liberals that are gonna wanna work with Elon. Especially if you, you look at what he's, what he's tweeting and the question is, can he, can he, you know, it's a big financial investment for him. Can he get his money out, you know without wrecking the company without wrecking society. And that's sort of the experiment we're gonna see with Elon over the next couple of years. So TWITtter, assuming the deal goes through

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
If TWITtter, yeah, that's right. It may not. We, we still don't know. Let's say we need something beside, do we a, do we need something like TWITtter? Do we need TWITtter? And is there an alternative that people could, would, could, or would flock to if they didn't wanna be on TWITtter, do let's start with the first one? Do we need something like TWITtter? How important is it?

Alex Kantrowitz (00:18:59):
We don't need it, but it is just part of the internet experience. I mean, it is in many ways the beating heart of, of the internet. I think that what Jack toy called it, the collective consciousness or the closest thing we have a collect

Leo Laporte (00:19:11):
Square. Yeah. You

Alex Kantrowitz (00:19:13):
Know, I, I think that it's the closest, it's the closest thing we have is TWITtter real life. Definitely not. You know, we should all remember. So it be only has 217 million monthly active users. It's a tiny portion of the population. Right. I personally like the product, is it gonna be a loss? It will survive if there's no TWITtter, it's not like it's oxygen for us. But it, it, it, there will always be something real time live focused on news on the internet. It's just a fact of the internet. And right now the TWITtter serves that role,

Leo Laporte (00:19:40):
Brianna, which, which would you give up Facebook or TWITtter?

Brianna Wu (00:19:44):
Well, I think Facebook, I think Facebook, like if you look at the grand scheme of harm to the world, I think Facebook is, is worse, right? Like TWITtter's not responsible for, you know, say a, a genocide, which Facebook has been. So you know, for me, I, this is a perspective I would get ask you guys to consider. So take the game industry, which I used to work in in the game industry, a lot of men just naturally network with each other. Right. So when I was first game starting in games, I would go to bars after work and try to meet important people in that field to form the connections my game studio would need. Right. So a bunch of dudes drinking at a bar and they would ask my husband if he's the engineer, right. <Laugh> my husband. Can't you

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
Couldn't possibly be. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Brianna Wu (00:20:33):
So my message to you is TWITtter from my experience has been a vital networking tool. As far as like my current boss, I met my boss because he was getting chased by TWITtter mom and I stood up to him for him. And you know there are any number of just really close friends and professional connections. I've got there. If you're talking about TWITtter going away, I really do think this is a place for women and people of color to network. And I think that's really under undervalued in the discussion about this. What I think is very interesting is to me, the key feature of TWITtter that it's missing missing is a really big investment in trust and safety. And if I were working on that trust and safety team and Elon Musk was taking, taking over, I personally would go straight down to the venture capitalists and say, look, give me, this is not that complicated a product, right? Give me 200, $300 million. Let me develop something that truly puts trust in safety. First, not to say everyone doesn't have a voice, but we're gonna get rid of the death and rape threats. That's garbage. It doesn't add anything into the dialogue. And I can really see something like that taking off and really succeeding. I would move there in a heartbeat. And I think a lot of other journalists would too.

Leo Laporte (00:21:58):
You sound convinced that it's possible.

Brianna Wu (00:22:01):
I, I think so. I think app.net failed, but I think Dalton had just a reminder listeners you know, app.net was this $50 month paid TWITtter service. That was open source, very similar to what they're doing now. But there was never a push to develop a really good first tier client for that. I think if you had someone that just won one client, they weren't trying to, you know, develop like 50 different TWITtter services and just focused on trust and safety. I think that's a product. A lot of people would use

Leo Laporte (00:22:36):
The other,

Alex Kantrowitz (00:22:36):
I agree with Brianna here. Go ahead. And I I'll just say quickly that like when TWITtter was found in March 20, March, 2006, so it's been around for 16 years, the human history has far, far out pace, you know, that amount of time. And I think we're just at the beginning of the social internet. Right. And so you look at that and you, you know, you ask a question, can, can TWITtter, you know, be usurped eventually, not only do I think it it's possible. I think it's likely. And the question is what the product is. It's what we have now, but a hundred years down the road, are we gonna be all on TWITtter, yelling at each other? No, I mean, I, I think that's unlikely. Yeah. And I think that's the beautiful, that's the beauty of having a market, right? If Elon goes in and breaks TWITtter, there becomes an opening to build something different like Brianna's talking about, or maybe there'll be many different takes and let the, let the best system win. Yeah. And I think that's cool.

Leo Laporte (00:23:23):
Do you think though, it's interesting, you said Brianna 300 million and I could build a a, a safe place. So something like MAED on an open source federated solution. There's, there's not anywhere near that kind of money to make a safe place. So you think it's gonna take some big commercial entity to do it?

Brianna Wu (00:23:43):
I, I do. And I wanna be really clear here. I'm not talking in a safe space. I'm talking a place where anyone can express their opinions without getting death threats, rape threats, docking bots, you know, defiling their reputation online. I mean, I'm, I'm talking about a place where everyone can have free speech to be really clear. I think the problem is

Leo Laporte (00:24:07):
So these way I love go ahead. It's important to point out your definition of free speech is different than Elon's Elon's as anything goes, as long as it's not illegal, but you're saying that's not really free because then there are a bunch of people who can't speak freely because they'll be immediately shouted down

Brianna Wu (00:24:24):
That that's exactly right. You know, I think the problem is with a lot of these products, you know, all respect to my, my engineer friends. And sometimes we're a little idealist about this and you're like, look, you can just go run your own Masteron instance and do all this free moderation work and your spare time and get everyone to download a client. It's gonna be great. You have the reality is things like discord catch on like a very straightforward, well coded solution. So I just think, I, I, I don't think it's that complicated TWITtter, but with real money and trust and safety, I think that's what people want.

Leo Laporte (00:25:01):
It's interesting.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:25:02):
We also,

Leo Laporte (00:25:03):
Maybe Eli sort of trying to buy TWITtter should have just spent half that money or attempted that amount of money and built something,

Alex Kantrowitz (00:25:12):
But that money can build something if Elon ruins it. So it's almost like he's opening up, you know, you need people like this is a content driven app. Yeah. And you need people to be able to go, basically,

Leo Laporte (00:25:22):
That's the problem. A network effect

Alex Kantrowitz (00:25:24):
Somebody to ruin it. Yeah. In, or in order to be able to build a ahead. It's not a very technically complex product. Let's be honest. So to be able to build something else for, you know, to 300, it would, it would be okay, you'd build the bones of it, but then you'd hire the trust and safety and say, I could do better, but you would need someone to ruin TWITtter proper in order to do it. Also, I think one last thing about this, we're talking a lot about free speech. I also think that there's some real, there's real credibility to the free speech versus free freedom of reach distinction. And this is a thing that I'm on, on the high horse about the hill that I'll die on, you know, for the entire, for the remainder of those social media discussion is that, you know, you can, you can allow people to say whatever you want whatever they want. You don't need to allow them to, to be able to get, you know, get amplified by the algorithms show up in people's mentions. And so it's very possible to create a TWITtter that there is, you know, quote unquote free speech. But one that, that doesn't, you know, necessarily TWITtter is the algorithm is an editor. So the editor doesn't need to give promotion to the horrible things that people say that it's making decisions every day. So it's the, the free speech is such a limited window to look at it.

Leo Laporte (00:26:30):
So Elon has raised about 5.2 billion toward his goals. So far 18 investors, 35 million shares rolled over from Saudi prince AWA binal, which always makes me nervous when I see investments from Saudi. But unfortunately that's kind of the way it is in Silicon valley, a billion dollars from Larry Ellison 800 million from Sequoia capital 700 million from VI capital 500 million from Binance 400 million from Andrews and Horowitz. So that hundred million I was asking you for Alex, he's found, he's found a few people to hand over even more.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:27:12):
If Felan was really smart, he would you know, put his 42 billion into TWITtter and then give Bre Rihanna, like maybe 300 million to build the alternate. Ah, yeah. So we could kind of hedge there and be like, listen, if I ruin this and now I own half of this well is,

Leo Laporte (00:27:26):
Well in a way there is something going on like that because before Jack Dorsey left TWITtter he funded, I think 54 million funded blue blue sky, which is an R and D project to create a federated open source, TWITtter that funding has already been awarded to blue sky. It can't be taken away by anybody including Elon. So there is a group going forward with something that was considered by the former TWITtter CEO and one of its founders to be the future of TWITtter blue sky. So maybe there is an alternative in the works. I don't know, I'm

Brianna Wu (00:28:02):
Worried that's gonna get so caught up with this web three stuff. I really am. I think that's been Jack's focus recently. I do wanna come back to something we were talking about, which was the investment here and how Elon is gonna pay for it. Because I think this is, this is really a bicker discussion here. If you look at Elon's if you look at say Tesla stock, before I say this, I wanna stress. I want EVs to win. The day. Porsche puts out an electro, an electric boxer will be the day I buy it. I've already talked to my dude. He will have me first in line for it. I want EVs to win, but I would urge anyone to go out and look at the price to earnings ratio of Tesla and the amount of money they actually make versus what their stock price is, which is it's so many more times the rest of the industry. It is ludicrous. It just makes no sense from like an objective stock market perspective. Like what can you make? How much

Leo Laporte (00:29:00):
It's a me, it really is a meme stock, isn't it? Yeah,

Brianna Wu (00:29:03):
It's crazy. So, you know, I filed my for a while. I did the thing on Robin hood, where I was just waiting for Elon to tweet about some, you know, meme, stock and a MEMA, you know, Bitcoin or whatever. And I would buy a bunch of it. And I was looking at, I made a fair amount of money last year, just doing that at the same time. I think if you're looking at Tesla and how he's actually going to buy Tesla, because the, the tech stock market has taken such a beating, I think that's the real reason he's taking on all the rest of these private investors who are going to want to be paid back. Some of these people that he's, you know, working with on this, don't have a great track record when it comes to social media app.na, I've already mentioned when's the last time you heard about clubhouse or went on there, you know, there are real concerns here about, you know, how he's going to pay for it and what the long term viability of this is going to be. So just consider me extremely skeptical about every bit of this endeavor, especially financially,

Leo Laporte (00:30:08):
It's really fascinating to watch. We live in a, kind of a different kind of Giled age, where we have these very, very wealthy people and they're able to do things. Some of them like SpaceX and Tesla maybe really are benefiting the world. Some of them not. But it's, it's really, it's not in the hands of the people. What, where this money goes, it it's in the hands of whatever these guys decide is important. And I'm not sure I fully trust these oligarchs to make those decisions. To be honest with you. I don't know if they're the best people to be doing that, but

Alex Kantrowitz (00:30:44):
It's also the benefit of being in a capitalist system. Like if they mess it up, someone else can come in and build something better. True

Leo Laporte (00:30:49):
And go to it. True. it'll be interesting to watch. All right. I said, we weren't gonna do any Elon <laugh>, but it I'd have to tell you the next couple of years, there's gonna be a lot of Elon in the, in the tech news and, and rightly so. It's fascinating. And of course there's always been an outsized. Twittter's always had a, kind of an outsized interest for those of us in the tech media. I mean it has a lot of influence. We pay a lot of attention to it, even though the rest of the world may not. And I guess that's why we care a lot about what happens to TWITtter. We li we live in interesting times. Our show today brought to you by user way.org watch user way.org. I'm talking about making your website, ADA compliant, accessible. Not only is it the right thing to do because you're opening up your website to a much larger group, 60 million plus people, you have a responsibility to make your site accessible.

Leo Laporte (00:31:51):
It's a public entity, so you gotta make it accessible. And with user way it's easy. That was my biggest concern was, oh, I can't afford it. Or it's gonna be too hard. No user way's really affordable. And it's really easy. An incredible it's AI powered tirelessly enforces all the accessibility guidelines though. W C a G WCA guidelines. And I love this. So do our engineers. It's one line of JavaScript, that's it? Because user way is so good. It's used by more than a million websites, including the big guys Coca-Cola Disney eBay. These are companies that really have to be accessible and user way can do that. As you get bigger, they scale with you. If they can handle Disney, absolutely they can handle you. They make best in class enterprise level accessibility tools available to you, your small or medium size business. And then as you scale, you need user way and you're ready.

Leo Laporte (00:32:43):
It just makes business sense. Some of the biggest problems, nav menus, very difficult. So the way this works, if you're blind or you're using accessibility tools, there is what they call an accessibility layer. That's what the screen reader sees. So really what user way does, is make sure that all the information available to the front page to the sighted user is available to the browser in the accessibility layer. It changes colors. Now you've got your Pantone color for your business. Of course we do too. Doesn't change that, but it adjusts human luminance. So it's easier for people with vision issues to read. So user way will generate all tags. That's one of the reasons it needs AI. It can actually see the picture and generate an all tag that matches the picture automatically. You can go in if you want, you can modify it. Of course it fixes violations like vague links, fixes, broken links makes sure that your website uses accessible colors and you'll get a detailed report of all the violations that were fixed on your website. So, you know exactly what it did. Plus you can work with it user way, integrates seamlessly with your site builder software, let user way help your business. Meet its compliance goals. Improve the experience for your user way can make any website fully accessible, ADA compliant, and everyone who visits can brow seamlessly customize it to fit their needs. It's a great way to show your brand's commitment to the millions of people with disabilities. It's the right thing to do

Leo Laporte (00:34:15):
User way can make any website fully accessible and ADA compliant. Just look at the bottom of TWIT TV and lower right hand corner. You'll see the user way icon. And you can see just with one line of code, how it's transformed our website with user way, everyone who visits the site can browse seamlessly can customize it to fit their needs. It's also a perfect way to showcase your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. You don't wanna leave them out, right? Go to user way.org/TWIT. You'll get 30% off user ways. AI powered accessibility solution right now, user way, making the internet accessible for everyone user way.org/user way.org/thank you user way. And thank you, viewers and listeners. Now you can come back. We're not gonna talk about Elon anymore. We're not gonna talk about TWITtter anymore. Although I honestly could spend hours doing it. It's just somehow endlessly fascinating. To me stocks have become fascinating to a lot of people. Big nada drop in tech stocks. Alex is you cover big tech. So obviously you're covering, you know, to some degree the tech stock prices. Is this a reflection of some deeper problem with big tech or is this just the usual financial market fluctuation?

Alex Kantrowitz (00:35:44):
I don't think this is a problem with big tech fundamentally. I think what we're seeing now is what a, what I think is a perfect storm of a number of really challenging factors, hitting tech all at the same time. I mean, just to quickly list them, you have the fed raising interest rates, which deprioritizes growth and prioritizes current profits. And we all know that you know, the valuations of tech are much more about what they can do in the future, cuz they have the ability to grow, you know, in a faster way than let's say like, you know, brick and mortar store. So that's number one. I think that's one of the biggest issues it's caused total rerating the valuations of these companies. Number two is the Ukraine war. You know, you, you take a look at companies like Netflix, right?

Alex Kantrowitz (00:36:25):
Which pulled out of Russia lost to million subscribers posted their first you know, subscriber loss based off of that alone. It's also hit Facebook and snap. I think those are big issues. The supply chain is still a mess. So any company that's gonna sell based off of ads on these platforms is now starting to rethink it and trying to figure out, Hey, how do I how do I handle this? Inflation is, you know, gonna cause people to change the way that they spend. And it goes on and on. And I think that when you have all this hitting at the same time it, it has taken a lot of the air out of the market, which like, let's be honest, the market was not exactly running on the fundamentals for the last couple of years. And now it is.

Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
So this is a, if this selloff actually makes sense, it sounds like,

Alex Kantrowitz (00:37:13):
Yeah, to me, the thing that didn't make sense was the run up on tech stocks over the last couple years. Right. You know, is some of that was

Leo Laporte (00:37:19):
Pandemic though, right? Yeah. Pandemic.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:37:21):
Yeah. That's where I was going. Is the pandemic gonna change the way that Amazon does business? Facebook does business you know, companies like Amazon, oh, we said Amazon, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, you know, zoom, of course it is Netflix. Yes, definitely. And we are still, we're still seeing massive gains that have haven't gone away for these companies, but the market, I don't know exactly what happened for some reason, investors got carried away here and thought that this is the way that we were just gonna be living forever. And I think in the middle of a COVID fog, it's possible to think that we're gonna be living in the COVID, you know, lifestyle forever, which means of course, Netflix should be a, you know, a thousand dollars a share, you know, versus what it is now. Right. 1 99 this last time I checked, it got up to around 700.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:38:03):
But, but you know, it is obviously just not the case. We were always gonna go back into the worlds, setting up when people like go on clubhouse. Right. They thought we were just gonna be on clubhouse, you know, forever. And then the first thing, first night, we're out able to go out for dinner. You know, that goes away. And so like earth to investors, like we, you know, you gotta think beyond and it's a good thing, you know, you gotta think beyond like a couple years of COVID and right now we're starting to see the hangover from which what, what was inebriated market that was just not working on fundamentals, working off for fairy tales,

Leo Laporte (00:38:37):
Bria.

Brianna Wu (00:38:38):
I would, I would love your, I would love your opinion on this because I have a theory about one of the main things that's causing inflation that I don't think is discussed enough and that is the supply chain. So let me tell you about two of my hobbies. So first is collecting CLA classic portions, right? Those prices have just skyrocketed through the roof. Right? I have a 9 97. It was worth $40,000, you know, three years ago today it's worth about 65 or 70,000 pinball machines are another one because people are spending so much time at home and it's so hard to buy these things new right now, my theory about why inflation is really leading to a lot of the, the fear in the stock market. I, I think a lot of it's the supply chain, just cuz it's so hard to get anything cameras, you know even rare video game prices or just skyrocketing just across the board. I mean, I, I feel like we're not gonna get a lot of these. I don't think we're gonna get the market on the right track until we get like our supply line under track because it's the two are very much connected.

Leo Laporte (00:39:46):
Yeah. And it doesn't look like the supply chain is gonna get fixed anytime soon, pat geling your CEO of Intel was saying 20, 25, not next year. That's the year after just in case you don't don't know. Go ahead, Alex.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:40:03):
Well, the big debate is whether this inflation is supply chain related or whether it's interest rate related. I tend agree with you B Brianna. I think that it is supply chain related. Here's a quick story. One of my parents' neighbors works in shipping and to import a container from China. You know, he called me over. He's like Alex, we're making hun money hand over fish, cuz it used to cost $2,000. Now we can make $15,000 and now it's cost. The cost is in the twenties, right? So the supply chain stopped. It started, there was huge demand ships didn't go back online and then you ended up having this massive increase in containers, which ends up, you know, and, and shutdowns in China. Right. Which causes supply contraction. And then yeah, prices go up and my neighbor goes, listen, there's gonna be inflation and low and behold, you know, if you're working in shipping, you know, and he knew, and that's where we are now.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:40:53):
But that being said, the fed is still gonna raise the rate cuz the fed, you know, understands that it's been an easy money environment for the last, you know, couple years that it tried to stoke the the economy because of COVID. And so it feels responsible too. And so you might end up in a situation where you have the fed, raising the rate, which, which inevitably does compress the valuation of stocks and that not so solving our inflation issue, which could be, which could lead us to all sorts of help. And so I do think that when people say, you know, there's a chance we're gonna end up in a recession in 2023. And the fed says we'll have a soft landing. I tend to believe that the you know, the people with the darker predictions on this one, because it's gonna be easy to fix. It was easy to keep our economy humming during the pandemic, which is, you know, somewhat of a miracle. But you know, we have to pay the Piper at a certain point and this is, this is where it's coming.

Leo Laporte (00:41:43):
Might not have been that easy. We also spent a lot of money on COVID relief checks and loans. And some say, that's also been a cause of 

Alex Kantrowitz (00:41:52):
Well, it's like exactly. It's like a credit card.

Leo Laporte (00:41:55):
Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:41:56):
It's like a credit card, easy to whip that out and spend tons of cash at the mall. But then the bill comes and you're like, God damn, where's, where's the money for all this? And it's like, oh, we should have thought about that when we were doing it because it felt like it was free when we were walking outta the mall. But eventually that bill does come do and there's interest on it.

Leo Laporte (00:42:12):
Brianna, you told a story about inflation having to do with your and the supply chain having to do with your hobbies. I I have purchased many, a poke ball plus in my life <laugh> to, to play Pokemon go, Lisa recently broke her Pokemon ball. Plus went online. It was $20 when I bought it before the pandemic $144 hundred 40, but I can get it tomorrow. Now Lisa's no fool. So she shopped around and she found somewhere where she could get it for $20, but you might not get it tomorrow. That was three months ago. And I think it's somewhere, oh my goodness. On a container ship between here in China. But you know, if you want it tomorrow, you're gonna pay a little bit a little bit more for your Pokeball plus, but I,

Brianna Wu (00:43:00):
You can tell Lisa I've got mine and I don't play that game anymore. So if she needs

Leo Laporte (00:43:04):
That, I, oh, you know, we might need an emergency Pokemon plus loan. This allows you to walk around town without having your Pokemon go game out all the time. You just press the button on the ball whenever it vibrates and you collect Pokemon <laugh>,

Brianna Wu (00:43:19):
It's amazing. It's amazing. Alex, I wanna get back to one of the points you were making though about lower interest rates. And you know, I do think that it's been artificially low for a really long time. And I think we don't talk about this enough that, you know, when the, the, the interest rate is that low, it does have, you know, consequences through the rest of the industry, right? Like a low interest rate is not automatically a good thing. The other part of that is I, I think my biggest criticism now that kind of the emergency has passed and we can look at what we actually got for all those, for all the COVID relief that we spent. And I think it's really important to remember. We spent, we literally fired Bacas of cash at the fed. There are plenty of people that made lots of money just following the stock market and seeing what the fed was like, basically propping up with all of that money.

Brianna Wu (00:44:14):
They, they made out like bandits there. And now that we're looking at how much of the money, the trillions that we spent on that actually ended up in the hands of things like rent relief, right? Or you know, things to actually help people it's becoming more and more apparent that money was just frankly misallocated. And we did need more oversight there. So, you know, I, I just think it's important to, to realize when we have an emergency, it, it matters how you spend that money. And I think we're looking at it now and realizing it didn't really help people as much as it should have.

Leo Laporte (00:44:47):
Well, not only that, but to add insult to injury, the value of Bitcoin has plummeted plummeted. I say over the last is now down to $34,000. Which I, you know, if you don't pay a lot of money, a lot of attention to Bitcoin, I thought it was like, well, below 30, but apparently it come back, goes up and goes down. I don't know if you, if you're all in on Bitcoin it's a, it's a crazy ride, isn't it?

Alex Kantrowitz (00:45:15):
Yeah. But you see, yeah, you still did better in Bitcoin than you would've in like Shopify, Netflix over the

Leo Laporte (00:45:19):
Last year. That's true. What, how much is Shopify lose 70% this year?

Alex Kantrowitz (00:45:23):
Shopify is down 70%,

Leo Laporte (00:45:24):
70%. What is, why, why are they hitting eCommerce sites?

Alex Kantrowitz (00:45:30):
Well, they're in the, the cross, heres of all these trends, right? I mean, supply chain, right? That's definitely like Shopify, of course. So if you put Amazon can survive supply chain. So Shopify is much more difficult for smaller merchants too. Yeah. And you put that and you combine that with inflation, right? People are gonna try to, you know, think about what they're gonna sacrifice. I'm gonna sacrifice buying from that Shopify site. Most likely not gonna buy that impulse purchase, you know, from Facebook or Instagram anymore. And then of course they didn't have the growth you know, that they projected. And if you're, you know, in an environment that rewards growth stocks, then you go to an environment that punishes gross stocks and you're not growing. And you're dealing with supply chain and inflation. Your stock's gonna go down 70%. And that's what happened to Shopify.

Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
I don't know if it's related to the fallen Bitcoin. And I don't know if I fully trust the wall street journal on NFTs, but according to the journal, NFT sales are flat lining. Actually I've seen this in other places too. The daily average sale of non fungible tokens down 92% from its peak of 225,000 in September down to 19,000 tokens. This week, the number of active wallets in the market, 88% down 14,000 last week are what's going on? Is this just a people money's tight, not buying NFTs? Is this people saying, you know, this whole NFT thing was a speculative bubble. That's my personal feeling. Are people wing up or is it just a, a normal slowdown?

Brianna Wu (00:47:08):
I think they ran out of bigger fools to market this too. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:47:12):
It's kinda my, kinda my point of view. At some point a pyramid scheme, you get to the top of the pyramid, it's done

Brianna Wu (00:47:19):
A hundred percent. I don't know if you saw this Leo, did you see there's a fantastic YouTube channel called legal equal. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:47:26):
And I did see it. They were the chat, the discord chat sent me a link to it hysterical. Oh,

Brianna Wu (00:47:33):
It's beautiful. It's beautiful. So just in case your listeners have not seen this, it's a 40 minute video of basically the legal case around NFTs and asking yourself very critically, what are you actually buying? And I had to tell you is a spectacular takedown. I was actually more NFT before I saw this video, but, and then when he walks through all the legal arguments, I'm like, Nope, this is a scam. And so his basic argument here is think of NFTs as basically a receipt showing that you've bought something, the receipt does not work in lieu of the strongest protection. You have to actually own something like a work of art. That's a copyright here. You can't say that it's subbed in one for the other. So as far as who actually owns the NFT itself, it's actually very, very murky argument. He also goes into the way a lot of these are marketed in how there's a very, very good legal argument that they fall under the good old fashioned lawsuits that you can find yourself faced with for fraud you know, pumping up schemes, promising something and getting something else.

Brianna Wu (00:48:38):
And even like, if you're a creator creating these NFTs and hoping to make money fr from them you could actually find yourself legally bound to follow us through, on some of these promises. An example he gives is like someone, the buys, an NFT, having a right to basically talk to a creator about that. Well, there's a certain way to look at that agreement saying, well, if someone buys a NFT, you've gotta get outta bed at 2:00 AM and go jump on a zoom meeting with them, or you're out of a line with the contract. So there's a lot of reason to be very legally careful with these. And I think that there's very little reason to feel like you actually own the work of art that you're actually buying with the men Ft.

Leo Laporte (00:49:22):
Wow. Yeah. Watch the video. It's really worth watching. Go ahead, Alex.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:49:26):
I was speaking to a Columbia business school class and NFTs came up and I was like a little bit probably too provocative, but I called it like business QAN, which is unfair

Leo Laporte (00:49:36):
<Laugh>. But

Alex Kantrowitz (00:49:38):
My, my, my thought on it was that it felt a lot like a collective delusion to me that like, are people like looking at signs and stuff and believing in something that just wasn't there. And the next day I get a a FaceTime from a, a, an investor friend of mine, Jason Stein, and he's like laughing. And he has like one of the students from Columbia business school who was in that class sitting in his office, talking about me and and I was like, all right, Jason,

Leo Laporte (00:50:07):
Can you believe he's called it business? QAN on.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:50:09):
Yeah, I know. Okay. That's fair. So, so Jason and I are gonna have a debate about this on big two oh podcast this week. Oh, good. But I will say we spoke a little bit about it. I do see some merit to it, but I think why did NFTs explode the way they did? And it goes back again to zero interest rate policy when you can't get a return by keeping your money on cash, because their interest rate is zero. If you look for alternate and riskier investments and, and, you know, okay, that could be riskier, bonds, riskier stocks, and then all of a sudden it became kind of anything Bitcoin NFTs. And the thing is when the interest rate zero and people are, everyone's looking for those investments. So it does seem like the, the price and the value is just gonna keep going up because there's just more and more money flowing into the system. So why are NFTs, you know, crushing at the same time the stock market is it's because now the fed is ripping that under and people are starting to see, I can get safer, more predictable returns. I don't need to be as risky, you know, as I did before, that makes

Leo Laporte (00:51:08):
Too much sense.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:51:09):
Yeah. And so they leave, they leave business QAN on and they go into, you know, treasury bond. Yeah. You know cabals. Yeah. And that's, that's where it goes.

Leo Laporte (00:51:18):
I will say that I do not as a matter of editorial policy by individual stocks of any kind nor NFTs, I do own some Bitcoins cuz for a while we are allowing Bitcoin donations, but I can't access them cuz I forgot the password. So I really, I don't have a dog dog in this hunt in any, in any way. But I do have my, all of my retirement money, the money I hope to live on at some point invested in the, in the market in index funds. And so, you know I am somewhat sensitive to this and I realize that at least half of America does not own any stock as no, they're not in this at all, but it does impact the economy. It does, it does affect inflation. It affects what the price you pay at the pump and at the grocery store. Maybe not directly, but it's certainly indirectly.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:52:10):
And it's crazy right now. I mean, you can be in cash and then down 8.5% because of inflationary, you can be in the S and P 500 and be down 13%. Yes. It's like nowhere to go right

Leo Laporte (00:52:19):
Now. Yeah. When the pandemic started, I thought I was real smart and I converted all my holdings to cash, figuring the market would completely crash. And that turned out to be the, exactly the wrong thing to do. So you know, I tuck my tail to my legs and got back into the S and P 500 into index funds. And it's been a great ride until, you know, a few months ago now I'm thinking maybe I should have stayed in cash. I don't, I dunno. I dunno.

Brianna Wu (00:52:48):
It's pretty scary right now, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:52:50):
It's scary if you're 65, it's scary. Yeah. If you like most Americans didn't save enough money for retirement. Your social security is not gonna provide for you. It is scary. And as somebody in that age group, I'm very sensitive to that, you know? Oh,

Brianna Wu (00:53:06):
A hundred percent. Yeah. You know, I think it's crazy is, you know, when I bought like my pinball machines to keep me sane over the pandemic, it's like, I mean, those have all made money. I could go sell them today and I will make 20% on what I paid for them.

Leo Laporte (00:53:20):
You know, I wish I bought more of those poke balls, to be honest with there,

Brianna Wu (00:53:23):
You

Leo Laporte (00:53:24):
<Laugh>, that's the best that one buy him a 20 sell at 144 that's 700%. <Laugh>

Brianna Wu (00:53:31):
A hundred percent, you know, I have a real, I have a really dark, like, not dark, but this, this is my honest opinion about what's going on with NFTs. I think that, as you said, Leah, we have an entire generation that doesn't invest in the stock market. They've really been kind of locked out of economic prosperity in the way that, you know, my generation, I think your generation

Leo Laporte (00:53:53):
Has mine is I'm the boomers. And, and, you know, we are the ones who, I'm sorry, <laugh>, that's all I can say. We put you and my kids who are millennials and the gen Zers. They are dead end jobs. They're working their butts off. They have, you know, horrific and they can't afford a home. They are really screwed.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:54:18):
Right. These stinks to be a millennial. You come out, you got recession, then you move into you know, the, the economy recovers, get another recession. And then you're just like, you know, hitting your stride of your career and COVID happens.

Leo Laporte (00:54:31):
Horrible.

Brianna Wu (00:54:32):
Yeah. Yeah. But to come back to my point with this I, I, a hundred percent agree with that. I think that you have a generation there and they're looking at well, how do I get on my feet? Right. How do I, how do I get a, a footing? And I think Bitcoin and NFTs have been, I think it really appeals to people.

Leo Laporte (00:54:52):
Well, it's magical thinking, but they're at the point where they need it. They need magic, right.

Brianna Wu (00:54:56):
A hundred percent. And they're, they're thinking like, okay, I under like NFTs and Bitcoin are technically complicated. They just are. And you think to yourself, okay, I'm smart enough to understand this concept. Therefore it's worth investing my money. And there's definitely this meme culture behind it that Elon's been very successful in, you know tagging himself onto. And I think it's, it's really led to these these investments that are detached from, you know, things I certainly learned when I took business classes, you know, PDE ratio or, you know, just basic fundamentals of the stock. And I think it's, it's, it's another scam on an entire generation, in my opinion.

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
Yeah. I, although I do, I understand go that and I've been having this kind of discussion with myself and with others for about a year as stock prices get more and more divorced from fundamentals, they become more and more indistinguishable from cryptocurrencies, their pure speculative investments. And at that point, well, why not invest in Bitcoin? It's just as speculative. There's no, if a stock, if Elon Musk's Tesla is worth hundreds of per, you know, hundred times more than the entire auto industry put together than it's speculative. So might as well buy Bitcoin. I completely understand that. Go ahead, Alex.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:56:22):
I mean, I'll just say that I wish when I was younger, there was a, a game stop situation or an AMC. And I think the, but don't you

Leo Laporte (00:56:29):
Think many people are gonna get hurt too, by that there's yeah. For every upside, there's a downside.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:56:34):
Totally. But it's much better to get hurt in your twenties, cuz then you start to about how to not, to not get hurt. And I do think that this, this moment really brought a lot of retail investors online and they're gonna make mistakes in their twenties that, you know, they otherwise might have

Leo Laporte (00:56:45):
Been, maybe they'll learn thirties

Alex Kantrowitz (00:56:46):
Or forties. Yeah. And learn, Hey wait, you know what? No, that's a good point. I mean like once people, when you put money into something, you all of a sudden have an incentive to learn a lot more about it and maybe people will start to like, you know, they're probably, you have young people reading CMBC, you know, people, I didn't read it when I was in my twenties. You have young people reading the, reading, the website, watching, watching the channel and they're gonna learn, you know, eventually you speak to enough people and you realize, you know, the way to make money in the markets is to put it in deceased. Like you're doing Leo and then wait for a while.

Leo Laporte (00:57:16):
Yeah. But I didn't learned that you're right. I didn't learned that to my forties, fifties. Exactly.

Alex Kantrowitz (00:57:19):
Wouldn't it have been awesome. If you had a game stop when you were in your twenties where you could learn that hard lesson early and then make the right moves. Cause you know, that, that does, it does compound over time. So I, I took optimistic lens over this and I say, it's probably a good thing. And hopefully, you know, this crypto thing will sort itself out. But overall I think

Brianna Wu (00:57:39):
I don't, I agree and disagree with that. I agree that it's good that some of these people are learning a hard lesson. Like there were stories about, you know, people and what they did during the, the game stop explosion, like people that went and took $80,000 of, of debt out at like 15% interest rates. Right. Like just crazy stuff at the same time. You know, if we're talking economics here, there's an externality to all of this. And the externality is you can look at poll numbers and you can see, you can ask this generation, like, do you believe in like the fundamentals of like the stock market working and you know, like the, the basic promise of America? Like, do you believe in things that frankly I'm a gen Xer, I'm the last year of gen X. We believed in this. Yes. And I think that this generation is coming away, remarkably cynical with this. And I think they do have a correct impression that the stock market is rigged for certain people. Like you look at payment for order flow. And, and just the ways that you fail to like you know, basically break the market for people with more information, I think they've come to a correct conclusion. So yes, I agree with you that they could learn a lesson here. But I think that the

Leo Laporte (00:58:54):
Lesson may be pretty dystopian. <Laugh> right. It's DYS by the dystopian. Yeah. 

Alex Kantrowitz (00:58:59):
Yes, but, but look, I think that first of all, it's more than just the market that, that isn't forming these opinions. And second of all, if you are in your twenties and you understand a concept like payment for order flow, you are way ahead of the game because order

Leo Laporte (00:59:15):
Market and many people learned that lesson from Robin hood

Alex Kantrowitz (00:59:18):
Look, yes, you're gonna just to, to bring this point home you, the market is rigged. And if you understand that that's when you can start to make decisions that are gonna be good for your long term financial health. If you are not gonna understand that and you're gonna stay out, you're gonna be in cash and you're gonna be a down 8.5% because of inflation. So are there gonna be horror stories that we can point to without a doubt, there are in every situation that being said, is there gonna be a large benefit because there's gonna be financial literacy among young people that there wasn't, let's say in my generation, absolutely. A hundred percent here. Here's the, I view that as a good thing.

Leo Laporte (00:59:54):
Here's the thing, Alex. And I think this is what Brianna is saying as well. Yeah. All well, and good. They're getting an education if there's an alternative that it, that makes sense. And right now all you're learning is it's all, you're outta luck. There is no like, well, okay, good. And now I understand that the market is rigged, so I'm gonna do, what, what is this? What is the alternative? Right.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:00:22):
I mean, it's obvious. You're okay. It's what, where is it rigged? It's rigged in places like Robin hood, where there's payment for order flow, where your free trade isn't trade and all young kids know that right now. So what do you do? You're gonna go to a different service where that doesn't make money off of payment for order flow and probably invest in index funds and sit there and wait for a long time. Oh, I hope so. And that's how you're gonna make money. I hope

Leo Laporte (01:00:42):
So. I mean, that's why, that's why always telling my kids, you know absolutely. Yeah. By their index funds there. Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:00:48):
There are can of books that get passed along once you, you know, speak enough about this stuff, you know, and I think really highly of, of the younger generations right now. And I, and I do believe in speaking with, you know, people in that generation, I do believe they get it. I do believe there's a hunger to get it. And I think they're gonna be way better off or they're gonna be mistakes. Yes. But can you find places, can you find places to get good returns on your money? A hundred percent. That is true. You know, they could probably, you know, being young right now by the S and P 500 discounted, you know, given that it's going through the hard time that it is at the moment. So I, I don't think it's all, it's all negative on this front.

Leo Laporte (01:01:26):
I'll I'll if you're under if you're under a certain age, how old are you Alex?

Alex Kantrowitz (01:01:31):
35.

Leo Laporte (01:01:31):
Oh, see you see, you're still baby, still a young, you're still a baby. <Laugh> Brianna. From my point of view, you're still a baby. This is when I woke up. I, and this was, I wish it had been sooner. By the way, you're zoomed in. Can you UN zoom in on my screen? The guy he's passed away at the age of 67 is very, he sad. He was the guy who ran the institutional portfolio for Yale. And there you go and did very well. Surprisingly well wrote a book called unconventional success that I highly recommend to anybody who is under Alex's age, who has learned this lesson, but then now doesn't know, well, okay, so what should I get? I, I guess I even lost my shirt on DOJ going <laugh> what should I get? And that's is exactly the strategy you and I have been talking about and it's, but it's a little bit more detailed, highly recommended unconventional success by David SWS and S w E N S E N. There is, or

Brianna Wu (01:02:33):
You could do what I do and just put all your money into Porsches

Leo Laporte (01:02:36):
Or by Porsches and pinball machines, baby,

Brianna Wu (01:02:39):
I'll wait for those to, to go up.

Leo Laporte (01:02:40):
That's a great strategy, a great strategy. You did say something though Brianna that I think is problematic and not just in the markets, but in general, the United States, as, as I think anytime people humans achieve something as a group, it's because they have a shared mythology mm-hmm <affirmative> and in the us, we had, and I say it past tense. I'm sad to say we had a shared mythology of, you can make it with hard work and intelligence. That democracy is good. Speech is good, that we all are in this together that we need to compromise to get forward. There were all these mythologies we had about the United States and the, and probably the most important, the rule of law and those, I feel those mythologies have been shattered. And I think that once that happens in a country and I've seen it happen in other countries the center cannot hold things fall apart.

Leo Laporte (01:03:44):
You will not survive as a nation. And it is re now I say mythologies, because they're kind of made up. I understand, but the belief in them, the fundamental belief in the perfectibility of humans and a country that can go forward and take care of all of its people and all of that, we've never really done that. Right. But we believed in it and we tried to do that is what keeps a country together. And I feel like that is where we really are gonna have a problem. And it's not just the markets. The markets are just a bellwether of what's gonna happen, ultimately, where we've lost. We've kind of lost our sense of what the American dream is all about.

Brianna Wu (01:04:27):
Yeah. I, I, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article a couple of weeks ago, this, this really struck me as the most true thing I've ever read

Leo Laporte (01:04:35):
About Jonathan hate, right? Yeah.

Brianna Wu (01:04:37):
I, I think so. It was the one that basically talked about what is going on right now. Why the power

Leo Laporte (01:04:43):
About 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid <laugh>

Brianna Wu (01:04:47):
Right. Yeah. It was talking about how it's like the tower B myth in the in the Bible. And if you're, you didn't read that growing up, basically what happens this myth that basically everyone left speaking different languages and it's how we kind of fragmented and as a, a species and went all around the globe. And I think that's really true. I mean, look at the discussion we just had on Elon Musk and what a different, you know, concept free speech means to me as someone that's really dealt with the brunt of trolls in a very dramatic way into someone like Elon Musk, we have such separate assumptions there. I think when society doesn't have a, a story that they can all like make sense of the world with, I think it's really dangerous. And I think, you know, for me, when I was coming of age, I remember the Gulf war, the first Gulf war with George Bush senior.

Brianna Wu (01:05:41):
Right. And I think that that incident really shaped a lot of the way that like my generation saw these American institutions, cuz we saw all these things working basically. And I think if you come to what's happened in all the years since it just seems to get worse and worse and worse and all of us have our own different stories about why we've gotten that way. And I just, I don't know how much longer American society can last if we don't have some sort of shared story about who we are and where we wanna go.

Leo Laporte (01:06:17):
And, and I don't mean to say that if you were black you know, 50 years ago, life was good. I don't mean this kind of foggy nostalgia for the good old days. I mean, and I think you would mean as well. I know you mean as well. Yeah. Brianna, that dream of what it could be that was first set out in the declaration of independence and the constitution. And of course we've never lived up to, but we still have to dream and work and, and strive for that. And once people disagree and say, no, you know, that's not it. Then we work in different directions and the whole thing falls apart. And there is a story that worries me considerably. It really does.

Brianna Wu (01:07:01):
There was a story that George West senior liked to tell about the the first Iraq war and basically a bunch of American soldiers captured a bunch of Rockies. And they were really, really worried that they were going to be, be killed and tortured. And the American soldiers laughed and said, look, we're Americans. We don't torture people. Of course not. And not to say that it's not true that we haven't created atrocities as a nation. But I remember hearing that at 12 and saying, that's my ideal about who I wanna be as a country. Right, right. That we would laugh at the thought, which is why things like Abu grave hurt so much. Cause it, it, it was so contrary to my personal ideals. That's exactly right. I think if you ask a lot of people in this generation, like, is this a story of America? Is this the direction we wanna go? I think you get a much more cynical answer. And yeah. I think we have an adult conversation about how we've missed the mark and God knows we have, but we need stories about who we wanna be and where we wanna

Leo Laporte (01:08:03):
Go. It's really about who we wanna be. Not who we were ever. Yeah. but who, how we want, want to be. And of course, yeah. As soon as we decided that waterboarding's not torture, we did torture. Yeah. Yeah. We do have

Alex Kantrowitz (01:08:15):
We're I would just say we're suffering from a, a decline in institutions across the board. And, and important ones religion, for instance, you know, the, the fastest growing religion in the us is none. Right. People are not identifying with religion. Community organizations are in decline, especially after COVID our government is not exactly acting, you know, like adults in almost every, in many cases. And then work, work, you know, we, we get a lot of meaning from work and you know, a lot of, lot of jobs out there have, have gone away or you know, are, are just like, yeah, not terrible, not, not good to be in like you know, for instance, in an Amazon fulfillment center and when all that stuff starts falling away and you don't have a link to your community, then you add in two, two years of being, you know, forced to sit at home. It does devastating things to society.

Leo Laporte (01:09:08):
Yeah. I think that's true. We, we said during the pandemic, this is bringing to a head problems have been simmering under the surface for some time. And now they're here. Yes. Yeah. Like income inequality and like a breakdown of institutions.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:09:22):
And, and then you add on top of that, the fact that the health institution hasn't, didn't exactly conduct itself. Yeah. In a great way. They were way too sure. They said, we know this to be true. We know this not to be true. And they didn't know. And you know, they lost credibility and you know, of course then, then once it was very easy to politicize the health establishment because they lost trust, you know, among the people. Right. And, and especially if you come out of a pandemic, you can't, you can't trust in the institution of, of like your, your health, your health your centralized health systems what, what can you trust in? And, and the answer for many people became nothing.

Leo Laporte (01:09:57):
Let's not forget. This was the week that we crossed a million deaths due to COVID 19 in the United States.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:10:05):
Some

Leo Laporte (01:10:05):
People, yeah. That's a lot of people. Alex Cantre is here, big technology. He does the big technology podcast, big technology do subec.com phrase newsletter. The author of always day. One about big tech. Of course, Brianna Wu game developer, executive director at the rebellion pack and Porsche and pinball collector. <Laugh>, that's it. Our show today brought to you by worldwide technology WWT and Cisco WWT is working with clients all over the world to transform their businesses at the heart of WWT, the advanced technology center, the ATC, an amazing, amazing research and testing lab that brings together technologies from all the leading OEMs, more than half a billion dollars in equipment invested in the lab at Lisa. And I visited it a couple of years ago and were blown away. I can't wait to go back, but what's great about the ATC. I mean, of course it was designed initially for the engineers and partners at WWT to use it, to spin up proofs of concept and pilots, to understand technologies, how they interact to confidently select the best solutions.

Leo Laporte (01:11:16):
But now huge WWT has made it available to all of the members of its platform. You for free hundreds of on demand and schedulable labs representing the newest advances in multi-cloud architecture and security, networking, primary and secondary storage, data analytics, AI DevOps, you can test out, you can test out products and solutions at the ATC before you go to market, not just labs, technical articles, expert insights, demonstration videos, white papers, all the tools you need to stay up to date with the latest technology. Most recently, WWTs engineers and partners have been using the ATC to help customers confidently select the best solutions for enabling hybrid work, something we're all facing. Now a wwt.com you'll find valuable resources related to hybrid work technologies, office hoteling, practical advice for reopening offices, strategies for improving your digital workspace. We, we all need this. This is a, we are in a Terra in cogni unknown lands right now, but WWTs been there and they can help.

Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
And when you're ready to dive deeper, you can launch on-demand learning labs to gain hands-on experience with specific technologies and develop your skillset in a risk free environment. If you've got questions, WWT has all kinds of events where you'll hear directly from experts as they discuss solutions to common hybrid work challenges. If you wanna learn more, there's all sorts of additional resources and demo videos, and just, it's amazing. There's so much to explore and it's all@wwt.com. Create an account today. Follow hybrid work to stay up to date on the latest technologies, events, research content, and more, whatever your business need. WWT worldwide tech can deliver scalable, tried and tested tailored solutions. Worldwide technology brings strategy and execution together to make a new world happen. And man, we are in a new world to learn more about WWT, the ATC to gain access to all those free resources, wwt.com/TWIT create a free account on the ATC platform.

Leo Laporte (01:13:30):
It's all there for you. Wwt.Com/TWIT. We think of so much for supporting this week in tech. We, we were getting, getting very philosophical, very heady here. <Laugh> it's great. I love it. I love it. We have smart people on it. It's great to talk about things that sometimes I think don't get talked about, you know and they're so important to understanding what's going on. Otherwise it's just chaos. So it's all about the metaverse we're really just living in the metaverse Leo. Oh, I hope so. I hope so. I can't wait. That's how it goes. As I've pointed out before, if you read about the metaverse in science fiction, invariably, I don't care if it's Neil Stevenson or William Gibson it's to escape a dystopia Ernie Klein. It's always to escape a horrific hellscape of real life. <Laugh>

Brianna Wu (01:14:25):
Give me them goggles.

Leo Laporte (01:14:26):
<Laugh> let me slap 'em on. Now. I was talking about that.

Brianna Wu (01:14:30):
Yeah, there was a story that came out last week. It was about the, the Pope not wanting to go on the record about a big, long a huge project they were doing in the metaphor. So I was like, did you not read snow crash? This is literally the plot with Reverend Williams. Perley gates. I'm like, who's El Bob refe. And this is it. Berg. Is it, is it Elon? Really science fiction.

Leo Laporte (01:14:54):
Say that father Robert baller definitely involved. At least he's one of ours. Right?

Brianna Wu (01:15:01):
I would trust him. I would trust him.

Leo Laporte (01:15:04):
You know, he talks about being working. He says, I can't talk about what we're working on right now. He's he's the digital Jesuit. He was called back for those who don't know he was a regular, he was one of our hosts called back to the Vatican some years ago. He was the guy who got the Pope on Skype. <Laugh> he's the, he's a Jesuit. So as is the Pope and he's tr and the Jesuits trust him. And I think he's their ambassador to the world of technology. I have to think Robert's fairly involved. And by the way, I should mention this Thursday, Robert's gonna do a fireside chat on on our club tweet. So we're gonna ask him aunt, you're gonna ask him, say Robert, are you working on the metaverse for father? The, the holy father father Robert baller will be here at 9:00 AM.

Leo Laporte (01:15:58):
If you're a member of club tweet, you can watch participate, live, ask those questions. 9:00 AM Pacific, May 12th. Just one of many things that go on inside club to it. If you're not yet a member, can I encourage you to join? It really helps us cover the bills, frankly, seven bucks a month. It's not much to ask you do get a lot of benefits, add free versions of all the shows because you're giving us money. We don't need to have advertisers. So that's, that's nice access to the discord, which is always great. And there's lots of stuff going on in there. Events shows we don't put out on the feeds like the untitled Lennox show, the GI fizz Stacy's book club. They're gonna be doing Neil Stevenson's latest termination. Chuck.

Brianna Wu (01:16:40):
They're so good.

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
I can't wait to read it. I'm trying to read it before the it's big, it's thick. It's heavy book. Oh,

Brianna Wu (01:16:46):
It's good though. Love it's worth

Leo Laporte (01:16:47):
Your time. I love, I love Neil. So that's gonna be the conversation on June 16th in about a month. You have a little time to read that so much stuff going on. Plus the TWIT plus feed, where stuff we talk about not in shows, appears plus those other shows and, and every in the discord, I, the discord is incredible conversations about not just all the shows, but autos, coding, comics, ham radio, and hardware and movies and music sci-fi software, even sports and sport ball. Wuhoo. It's <laugh> that's the

Alex Kantrowitz (01:17:25):
Club TWIT discord.

Leo Laporte (01:17:26):
Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:17:27):
Nice. So it's, it's moving well.

Leo Laporte (01:17:29):
That's awesome. Oh yeah, because I was here

Alex Kantrowitz (01:17:30):
When you launched it and it looks like

Leo Laporte (01:17:32):
It's really, we're very happy. Robust. Yeah. That's awesome. It's it's I think it's become a great place to hang out. We're very happy with it. It's a, you know, I realized discord is a social network that oh, yeah. Is really fantastic. Actually. so seven bucks a month, TWIT.tv/club tweet. Yeah. I think since cuz you know, we've followed closely what you do, Alex and others to kind of, you know, create a membership and you know, we're trying look at all the best practices and stuff. And when we started what was that a year ago now? Something like that. When is the anniversary pretty soon? I think we now have, I don't know, is it 4,005,000 members? The discord itself is only about 3000 people. Not everybody wants to join the discord, but we're very, it's helped us along 4,000

Alex Kantrowitz (01:18:21):
Members. Congratulations.

Leo Laporte (01:18:22):
Yeah. It's thank you. And thanks to our members. We really we really appreciate it. All right, let's talk. So I, before the show, I was talking about privacy and how I've changed my tune. For a long time, I worried that being a EST about privacy was going to hurt the kinds of technologies, slow down the development of technologies that would be fabulously, useful things like Google assistant you know, Siri is Apple's privacy forward version of that, just not as good because it's privacy forward. And, and for a long time, I thought, well, privacy. Yeah, everybody. I mean, I understand the desire for privacy, but really all of these tracking technologies are doing is you know, targeting ads. What's the harm in that, right? Everybody makes a big deal about it, but, but you know, and people like Devar would say, well just, well, the insurance companies get ahold of it and they deny you insurance cuz they know you went to dunking donuts four times last week.

Leo Laporte (01:19:27):
Yeah. When that happens, you know, maybe there's a cause for concern. Well it's started to happen. <Laugh> so now I am a little more careful and a little less Sangu about privacy concerns. Here's the one that stopped me in my tracks. There's a data broker called safe graph, not a good name, not an appropriate name. They were selling for 160 bucks because motherboards vice bought it. The data of everybody who visited a planned parenthood over a period of time, 160 bucks, no warrant, anybody could buy it. And now you immediately see the risk, especially in light of what may be the overturning of Roe V. Wade. That could be information that could put you in jail yeah. In Texas for sure. And get you sued. Safe craft says, oh <laugh> whoops. We didn't mean to do that and we're gonna change it. Yeah. Okay, fine. But these data brokers, you could see, you could start to see as, as stories come out about law enforcement and others using these data brokers about people being docked you know, there's a big story about how apple, Google snap and others had inadvertently given information to people posing as law enforcement. They didn't check cuz it was an emergency request and they said, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an emergency. Here's a Brianna W's home address. We're starting to see the problem here. Your OPSEC is probably very good by now, Brianna. I'm sure

Brianna Wu (01:21:05):
It, it is. But I wanna tell you Leah, with my, with my current job, we do a lot of ad targeting. We do work with a lot of these data brokers and it's, I hesitate to use the word dystopian, but it is very concerning just how much information they have and what they can do with it. Let me give you a specific example if I want to, if I'm working in an election and I want to target people that have let's say an issue of like I, I don't know $15 minimum wage or, or let's say bankruptcy, right. I can actually go out there and request everyone. That's read an article on say how to file for bankruptcy and their Google results. And then that will be tied to their unique ID identifier. And I can serve them ads on that across multiple networks.

Brianna Wu (01:21:56):
I mean, it is a truly staggering amount of information there I've been saying for a long time, this needs to be regulated. And just one more point here. I didn't know this until I started running for Congress. And I started talking to various people that were basically defendants lawyers that worked defense cases. There is such an asymmetric power of discovery in if the government wants to pursue a case against you in the information they are able to subpoena and find we're talking nest cams where your Google account has been. Basically they can just keep collating all this data until they find something that is basically builds the case that they want. Oftentimes the choosing data that is incomplete or, you know, may give them a incorrect picture of a situation,

Leo Laporte (01:22:48):
But might be very compelling to a jury because it's technology and well, we know how good that is

Brianna Wu (01:22:53):
A really good example. There was a guy that had someone else's phone with him in his bag and he ended up being put on the, on the location of a murder scene in New York. Right. that was very compelling evidence. And you know, you don't have that same power discovery to prove that you aren't there. So this is a very important issue and I'm glad people are finally saying this.

Leo Laporte (01:23:18):
I'm sure this is you're finally Alex saying, well finally, Leo, you finally came around, took you a long enough.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:23:25):
<Laugh> okay. I, I mean, it's interesting cuz I am sympathetic with your view. Like I do think or your previous view. I do think that like a lot of times data can actually be useful for us. Especially when it comes to targeted advertising, like I would rather have better ads than worse ads. And I think that like many things on the internet, the discussion of privacy has become flattened and polarized. Whereas it's an extremely nuanced conversation where we should say, you know, I don't think you can say it's good or evil. I can say there are, I would say there are useful and destructive purposes. And do we have the attention span to, to talk about some of the, you know, useful and destructive purposes and actually push us towards a better internet versus having to be all in or all out, you know, on one way or the other.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:24:08):
And I feel like we've always had good discussions about it here, you know, on TWITtter. And I, and I think that this is yes yet another data point where we look and, you know, we found more stuff that we need to be skeptical about, but you know, I'm gonna go back to a point I made earlier, which is that we're in the like first inning of the, of the internet. I mean, so early on, and this is like our opportunity to determine what the direction we're going in is gonna be. And you know, I, I think that like if we can find the wherewithal to concentrate on these cases, we're actually gonna be in a much better place than if we go all the way on one side and say privacy is good, you know, or all the way on the other side and say, you know, I, you know, it's bad. Like there's, there's nuance here, but these cases that you're bringing up, I mean are extremely, you know, concerning and alarming and stuff that, that we do need to get start, start to get dealing with.

Leo Laporte (01:25:01):
Here's one I have mixed feelings about also from motherboard advice, the CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed COVID lockdown orders, new documents from the CDC show that they bought access to location data. Again, from these brokers harvested from tens of millions of phones that, I mean, in this case, I think there's a real benefit for public health benefit. They were now, you know, they were analyzing an aggregate you know, they didn't care about what you or I did. They, they wanted the, the massive people, they tracked patterns of people visiting K through 12 schools. They specifically monitored the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo nation. Good or bad.

Brianna Wu (01:25:53):
I, I think I read that and I'm like, okay, I can see what they're doing is a study about this, to understand the effect of the, the policy that they are, are bringing out. And then you can see how it's gonna be weaponized and turned into another stupid left versus right. Screaming match, which is very concerning obviously. Yeah. To come back to your point though, Alex I don't think that we need more conversations about this. What I think we need is smarter regulators who are actually interested in thinking about these policies and coming to better decisions on this. Doesn't ultimately matter what you and I say, there's gonna, if it's legal, there's gonna be a market for it. And they're gonna care about making money more than doing the right thing as I think our current situation shows. So I think I, I just feel like there's no path forward. I have confidence in where Congress is going to get really interested in regulating ad tech to make sure it's not abused in these situations. Unfortunately, so that's what

Alex Kantrowitz (01:26:57):
I feel well. I mean, yeah, look, I, I think that, like, it's not exactly what I say. I think the regulation is always downstream of like the conversations that experts have. And I hope that when we have reg, you know, if regulators are interested in this and I know they are right, then they should also have nuance conversations about it. But what all I'm trying to say is painting with a broad brush. Isn't gonna do anyone any good because it, you know, there's plenty of details here that need to be addressed. And, you know, if we're gonna go in and say like, it's, it's exactly the problem, go in and say like, you know, they need to be regulated. They don't need to be regulated. It sort of gets us back to a place where we're not making smart policy. So I'm, I'm, I'm just, I'll stand here on the table and, and scream for nuance conversations, you know, places like this and the, and the public forum. And then when eventually when it gets there in Congress and in, in the halls of government regulators as well.

Leo Laporte (01:27:44):
An interesting sign note on this, by the way vice got this information from a freedom of information act CDC paid a data broker guess who safe graph $420,000 for access to a year of data safe. Graph's investors include Peter teal. The former head of Saudi intelligence, Google was so concerned about safe graph. They banned the company's apps from the play store in June

Alex Kantrowitz (01:28:12):
One graph

Leo Laporte (01:28:14):
Unsafe <laugh> unsafe graph, but <laugh> again, I mean, I, I think the national health agency, the CDC probably ha has a real interest, a public interest in finding out some general patterns on how people are behaving in pandemic. Although if you look at the list of potential use cases that the CDC listed, there's quite a few of them, quite a few of them, and some of them you might feel a little funny about, I think we do need to talk about this. And unfortunately, I don't really trust Congress to do anything sensible about any of this. So you use data brokers, which is interesting to me, Brianna. So you clearly, you have a use case that you feel is, is good and justified. 

Brianna Wu (01:29:07):
So here I just got done working in an election last week, right? We, we, our candidate was very strongly advocating, a $15 minimum wage, right. We targeted that ad at people that made under $60,000 a year. Right. And were part of the party that we were representing and were registered voters, right? Those are some subgroups. And I think I would argue that an ethical use of all this data is look, there's a, a politician that's going to represent a policy that you believe in. I, I don't think it's really problematic for me to find that out and then show you information that will get you out to vote. Right. What I am saying, and this is coming back to your, your nuanced conversation, Alex, is that when you really dig down deep in how they get those ad identifiers and how they figure out who is interested in what it's in some really creepy ways. And I think there's, I, I think we don't really have consent about all the ways we are being tracked around the internet. Just one last thing. I am pretty paranoid. I would say in the amount of information I give up as I go around the internet and I've looked at my own file there, and it's, it's frightening the amount of information that's there, particularly with news sites and articles that I read that they end up having information about. So it's

Leo Laporte (01:30:32):
Very tempting is to give up, isn't it? It's like,

Brianna Wu (01:30:34):
Yeah, it really is. To be

Leo Laporte (01:30:35):
Honest, what are you gonna do? So

Alex Kantrowitz (01:30:38):
The CDC shouldn't be asking for any data, cuz those people couldn't tie their shoes right. During this, All the differents. There's another problem recommendations they're giving like, come on. Yeah. Focus on the health stuff first, then go get the data

Leo Laporte (01:30:53):
Low public service announcement. So there has been for a long time, most of the browsers, except notably Google Chrome have had a setting called do not track. Google says we don't do it because it doesn't do anything. And in fact, they're right. Do not track is a suggestion <laugh> and most in fact, as far as I know, all sites ignore, do not track well, thanks to GDPR and the California, consumer privacy, X E CPA. There is a new sheriff in town, which has some this time, some real teeth, global privacy control as part of GDPR, you may or may not know, but in G under GDPR, the, the fines can be as much as 10% of global revenue, they can be a serious, much more serious publishment punishment. That was a problem with do not track. There was no consequence. CCPA and GDPR are giving us a new tool.

Leo Laporte (01:31:55):
And right now this is available in Firefox 100, which just came out. You can see I'm at a website called global privacy control.org. And you can see at the very top, I've got a little red light saying the GPC signal is not detected. Please download a browser extension that supports it. There are extensions. Steve Gibson talked about this on Wednesday on security. Now there are extensions. You can add I don't know if you can add it to Chrome, to safari, I believe an edge that will turn it on. But if you are you lucky enough to be using Firefox is a good reason to use Firefox. You can type about colon config in Firefox and that it'll warn you. Yo, this is risky. You're gonna do advanced configuration. Are you sure? You know how to, and then there's a search box at the top.

Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
Let me okay. I'm in full screen and you can barely see this, but I'm gonna type global privacy, one word. And I'll see, before I finish two settings, privacy, global privacy control enabled and privacy global privacy control functionality enabled. They are both false by default, but if you click that double hair headed arrow, you can turn 'em to true. And now you've made Firefox any site you visit say, I want global privacy. Now, if I go to the global privacy control.org, it can see the signal and you can go further. If you want, you can test it against the reference server and see, you know, what's going on. There is, I at least have some hope that this will be honored by websites. It is never gonna be available in Chrome. It's pretty clear. Google has no interest in global privacy of any kind. But at least in Firefox, you can do this. And I think it's worth turning that on. So a little public service announcement there 

Brianna Wu (01:33:49):
You know, it's so hard cuz Chrome is such a great product, but just for exactly it, the reason you just said, Leo, I have no faith in, in any of the, the, a tracking stuff on there. And sadly I'm willing to sacrifice Ram and speed for privacy on my machine.

Leo Laporte (01:34:05):
<Laugh> I'm just gonna say try Firefox. It's great. And the other reason I use Firefox is we're rapidly getting into a monoculture where we only have Chrome and Chrome derivatives edge is Chrome. Brave is Chrome Vivaldi, Chrome. A lot of these browsers they're Degod chromium is Chrome, but they're still the Chrome engine. And regardless of how you feel about privacy, I don't think it's a healthy ecosystem for all the web to be dominated by one browser engine. It makes it easier for developers, I guess, but I want to keep fire and Firefox's usage numbers are tumbling now. I want to keep it alive. So I use it on all my machines and you know, it's a great browser highly recommending it also containerizes Facebook. That's right. Doug. Yeah. And that's another good reason to use it. I it's our, you know, when I see any, whenever you guys say with a Facebook like button you're, you're sending a signal back to Facebook unless using Firefox and you can turn that on and it will lock that I have come completely around on this. Not, I just, I feel like, all right, especially government agencies have now shown a willingness to impinge on our privacy for their own gains. And it's Leo it's too bad.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:35:25):
We got a new guy here.

Leo Laporte (01:35:26):
I know <laugh> I don't, but I I'm with you, Alex. I don't wanna be privacy absolutist. It is

Alex Kantrowitz (01:35:32):
Newing. Yeah. And I think that like your, from what I understand, like, you know, having spoken with you about this over the years, your standpoint has basically been like it, it's almost as if the, the conversation went too far to one end. Yeah. And you're like a little sanity here. Yeah. And now we're starting to see, okay, actually now people are abusing and you're like a little sanity here. So I think your position has actually been consistent. It's about, you know, trying to reign in some of the polls on both sides, which I find Valant

Leo Laporte (01:35:59):
<Laugh> Valiant and quick SOIC, <laugh> foolish.

Brianna Wu (01:36:02):
I'm just trying to understand the period of tech history, where we went overboard on, on privacy implementation. It made users so safe that it made the product worse. And

Alex Kantrowitz (01:36:15):
I just can't, I'm not saying implementation that would've been, yeah, I'm not saying implementation. I'm just saying that, like, there was a moment where the conversation, you know, became scaremongering and, and, you know, sort of lost credibility because it was being held by people who didn't have a full understanding of the technology and was proposing solutions that just were, you know, weren't gonna be effective. And that's what I'm saying. I would want those conversations to be drawn back to a place where we actually can have solutions we can implement that will work, you know, versus people like giving Ted talks and selling books, you know, based off of you know, I ideas that sound really nice and when addressed in public, but are, you know, can be extreme and difficult to actually put into pub put into practice.

Leo Laporte (01:36:55):
And I'm just enough of a utopian utopist to think that there's some really amazing things, you know, that can be done with the information, the data stream that comes off of me, that would be very useful to me. And so in a way, what I really wanna advocate it for is tight controls on what can be done with that data, so that I wanna be able to give Google my data and not have it automatically be sent to somebody like safe graph for use against me in a court of law. But I want it to be used by Google to give me valuable insights into, into, you know, or just to simply to pop up my airplane ticket. When I arrive at the airport, those are useful things. You may say those are such toys that I should probably give those up in favor of better privacy, and maybe I'm gonna have to, but I think if you control it, if we control what they can do with it, then there are some real benefits to be gained by giving them that information. We just have to get to a point where we can trust them with it. I don't, I, you know, even apple, I'm not sure I can completely trust apple with that information. Maybe that for some people that's the solution just use an iPhone.

Brianna Wu (01:38:10):
No, I think that's, I think that's silly if you think Apple's gonna protect you from everything. I think another under discussed thing we're not talking about is as cars really become more always on internet appliances. You know, there's a, there's a real risk of this, this information. Like let's say you drove to an abortion clinic, right? Oh, absolutely. You that if your car

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
Knows Tesla knows records everywhere you go.

Brianna Wu (01:38:37):
One of my one of my newer cars, it has GPS built into it. It's used just like a, a subscription thing you can use to find out, you know, is someone's speeding while they're driving it or where it's parked, if it was stolen. Right. But the downside to that is like, do I really believe that Porsche who hasn't updated their iPhone app since like the last 10 years, do I really believe they've got top notch, InfoSec team stopping those those servers from being hacked? Do I really, really believe Porsche's gonna put up a real fight if the United States government starts subpoenaing them to find out where their, their users have been driving to. I have no faith in any of that. And I think that's why we need smart regulation.

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
Yeah. Yeah. Completely agree. And, and maybe there is a technological solution. So many of the chat rooms reminding us about Tim burner Lee, the solid foundation, this was a goal. And I, and still around, as far as I know, the creator of the worldwide web wanted to create a system where you would kind of silo your personal information and, and control what happens to it and offer it you know, intentionally to people who could use it appropriately, but, but maintain control of it. And I think it's a very good idea. We'll see if it happens, but I think there might be technological solutions. I might have higher hopes for that than, than regulatory solutions.

Brianna Wu (01:40:04):
Yeah. I think that's

Leo Laporte (01:40:05):
Fair. Yeah. Although I am turning on that global privacy control for sure. <Laugh>, mm-hmm, <affirmative> I definitely I definitely want that on 

Alex Kantrowitz (01:40:13):
That's weird, cuz like the best solutions are often like, you know, let people control and then let them make money on their data. Yeah, but those are just kind of, I mean, it's possible that that's where we end up getting to, but those can be tough to actually give people a strong enough return that they're gonna be able to wanna put the time in to do

Leo Laporte (01:40:30):
It. Yeah. Take a little tiny break. More to come in just a bit with our great panel, Alex, kreitz host of the big technology podcast. I'm gonna definitely listen next week or

Alex Kantrowitz (01:40:42):
I guess, oh, it's gonna be fun. I can't

Leo Laporte (01:40:43):
Wait. Can't

Alex Kantrowitz (01:40:45):
Wait. We're gonna get into it.

Leo Laporte (01:40:46):
Yeah. You're brave

Alex Kantrowitz (01:40:48):
Nfts.

Leo Laporte (01:40:48):
Do you have a format for debate or is it just a, you know, you back and forth or how do you, how are you gonna do that?

Alex Kantrowitz (01:40:54):
The format is no holds barred.

Leo Laporte (01:40:56):
Oh God. Full time. It's the, the cage match where take a

Alex Kantrowitz (01:40:59):
Break at some point. That's right. But it is, it's gonna definitely be full on podcast. It'll

Leo Laporte (01:41:05):
Be fun. Oh, I can't wait. Just search for big technology podcast. Wherever you get your podcast. Yes, that's right. Okay. Brianna Wu. Who also does her share of podcast, including the fabulous rocket with Christina and Simone, Simone rush four and Christina Warren congratulate. Christina. I'm sure you have are being featured by NPR.

Brianna Wu (01:41:31):
Oh my gosh. Yeah. I'm worried. It's gonna fuel her bad spending habits already. If you know Christina, she will waste money on anything. She was featured in NPR for her pension to buy up dead tech company merch like Theno stuff. And here

Leo Laporte (01:41:47):
She is wearing a movie past t-shirt in the NPR article. She has CNN plus pop socket. She said the holy grail was her was Theranos any Theranos merchandise. And I've seen some Theranos merchandise like pens, very expensive. So you're right. And we're

Brianna Wu (01:42:05):
Working on that. I told her, I'd go halfies with her. If she wins some pens, then yeah. She can have three of them. And I'd take two 

Leo Laporte (01:42:12):
Who she is with your festival. T-Shirt <laugh> God,

Brianna Wu (01:42:16):
This is what I love about rocket. We are, we're a serious show that we cover the really big stories, but the other half of it is just ridiculous stuff like fire Fest and DNOs. And I, I, we're a really good mix of silly and serious

Leo Laporte (01:42:34):
Relay.Fm/Rocket. And it is definitely I two great shows, big technology podcast and rocket from our two great contributors. Our show today brought to you by mint mobile. Oh, I love my mint mobile man. I spend, as you might imagine, a lot of money on cell phone service you know, as an occupational hazard, I have Verizon sprint T sprint and T-Mobile kind of merging. That's been an interesting experience by the way. I'll tell you that story. And at and T I have all the big three, cuz I'm keeping an eye on all three, but I'll tell you what, when it's my money to spend, I got mint mobile. If it's your money you're spending, you'll want mint mobile, the best wireless carrier, 15 by earlier 15 bucks a month gives you an incredible deal, unlimited nationwide talk and text and plenty of data.

Leo Laporte (01:43:29):
You can buy more if you need it. But four gigs of data a month, I think for 15 bucks is a that's that's all in 15 bucks. Now they have a new family plan and this is awesome. They call it the modern family plan. You'll only need two lines to get started. Mint. Mobile is amazing. They basically got rid of the stores and saved enough money that they were able to give you wireless just 15 bucks a month. And now with the family plan, you're getting even more, all plans would come with unlimited talk and text high speed data on the nation's largest 5g network. The family plan lets you mix and match data plans. So it's like Goldilocks in the three bears. You can get it just right for whoever you are in the family, Papa bear, mama bear, a baby bear. Everybody gets the right amount of data for them.

Leo Laporte (01:44:20):
You can use your own phone, bring your own phone. They will send you a SIM for free. They'll port your number over. So your number doesn't change or you can buy a phone from in fact, I've got an iPhone. I see, I love my iPhone. I see from min mobile to get your new wireless plan, take a look at the family plan. If you've got two or more lines or just for yourself, 15 bucks a month, including the modern family plan mint, mobile.com/TWIT it's minty fresh. They'll even send you the plan, the SIM card and everything for free mint, mobile.com/TWIT. It's time to shake up the wireless industry. And I'll tell you what, when it comes to spending my own money, that's where I go. Mint mobile.com/TWIT cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month. That's it's like a quarter of what I spent with these other guys. It's amazing for the same service.

Leo Laporte (01:45:18):
Let's see here moving right along down the rundown, Google IO is coming up this week. Google's developer conference. We're gonna do a a live coverage of the keynote. 10:00 AM on Wednesday. Jeff Jarvis will join me and Jason Howell, as we cover the keynote, we don't know how long it'll be. This is sort of a semi return to normal. They're they're gonna have an audience, but it will be mostly Google employees. And I think some lucky journalists we don't know what they're gonna announce, but there seems to be some consensus. They will announce some things, including a, a pixel watch. Google has never made a watch. Ooh they've they've yeah. They've offered Android wear for some time other companies have made it like Motorola and fossil, this <laugh>, this is in the middle, comparing it to the galaxy for classic and the iPhone on the left in the middle is the Google watch minus a band.

Leo Laporte (01:46:21):
This is the Google watch that was found. See, I'm a little suspicious. I think Google planted it personally. <Laugh> cuz they wanted the attention. But we know a lot about the watch now because this one was left behind in a bar somewhere kinda like the iPhone four, according to nine to five, Google cellular version will be wearable. I'm sorry, with 300 milli amp hour battery. So there'll be both cellular and non cellular. It's gonna be pretty and round. I like how it looks with detachable interchangeable bands, kind of like the apple watch. 

Brianna Wu (01:47:00):
I, I think we've got numb to just how, how do I say this badly designed a UI? The apple watch is I didn't really understand this. It's terrible. Yeah. Until I did TWITtter blue did a survey thing where they wanted to ask users about if it was actually good or not. And I'm like, sure, I'll do that. I'll show up. I'll participate in that. And I used the money I got from that to buy Frank and apple watch. And my husband is just not good with technologies. He's a PhD in bacterial genetics, smart guy worked on the coronavirus vaccine, but he does not understand technology at all. And watching him struggle to use this interface really made me go. There's a lot of, you know, potential here in the market for something like this. That's actually usable for normal people because like, just like figuring out your messages, okay. Push the button on the bottom, scroll down until, you know, you hit the right out, tap on it, wait for it to load. It's terrible. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
Can Google do a better job? I mean, part of the problem is the screen is teen C winy. I don't know how you make a good UI on that screen. Samsung's done a pretty good job, their Beil, it turns. And that actually is the foundation for the operating system. Like to see notifications on the Samsung, watch you turn the bezel counter clockwise and it scrolls to the left. You turn it clockwise. It shows you apps on the right. And it just, it's a pretty intuitive thing. I really like it, but apple does not do that. I, I hardly the only time I touch touch the watches to unlock it. Oh. And to do apple pay, I do do apple pay and apparently never under apple thinks I'm exercising right now, which is <laugh>, that's another, that's

Alex Kantrowitz (01:48:49):
What happens in the home stretch of the, of the pod.

Leo Laporte (01:48:51):
Yeah. Suddenly feels

Alex Kantrowitz (01:48:52):
Like you're

Leo Laporte (01:48:53):
Exercise and I'm exercising. Boom. Yep. I just

Alex Kantrowitz (01:48:55):
Understand like, okay. So I had the watch for a bit, never really caught on with me. Can't your phone? Just do everything. Like why do you like the watch the

Leo Laporte (01:49:04):
It can, and it can't. I mean, I could on my phone, open up apple pay, tap the phone. It's a lot easier just to double tap the button and go like this with the watch. The exercise features the they're pretty

Alex Kantrowitz (01:49:16):
Good.

Leo Laporte (01:49:17):
I'm not gonna carry a phone while I'm exercising. But before I go on a, on a walk or before I go to work with my trainer, I will choose the appropriate workout. And it monitors that keeps track of that is that beneficial. You know, it's the gameification of exercise is probably some value. To me, a lot of people pay attention to their rings. We've seen some life saving benefits in the apple watch. It will notify you if your heart rate is abnormally high. Especially if you're not doing anything. It will I, you know, I was just at a concert and it will monitor the audio level and warn you if it's above 90 decibels and, and can risks your risks, you're hearing. So things like that I think are, are, are kind of cool.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:50:04):
Well, I think the fact

Brianna Wu (01:50:05):
I use the, I use the exercise features religiously. I never leave the house without my apple watch. It's it's I am it. It's my favorite thing to, to use just cuz I love to work out. Yeah. I'm for whatever reason, I'm very, very susceptible to the gamification of working out like Peloton has a new product, the Peloton guide, which is a weight product that I love because it's the exact same thing. Like, can you fill up the meter as you're doing weight training? But I, I just, I feel like I'm such a freaking niche case case for it that I just, I don't think normal people are, wanna make sure that they've burned X number of calories a day to remind them to give you a second workout. I just don't think that's what normal people do. Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:50:52):
But the fact that it's gone health is probably helpful to Google's case because apple, initially I was reading trip Nick's book after Steve. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:50:59):
He

Alex Kantrowitz (01:50:59):
About that. Yeah. And he talks about it. Right. And apple initially wanted it to be a fashion accessory if it remained a fashion, accessory, Google screwed. But the fact that it's gone to from fashion to health, I think puts Google in a position to actually start to compete with apple.

Leo Laporte (01:51:12):
Are you saying that Google can't do fashion <laugh> yes. I think I am. I think you're exactly right. <Laugh> 

Alex Kantrowitz (01:51:23):
I remember the last thing they last wearable. They did. I'll give you a hint. It you wore it on your face.

Leo Laporte (01:51:28):
Oh God. The Google blast. Oh yeah. You're right. Oh yeah. We called it the nerds contraceptive device. Cause you're never gonna get a date when you're wearing that. Yeah. Google. Yeah. Google is kind of the classic wash your hair with soap kind of engineering type. Right. <laugh>

Alex Kantrowitz (01:51:51):
Hey look, if it works, it works.

Brianna Wu (01:51:54):
I think apple pushes this idea that their apple watch is like super fashionable and it's just not,

Leo Laporte (01:52:01):
It's not at

Brianna Wu (01:52:02):
Mcdonald's. Yeah. It's it's not even attractive. It's so ubiquitous that it's just, it's

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
Everywhere.

Brianna Wu (01:52:07):
It's meaningless. I mean, I have a very nice one. That's red with the Millies loop and it's nice, but 900 million other people have it. And you're just, it's like saying Dockers are fashion. It's so ubiquitous. It's just

Leo Laporte (01:52:21):
Not right. Does where, so Christina strikes me as a kind of a fashion icon.

Brianna Wu (01:52:27):
Yeah, definitely.

Leo Laporte (01:52:29):
What is, what is her opinion of that?

Brianna Wu (01:52:32):
I mean, she wears it, but you know, she's apple watch. She, she has a bunch of the different bands and stuff, but that's all you can do.

Leo Laporte (01:52:39):
Same thing with her Renee Richie, just buy hundreds of bands, which by the way, apple makes a pretty penny on. If you buy apple bands, holy cow. Anything else that you'd like to see from Google? They'll certainly talk about Android 13, which is already in the beta. I, I don't know if they will announce another pixel book. I wish they would. They, this seem to be in as typical Google. They just, they got bored and they their attention wandered and they've completely lost track of Chromebooks. I'm sure they'll say something about it. Google has an opportunity to do something with work from home. I think, I feel like the hybrid hybrid work is gonna be interesting. Speaking of work from home I've heard numbers as high as 50% of apple employees are not happy with Apple's plans to bring workers back to the campus.

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
And people are starting to quit, including Apple's chief of machine learning, who explicitly said I'm quitting because I don't want this new return to the office policy. I don't wanna come back to the office. Wow. The director of machine learning, Ian Goodfellow has resigned. He was there three years now. Somebody <laugh> some wagon on TWITtter probably pointed out, you know, three years is telling that's usually how long it takes to vest your options. <Laugh> so it could well be he's just quitting to spend more time with his money. I don't know. But he did. I

Alex Kantrowitz (01:54:14):
Don't think it's yeah. It's probably not great to be a machine learning scientist inside apple

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
Or Google. Can't

Alex Kantrowitz (01:54:19):
Talk to your colleagues. I think it's probably better to be a machine learning worker inside

Leo Laporte (01:54:23):
Google. Yeah. You keep your job. They keep firing people for not towing the line. Right. Good fellow said I believe strongly more flexibility. Would've been the best policy for my team in his goodbye note. So director of machine learning and the special projects group he's moved on petitions have been circulated it's estimated, as I said that about half of the apple staff, which is a huge number say yeah, we're we don't like this return to office and apparently great. Many of them are, are willing to quit.

Brianna Wu (01:55:01):
I remember there were complaints. I used to live in Palo Alto and I got to know a lot of apple engineers when I lived there. And there were a lot of people that were very frustrated with their very strict policies about like working from home when you're sick, they would, they would box them to a couple of days a month if I remember correctly. If you think like, I don't even think this is that complicated. The last time I was driving through Cupertino, I couldn't believe how much worse the traffic was then, you know, in the decades, since I left there just difficulty getting around, like imagine being stuck in that for like one, two, you know, two hours a day, both ways. Why would you wanna do that? And I, I, I see like my own husband, he's been working from home for, you know, the entire pandemic. He's not going back to the office. So I think if apple wants to recruit top people, they're gonna have to show some flexibility on this.

Leo Laporte (01:56:00):
Yeah. I don't blame people. Although I've through the entire pandemic, I've come, come to work <laugh> but I think you get spoiled working in your jammies with the refrigerator right there. And I don't think there's any evidence that you're not getting the same job done. Right.

Alex Kantrowitz (01:56:16):
Well, not everybody thinks that way. I think there are CEOs that I've spoken with who want their people in the office. I think that's the wrong perspective, but I can see like, you know, we all know when, when people are working from home, you know, it's, it's different. Like some people will work just as hard. A lot of people won't work just as hard, but I just find it interesting that it's apple because apple doesn't let people inside the different divisions speak with each other. There's a great tweet from benig Devis he goes news report, apple insists all staff, go back to the office so they can bump into people from other teams in the hallways and discuss what they're working on in informal unstructured ways. Oh wait. <Laugh> because they're not allowed to do that. So it is surprising that apple, lot of all companies is insisting that this happened, especially Always Steve, you can't have that cross pollination.

Leo Laporte (01:57:03):
That was always Steve Jobs's dream. The story may be apocryphal, but the story was that Steve only wanted one bathroom per floor in that giant ring camp because he wanted people to move around and talk to each other and bump into each other and talk. And that Johnny I've, I think, convinced him that no, you need more bathrooms, fatigue. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:57:27):
How is that?

Alex Kantrowitz (01:57:28):
That's true. Reality distortion filter was, yeah. When you, when you believe that your employees can talk to each other about their different projects, when you explicitly do not allow them to

Leo Laporte (01:57:36):
Do that, you prevent them from it. Yeah. Yeah. How was that trip? Book, everybody seems to like it quite a bit. Did you, did you find,

Alex Kantrowitz (01:57:42):
I I learned a lot about, I enjoyed it. He's he just came on the pot also. I enjoyed learning a little bit more about Tim cook as a young person and Johnny I, as a young person you know, the stuff when it gets into the company. Okay. But like learning a little bit more about where Tim cook comes from, like trip went down to his hometown and actually found like he had said that he had seen a cross burning and there was a deacon from like a nearby church and basically like the people from Tim Cook's hometown fact, check him on that. And there's some things that don't fully add up. Oh. So I just found that to be kind of interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:58:16):
Hmm. New York times reporter good sources. I talked, he said to 200 people to write the book. It seemed to be mostly about Tim cook versus Johnny ive and and, and ultimately explained Johnny's leaving, which I, I think most of us suspected had something to do with Johnny ne not being happy with the direction apple was taking. And, and as an apple user as much as I love Johnny I's design sense, I'm kind of glad Apple's gotten back to function over form. And I think most apple users feel the same. In fact, apples sales of the Macintosh have jumped their quarterly results were very good for the Macintosh and apple estimated that 50% of buyers of the new Macintosh computers had never owned a Mac before. So that is very good news. For apple PC sales have not been great AMD itself though. Sales say sales jumps 71% for AMD. Maybe that's more of an indicator that people are looking for budget PCs.

Brianna Wu (01:59:24):
I, I don't know, Leah, I read that 100% supply chain stuff. Like it is so hard to get the parts to build PC right now, graphics card. But you just, the entire bit of it 

Leo Laporte (01:59:36):
Maybe easier to get radio on chips than it is Invidia

Brianna Wu (01:59:40):
Chips. A hundred percent. Yeah. It's impossible right now with all the cryptocurrency mins, huh?

Alex Kantrowitz (01:59:45):
Oh, interesting. They also have a strong B2B business. And in this past quarter, B2B businesses tended to fare a lot better than, than businesses that are catering to consumers. Interesting. So I think that bolstered AMD in a big way,

Leo Laporte (01:59:58):
Lisa Sue doing a, a, a really good job there at AMD. Very

Alex Kantrowitz (02:00:02):
Impressive.

Leo Laporte (02:00:03):
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. All right. Let's take one more break. We're almost done. <Laugh> I have to say that, cuz I think this can be a marathon and and for, for either one of you, I appreciate your patience. Last week, Corey doctoral said, I'll do the show, but I cannot sit for more than two and a half hours. So you gotta keep it. You gotta keep it short. And I said, okay for you, Corey, absolutely. Our show today brought to you by oh, brand new sponsor, very excited about him, policy genius. I think you might know the name, whether you're graduating from school or planning a wedding, welcoming a baby switching jobs.

Leo Laporte (02:00:43):
It's mother's day. It's really time to think about protecting your family's finances. And that's why you need life insurance. I didn't have life insurance until I had kids, but that's when we got life insurance, it can give you peace of mind that if something happens to you, your loved ones will have a financial cushion, but you gotta choose the right insurance at the right price. You may have life insurance for your job. We do, but it's not enough. It's not enough. Most people need up to 10 times more coverage to properly provide for their families. Of course, life insurance gets more expensive as you get older. So it's, it's better to start a policy sooner rather than later. And I strongly suggest you go to policy genius to do it a one stop shop to find the insurance you need at the right price.

Leo Laporte (02:01:37):
There's a link at our show pager. You can go to policy genius.com/TWIT policy genius.com/TWIT to get started in minutes, you will get personalized quotes from a bunch of top companies. So you can find your lowest price that actually can save you. It's. There really can be a big difference in policies, same policy from different companies can be as much as 50% apart in the cost. You could say that's right. You could save 50% or more on life insurance by comparing quotes alone with policy genius. And then because it is, you know, it, you are getting your life insurance via policy units. They have licensed insurance agents. They are required to by law. They'll be there to help you throughout the entire process. So you can ask 'em questions. They'll they're not selling insurance though. This is the beauty of it. They're there to help you so you can understand your options and make you decisions with confidence.

Leo Laporte (02:02:33):
They don't work for the insurance companies. They work for you. They're not salespeople. They're there to give you the information you need. Policy genius. Doesn't add on extra fees, very important. Giving our last conversation. They do not sell your info to third parties. They really understand that that privacy is very important to us. Just check their reviews on Google or trust pilot, thousands of five star reviews. You can get coverage. As in as little as a week, you can get coverage. If you want to, without medical exams, they've been doing this for quite a while. Since 2014, in fact, policy genius has now helped 30 million people shop for insurance. They've placed over 150 billion in coverage and they do it the right way. By giving you information and giving you a choice, strongly recommend you do this policy genius.com/TWIT. Yes, they have home auto disability, renters, insurance, and more.

Leo Laporte (02:03:28):
They have the full gamut, but I today I want to cuz it's mother's day you gotta take care of your family, you know, and mother or father and you. And sometimes that means if you gotta think about the unthinkable, if you're not gonna be there to take care of him, who is policy genius, policy genius.com/you can get free life insurance quotes, see how much you could save. See how little it'll cost to give you that kind of peace of mind. I was very glad I did it. I'm very glad. You know, Henry's Henry's TikTok career is not necessarily gonna take him to the moon and back. Do you know that Brianna, that he has a, my son's 2 million followers in TikTok. Did you know that salt hang got hungry? So he's, he's just, he'll make you hungry Tuesday. He's gonna be on access HollyWud again for something. Yeah, there's something they're doing. That's I think pretty exciting. It's called, I think the sandwich head, head to head sandwich competition. He'll be, he'll be on access HollyWud on Tuesday with another sandwich maker, another famous sandwich maker <laugh> And, and, and and then the audience will choose which one they like the best. If he makes the vodka par sandwich, there is no question in my mind, none at all, that he will win. But 

Alex Kantrowitz (02:04:55):
But we all know that if, if they if they count the votes fairly, he will win. And if not Rigged Too soon,

Brianna Wu (02:05:05):
<Laugh> maybe not. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:05:10):
Let's we're gonna come back with our final, a couple final stories. In fact, a very big victory for people in the Southland. But first let's take a look back at the week that was cameo lays off, close to 90, including the C P O CTO and VP of marketing.

Brianna Wu (02:05:27):
Why don't you get on cameo and see how you do? I'd be so curious.

Leo Laporte (02:05:32):
What, what should I say? Don't you wanna have like your trademark thing that you say, Hey, Hey,

Brianna Wu (02:05:38):
Hey, <laugh>

Jim (02:05:43):
Previously on TWIT, Matt break, weekly

Leo Laporte (02:05:47):
Apple self-service repair is now available that equipment though. Leo

Brianna Wu (02:05:52):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:05:54):
216 bucks. I need a quest

Brianna Wu (02:05:55):
All in there.

Leo Laporte (02:05:55):
We should just get one of these for the studio. It looks like you make a cup of coffee. Yeah,

Jim (02:06:01):
IOS today,

Brianna Wu (02:06:02):
Let's talk about web cams. We can make these better. There are waves. There's two different apps that make using your iPhone as a web camera, much easier. It allows you to take the great camera on the back of your device, even on an older iPhone and use it as a web camera. Have you got a cat on your head? Micah. Now there's mic has a, Micah has an AI cat on his head. Okay.

Jim (02:06:24):
Hands John photography,

Ant Pruitt (02:06:25):
The one and only who 49ers photographer amongst other things. Canon Explorer of light. Mr. Terrell Lloyd.

Brianna Wu (02:06:33):
Get

Terrell Lloyd (02:06:33):
It right in camera. If it's garbage in his garbage out, that's right inside the camera. Do the least amount of postproduction work. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> on. I mean, if you have to right

Jim (02:06:43):
TWIT tell your boss it's job related.

Leo Laporte (02:06:47):
<Laugh> he'll believe it she'll believe it. <Laugh> I should, we should have a segment on the show based on the meme. This is fine. It's time to play. This is fine. And Vidia fine. Five and a half million dollars for allegedly. Why is it allegedly? If they got fined, we can say they did it hiding how many gaming GPUs were sold to crypto miners. S E C said you misled investors by reporting a big boost in revenue related to gaming without alluding to the fact that no, <laugh>'s not gaming. It's crypto mining. We're just talking about that. The problem is a five and a half million dollar fine for Envidia is nothing. It's the cost of doing business. Intuit paying a little bit bigger, fine, 141 million for free free, free turbo tax ads that weren't free. Free, free. No, I think 141 million probably stings a little bit more. But again, these companies are making

Alex Kantrowitz (02:07:55):
For the biggest scammers they're turbo tax men.

Leo Laporte (02:07:58):
Yes.

Brianna Wu (02:07:59):
I feel so strongly about that one. You know, part of like TurboTax is they came into agreement, an agreement with the United States government who wanted to develop their own tax filing software as just like a, a service to S to make it easier. And they went to Congress and they said, look, we're gonna give you a free version. It's gonna be very easy. For people to file, it will be open. And then only sophisticated people will need to pay for our full product here. Of course it never happened. It's just a lie. And then you see this lawsuit, oh, it get too mad. I feel

Leo Laporte (02:08:32):
Every year, this one, I, my mom's taxes. She's 89. So taxes are very simple. Every year I select free <laugh> I want the free turbo tax. I end up paying $89 every year, no matter what, <laugh>

Alex Kantrowitz (02:08:47):
A hundred percent the same. This is, this is our broadest point of agreement on the panel, which I'm very excited about because they deserve, they deserve the ire combined ire of the three of us, but

Leo Laporte (02:08:57):
Is 141 million enough, right? No.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:08:59):
Do more, do

Leo Laporte (02:09:00):
More, do more, make it, make it, make it hurt. Cause what happens

Brianna Wu (02:09:04):
Make a million. I'm

Leo Laporte (02:09:04):
Making a billion. Cause what happens is these companies say, well, it's cost doing business. We made 800 million. I'll give you a hundred forty four, eighty,

Alex Kantrowitz (02:09:12):
None of those 300 something million people in the us, 89 times a good chunk of them. And we can definitely be okay with that 141 million fine. They

Leo Laporte (02:09:21):
Will have to suspend their free, free, free ad campaign pay restitution to 4.4 million S so maybe, you know, maybe this will, maybe this will cost them a little bit

Alex Kantrowitz (02:09:31):
More. They should have their CEO on video. Apologize, apologize that as sorry America

Leo Laporte (02:09:37):
Ripped you off, you know what? We knew,

Alex Kantrowitz (02:09:39):
We knew we were ripping you off, but we did it anyway. We

Leo Laporte (02:09:42):
Can't charge these people enough, humiliate them instead, make them come. I love what I did. Make them come on TV and say, we lied. We

Alex Kantrowitz (02:09:51):
Did it. We did it.

Leo Laporte (02:09:52):
We lied.

Brianna Wu (02:09:53):
I don't understand why people have to do so much of the heavy lifting here. Yes. Like many other countries, the, the, the government has a lot of this information already. Like my mortgage deduction. Right? Get that from the like, you know, how much money I made, you know my mortgage deductions, like I'm gonna have to do some things like, you know, camera equipment from my office to, to deduct that, right. There will be some legwork

Leo Laporte (02:10:17):
In Finland that you get a postcard when tax time comes to says, we think you owe this much. If you agree, send us a check. <Laugh> right. That's it. I can't imagine that happening in am in America. I mean, it's hard enough getting people to pay their taxes. Yeah. You also got big turbo tax lobbying the government. Well, that's the real problem software. So that's the real problem. You know, the federal government has a free file program. Okay. and then, and in finally, and this is fine. <Laugh> I love this segment. I'm gonna do this every week. Then this is great. This is, this is fine. This is when we got a little, this is fine. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. The world's burning, but this is the dog <laugh> and this is fine frontier. Oh man.

Leo Laporte (02:11:15):
When frontier bought all the customers from, I think it was spectrum, they were leaving the LA area, the LA market. So frontier bought all the customers. I was getting call after calling the radio show, just people were, it was awful service. It was terrible. Cory doctorals gone off on frontier about, you know, intentionally keeping their physical plant underpowered and underperforming FTC said. And this is as of May 5th, it has moved to stop internet service provider frontier from communications, from lying to customers and charging them for high speed internet. It fails to deliver. They were suited last may. It took 'em a year, but on Thursday they agreed to a settlement admitting. No, no no no admission of guilt with the FTC and district attorneys in Los Angeles county and Riverside Cali representing the people of California. But it's again, it's a slap on the wrist. Frontier has to pay eight and a half million dollars to California for investigation and litigation costs. And what do they give customers who are harmed? Two 50,000 will be distributed to frontier customers. You're gonna get a check for a buck, 25,

Brianna Wu (02:12:35):
Whoever negotiated that settlement needs to be like, that's that is professional malfeasance, right? There's such

Leo Laporte (02:12:44):
Million to California. 250,000 to the consumers.

Brianna Wu (02:12:48):
What a joke. No, no, no. That whoever prosecuted that case for the government, they need to go find another line of work and they probably will. And they will, they probably leave this settlement and go into the, they go work the same people. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:13:00):
Go work. Frontier frontier also has to let customers cancel service and no charge. Yes. Yes. Frontier was one of main, many cable companies that charge you to cancel service. Ugh, you could cancel service, but it's gonna cost you what other business in America, if you went to your dry cleaner and said, I'm gonna go to the direct cleaner across the street. Oh, that'll be $48. What? No one, no other business does that cable companies do so they can't do that anymore. Oh, well, that's good. And <laugh>, they will also discount the bills of California customers who have not been notified. They're getting DSL service that is much slower than the advertised speed, much slower. A judge will have to approve this, although the FTC approved it for nothing <laugh> it was a slam dunk. And that is our segment. This is fine. <Laugh>

Brianna Wu (02:14:00):
I think all this companies should have to come on, quit and GROL before

Leo Laporte (02:14:04):
You may,

Brianna Wu (02:14:05):
It should be a judge show. Just like judge Judy, the judge Leo, and then you set the fine. And I would watch that show.

Speaker 9 (02:14:13):
I'm sorry. I did it. I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:14:19):
New York city is suing act vision targeting Bobby Kodak. Everybody's favorite CEO. How much did Kodak make when Microsoft bought act vision? A lot hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course. He is also been accused <laugh> of all sorts of malfeasance, including turning a blind eye to harassment. 

Brianna Wu (02:14:51):
I, I think you mean free speech

Leo Laporte (02:14:54):
Freak speech. That's right. Oh, kidding. CEO. Bobby Codick knew of sexual misconduct at the company, according to the allegations but did nothing about it. New York sought ACTIS access to divisions. Books is a basis to Sue for allegedly costing the company value. Kodak said no. Anyway, we shall see, we shall see. I think he's gonna skate to be honest with you. And he's gonna skate with a lot of money.

Brianna Wu (02:15:22):
He had threats on his own workers. I mean, this is go read the wall street journal reporting. Yeah. This is like, there are very few angels in game development. I, I feel very qualified to say Bobby Kodak is a particularly I think his actions are extremely, extremely problematic. Culture comes from the top in the game industry. If you look at some of the things that happened under his watch, just to remind your listeners, one of them, you had a woman that was working for a man on this team he sexually harassed her. She eventually died by suicide mm-hmm and then that team passed around nude photos of her after her death. Oh my God. For all the men on the team to watch and enjoy looking at. So some truly shocking stuff, if you look at it like the fact that I think it's important to note also this deal has not officially gone through yet. There are regulators that are looking at it and I can tell you for a fact, there are people looking into the culture of act vision, and wonder if it's going to be a good fit for Microsoft. That could cause some complications in how this goes through. But overall, just, just an absolutely terrible tenure, probably the worst tenure of anyone in the history of games. And that's a really high bar.

Leo Laporte (02:16:44):
He ran active vision for 30 years. Microsoft's offering $95 a share if that does go through, he stands to gain 520 million, half a billion. But you know, the New York state's going after him let, ah, okay. I don't want to end on that note. Let's find something happy to, yeah. I feel

Brianna Wu (02:17:08):
Like that should have been in this. Can we talk about the apple machinery for fixing iPhones? That is so cool.

Leo Laporte (02:17:15):
Yeah. We showed a little bit of that in the promo Apple's self-repair plan has gone into effect. And actually I think I'm gonna give apple props because they could make you buy hundreds of dollars worth of equipment. Instead they're gonna rent it to you for a week for $49. Plus the cost of the of the part you're gonna rep repair. Now you do have to get the machine for the, for the device that you're repairing. These machines are very specific. But if you go to apple self-service repair store, you, you can order the parts yourself. I would say you gotta know what you're doing. Let's let's say I wanna replace the battery in my iPhone 12 pro max. Okay. So the kit, the battery bundle itself, eh, 71 bucks. But if you return the old battery, you get 24 bucks back. So that's about 50 bucks for the repair. That's not bad. You will have to rent machinery. It comes, this is my favorite part. It's nice. It comes in a, in a really, a couple of really nicely packed Pelican cases weighing hundreds of pounds. Yes. These are not little what? Yes, cuz you're gonna need this. It's a battery

Brianna Wu (02:18:35):
79 pounds for the one I look at and this is what I love about it. You're gonna need this. I called the company. That's always talking. We're green. We love, we, we love the environment. Y'all so our new plan is to ship like 79 pound packages, just all around the country constantly.

Leo Laporte (02:18:51):
Right. And you better return it on time or you will owe, you will owe these only $49 to rent it. But yeah, you're gonna owe a little bit more if you don't return it in. I think it's only seven days. Oh, that's cool. But they pay my screen. I can, I can fix my screen with one of these things. Yeah. Yeah. The, the toolkit comes in cases. Then when stacked on top of each other measure measure <laugh> four feet high. What's that? Okay. Maybe. Well, case weighs 43 pounds, the other 36 pounds.

Brianna Wu (02:19:20):
Oh my God.

Leo Laporte (02:19:20):
The ups driver is not gonna like you. Oh, but good news. The cases do have roller wheels to aid in transport.

Brianna Wu (02:19:29):
So you're making the ups guy, literally love a hundred dollars of equipment to your house because you're too lazy to get the apple store.

Leo Laporte (02:19:37):
Yeah. And by the way, it is cheaper to, to bring it to the apple store. Incidentally, you will save. It is. Yeah.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:19:43):
Oh <laugh> well, we, we got the right to repair,

Leo Laporte (02:19:46):
But you have the celebrate that in a way, I feel like this is apple saying, you asked for it, you wanted it. And this is what it takes. It's not easy to do.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:19:55):
You made daddy give it to you. You made daddy. Now you have it.

Leo Laporte (02:19:58):
There's a term for that. It's called malicious compliance.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:20:02):
Yes, it's perfect.

Leo Laporte (02:20:03):
Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. ladies and gentlemen, you have been a very patient and lovely audience, but I think it's time to roll this show up and declare it completed. Alex can, Truitt's always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much. The the website is big technology dot subst stack.com. Subscribe to the newsletter. The podcast. Is it free? I think it is. Yes.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:20:32):
Yeah. Free podcast, big technology podcast. It works on every app.

Leo Laporte (02:20:36):
And I must listen this week. Yeah. You don't, it's not a Spotify special.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:20:41):
That's right. Yeah. Buzz Spotify. If you're listening a hundred million and it's yours

Leo Laporte (02:20:46):
<Laugh> I always say the same thing

Alex Kantrowitz (02:20:49):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:20:49):
Of us. Yeah. Hey look,

Alex Kantrowitz (02:20:52):
One day Leo we'll get that. Spotify did you know? So, so Spotify is now worth 20. I think they actually paid a hundred, 200 million to Rogan and they're now worth 20 billion. So a full one 10th of their valuation went to Joe Rogan. That's astounding. Pretty wild. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:21:08):
God, I don't, you know, in some ways I don't mind, Joe Rogan getting 200 million. It's called her daddy who got 60 million for one show. Yeah. One show a week that it irks me a little bit. It just, it's just a little, you know, I'm not a teenage woman. So I don't know. I mean, I'm sure it's a wonderful show for the people through the young Youngs,

Alex Kantrowitz (02:21:29):
But Leo, great to be on. Thank you for having me. It's really always a pleasure to talk tech with you and Brianna. I mean awesome. Talking with you really nice to meet you. This was super fun.

Brianna Wu (02:21:37):
Absolutely. Read your stuff all the time. So it's an honor

Leo Laporte (02:21:41):
Trip nickel. On the last episode, will Tim cook be, was Tim cook the right choice for apple? This week, the big debate, big technology and

Alex Kantrowitz (02:21:49):
Ft is good or bad scam or legit. Are they the future of collectibles or business? Q Andon. Are

Leo Laporte (02:21:56):
You comparing like its a debate find out like, are you were, did you do debate in school? Are you like gathering your facts? Marshaling your arguments?

Alex Kantrowitz (02:22:06):
Not really. No.

Leo Laporte (02:22:07):
<Laugh>

Alex Kantrowitz (02:22:08):
It's just gonna be like me being like, but really being like you're wrong. I watched, you know, I did watch line goes up. I mean, line goes up, is this amazing YouTube video that like talks about the block team that's NFTs and it's one of like the best YouTube videos I've ever watched. So I did take a heck of a lot of notes and I will come armed with those notes.

Leo Laporte (02:22:28):
I watched a YouTube video and I am ready to debate.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:22:32):
I'm not even ashamed to admit it's the truth. <Laugh> Marty to roll. Yeah. That video

Brianna Wu (02:22:35):
Is so great. I love

Alex Kantrowitz (02:22:37):
Great video video

Brianna Wu (02:22:39):
Videos. And then I'm like, well, what else has this guy done? This is, this is awesome. And then yeah, there's like he has like a 10 hour video series on like analyzing the BDSM in TWITlight of like

Alex Kantrowitz (02:22:53):
I'm here for this.

Leo Laporte (02:22:53):
What? For some different content. Oh I have to, I have to play a little bit of this cause

Alex Kantrowitz (02:22:58):
Oh yeah. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:22:59):
It's so good. Just do you have

Alex Kantrowitz (02:23:02):
Watch line if watch line goes up it's it's so good.

Leo Laporte (02:23:06):
Okay. I can't play it. I wish I could just watch it. This is the, this is spoiler. All the great quotes. They're hysterical.

Alex Kantrowitz (02:23:14):
The, the line doesn't go up. That's the spoiler. Doesn't

Leo Laporte (02:23:18):
There's the spoiler. Yeah. Yeah. Really good stuff. That and the legal Eagle. Yeah. Then you're set then you're set. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> thank you Alex. Brianna. We love you. Thank you so much for being here. Your voice is all better. It sounds great.

Brianna Wu (02:23:32):
It it's mostly better. I've got a little bit more to heal, but it's a lot better than

Leo Laporte (02:23:36):
It has been. You'll you look great. Things are going well. Tell us about rebellion pack

Brianna Wu (02:23:42):
Rebellion pack. You know, we have the midterms coming up. We're gonna be supporting a lot of candidates. This

Leo Laporte (02:23:47):
Is not get outta the, do not let this stand William. I'm sorry. I'll

Brianna Wu (02:23:54):
Mean It's not a, this is not a political show, but I would imagine they of your listeners have watched event happen this week with some trepidation. Yes. if you want to, if you wanna get involved, it's not enough just about needing to either run for office or, you know, donate to candidates or cost.

Leo Laporte (02:24:12):
Should I avoid act blue? I feel like act blue. I don't, should I just,

Brianna Wu (02:24:17):
I want to do a whole show with you, Leah, sometime talking about the ways that professional donors misuse your information, you, because thank you. I am, I, I would, I will go on your show and take a lie detector test that I've never sold any information to anyone and never will good, but there is a really cavalier attitude yeah. In my party and how we treat donors information. And is, it is so counterproductive plus

Leo Laporte (02:24:48):
Because I, I there's dark patterns on the site that gets you to do automatic recurring donations. I was donating a thousand dollars a month for three months before I called, oh my God. I was a little upset. You know, I, I wanted the initial donation. I didn't want the subsequent, but I missed the little check box and it was very upsetting. So yeah, so

Brianna Wu (02:25:12):
Some really, we have some practices that are not justifiable in my opinion, but 

Leo Laporte (02:25:17):
So you can donate directly to rebellion pack at the website donate.

Brianna Wu (02:25:21):
Yes, you can. You can go to help the rebellion and do that. And I, I promise you, Leo will have words of me. If I did this, we do not sell your information. Good. I wanna put up just one more quick thing, Leo. If any of your listeners are in Arizona, I have a really good friend of mine. Derek. He's actually a producer for he's a producer for was the British car show. The really famous one. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:25:45):
Yeah, yeah. The new, but they have a new name.

Brianna Wu (02:25:48):
Oh God. I'm I got four hours of sleep last night. Cause

Leo Laporte (02:25:52):
Remarkably well, given your, thank you.

Brianna Wu (02:25:54):
I appreciate that. No, but I, a friend of the

Leo Laporte (02:25:58):
British car show show was state. Yes, the British

Brianna Wu (02:26:01):
Top gear

Leo Laporte (02:26:02):
Top, top gear top

Brianna Wu (02:26:03):
Care. His mother unfortunately is 80 years old. She suffers from dementia. She left the house on Thursdays from missing. After, since I've been donating a lot of time working to get people down there to get volunteers for the searching re rescue effort, actually talking a good use of ad technology. We've been using the technology of microtargeting ads to help get together people to go down there and basically scour to go hiking, to try to go find her. If any TWIT listeners are interested in that, please reach out to me. I will happily put you in touch. Obviously it get to be a hundred degrees in Phoenix. Time is short, so we, we really appreciate

Leo Laporte (02:26:46):
Your help. Oh, so just at Brianna Wu on TWITtter.

Brianna Wu (02:26:50):
Yep. Just shoot me a tweet. I'll be happy to point you in the right direction.

Leo Laporte (02:26:55):
Wow. Yeah. That's something to do for mother's day. Yeah. Wow. All right. Kiss your mom. Hug her, hold her tight. Because she's, I hope still with you and if not, I do too.

Leo Laporte (02:27:10):
Remember thank you, Brianna. Thank you, Alex. Thank you to all of you who watch and listen. We appreciate it. If you wanna watch us do it live, it's always interesting when we're live, by the way, not quite the same show you're gonna get in the final polished edition. You can do it at 2:00 PM. Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2100 UTC every Sunday evening the livestream audio or video live.TWIT.tv. After the fact, all of our shows are available at the website, TWIT.tv or on the YouTube channel. Each show has its own dedicated YouTube channel where you can watch the video. We have audio and video of every show. The best thing to do is search for TWIT on your favorite podcast app and subscribe to every single darn show <laugh>. That would be the best thing to do. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time. Another TWIT is in the can!