This Week in Tech Episode 876 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 tr this week in tech. We've got a great show. My old friend from tech TV, David spark returns after a multi-year absence and Amy Webb is here. That means big thoughts, big thinking. We'll talk about the fact that the New York state attorney general wants to blame TWiTtch and for Chan and discord for the Buffalo shooting, Elon Musk's real plans. Amy explains all, and then apple losing, perhaps its most important employee because they wouldn't let him work from home. Come on, man. It's this week in tech coming up. Next Podcasts you love

TWIT Intro (00:00:39):
From people you trust. This

Leo Laporte (00:00:42):
Is TWiT. This is TWiT. This weekend tech episode 876 recorded Sunday, May 22nd, 2022, Elon and El Ron.

Leo Laporte (00:01:03):
This episode of this week in tech is brought to you by stamps.com. Start mailing and shipping with stamps.com. Sign up with a promo code TWiTt. You'll get our special offer, including a four week trial free postage and a digital scale, no long term commitments or contracts. Go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the page and enter the code TWiT and by express VPN, be smart. Stop paying full price for streaming services and only getting access to a fraction of their content. Get your money's worth. Get three extra months free with a one year package@expressvpn.com slash TWiTt and by Noom. Unlike other programs, Noom weight uses a psychology based approach to help people better understand their relationship with food and gives you skills and knowledge. You need to build long lasting positive habits. Sign up for your trial at noom.com/TWiTt and buy Indo Chino. If you've got a big day coming up, getting the perfect look is no big deal with Indo Chino. Get $50 off any purchase of 3 99 or more by using the promo code TWiT@indochino.com. It's time for TWiT this week at tech show, we cover the weeks tech news and we have such a good panel today. I thought, you know what? I'm just gonna sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Amy Webb is here. Our favorite futurist from the future today Institute author of the Genesis machine, our quest to rewrite life in the age of synthetic biology. I haven't seen you since the book came out. Is it doing well?

Amy Webb (00:02:48):
Book is doing really well. And I actually <laugh> Eric Schmidt gave me hives last week we were at a conference together on a panel talking about AI. Yeah. And he diverged and started talking about, he said some very, very nice things about me.

David Spark (00:03:05):
Wow. The book.

Amy Webb (00:03:06):
And I was, so it was in front of this big group. I was so embarrassed, like in a good way, but I was so embarrassed. I broke out into hives, everywhere, turned bright red and I, and I was, I was like three minutes into the session. Oh.

Leo Laporte (00:03:21):
And I was like, oh Lord. Oh embarrassing. But that's

David Spark (00:03:25):
Amy. You have set up the challenge for both Leo and I, we have to high to break out at high that's. This is our goal

Amy Webb (00:03:31):
Happen very often, David. It doesn't happen very often.

David Spark (00:03:34):
We have two hours to do this. Leo

Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
David spark is in the house. Oh, I love seeing David spark long time friends since going back to tech TV. He's been on TWiT many times, not in a long time though. So I'm really glad to get you. No, for a while you have started a new network on security called the CISO series. Do you pronounce it CISO or is that just me?

David Spark (00:03:54):
Yes. But if you go, we did a show, a live show in Australia and there down under they pronounce it. CSO

Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
Router. Ruter they call it Ruter oh, CSO. Okay. So SSO CSO. So I'm gonna say CSO because that's that's a,

David Spark (00:04:09):
Most of us say

Leo Laporte (00:04:10):
We're America. And so this is, you've got five podcasts, all about security, which is great. Yes. Defense in depth, super cyber Friday, capture the CISO <laugh> cybersecurity headlines. Good

David Spark (00:04:23):
Job. Capture the CISO's our new show.

Leo Laporte (00:04:25):
I like,

David Spark (00:04:25):
It's kind of like it's kind of like shark tank in that there're, CISO's judging security vendors, but instead of like seeing full pitches CSOs, which are chief information security officers, they come on and they've already watched the demo videos of the products. And they're just having conversations with these security vendors, asking them, like, tell me more about your product and ask relevant questions about it. Nice then you know, and, and that's kind of like what everyone wants to hear in the yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:04:56):
The kind of thing you would be asking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's part of the problem with doing this kind of stuff is it tends to get very vendor heavy and ends up being an ad. So this is really good. This is a way to get some solid, solid content.

David Spark (00:05:09):
It's it's the conversation, not the pitch.

Leo Laporte (00:05:11):
I am drinking today. Some synthetic booze provided by Amy Webb. It's called cliff G L Y P H. It is. I wanted to say distilled in San Francisco, but I think it's probably created a VA somewhere in San Francisco. Yeah. All the spirit, none of the rules. So I think we had talked about this on a previous show, right? The idea that they couldn't, maybe it was in the Genesis machine that they can make whiskey without actually putting whiskey barrels and all that.

Amy Webb (00:05:40):
Right. Basically if you've got the molecular formula, the construct, you know, you can, you can print out molecules and, and just distill in a different way. Hang on a second. I've got crazy different microphones going here, printed

Leo Laporte (00:05:56):
In printed the molecule kind of like a star Trek Syntha hall or a, I mean every effect, every science fiction has a synthetic whiskey. I'm just finishing the Bob averse and that's one of the first things. They try to figure out how to, how to make whiskey again. Right. So this is the show with give a hives. I think that's a good, that's a good goal. You've established,

David Spark (00:06:16):
But we have a challenge.

Leo Laporte (00:06:17):
We have a challenge. You and I, no, I, we have to, I can't do that to four Amy <laugh> I just

Amy Webb (00:06:23):
Can't please. Don't I, I had a very, very

David Spark (00:06:26):
Compliments, right?

Amy Webb (00:06:26):
Yeah, no, it was

David Spark (00:06:28):
Came off a compliment. So she's not gonna hate that.

Leo Laporte (00:06:30):
No.

Amy Webb (00:06:32):
I just, I'd never had anybody co I, he, he just said very nice things and it seemed very sincere and it was kind of outta nowhere and we were deep in the weeds on AI at that point. And he,

Leo Laporte (00:06:42):
Well also coming from direction.

David Spark (00:06:44):
Do you want us, do you want us to go in the opposite direction?

Leo Laporte (00:06:49):
What's the opposite of high? What's the opposite of high?

David Spark (00:06:52):
Well, no, I it's like got

Leo Laporte (00:06:54):
The high monkeypox. Let's not give her monkey P

Amy Webb (00:06:56):
Monkeypox. Let's not do that. Let's not do that tonight,

Leo Laporte (00:06:59):
Please. Okay. Thank you. Monkeypox is the new the new I don't know. Cause Celebra, I don't wanna celebrate it in way.

Amy Webb (00:07:09):
It's a cool virus. Everybody wants to take to prom this year.

Leo Laporte (00:07:12):
No, no, no, no, no. So, okay. So I, I know everybody's afraid and, and, and rightly so that we might start talking about Elon. We're just gonna get outta the way. It's gonna be quick. Knock it out. It's

David Spark (00:07:23):
Gonna be brief, like, like ripping off a bandaid, just

Leo Laporte (00:07:25):
Rip off the bandaid, get it over with quick Elon, what's the status of Elon's TWiTtter deal. Is it, is it up in the air? Is it, is it it's all

David Spark (00:07:36):
It is up in the air based on the, the percentage of bots that are, or the fake accounts that are on TWiTtter, of which it doesn't appear there's any third party that's verifying these. It just seems to,

Amy Webb (00:07:49):
Oh, there, there Isely. No, no, there are third parties that are verifying it. There's been a couple of academics that, and there's a, there's an independent group. That, to be fair, like built some type of tool it's not bought or not. I forgot who it was, but that there are groups that are pulling as much data as they can by doing samples. And to be fair, you know, it's hard to get a huge sample size, but I mean, I think we all know, even Ana, like I even know, anecdotally, like there's a tremendous amount of thought activity and there always has,

David Spark (00:08:21):
I think it's way over 20% though. That's the thing I think, well,

Leo Laporte (00:08:24):
El I was told it was 5% and that's where he, it doesn't sent the poop emoji to the CEO of

Amy Webb (00:08:30):
Twittter. <Laugh> none of, none of it matters. He's trying to use this as a wedge, right. To get out of the deal. And why did he try to get maybe he's I don't know. Maybe he, the, the number of the number of bots thwarting, his investment is sort of a, a red herring, right? At this point he just

Leo Laporte (00:08:47):
Wants, do you think he really wants to get out of it? That that's really what's going on is he's

Amy Webb (00:08:50):
Just, I, I think what, what happened is that he bought up a bunch of shares. He got invited to be on the board, realized that he had a fiduciary responsibility as a board of directors member. And he couldn't go around trash talking the CEO or others, or the edit button, or pick, pick whatever you want, free speech then left because Elon doesn't want people telling him what to do. And I now think he just, you know, he's got that had, that had repercussions that had repercussions on the other businesses where his finances are, are tied up. So why tank Tesla over a, a social media, which a lot of us use, but let's face, it has a limited number of DAUs. And like, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:09:34):
It was never

Amy Webb (00:09:34):
A

Leo Laporte (00:09:35):
Ton of money. It's never made more than a billion dollars in a year. If you pay $44 billion for something that's a BTA is less than a billion, it's gonna take you long time.

David Spark (00:09:46):
No, but there is, is there, I'm sorry. Is there any history of any company being purchased at that level of multiple of yearly revenue? Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:09:54):
Yeah. Mean, I don't think so. That's, that's 44 X. That seems 44.

David Spark (00:09:58):
I mean, I don't think it's that <laugh>, I don't know if anyone's purchased anything at that.

Leo Laporte (00:10:03):
And then, then I've heard people say, oh, now that it's off watch while Microsoft SWOS in, no Microsoft doesn't want TWiTtter. No one wants TWiTtter. That's the whole point TWiTtter's been trying to sell itself for years and not succeeded. So I don't know if Elon legitimately wanted it. I think he did. I think he found out that when he would get down to it, he was gonna have to come up with 21 billion of his own money. He, he leveraged himself against Tesla stock that opens him up as the stock drops, which it has it's plummeted as a result to, to, to a margin call, which could put him out of business. It also it's also hard to get the rest of it. Although he seems to have found Larry Ellison gave him a billion, seems to have found a few other suckers. I mean, investors who are willing to give him money for something that is never gonna pay off. So he, but this could also be

David Spark (00:10:54):
A negotiation tactic.

Leo Laporte (00:10:55):
It could, it probably is, you know, an attempt to get, because

David Spark (00:10:58):
The stock went down because of this. He, you know, his what, $54 per

Leo Laporte (00:11:05):
54 20, because it's gotta have something to do with marijuana or he won't do it

David Spark (00:11:07):
Exactly. But he, you know, showing how much it's going down because of his suspicions of the high percentage of fake accounts, then he could say, well, it doesn't really have X million of users. It has this percentage of users. So doesn't

Leo Laporte (00:11:23):
Matter

David Spark (00:11:24):
Lowering

Leo Laporte (00:11:24):
That, but it doesn't matter as he well knows cuz he made the deal. In fact, waiving due diligence, you don't get to say, I don't have due due diligence. Here's the amount of money I'm gonna pay sign on the dotted line. And then, oh, now I'm gonna do due diligence too late.

Amy Webb (00:11:37):
Clearly there's, he's got there, there have to be compliance people that he works with. There have to be lawyers. And I cannot imagine that job having to run the job ever for that. Yeah. I mean, I, I can't even wrap my head around what that must be like.

Leo Laporte (00:11:53):
This is William Cohen, who is a M and a guy writing for puck news. I like puck news a lot. Elon's next moves. He says Elon played it like a Jedi up to a point listening to his financial advisors. S Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, chase, Alan and company his advisor, Rob Kindler who was Cohen's old boss. So Cohen knows him well at Morgan Stanley now vice chairman global head of the M and a group followed all their instructions up to a point. But after this is what Cohen writes after make, after won his prize, what seemed, what seemed like a minimum effort. Elon started to lose his deal, making poise, he neglected to tell the S E C he he, he basically started, you know, trolling at TWiTtter, violating his nondisclosure. And, and he points out Elon's equity hole is still $14 billion, even with a billion from Ellison and prince ALA weed who put in 1.9 billion. And of course the 4 billion in shares that he's already got that he doesn't have to buy again. He still has to come up with 14, you know, billion dollars. It could just be that Elon just kinda lost his head and now is trying to get out of it. Twittter's response is yeah, no, <laugh>, we're holding you. They told the shareholders you let's go <laugh> that? That's a good price. We're gonna take it. Elon says he can't move forward. He already, he already agreed, says TWiTtter. They're gonna make him,

Amy Webb (00:13:33):
You know, TWiTtter doesn't have to make money because TWiTtter makes power. If you stop and think about the mm-hmm, <affirmative> the sort of ven diagram of who's using TWiTtter. Obviously let's, there are many, many bots, but it's media people like I'm a TWiTtter OG and you know, a lot. So it has

Leo Laporte (00:13:50):
Anize importance in the, in the,

Amy Webb (00:13:53):
In the media community, media community, right? Yeah. And, and tech community. And would you grant in political

Leo Laporte (00:14:00):
Position that it is the public square? I don't think it's the public square.

Amy Webb (00:14:03):
No, I, but here's the question that I would be raising, which is think of the amount of influence he's wielded in the past, over the market. I mean, he made a crypto that nobody cared about become a thing, right. For some people. Right. So another way to look at this is that TWiTtter doesn't have to make money. It just has to continue to make waves. And if you continue to get the right nexus of powerful people in that space talking, do you

Leo Laporte (00:14:28):
Think Larry Ellis

Amy Webb (00:14:29):
Never has to earn revenue

Leo Laporte (00:14:31):
Is putting in a billion dollars prince, although weed putting in 1.9 billion, not because they expect return on their investment, but because they expect power, they expect access. Yeah.

Amy Webb (00:14:39):
Yeah. That's exactly what I, that that's true. No other scenario makes sense to me.

Leo Laporte (00:14:44):
There is a risk though, because if Taylor swift isn't tweeting just prince awe and Larry Ellison.

Amy Webb (00:14:51):
No, no, no. I'm not saying no, no, I'm not. They don't have to tweet. Right. The, the point is, if you, so this is sort of deep state stuff. If you want politics, political decisions, policy to go a certain way. Oh

Leo Laporte (00:15:04):
Yeah. You don't speak out loud. You have others speak for you.

Amy Webb (00:15:07):
You, you wanna be able to have influence control. And so there

Leo Laporte (00:15:12):
Control the Overton window as it were

Amy Webb (00:15:14):
That's right. And, and there could be an argument made at the moment that that's the real net benefit here that, that this is not at all about monetizing. Well, that's

Leo Laporte (00:15:22):
Pretty

Amy Webb (00:15:23):
Ugly. Never else. It's

Leo Laporte (00:15:24):
Kind of dark. It's a dark

Amy Webb (00:15:25):
Point of it. It's well, that's my, well, that's my thing.

David Spark (00:15:27):
I, I, I wanna say though, Amy, you make a very good point in that, you know, think about just all of media on the internet, how hyper decentralized and splintered it's become. Yes. And bizarrely TWiTtter is the only, or the largest megaphone I think left in all media. I mean, I don't even think, you know, like network television doesn't even have the megaphone power that TWiTtter has. And so Amy, you make a really, really good point here. I mean, it's the last fashion of literally world power that, that could be left and I mean, you could actually buy it.

Amy Webb (00:16:07):
Yeah. There's there are other places where people have sort of scurred off to discord Keybase although I think I might literally be the only person that I know on Keybase at this point.

Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
So I know I left as soon as they got sold to zoom, I left, but you know,

Amy Webb (00:16:21):
There are other spaces, but the, the point is there's, there is still some something to be said for having a, a fairly high profile and, you know, tweeting a poop emoji at a, at a CEO. There, there is some power because it's being done in front of other people and, you know, journalists I, you know, and been years ago, that was my, my first career, you know, they're, they're looking at Reddit and they're looking at, at TWiTtter to start developing stories. And so there, there is this sort of network, right? That goes between broadcast media, especially, and TWiTtter, and really high profile, powerful people like Elon

Leo Laporte (00:17:01):
On TWiTtter. I like your take. It makes it's the only thing that makes a lot of sense. Cohen writes my view is the Elon's antics in the last week, or so have made him into a fool. Who's grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory. But in fact, he is playing 40 chess. If he can get the price, he's gonna buy TWiTtter. In other words, you think he's gonna buy TWiTtter. He's trying to get the price down. He may end up buying it for 54 20, because he doesn't have any choice, but it's worth it is your point.

Amy Webb (00:17:29):
Right? Well, the other point is now that we've got a financial, like a, an honest conversation happening about financials, what other investors is gonna swoop in. Yeah. Right. And, and I mean, TWiTtter

Leo Laporte (00:17:40):
Has been for sales

Amy Webb (00:17:40):
Team. It's way overvalue to begin with. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:17:42):
Nobody's gonna buy

Amy Webb (00:17:43):
Twittter so he could force, he could force the price down change some of the rules. And then there would be a net benefit to getting, especially a lot of politicians back and getting them to talk openly because it's an opportunity to wield power behind the scenes.

Leo Laporte (00:17:59):
If I said to somebody, if you give me 44 billion, you could guarantee who the next president of the United States would be. That would be worth it to some people

Amy Webb (00:18:08):
Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> it Def it absolutely would. And, and there's, there're huge. He's in two industries, space economy, space tech, and autos that have, that were not disrupted there, there was no disruptive innovation happening really before him. And again, I am not, I am not an Elon fan girl to, to like at all, but the, but the point is he know, you know, he, he's very good at both at 

Leo Laporte (00:18:35):
Both industries heavily regulated by the government, both industries heavily subsidized by the federal government. <Affirmative> for Elon in those businesses, having control of the, of the levers of power in federal government are vital to both those businesses. Absolutely. Yeah. So he doesn't need to make money on TWiTtter. He just needs the power, TWiTtter confers, I think,

Amy Webb (00:18:59):
To nailed it. Right? Yeah. That, that's the only, that's the only, that's the only part of this that makes any sense to me whatsoever that, or he is you know, he, he has a mental health issue that would cause him to make

Leo Laporte (00:19:14):
I mean, we're always asking that question

Amy Webb (00:19:17):
First. I'm saying, I'm saying it delicately because, you know, listen it's lot, well,

Leo Laporte (00:19:23):
He could be a troll. He could be a tension who he could be saying, well, I'm the EST man in the world, but I think he would not risk Tesla, which he has done, unless there was something of real value there. And I think, I think that no,

Amy Webb (00:19:33):
And I think the shareholders would not, yeah, his whoever's that, that, that board, the people that he answers to that again, everybody's got fiduciary responsibilities and it just wouldn't right there. There's no other reason that this would make

Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
Sense. He'd like us to think he has billionaire brain and he's, you know, just, but I think maybe he's crazy like a Fox. That's really an interesting point of view, David, if he did this and TWiTtter's price went down and suddenly others saw it as the potential power lever that it is who else would buy Microsoft doesn't care about that? Do they, who else would buy

David Spark (00:20:04):
It? No, but it's it's well, it's, you just have to look at the list of billionaires and who's willing to do something like

Leo Laporte (00:20:10):
That. I could see Jeff Bezos wanting to buy

David Spark (00:20:12):
Bezos, possibly Larry Ellison who already has a billing sunk in Ru

Leo Laporte (00:20:17):
Kurt Murdoch. Why is, I would think Rupart would jump

David Spark (00:20:19):
Rupert Murdoch. Yes. Good point. You know, that's the only list you can really look at after work.

Leo Laporte (00:20:24):
You know, somebody who has so much money, but this is what you get to when you get oligarchs running a country, this is, this is the, the, the place you get to.

David Spark (00:20:32):
But, but just think about it. Power is, can be purchased up to a point, but Amy made a great point there that TWiTtter's got a level of power that there's no other mechanism that has that level. And the thing that's also we've seen in the media happening. And this is what all always fascinates me is just think of the sheer number of news stories that are about a TWiTtter feud. Or somebody said this on TWiTtter, I'm astonished by just the sheer number of news stories that are just, oh, commenting, totally

Leo Laporte (00:21:07):
Lazy

David Spark (00:21:07):
Journal tweets.

Leo Laporte (00:21:09):
Totally lazy journalism. But it's happening completely lazy everywhere all the time. Yeah. Yes. And that's

David Spark (00:21:14):
Why, anyway, Amy wins that story.

Leo Laporte (00:21:16):
Amy wins. We have a winner. <Laugh>, you're amazing. You are so smart. You're incredible. Is it working?

Amy Webb (00:21:23):
It's not happening. <Laugh> it's

Leo Laporte (00:21:24):
Not happening. It's

David Spark (00:21:25):
Not happening. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:21:28):
All

David Spark (00:21:28):
Right. I'll work her a little later. You know what? Get, we'll get the hives coming out.

Leo Laporte (00:21:31):
I wasn't gonna bring up Elon <laugh> but you know what that's, what's great about having Amy and David on is there's a new, fresh take on it. And I think you're, I think after all this conversation over the last six weeks, you have finally come up with the real reason, the real story behind all of this. And, and frankly, it's the most chilling of all possible worlds.

Amy Webb (00:21:54):
I have zero data by the way back any up, anything you don't need it it's just pure speculation. You don't, it's what happens.

Leo Laporte (00:22:00):
16 social media happened in 2016. Yeah. Right. if Trump had 44 billion <laugh> he would buy TWiTtter. He's trying to create truth, social to kind of create an alternate universe, but there's a mistake. All you've got is the base there. What you have at TWiTtter is so much more useful. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Amy Webb (00:22:18):
You also have working code at TWiTtter <laugh> well, which is not the case

Leo Laporte (00:22:22):
On the other two. Social is not exactly working yet. Alright. I wanna take a little break cuz then we are gonna get into something a little more serious and a little more depressing, which is the Buffalo killing spree and the decision of the attorney general of the state of New York goed by the governor of New York to investigate gun stores. No to investigate right wing terrorist organizations. No. To investigate TWiTtch and discord. And for Chan there's a lot to say there. We'll talk about that in just a bit. What a panel. So good to have you both David, how long has it been since you've been on? Did you have your count up?

David Spark (00:23:05):
I was, it's been many years. I many years. I'm trying to remember. I was in your original cottage way back when

Leo Laporte (00:23:10):
I know.

David Spark (00:23:11):
And you're

Leo Laporte (00:23:12):
The OG TWiT.

David Spark (00:23:14):
Yeah. I was on that. And, and then I've done a few of your other shows, but it, it had been a long time. Yeah. And also now I'm, I'm back to doing traditional media again.

Leo Laporte (00:23:22):
What? Yeah. Oh, you know, I think that's what happened. You became a, you were, you went over to the other side, you became,

David Spark (00:23:26):
I was in content marketing.

Leo Laporte (00:23:27):
I was in that for

David Spark (00:23:28):
A while, but now I'm, I'm back to traditional.

Leo Laporte (00:23:30):
I think that's what happened. I try to, I try to avoid marketers, PR people yeah, because you know, this is supposed to be tech journalists, but no,

David Spark (00:23:37):
No, no. I'm, I'm totally on board with that. I, I have rules for my own show too, with with vendors. So I am

Leo Laporte (00:23:44):
Completely, and 100% respectful that it's very old fashioned. That concept mm-hmm <affirmative> nobody does it anymore. Let's take a little break and talk about our sponsor. That's that's who makes this all possible unless you're a member of club TWiTt and you're watching this ad free in that case. Thank you. Because of course you make this possible too. Stamps dot. Com's been a sponsor of our shows for many years, probably since David was here last we've been using it oh gosh. More than a decade. I think they started advertising 10 years ago. I have stamps actual stamps of my head on them. But they, I made a mistake when I made them. I didn't make forever stamps. So every couple of months I have to go to Debbie and I say, could you print me some more stamps, penny stamps, 2 cent stamps.

Leo Laporte (00:24:29):
So I can still use the picture with my head on it. That's the problem. Right? The postage changes, stamps.com solves this. What is stamps.com? Let's just the easiest way to, if you're a business to do mailings all the services of the post office without going to the post office. So with your computer and your printer, you don't even need a postage meter. You can print real us postage for packages, for envelopes, for anything you would wanna mail discounts. You won't get at the post office. And now, and if, if you, if you've been hearing these ads and saying, well, someday, this should put you over the top. Now it's ups as well as us P S so you get the postal service and ups and discounts. You can't get anywhere else. And stamps.com will even do the great thing. Stamps.Com. You'll you say, okay, I wanna print this package.

Leo Laporte (00:25:20):
It'll say, you know, it'd be cheaper to ship the ups or it'll be cheaper to ship postals, or it'll actually pit them one against the other to get you the best rate discounts like crazy up to 30% off postal service rates, 86% off ups. That's gonna save you every single time. You mail a package more than 1 million businesses use stamps.com because it's easy. It's fast. It'll save you on shipping. It'll save your time. And it also looks more professional, whether you're on Amazon or Etsy or, or, or eBay, or your full blown warehouse, shipping out truckloads of orders, those packages look more professional that, that you can print right on the envelopes with your company logo, the return address. It's just a great mailing and now shipping solution for you. And it'll take by the way, save you time too, cuz it'll take all the information from those websites automatically you'll fill out forms that you need, whether it's international shipping forms or or you know, certified mail, all that stuff just fills it out automatically.

Leo Laporte (00:26:25):
And by the way, easy, you'll be up and running in minutes. You can do it before the show's over printing official us postage for any letter, any package anywhere you wanna send, they've been a partner of this show since 2012. If you haven't signed up yet, you, I don't know what you're waiting for. Do it right now. So start mailing and shipping now with stamps.com, keep more money in your pocket every day, go to stamps.com click the link that says hurt us on a podcast and enter the offer code T w I T. Wow. What a deal you're gonna get? Not only a four week trial, you're gonna get a ton of free posts. You can use over a period of time, a digital scale stamps.com, no long term commitments, no contracts, just a chance to try it, go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, enter TWiT and and enter a new world of mailing and shipping stamps.com.

Leo Laporte (00:27:20):
I, I think Mike MAs Nick's headline on tector.com kind of says it all New York launches ridiculous, blatantly unconstitutional, invest quote investigations, end quote into TWiTtch and discord semicolon, Def defecting, deflecting blame from new York's own failings. We know that the shooter, I'm not gonna by the way, say his name, not gonna give many publicity, but we know that he opened a discord chat room before the shooting. Anybody can do that. It's free. We have a discord room. It's, couldn't be simpler, set up, invited people in to discuss his plans. The police say it was as many as 15 people in there before he did anything. Those people knew what he was about to do. He then started up a TWiTtch stream, which only ran for a couple of minutes as he launched into his attack. Twittch pulled it down right away. I think I saw 40 people saw it on TWiTtch, but since then 40 million people have seen it as it's been passed around. David is, is TWiTtch or discord to blame for any of this?

David Spark (00:28:31):
Well, I, I don't think we, any of us believe this, and this is why we're all kind of shocked at the attacks of TWiTtch and discord for that. But it it's interesting that 15 people in discord heard what they were, did nothing the person was saying

Leo Laporte (00:28:47):
Did nothing,

David Spark (00:28:47):
Nothing now, but this goes to, and this is something we talk about in our, in on our shows about cyber security and about where security awareness training is, you know, there's this fear of, well, it's probably nothing I don't want to cause a stir. I don't want to say anything. And there's a fear of that. But man, there is a, you need to say something when you see something like this and it's not for you to deal with it, it's for authorities to deal with it. And we need everybody's eyes and ears to act as, you know, monitors for these kinds of things. And you know, don't cast blame when you may not know something that's going on, but if someone is talking about some serious, violent, dangerous things on a social channel, alert an authority,

Leo Laporte (00:29:36):
I have to say the shooter was clearly radicalized into believe he's only 18 years old. And to believing this BS replacement theory, which, you know, frankly, Fox news has been flogging mm-hmm <affirmative>. But I don't see any, I don't, I don't see anybody investigating Fox news nor do I think they should. This, the first amendment protects that. Yes. I

Amy Webb (00:29:59):
Disagree.

Leo Laporte (00:30:00):
Good.

Amy Webb (00:30:01):
I, I disagree. I didn't mean to interrupt. I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:30:04):
No, please. Should, is, should TWiTtch discord four Chan and eight Chan they're also under investigation be inve now that's the internet. They didn't say anything about investigating news media. Probably realizing that they're gonna, you know, that's potential problem with the first amendment, but should they be held responsible?

Amy Webb (00:30:25):
So I'm not a constitutional scholar or lawyer. I made a last minute decision not to go to law school. So I'm I'm with those caveats being said, <laugh> I do pretty well in the all set <laugh> but with those caveats being said, the first amendment was written in 1791. And the point of it in 1791 was to, was to require Congress to restrict speech and to restrict the press in promotion of the public. Good. So what's happened in the, in the, to prevent

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
In the, to require Congress to prevent Congress.

Amy Webb (00:31:06):
It requires con basically

Leo Laporte (00:31:08):
It says Congress shall make no law respecting establish a religion or prohibiting free speech thereof, free exercise thereof, or a bridging the freedom of speech or of the press or of the right of piece people to peacefully assemble and to petition the government for regress agrees. It's very simple. It says Congress shall make no law, by the way, we should point out that almost immediately after this, the sedation acts were passed, which did exactly that and was used to prosecute people like crazy. So the history of, of enforcement of the first amendment is not, is very checkered to say the least,

Amy Webb (00:31:40):
No, the the, again, I think the original intent of the founders I wasn't there. So I don't have quantitative data on this, but it's my interpretation that the founders originally were just trying to make it so that the public good was what was preserved and at the time, so again, this is like the seven, this is 1717 91. It was very expensive to create speech right in written form. Right. And mm-hmm <affirmative> hand out. So like the, you know, eight functioning newspapers were sort of just getting started. And it was very, very expensive. So free speech was meant to be not restricted in certain cases. But at that period of time, when this was invented, there, there was no completely unfettered speech. And certainly there were no algorithms. I, I would ask the question does a strict interpretation of the first amendment, which is it's, it becomes one of these like super polarizing things. There's just no room for nuance. I would ask in an age of algorithmic determinism and unre, you know, com completely unfettered speech. That's also unedited and can be taken out of context, you know, does, does our strict interpretation of free speech makes sense? And I don't think, I, I know that I'm in a minority here, but I actually don't think that it is, does. I'm not saying we go the direction of, of

David Spark (00:33:05):
China, but so let's say we go down that direction, Amy, let's say, we go down the direction. Yeah. Then becomes the issue of who then decides who is the grand decider. And that becomes a big issue in itself. I should mention that we have more updated laws since the first amendment. And I, I was feeling that section two 30 of the communications decency act actually protects, you know, or, you know, groups like discord and TWiTtch, which essentially, and I'm quoting here, no provider user of an interactive computer service shall be treated. I see publishers, publisher or speaker of an, in any information provided by another information content provider. So essentially they're not, and we've dealt and this has come up many times, right? And this is just for any like hate speech or pornography or anything else that appears on some type of service that they are protected for liability because someone else published something on this.

Leo Laporte (00:33:58):
And that's why, what you said. I totally get it makes me nervous. Cuz there have been a lot of people who said, let's get let's abandon section two 30. It's too broad. Right.

Amy Webb (00:34:05):
This is,

Leo Laporte (00:34:06):
And I disagree wholeheartedly because with that section two 30, there is no moderation. In fact, Mike Masek protector points out TWiTtch might have been by the new Texas social media law prevented by that law from pulling down the, the stream. Yeah. They would have to justify it and then could be sued over it by the new Texas law.

Amy Webb (00:34:28):
So again, I think the problem here is that we are thinking with too many constraints and parameters, let's go back to the year. Good. 2000. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:34:37):
Let's just start from scratch and re let's rewrite. What would, what would you say as a founding mother today? That should be right. Our constitutional right

Amy Webb (00:34:46):
In the year. I wanna address the problem in the year 2000, I was at journal. It was at the Columbia graduate school of journalism. So great great school. If you wanna be a journalist and pay a lot of money for the privilege of having a, a degree I'm I'm in the first ethics class and I had just moved back to the United States from Japan and it was like, I had traveled back in time from the future because of the technology that we had here and it was, you know, not comparable in any way. So, so we spent an hour and a half looking at the Newsweek and time magazine covers of OJ Simpson. Some of you will remember that it was time magazine that ran the, I think it was time that ran the unedited version. One of the magazines ran an unedited photo, his mugshot. I remember this, the other one darkened it. Okay. So this is everybody's favorite. It was first day of ethics class. And the question that we were being asked was should journalists be allowed to use digital cameras and digital editing software? Was that, was that the right thing to do, right?

Leo Laporte (00:35:46):
Here's the time magazine cover. Here's the New York cover and you could see OJ in the time cover

Amy Webb (00:35:53):
Here's here's what I said. My response to that question was why are we having this conversation on my phone, which I realized doesn't exist yet in the United States, but this phone in the year 2000, I've got a camera in this phone pretty soon, literally everybody's gonna be taking pictures with their phones and we will be able to send things fast. And the, the question should journalists be allowed to do this is the wrong question. I, to me, that is, and I, and I like nobody wanted to have that. Nobody wanted to engage. So

Leo Laporte (00:36:26):
Conversation times cover is protected, but you, the Congress can't make a law saying you can't darken somebody's image on the cover of your magazine.

Amy Webb (00:36:33):
My, my point is we are ha we're asking the wrong questions. It's not should section two 30, be scrapped or rewritten. It's not, you know, it, we, we have to be, we, we have to approach these conversations with better questions and more nuance. And David, I don't have an answer to who gets to be the arbiter of what the news rules look like. What I'm actually in favor of is in this particular case, an incremental approach that, that as technology change changes, we should not be playing catch up. We should rather be creating policy and laws that are able to keep pace with the changes.

Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
That actually makes sense. That's a very reasonable thing to say, and I agree with it.

David Spark (00:37:14):
Right. But, but historically, you know, it's hard to yeah. It's policy and regulations, keeping pace with technology does not have a good history right. At all. And so, well it, doesn't

Amy Webb (00:37:26):
Sorry. Go

David Spark (00:37:27):
Ahead.

Amy Webb (00:37:28):
No, I interrupted you. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

David Spark (00:37:31):
What I I'll just complete is what happens is organizations trying to protect their own brand, develop their own sort of rules and regulations of what can and cannot be on the platform. And the hope is they can do that. Look TWiTtch. You know, if someone's doing something horrific on their platform, there's only a certain amount of speed that you can a catch it and stop it. I mean, the number of people who are monitoring it is an infinite. So some stuff slips through for a period of time. And fortunately, you know, TWiTtch was able to take this down more. My concern is we need to educate the populace of when you see scary dialogue going online. You know, we don't want to get into a, into a state where we're reporting on our neighbors, but there has to be a state of if someone's going to yell fire in a movie theater, we need to report that, you know, there does, there is a very clear line at that point,

Amy Webb (00:38:31):
Right? But so again, just to untangle a few things, first of all, from a technology point of view, there's absolutely a way to solve this problem. China is doing it every day through brute force and really smart machine learning. But you

Leo Laporte (00:38:43):
Did say you don't want, it's absolutely possible. You don't. I mean, China just passed a law that said you can only right. Be upbeat and positive.

Amy Webb (00:38:49):
<Laugh> right. I don't, I don't think that's the right way, but here's the issue. The challenge that we face in this country with just about everything is that there's a, there's a monetary incentive tied to everything. It's a huge problem. So the reason there, there is a reason that between whatever 20 10, 20 11, 20 14, over and over, I was at TWiTtter talking about some of these issues. And the problem is that if you make the bad parts of TWiTtter, go away, you know, that's partially what drives people to have those, you know, it's what partially drives people there. So, so part of the challenges that we've got the wrong incentive structure to, to try to compel these companies, to fix things, there are parallels in artificial intelligence. We know that there are all kinds of huge transformer models that are, that are very great, but that have been trained on data or bad data.

Amy Webb (00:39:46):
Sorry. So like, we, we know that these problems exist, but there's no incentive to, to fix any of it. In fact, there's a, it's, it's, it's gonna be met with a penalty. There's a financial disincentive to fix these things. So what I would like to see is totally different legislation that doesn't focus on. How are we gonna fi define this particular act, being shown on video at this particular moment in time, right? Because that's Al it's a moving target. It's always gonna change. Is there a way that we can compel the platforms to promote, to, to, to attack what they know is bad stuff, head on through incentives that are tied to revenue? I think that's, it's the only cause nobody's gonna come to the table and do this voluntarily. It's falling up the Supreme court. If Facebook is falling apart, we've got our own government agency where, where a misinformation, disinformation board didn't work for, you know, reasons that are tied to disinformation itself, which is tied to, to how the platforms make money.

David Spark (00:40:46):
But, but Amy, don't you think if, if there could be financial incentives attached to this, don't you think we would've seen this by now? Because I mean, I like conceptually what you're saying, but I don't under even, I can't even gro how the heck heck that would happen.

Amy Webb (00:41:03):
Yeah. So again, we just haven't done it before. So there's, there is a carrot and stick model that can be accomplished through all kinds of things that are gonna be wildly unpopular <laugh>. But we know work right tax incentives. There, there are lots of ways to achieve this. If companies can commit to measure and enforce making sure that content is in the, the sort of is being generated for the public. Good. And I know that this immediately, the easier thing to argue about and have a conversation about is censorship. The harder thing to do is to, is to solution it right? To get to a solution that involves a different type of incentive structure. Is

Leo Laporte (00:41:51):
It it gonna come from government? Is that where it's gonna come from?

Amy Webb (00:41:55):
You know, it's

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
Not gonna come from the companies cause they're they're

Amy Webb (00:41:58):
I don't think so. The companies are gonna fight that and they're gonna, you have,

Leo Laporte (00:42:01):
Right. You've really raised a larger issue though. Larry Lessig, the great Larry Lessig, who was for a long time as a advocate, as strong advocate for eliminating copy protection and, and, and changing copyright law finally gave up and realized I can't do this because of the perverse financial incentives mm-hmm <affirmative> and the money in Congress. He said, we can't do anything until we get money outta politics and became, and that became his cause by the way, he's still working on that. <Laugh> but I don't

Amy Webb (00:42:32):
Think he's still working on that.

Leo Laporte (00:42:33):
Yeah. I don't think that's gonna ever happen. So I understand if you could say, well, if there were no perverse financial incentives, we might be able to come up with a framework, but that's like saying, you know, if the moon were made at cotton candy, we could all live on Mars. I mean, it doesn't,

Amy Webb (00:42:48):
It's just different. It's just different. It requires repper, percept, repper. Percept is the art of taking the data that surround you at any given moment and looking for the white spaces. And

Leo Laporte (00:42:58):
This is what you're so good at getting, well, this is what I outta the box. This is what you do.

Amy Webb (00:43:03):
You know, all, all we have to do is spend a little time, not us right now. But like a, a huge group of people should just spend some time batting this different idea around. And if you get to the end and decide, this is not gonna work fine, the problem is that we we're not

Leo Laporte (00:43:19):
Even thinking about it. We're not even going

Amy Webb (00:43:20):
No. And I feel like I know a lot of the people who listen to the show are the ones who have those great ideas. And sometimes you bring those ideas up at, at work and, or you're afraid to, because you don't wanna be ostracized. And like, because it's different, different equals bad, right? Different should equal curiosity. Let's exercise our curiosity and see where we get. And at the end we get to the, a bad place. Fine. we're gonna be in no worse situation than we are today.

Leo Laporte (00:43:49):
I agree with you. We should do all that. But I also think given the exigencies of the world as it is the, you know, real politic the real world, we are lucky we have something so simple. And so clear as the first amendment and section two 30, which is by the way, very short, very succinct description of and yes, there may be a better way than that, but because they're so simple and so clear and they have, and I think they have worked for the most part for so long. I think that that's a good

Amy Webb (00:44:28):
Fallback if they were, if they were simple and clear, there would be no ambiguity and well, there's gonna be debate would not have two centuries of case law. Yeah. Arguing what debate ation actually means.

Leo Laporte (00:44:39):
But that's the, that's the nature of the constitution and nature of the world is, and that's why you have courts. I, I, I, I, I don't think that that's the wrong thing. That's kind of more of what you were talking about. This is let's, let's, let's refine this, but don't you think it, what, is there any country in the world that is doing something that you think is a good direct? I understand nothing's perfect, but a good direction that we should be looking at is the Chinese. I get this new Chinese rule is very interesting. Is it a good rule?

Amy Webb (00:45:07):
No, of course not. I think that the amount of policing that happens in China, I mean, for God's sake, that there are people who are worried at this point about using VPNs to talk about the absolutist COVID policies, zero tolerance throughout the country. You know, even people who live outside of China who use WIBO and some of the other social networks who clearly have a different IP, they're being targeted by people. They're not bots, they're actual people. They're being targeted and, and attacked with propaganda and, and being ousted as foreign spies or, or people trying to take down the CCP. So, no, I don't think that model is good. You know, I see Scandinavia and I know that I bring it up a lot and I don't mean to sound like a broken record, but, you know, we don't see a lot of the ex the serious extremes. And there, there are problems, but Norway, Sweden, Finland, you know, it's just, you don't see a lot of the same volume

Leo Laporte (00:46:10):
Spread Norway. Well, but there, I mean, Andres Brak killed 77 people in Norway about yes,

Amy Webb (00:46:16):
20 years. That was a right. I mean, there was that there was a horrific incident in Sweden, but it's not, you know, we, two weekends ago we had awful, or I guess this was last weekend, there were multiple mass, you know, I mean, it's

Leo Laporte (00:46:32):
The ch the Chinese, this is a, a new rule. And by the way, a very excellent thread from Kendra Schaeffer from a few months ago, I guess a, almost a year ago now about the Chinese cyberspace watchdog, CAC regulations, many of which I think privacy advocates in the us would say, Ooh, yeah, good. But the funny thing is the out, this is the funny quote, the algorithms recommendation service provider should adhere to mainstream values by the way, when the CAC publishes that, you know what that means mainstream values actively spread positive energy and promote the application of algorithms for the better. It's very communist utopianism speech. I,

Amy Webb (00:47:19):
I, I, there is this paradox that has yet to be solved in the United States. Everybody seems to be very concerned, or at least they talk about being very concerned about their privacy. They don't want to be surveilled, right. And at the same time they want absolute free speech.

Leo Laporte (00:47:36):
Everybody else should be surveiled. Yeah. <Laugh>,

Amy Webb (00:47:39):
There is a tension. There's also no acknowledgement that we are all constantly being surveilled all of the time by the same exact platforms that, so, so, so in a cloaked way, you know, there, there's just huge piles of data. And, and all of these companies are using the data for the purpose of making more money, right. For advertising that somehow isn't defined a speech. But people seem there there's a paradox between again, like what, what we, what we get so upset about. I, I wish there was a way to have a conversation that it did not immediately devolve to, well, who's gonna decide this is censor censorship, you know, China. It's important that we have these conversations, and I really hope everybody listening will be willing to engage in a more nuanced version of that conversation, because a lot of you are the people who are gonna help build this. Yeah. Other future. I hope

Leo Laporte (00:48:38):
I I'm tr look, I want to, I agree with you and I'm trying, but it's hard for me to imagine a framework that isn't just transferring control to another party. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> right.

David Spark (00:48:54):
I mean, that's what it, but there's two different ways also to do about this. And this goes into what you were talking about with regards to privacy. And I wanna give some credit to Davi, OIM of interrupt. That's Tim S that's

Leo Laporte (00:49:08):
That B T's thing. Yeah.

David Spark (00:49:09):
Yes. His company and Davi works for me. And I literally, just before this show, I, I talked with him and, and, and this goes to another story that that's on our list about the about the fact that the, these tools that we use are sharing our information, you know, hundreds of times, oh, more so in the us than even in the UK,

Leo Laporte (00:49:29):
Terrifying.

David Spark (00:49:30):
Yeah. For that matter. And

David Spark (00:49:33):
We don't get to decide that they're deciding for us, there's so many decisions that are being made for us about our own information, which is kind of tragic. Now this is in R's whole charge is to reverse that where you control your own information as to who it goes to. And, and so it, it, so you know, where it's being gone, where it's going and it's being used. And actually, and I thought quite the opposite, but what Davi said is advertisers really, really love this kind of concept where, well, we know people truly like this, cuz they individually approved. They wanted it. And that shows that you know, their, their money that they're spending on advertising. And I know I'm sort of directing this slightly differently is actually being used appropriately. So if we get to a point where people are self-directed can take ownership of their information and it's not used unknowingly by them, then that is a good direction to go now per what you were saying, Amy, as to somebody or having a conversation of how we're gonna find the defining line of what can and can't be said and how much it can be said and on what platforms we've already been having this conversation.

David Spark (00:50:56):
I don't think this is the first time it's been brought up.

Leo Laporte (00:50:59):
I feel like it's authoritarianism in any, in any fashion that you could think of. If you, if you're not a absolutist on free speech, then you're giving somebody control of speech. And I don't think in any situation that that's gonna be acceptable because even if you trust that person today, you know, the reigns of power could be passed on tomorrow. How I don't, I feel like free speech absolutism is the only way to go here. I know that's exactly what you're arguing against. Amy, am I right?

Amy Webb (00:51:35):
Again? I, I I'm, well it's me. So generally speaking, I'm not in favor of any absolute, regardless of what it is,

Leo Laporte (00:51:43):
But, but anything that would, anything that would say you can't say, I feel like if we just let everybody speak, <laugh> algorithms are a problem because we are boost, we are amplifying artificially some speech. So I agree. That's a problem. But if you could say, everybody can say whatever they want and everybody else could judge everything that they say. If you get the algorithms out of it, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, that's true. Free speech. Nobody's amplified over anybody else. One of the things that the internet has given us is a much more democratic communications, medium. So everybody can have a voice if they want, let everybody speak, teach people how to think critically.

David Spark (00:52:27):
Let me

Leo Laporte (00:52:27):
Teach people to think critically about what they read, do not algorithmically amplify stuff so that, you know, you don't get radicalized. Isn't, isn't that the only possible solution, anything else is somebody, whether it's you or president Biden or Donald Trump saying that's okay. That's not okay. Or, or Google saying that's okay. Okay. I don't wanna see that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I think that's always fraught.

Amy Webb (00:52:54):
Okay. So let me offer a counterpoint. So broadcast media in the United States and in particular national public radio. So actually there's a listener docos. Afor sorry if I mispronounced your name who, who brought this up on TWiTtter? Literally just now we have standards and practices. You can't just broadcast anything you want on

Leo Laporte (00:53:15):
Only on the airways you can on you. Can't on, that's just an FCC.

David Spark (00:53:19):
Yeah. Different rules on the internet, the

Leo Laporte (00:53:21):
Internet, everything you want.

Amy Webb (00:53:22):
I'm well aware of that, but again, I'm trying to make a, an analogy here. So what, you know, the platform in a way is like this notebook that I'm holding up, this is also a platform and I can, and, and I can write anything that I want on it. Right. And if I write horrible things, I guess or if something horrible happens, nobody's gonna Sue the maker of this notebook, right? They're gonna, I'm gonna be the one that gets in trouble. And so I think that's the, the position that modern media has taken. We're just the platform we are just distributing. There have been questions about whether or not algorithms are entitled to the same rights to speech as humans are. And that has yet to be decided. But I have to ask a question. If we continue to, you know, you can't say certain words on NBC at eight o'clock at night, nor can you show nudity or certain types of violence. Why do we hold? I mean, I know legally why we hold broadcast media to a different standard than a platform, but from a functional societal point of view if, if we are free speech absolutists, then why hold broadcast media to some standards

Leo Laporte (00:54:28):
Because that takes,

Amy Webb (00:54:29):
And they distribute content

Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
A time of scarcity, just that scarcity you were talking about, but as scarcity goes away and scarcity is going away, thanks to the internet. I don't think you'd have to do those regulations anymore. And well, you can't, there were three networks and there were very, and it was it was a scarcity of the airwaves and there was no other way to do it. You had some regulation, but let's get rid of the scarcity, which we have. I think the regulation goes away too. And it did, we don't have, we don't have equal time. We don't have the seven dirty words, none of that. And I think that that's a good thing. And if you don't, if you thought that TWiTt would be full of expletives and you didn't want that for yourself or your family, you wouldn't listen. That's

Amy Webb (00:55:10):
Fine. I wouldn't listen, but I am not a 15 year old kid. Who's hanging out. Listen, my daughter that's to

Leo Laporte (00:55:15):
The, then that's up to the parents. If you want. I mean, a parent has the right to regulate their children. That's different. <Laugh> I would, I would, I would say there's but

Amy Webb (00:55:23):
We know, but we know that that's not happening. Like, I mean, that's

Leo Laporte (00:55:27):
Not then big brother. Doesn't get to come in and fix it. I don't care if that's not happening.

Amy Webb (00:55:31):
Here's here's the question that I would love for us to ask if we go into the future 20 years, what kind of life do we wanna have? Do we wanna have more like, because we, we have these mul multifaceted problems, all of which at this point now intersect with speech, whether that's catastrophic climate change or horrific gun violence or, you know, economic insanity, we have all of these problems, all of them intersect with both algorithms, you know, tech and speech. So we have to ask the challenging question 20 years from now, if we make no change, what's our baseline. What's the baseline scenario. And from my vantage point, the baseline scenario is not a good one. It, we, we are in a worse situation. I don't have an immediate answer. I'm not suggesting that the government or some arbitrary body of people start policing what we say, how to whom and where, but I also don't think we, we should continue to support total anonymity and, and totally unfettered all, anything goes without any type of consequence in a real way, because the, the problem here is that I don't see us mitigating these, these other problems.

Amy Webb (00:56:45):
And so we wind up more politically polarized. We wind up with more economic uncertainty. Again, this is just my opinion. And I think we wind up with more, more totally unnecessary violence.

Leo Laporte (00:56:59):
I think the, the problem, I think the solution to that is, is small communities communities of affinity. There has to be communication between the communities. I think, you know, I think that's one of the reasons I think the fed averse works it's Macedon works compared to TWiTtter. Those are individual communities that are self that enforce their own by agreement rules. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that you participate with or not, depending on whether you agree with those rules, that seems to work quite well.

Amy Webb (00:57:31):
Yeah, absolutely. They're federated models. I just wanna say one other quick thing, because I think it's worth noting. I know all of this sounds really speculative and like I'm thinking like worst possible cases here, for those of you who are not familiar with what I, what people in my position do. So technically the term is futurist, but what we really do is strategic foresight. We use data sets and build different types of models to look for long term indications of change. So my eco, my academic background is game theory and economics. This was before the, the journalism stuff. So this is not just you know, a crazy lady on a Sunday, oh God, no Sping off, you know but I think that's important because again, there, there is, there is some there's data and evidence rooted in, in what I've been stating. What I, what I've been talking about a federated model works really well, but that requires boundaries. Now, maybe some type of Dow is a so potential solution here. Dow is a government governance model versus an investment model could be actually kind of awesome smart contracts making a lot of this totally transparent. Maybe that's another, that's another, you know, there, there is emerging technology that we could use to solve our current technology problems, which would be kind of awesome, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:58:49):
Yeah. Good. I mean, we, yeah. And by the way, nobody <laugh>, if I read the chat room to you, nobody, second guesses, your credentials are your

Amy Webb (00:58:59):
Well, I just I'm, I'm on the chat room and that's why I'm like somebody totally. Well, there's always within your right to say this, by the way was like, I don't know, what's she talking about? Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:59:06):
There's always gonna be people there. But I think if you look in general, oh, did somebody disagrees with someone on the internet? <Laugh>, what's going on in general? It is widely recognized that your contributions are always thought provoking in a, in a real interest. And I'm always trying to pin you down. And I can't, cuz I, I don't know if you're a wide-eyed optimist, <laugh> a complete dystopian pessimist. I'm a,

Amy Webb (00:59:31):
A PR I'm a pragmatist. I'm a, I'm a pragmatist. Yes I am. Yes I am. And I, I'm not a techno utopian. I just, my job is to model plausible outcomes. That's it? Yeah. That's all I do. It's very boring most of the time. And

Leo Laporte (00:59:44):
It's, I mean, and also it's, I think it's appropriate to imagine, in fact, it's I important to imagine a goal state where if, you know, we could forget all the yeah, totally. Just to think what would we like, I think is a really good exercise without worrying about how hard it's gonna be to get there.

Amy Webb (01:00:00):
What would that's that's right. So, yeah, that's right. And that's a good exercise for everybody go into the future. If 20 years feels too wrong, like try 10. What, what should people like in an ideal world? What, what type of speech do we have? Because again, we haven't

David Spark (01:00:16):
Really talked about QT three. I will provide one thing. One thing that I would like one source of truth that we can all agree. That is actually truth. As if something actually happened. This has become our major, major problem we've seen over the last number of years is that we don't agree that something is black is black and something is white is white. We, we can't agree on legitimate facts. So

Leo Laporte (01:00:41):
Here's how, in my opinion,

David Spark (01:00:42):
That

Leo Laporte (01:00:42):
Is scary. How you handle that. It's, it's all, in my opinion, it's all societal, it's all norms. That's why I like a federated model. I like a small community model because the best way to decide that is not for any individual to say that's facts. That's not facts, but for community to censure liars. And when the community says, you know what, that's a lie. That sky is not green. We all agree about that. And, and those of you who say the sky is green, no, you're wrong. And, and the community it's no

David Spark (01:01:15):
Longer, but, but it, that, it's, it's the argument of whether the sky is green has now become a political issue. No, I understand. It's no longer a factual

Leo Laporte (01:01:22):
Issue. And you know what, there may be polarization and there may be groups that then say, well, we believe the sky is green. We're gonna go off and do our own thing. That's fine. That's fine. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think the, I think in every case you get in trouble when you become authoritarian and say, no, no, we're gonna enforce the fact that this is a fact because David, as you well know, one man's fact is another man's fiction. And it's impossible to say for many things, not everything, but for many things, it's impossible to say what a

David Spark (01:01:52):
Fuck. There are things that we all watch on video that people argue didn't actually happen. No, I know. And that is the sad

Leo Laporte (01:01:57):
Reality. I know. And, and what are you gonna do about that? Are you gonna bash somebody in the head because they disagree? What are you gonna

David Spark (01:02:04):
No here, no, here's the,

Leo Laporte (01:02:06):
You have to let them have that opinion. Stop

David Spark (01:02:07):
Giving air time to the people who point out. And that's what I'm saying, blatantly obvious. The problem

Leo Laporte (01:02:12):
Is amplification. And so that's the real

David Spark (01:02:14):
Problem. It's amplification.

Leo Laporte (01:02:15):
That's always the problem and algorithms, amplify media amplifies. And but I think we're going in a D in a better direction. Aren't we by, I think it's much more democratic. There are many more voices. Yes. Right now it sounds chaotic. There's a lot of people talking at you. We're gonna have to learn ways of dealing with that. Learn ways to judge whether something's true or not. That's part of the strife that's going on right now, but in the long run, we're moving in the positive direction. But I think a, I've always said, algorithms are a big problem. And I don't think you say, I also think you come up with a better algorithm of fact fiction, hot dog or not algorithm. I think you just stop algorithms,

David Spark (01:02:54):
But there's also the just journalism in general, the training of journalism in general says get both sides of the story. Every like day one in journalism school, it's taught to you. I know.

Leo Laporte (01:03:04):
And that's wrong

David Spark (01:03:05):
Too. I agree. Sometimes there's not a second side of the story. And oftentimes there's five sides to the story and you know, and this is the problem. And you'll see so many stories in just your local TV news. Like what's the opposite side of this story. What's there is no opposite side in many cases. Sometimes it's just a fact report it be done. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:03:27):
Amy, go ahead.

Amy Webb (01:03:30):
So I was, yeah, so I found journalism school to be really challenging because I, there weren't a, so Leo, you were just talking about the sky is blue. The sky is green. Like my vision for the future is that we all walk outside and somebody says the sky is blue and somebody else is like, the sky is green. And the, the sky is green person says like, come at me, bro. Let's, let's talk. But like, but like like let's why do you think the sky is blue? Let's

Leo Laporte (01:04:01):
Talk about it. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:04:03):
In exactly. I think the, the central problem that we face and the reason that we like algorithms is because people are very uncomfortable with uncertainty. And part of what algorithmic selection does is it reduces the tyranny of choice. So we, we have more, we're goed into thinking we have more certainty and that the decisions that are being made for us, our good ones, and then our behavior starts to change, to match. I think that's what drove a lot of people to discord, including me. I I've spent tons less time on TWiTtter in the past year than I did five years ago. In part, because of like just, you know, I'm getting like every day, just crypto bots and crypto bros are just it's me with a whole bunch of hashtags. And you know, it's like meaningless, like horrible,

Leo Laporte (01:04:53):
Right. Twittter goes through those discord, doesn't it? Yeah,

Amy Webb (01:04:55):
It does well discord. So

Leo Laporte (01:04:57):
What you've done, what you've done with discord is exactly what I was just talking about. Would you formed your own community? Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:05:02):
Right. So, you know, I've got a discord, it's a shame. I had a key based community.

Leo Laporte (01:05:05):
It's a shame because TWiTtter, what TWiTtter is the potential for TWiTtter is to bring people from different communities together just to, to discuss it could be a great discussion ground. Right.

Amy Webb (01:05:17):
It could be, but you and I have both been harassed pretty. Yeah. It's nasty, you know, prolifically. Yeah. It's, you know, and whatever, like, I, it's more inconvenient. I don't actually care. People have said some pretty horrible things. Yeah. I just, just ignore it. I'm very, of course, yeah. I'm a very confident person, so I'm quite fine, but it just makes the experience less. And every time I've reported to TWiTtter that the, the harassment that meets their own criteria, it's not dealt with. And even if it is dealt with there's, it's like a Hydra, right? You, you got like five new, well, and that's, what's

Leo Laporte (01:05:47):
What's disturbing is that all of the things Elon has said have show an ignorance of what the issues are. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> TWiTtter's I think done a lot. Believe it or not, they've gotten better. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's, it has gotten a little bit better. I think, I do think we need a place if we all go into communities where the communities can come converse. I mean, I really like massed on for that reason. Yeah. There needs to be some porosity to the bubble that you're in. Otherwise you all believe the sky is green. And so it's important that there be communication. I

Amy Webb (01:06:24):
Mean, are you, are you using Mato on or David or are using Mato on?

David Spark (01:06:28):
I am. I am not.

Amy Webb (01:06:30):
No. I wonder from a sea perspective. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:06:33):
We, we, our own

David Spark (01:06:34):
Fact, this other

Leo Laporte (01:06:34):
Thing is instance by the way, TWiT that social. So yeah. Yeah.

David Spark (01:06:39):
What, what is aggravating me is we should never have a conversation about whether the sky is blue or green. Like some certain facts just are facts and we, but what's happening is we're being, we, we are wasting time on these conversations and these issues that should have never, ever come up in the first place. And it's often to divert our attention from something that's that is re that is yield

Leo Laporte (01:07:05):
There. Is there a lot of nasty manipulation going on? Yeah. Or, and that's your fear. Of course, if Elon gets TWiTtter, is he would use it to manipulate the electorate. And so there is, there are people willing to manipulate and the solution to them is to solve this amplification, algorithmic amplification issue. And I'm not sure what the answer to that is, but you're right. And, and maybe the other issue is for us to become more aware of manipulation, to raise our consciousness, to understand we're being manipulated. And maybe there's a lot of people probably is probably the majority of people who don't care. They like being

David Spark (01:07:43):
Manipulated, but we fall, but we fall for it all

Leo Laporte (01:07:46):
The time.

David Spark (01:07:46):
But just look

Leo Laporte (01:07:47):
At, remember, David, maybe you're not, you're, you're kind, the three of us, I think are natural skeptics. We're always even debating with ourselves about what we believe, but there are a, I would say the vast majority of people just wanna be told what to believe and love that warm bath of no doubt, right. Of pure faith. And and if, if a charismatic leader comes along and tells 'em a fairytale, that that makes them feel good, they love the, that they can belief they can. Yes. But then they can turn off that very hard thing, which is thinking <laugh>. And I unfortunately think that that's a natural human tendency. So that may be also

Amy Webb (01:08:29):
Let me ask, this is not on our show notes for tonight, but I got a good example. Why is everybody so fascinated with the Johnny D and Amber herd trial? Because it is showing up. That is the thing that shows up on TWiTtter, right? It's it's, it's being live streamed. It's it's like,

Leo Laporte (01:08:45):
It's well, I could tell you why do you wanna know why <laugh>

Amy Webb (01:08:48):
Well, I, to me, this is an example that illustrates, you know why, I

Leo Laporte (01:08:51):
Mean, it's tied exactly

Amy Webb (01:08:53):
To what you just said, but we,

Leo Laporte (01:08:54):
So that's, it's biological imperative that we talk about emo these things, emotions at a distance for, and feelings. It's why we have celebrity. We love that. And I think it's just biological, but we, we love celebrities getting knocked down. Yeah. Yeah. We love all that. Yeah. We love the gossip we watch. Yeah. Someone had a high power falling. Yep. Yep. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and just plays two words. So this is tendencies,

Amy Webb (01:09:19):
Right? So this is the challenge with artificial general intelligence and with algorithms in, in general, they're

Leo Laporte (01:09:25):
Gonna be as stupid as we are. Is that what you're saying?

Amy Webb (01:09:28):
No, it's just, it's really hard to parse the, the, the, the, the things that draw us in. And I know there's like plenty of companies that have promised that they can like figure out intent and predictability and all these other things, but on a very base level, I mean, yes, we like, we, we are drawn into celebrity gossip, but why, why that trial and not some other trial, because arguably like Johnny DE's a little past his prime, you know? Yeah. And like how many people really know,

Leo Laporte (01:09:56):
Like there's still big celebrities. Right. But we just love,

Amy Webb (01:09:59):
So this is the challenge,

Leo Laporte (01:10:00):
You know,

Amy Webb (01:10:01):
There, there, but this is the part that I think is really important.

Leo Laporte (01:10:03):
Why is the Royal family exist?

Amy Webb (01:10:06):
<Laugh> well, that, I don't know, but from a, if we were to try to like, who polices the algorithms, I think is the quest the, the conversation that we're having. Yeah. The problem is that to get to the end of that, we would wanna have some kill switch, right. So that we don't all get sucked into to something that is probably not great, but defining that would be really challenging. I mean, this is one of the core problems with, with AGI. And so you wind up with the reverse of that, which is a system like G P T three, which makes a lot of assumptions based on like problematic data sets and a handful of people who are making the decisions during coding. So again, if I like play this forward, this is an interesting, another place for a Dow, again, not tied to finances, but what should those decisions be? What should the, like, like what should the data set be? What should some of the programs be like? You know, and, you know, nobody would care, but maybe some people would care. And maybe that's another way to think about this. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:11:08):
This question is as old as time and has been asked for instance, how is it that an entire nation would fall for Adolph Hitler and Nazim and follow in what was inevitably going to end in disaster? How did, and this is of course the, the, the work Hannah Aarons work, the origins of totalitarianism that tries to answer that question. And, you know, I think it in sense, she is, look, I, I probably should be the wrong. Have you read it? Yeah. But I'm the wrong person to synopsize it. It's kind of, it's kind of the, it's kind of trivializing in a way, but she says it's loneliness. <Laugh>

Amy Webb (01:11:54):
She? I think that, I think there's something there for

Leo Laporte (01:11:56):
Sure. She says loneliness and validation is a precondition for totalitarian domination. That if you're socially isolated, you're more likely to be attracted to totalitarian ideology. And I'm not sure I ever, I'm not sure I agreed with it when I read it. It bugs me still. But you see evidence of it time and time again. And but there's something in our nature that it draws us to a strong man and draws us to somebody who will tell us a myth mythology it's certainty. Yeah. We don't like thinking certainty. We don't like uncertainty. We much prefer it. If we're told what to think.

Amy Webb (01:12:36):
There's another book called cultish, which is somewhere in my office.

David Spark (01:12:40):
I, I read that book. I enjoyed that.

Amy Webb (01:12:42):
What did you think? Did you, did you like

David Spark (01:12:44):
It, David? It's about the Lang about language is what's driving us to believe in cults and the cults go from, you know, the branch to Videon all the way down to your Peloton instruction, CrossFit

Amy Webb (01:13:01):
As well. Yeah. And CrossFit, but the language. Yeah.

David Spark (01:13:05):
And that they use the same language across all. It's it's quite,

Leo Laporte (01:13:09):
I think she talks about soul cycle compares soul cycle to scientific

David Spark (01:13:12):
Soul cycle. Excuse me.

Leo Laporte (01:13:13):
Soul cycle is definitely cult. Everybody knows that, but <laugh>, but you know, but I, I think these are different facets of the same elephant that, I mean, language and Joseph BBS knew this Hitler knew this language is a tool, a very powerful tool. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and the language you choose is part of this. I don't think it's all of it. I don't think it's neurolinguistic programming. I don't think, you know, you, if I say the magic words, you're gonna fall into bed with me, but it's certainly a tool in this, in this manipulation, the whole reason. So is we're so willing to go for it. We wanna believe

David Spark (01:13:52):
Amy brought up something about about challenging ourselves, which I loved. And, and here's something like often when you hear somebody speak,

Leo Laporte (01:14:01):
I'm gonna read this book by the way. Thank you. This is great. It

David Spark (01:14:04):
That's good. The common phrase people say is, oh, I like what so. And so said, I like what Amy said. I like what Leo said, but, and this is what we should be saying to ourselves. I'd like what Amy said, because it challenged my think. There you go. And people don't say that and they should

Leo Laporte (01:14:20):
Never. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:14:22):
Well you, again, if I just bring the book and the conversation back to, to sort of tech and the, the issue at hand, which is like, should New York be creating draconian social media laws? 

Leo Laporte (01:14:34):
Language is, well, by the way, a piece of this, this was the story that we begin with and, you know, nothing will come of that. Right? That's just them going

Amy Webb (01:14:40):
Over.

Leo Laporte (01:14:41):
I'm so mad, mad at discord. I mean, I admit fortune, which by the way, fortune is exactly what Elon Musk wants to turn TWiTtter into for Chan was very much part of this kid's radicalization. He, but he found like minds there and he found the information he wanted and it reinforced his own beliefs. So,

Amy Webb (01:15:01):
Right. So again, this is all structured data. This is the problem. So when you have radical ideas starting to take over, they tend to, to share a common linguistic base. That's interesting, which is partially what this book is about. Isn't that

Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
Fascinating?

Amy Webb (01:15:14):
Yeah. That makes sense. Right. But the problem is that that's like straight up structured data. And if everybody's using the same words and phrases, then you know, you have two options there. It becomes much easier to identify and remove or mitigate on any, you can train any system to recognize those words and they will evolve because people will come up with additional code words then to right. Right. But but, but it gives you optionality. If you're, if you're looking at it as structured data you can either deal with it and remove it or you're making a choice not to. So you know what I've got. Did I ever show you this? I have

Leo Laporte (01:15:55):
Ho actually, hold on, talk about, go get it. And we're gonna talk about it when I gotta take a break. So hold on just a second. Okay. But when we come back, Amy will show us something.

Amy Webb (01:16:04):
I don't know if I should

Leo Laporte (01:16:05):
<Laugh> yes, you should. Hold on. Our show today brought to you by express VPN, watching Netflix without using express VPN is like buying tickets to his Taylor swift concert, but only being allowed to watch the opening act. Oh man. How disappointing is that? Well, let me explain. <Laugh> express VPN unlocks the content you want. It lets you like, like any good VPN change your online location, but there's a real reason you'd wanna use express VPN to do this. First of all, actually, there are a number of reasons. There's security, there's privacy. There's eliminating geographic restrictions. I do all three ever wanna watch Dr who on Netflix? You can go to Netflix, UK, if you're already in Netflix, subscriber in the us, and now you're in England, they invest in their infrastructure. So you can watch high Def video cuz it's fast. One of the ways VPNs get blocked is because an address, an IP address becomes associated with a VPN and then the BBC or somebody else says, well, we're not gonna allow that and blocks that IP address express VPN rotates their address.

Leo Laporte (01:17:16):
They do a really good job of, of not only hiding you, but hiding themselves. So with express VPN, this is one of many reasons to use it. You can just open their app, select a country, go to the country, run Netflix. You're already logged in. Suddenly you'll be seeing Netflix, UK or Netflix, Japan. Beautiful, beautiful HD video. Without buffering that, to mention the security factor of using a VPN. When you go, you know, on a Google search, even if you're in incognito mode, Google knows your IP address. They say, oh, hi Leo, not with express VPN. It's not Leo. It's some other IP address. Express VPN works with everything. You use phones, your laptops, your, your, your consoles, your smart TVs. You can even put express VPN on your router, protect the whole house. And because they've got servers all over the world, 94 different countries, man, the world is your oyster.

Leo Laporte (01:18:13):
Yes, it works with Netflix. It works with BBC's eye player works with YouTube. It's really a remarkable VPN. Here's the final, final issue with the VPN. Sure. You're protecting your privacy against the other guys, but the VPN knows everything you're doing. You want a VPN service that protects your privacy the same way you protect it. I'll never forget the time that I I fired up iTunes. And on this list of everybody's music in the hotel, I could listen to their music. That's when it hit me. You know, I probably should be using express VPN. There was a great article on bleeping computer about express VPN and how they do it. I was so impressed. They run a, a custom version of Debbie and Debian and it gets wiped completely every day. So there's nothing on the hard drive. Furthermore, with their trusted server technology, they are launching a Ram only server that can't, that sandbox can't write to the hard drive.

Leo Laporte (01:19:19):
So it can't write to the hard drive it's wiped regularly on reboot. It is, it, it there's a verification system that prevents insider code tampering. It's patched every week with clean installs on every express VPN server. So when I read this on bleeping computer, I thought, you know what? This is, this confirms what I always thought express VPN. It works better. They invest in infrastructure. They protect your privacy and all of this for less than seven bucks a month. When you go to express vpn.com/TWiT, be smart, stop paying full price for streaming services and only getting access to a fraction of their content. Get your money's worth express vpn.com/TWiT and sign up for a year package. You'll get three months free, big discount, less than seven bucks a month to protect your privacy, to put yourself anywhere in the world. It's amazing worth every penny. It's the only VPN I use. The only one I trust express vpn.com/TWiTt. We thank 'em so much for their supportive TWiTt. They've done a really good job of making this service. Now, Amy Webb is gonna show us something

Amy Webb (01:20:31):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:20:32):
Da, da, is it a book

Amy Webb (01:20:34):
I show, whoa, whoa. So I collect I like to collect rare books, hard to find books, books on weird topics. And obviously like any type of book that was predicting the future, you know, like foretelling the future. I also really like dictionaries. I got my hands. I love dictionaries a copy of something. Yeah. I'm not sure I'm supposed to have this is the technical dictionary for Scientology.

Leo Laporte (01:20:59):
Ooh, they're gonna be coming to your door, knock, knock, knock. They

Amy Webb (01:21:03):
Might be knock and I'll know what they're talking about. Cause I've like read a lot of

Leo Laporte (01:21:07):
This. So Scientology, which is 70, definitely a cult mm-hmm <affirmative> has a lot of secret lore that you have to pay to get to. Yeah. And I imagine that book is one of those.

Amy Webb (01:21:21):
Yeah. There's a lot of, so again, like language is, language is so interesting because it's a way of creating in and out groups. It's a way to manipulate, create exercise power. And which again, why, when we think about language,

Leo Laporte (01:21:35):
Look up Xeno is Xu in there.

Amy Webb (01:21:37):
Let me take a look.

Leo Laporte (01:21:38):
X, E N U <laugh>

Amy Webb (01:21:41):
Moment, please.

Leo Laporte (01:21:44):
We could get so much trouble. I had a girlfriend who was an ex Scientologist. It is the hardest thing ever to get out of.

Amy Webb (01:21:51):
No, there's four entries, X, one X, two X unit and X. Yeah. They tell you X one is a code number of a process X unit. Yeah, this is

Leo Laporte (01:22:01):
A

Amy Webb (01:22:01):
Very relative to

Leo Laporte (01:22:02):
Maybe look her L for Lord Xu. <Laugh> she? The things they did to her to try to keep her in Scientology were mind boggling, including putting, putting a bullet in her mailbox, a 45. Oh my God. 

Amy Webb (01:22:20):
No's

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
No Lordy. So you do not have, I'm sorry to say, you have not paid sufficiently to get the final materials. There was somebody released it, the stuff in the safe, you know, that you have to get clear to get somebody. Yeah, yeah. It's

Amy Webb (01:22:37):
No, this was first printed in 1975, but again, it's just there there's thousands and thousands of words in here. And, and if you're, you know, if you wanna continue to rise up, you have to know what all of this means. Yeah. So again, think about this in terms of tech and structured data and taxonomies and the nomenclature and like the words that are getting used to train systems to learn and understand and talk it's like, it starts to be like totally mind bending. If you think about the power that we are giving to decisioning systems, based on a handful of people's like language, like words, selection, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:23:14):
I think the good news is

David Spark (01:23:16):
Leo. Yes. Wait a second. Leo. I think she just got this book so she could cheat on the test.

Leo Laporte (01:23:21):
<Laugh> you know? No, no, no. Looking into the soul of the person next to you as Woody to say I, yes. I'm glad you have that, Amy and I hope that you survived tonight.

David Spark (01:23:34):
Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:23:35):
That's all. That's all I can say. Do you have other artifacts from religions? Worldwide?

Amy Webb (01:23:43):
I do. I'm very interested in religion again, like it bugs me a little bit that some people I really admire in science have become hardliners on religion and, and or lack or, you know, like there is no God. Right. I think that just, I don't know, maybe I don't, I don't have the sufficient data to make that

Leo Laporte (01:24:05):
Decision. I, well, well know when we're dead or not.

Amy Webb (01:24:08):
So again, like, I, I don't wanna go through life. I, it took me a while to get to this point, but I, I wanna be open to possibilities. Yeah. I wanna learn new things. No

Leo Laporte (01:24:17):
Agree. I'm a hundred percent there. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:24:18):
You know, I, I

Leo Laporte (01:24:19):
Don't judge. I, I

Amy Webb (01:24:20):
Many values are,

Leo Laporte (01:24:21):
I don't judge anybody for anything that they believe, even if they thought the sky was green. But

David Spark (01:24:29):
Hold, wait, if they thought the sky was green, how much would they you believe anything else? They said, well,

Leo Laporte (01:24:34):
It might be green to them. Green's just a construct.

Amy Webb (01:24:37):
Well, somebody in the chat

David Spark (01:24:38):
Brought us up, they're colorblind. That's a whole different

Leo Laporte (01:24:40):
Issue. Well, that's the point. We don't know. There you go. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:24:44):
Just in, so I lived in Japan for a long time. And as I think a lot of people who listen to the show now I speak Japanese fluently and somebody brought this up in the chat. But O is the name so, so there is no, the, the words for blue and green kind of get interchanged a lot, right. In Japan, like a, a stoplight is owl, which technically means blue, but it's, it's definitely green again. Like it's

Leo Laporte (01:25:06):
A ham

Amy Webb (01:25:07):
Construc. Think we were a little, yeah. Yeah. Our, our creativity, our thinking is a little hamstrung by the absolute is language that we use. And I think that's, again, we're training machines to do the same, which is,

Leo Laporte (01:25:18):
But see, this is why I do think you're an optimist because I am maybe I used to be an optimist. And now as a reformed optimist, I'm very pessimistic and <laugh>, and you know, there's nothing worse than a lapsed Catholic or a reformed optimist. We're the worst. But the, I kind of am thinking it's hopeless and we are so mired. We don't, we do not know what we don't know to the end's degree. And we're so mired in our, you know, pat brain patterns that it's just, it's just hopeless. And I, the good news is G P T three, not withstanding, we're never gonna have self-driving cars or general AR artificial general artificial intelligence. That's impossible.

Amy Webb (01:26:04):
Oh, I think we've already got AGI. Where well, Ian Goodfellow just left and, and went to the place where it's being invented

Leo Laporte (01:26:12):
The place. That's actually another one of our stories. He was the apple guy who had come from Google to go to apple. Well, yeah. To who is the king of GP three, three or G, right? He's the

Amy Webb (01:26:24):
Guy. Well G so, right. He was the first person to really one,

Leo Laporte (01:26:26):
The first adversarial

Amy Webb (01:26:29):
Network

Leo Laporte (01:26:29):
Network, which is a very deep form of machine learning. He, yeah.

Amy Webb (01:26:35):
Some of his papers, early papers are fascinating to read now.

Leo Laporte (01:26:38):
And he, he was unhappy with the requirement to come back to work. He liked working from home who knew mm-hmm <affirmative> and said for that, and other reasons I think decided to leave apple and and then go back to Google. There was a great quote, this is this is from TNW, E N w Tristan green. He said to put this into a sports analogy, what Apple's done is like letting Tom Brady or Michael Jordan leave your team over a disagreement between them and the team owner on how towels should be folded.

Amy Webb (01:27:13):
That kind of happened to Jordan though. Didn't it?

Leo Laporte (01:27:14):
Yeah. Let good follow. To be honest, it happens, let good fellow and his team work from wherever they want. If they think they can code a better machine learning model from the international space station, you should probably look into building a rocket. So you think that AGI is where

Amy Webb (01:27:36):
Absolutely it's here. This is the problem. We, first of all, the 

Leo Laporte (01:27:40):
How do you define it? A lot of the, I mean the, well, we know the turning test is, is bogus.

Amy Webb (01:27:45):
It's a lot of, so the, the benchmarks have typically to do with language. So there's something called the glue G L U E benchmark, which is an action acronym that stands for stuff. That got surpassed. There's super glue. That's been surpassed. There was the Aari benchmark. We

Leo Laporte (01:28:02):
Can't even define it is

Amy Webb (01:28:04):
The problem. No. So this is the problem. We talk about systems being generally capable of performing multiple tasks at once, add or above the level of humans. I would argue that we are already starting like, like alpha fold, you know, uses language, uses, decision, making, uses recognition, making decisions. We, we already have systems that I think evidence sort of the outer edges. We have edge cases now. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (01:28:35):
They're very specific domains. So I always think of AGI as, as more like Computer. Yeah. Like, well, no computer, just not in any, I mean, you could say, yeah. Indistinguishable from human. Steve Bosniac said if a, if a, if a machine could come into your house and make a cup of coffee, <laugh> on the machine machine

Amy Webb (01:28:54):
Is in my house. <Laugh>, I've got a, I've got a machine that makes automate most of the stuff. And I do very little, you know, I've got machines that make me coffee. I've got machines that are connecting me to you from half of, you know, I'm on the east coast.

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
Yeah. It's pretty amazing in a way, but these are all very narrow. That's not, that's why I say general intelligence, cuz these are all like, well, yeah, of course machines can do a lot of things, but honestly that's algorithmic, in my opinion. 

Amy Webb (01:29:19):
The problem with the current benchmarks is that you're you're right. They are specific. They are mostly tied to specific types of language. And with, but you have to have the benchmarks because that's what galvanizes activity in the research community cuz people wanna beat them. Yeah. I think we have to just define. So in the last book that I wrote, the big nine, I actually came up with a different, my version of what a better benchmark would be. It's called the I think I called it the meaningful contribution test, which is where you would have an AI system. Like the, a word, for example, disembodied voice sitting in on a meeting with you and it would sort of automatically intervene or be a part of conflict conversations. It would automatically

Leo Laporte (01:30:00):
See, I think that's super hard and yeah. Much harder than we think. I

Amy Webb (01:30:03):
Think that's

Leo Laporte (01:30:04):
Yeah. I feel like the, the first 80% is easy. It's the last 1% that's impossible. And I think that's,

Amy Webb (01:30:10):
That's everything.

Leo Laporte (01:30:10):
Yeah. It's everything. And I think that that's really, we we've underestimated that last 1%, all this time, you know, the, the right now the U the EU is proposing that every social network should be responsible for the content of that network. Not only child sexual abuse material sees Sam. That's what apple was proposing with a CSAM scanner for the iPhone, but of grooming behavior. So this raises a number of things. First of all, that means no end to end encryption, because if WhatsApp is responsible for all the conversations on WhatsApp, they can't encrypt them. They've gotta be able to see them, but then there's even a more difficult, what is grooming behavior? How do you know, do you know, can you identify it accurately enough to send somebody to jail?

Amy Webb (01:30:59):
I didn't even know what that word was. I'd never heard that. So, you

Leo Laporte (01:31:03):
Know, now

Amy Webb (01:31:04):
Very I do, unfortunately. Yeah. Now I,

Leo Laporte (01:31:06):
Yeah. It's what I've been. I've been grooming you for months. <Laugh>

Amy Webb (01:31:10):
The hives

Leo Laporte (01:31:11):
They're coming. But, but that's the thing, if you say if I say to David spark, ASL age sex location, which was the, you know, the acronym on an AOL aim mm-hmm <affirmative> some would say that's grooming behavior, right? It's it could certainly be the first step in grooming behavior. But maybe I just wanna know David better. And how is a, so this is by the way, it's not yet the law in the EU, but this is an, a, a serious proposal that could very well become law in the EU. And bizarre. I don't know how you did how you would enforce it.

Amy Webb (01:31:49):
I think we're gonna look back in a hundred years. I I've been oh wait, you're gonna be around

Leo Laporte (01:31:53):
In a hundred years. I wish.

Amy Webb (01:31:54):
I hope not. I hope not. No, no,

Leo Laporte (01:31:56):
No. Wouldn't you wanna be if you could be poured into of course. Yes, of course.

Amy Webb (01:32:01):
Of course. Yes. Oh yeah. If I could go far enough in the future. Absolutely. No, but maybe

Leo Laporte (01:32:04):
I would need to go far. I'm on hundred years, I got about 18 years left. I'm hoping between now <laugh> and and what is that? 20, 20, 28, 20, 38. That somebody will figure out how to put my brain in a jar and you know, get, you know I could live forever. Well, right now your brain needs to figure out basic math, cuz it'd be 2040. Okay. Whatever.

Amy Webb (01:32:26):
Here's what I, I been thinking a

Leo Laporte (01:32:28):
Lot about that, you know, <laugh>,

Amy Webb (01:32:31):
I've been thinking a lot that ego, a hundred, 150, 200 years into the future. Those people are, are gonna look back at us, the generation that's alive right now. And, and we're the generation that we're gonna look so primitive. Right? We, we are the ones who started things. We're like cave people, right. In a good way. Right. James Webb is gonna start porting back images that are literally gonna, they're gonna, we are going, it's just beginning to confront our interpretation of rally. Yeah. I also think looking back at us now, we're gonna look like barbarians the way that we be. But the weapons that we're using, the, the weapons are like, bludgeons right. We look at the way people fought a thousand years ago and we say, now how could anybody have lived through this? How horrible? I think they're gonna look at our digital tools. Sure. of course, course they are. And they're gonna say the same types. That's gonna be the same analogy. About us. I personally, I would love to be the generation. That's like, Hey, we figured out like fix and shovels and how to make fire. And then we did some good stuff with those tools versus we were the barbarians, you know?

Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
Well, oh, but isn't, isn't it always, those, those guys were really, you know, they didn't take baths. <Laugh> isn't that they thought baths were unhelpful. I mean, isn't, aren't they always barbarians in the distant past.

Amy Webb (01:33:52):
We're Al yes. But in a way that I think is

Leo Laporte (01:33:54):
We're gonna be worse. I think they're look back, there's an opportunity and say, what the hell were you thinking? Digging, you got energy coming in from the sun in almost infinite quantity. And you thought it was a good idea to dig up animal matter from under the ground and burn it. What the hell were you thinking? That's what I think they're gonna think.

Amy Webb (01:34:14):
No, of course. But it's, I I've been having fun going pretty far out thinking what are the things that we are the, the first, really the first, I mean, yes. In 69, we like humans went to the moon. That's fine. But this is

Leo Laporte (01:34:28):
Something different. That's pretty good, right?

Amy Webb (01:34:30):
Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty good. But, but we're on the cusp of, of doing totally different types of like building a space economy and becoming a multi planet species, which is pretty amazing. We're engineering cells. We're programming cells. We're programming money. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:34:42):
That's what this book is about.

Amy Webb (01:34:43):
Right? This transition.

Leo Laporte (01:34:44):
This is what you're saying in the Genesis machine is we're on the cusp. We're on the edge of

Amy Webb (01:34:49):
A, well, we are, we are the edge. We are that we're the transition generation. Yeah. So it makes me excited. Yeah. It also makes me feel this sense of urgency. Like we gotta all make good choices here. Yeah. You know? So that anyways,

Leo Laporte (01:35:02):
Well, no, that's right. It's you know, if you're if you're shooting at Mars, one degree off at the beginning could be a million miles at the end. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta aim carefully. Of course we're not habitually clearly.

David Spark (01:35:20):
Why do you wanna blow up

Leo Laporte (01:35:21):
Mars? <Laugh> what did Mars

Amy Webb (01:35:24):
Do to you? Did you guys watch the, did you watch the expanse? The Martians are

Leo Laporte (01:35:29):
They really ended up

Amy Webb (01:35:30):
Portland on, on the show? Yeah. On the show. Some of

Leo Laporte (01:35:32):
Them. Yeah. So no,

David Spark (01:35:33):
But in real life, the margins are very nice.

Leo Laporte (01:35:36):
I, so that's a really good point. So for instance, somebody like Elon and others just saying, we're gonna, we gotta go to, we gotta go to Mars. We gotta live on Mars. We gotta inhabit Mars, incredibly difficult, probably not valuable. And at this, we have places

David Spark (01:35:50):
Here on earth and have

Leo Laporte (01:35:52):
Oxygen. Yeah. At point in time, it would be better to make sure that this place right here is in good shape. It's a MIS, is that the kind of aiming you're talking about?

Amy Webb (01:36:04):
We could do both. It doesn't have to be in either, or this is the argument that gets made. Right. Why do we have our said set on Mars? We should make things better. Right? Again, like can't we operate in two cognitive spaces at once. It takes a little bit more energy, but why can't we, we work on both, you know, I'm,

Leo Laporte (01:36:19):
I'm up for that. I don't mind that. I do think

Amy Webb (01:36:21):
Sometimes I D know why everybody's with Mars though.

Leo Laporte (01:36:23):
We say, well, yeah, I don't. Yeah. But sometimes we use that as a way of avoiding our responsibilities on our, and that is a little risky, right?

Amy Webb (01:36:31):
Yeah. Yeah. Would you go, would you get on

Leo Laporte (01:36:35):
And I'd go on a one way trip. Now would,

Amy Webb (01:36:38):
Would you make a, would you make the return, would you make one of the,

David Spark (01:36:41):
The 18 years left? Wait, wait. A good 17 and a

Leo Laporte (01:36:44):
Half. Okay. In 17 years, I'm on my way. 

Amy Webb (01:36:47):
Would you, if you, if money was not an object, here's what I'm asking. Would you, would you hop on a SpaceX capsule and or blue origin? They're not really going to space space, but would you, would you

Leo Laporte (01:36:56):
Go up? Yeah, I don't, I, I, I wanna get my wings, so I wanna do, I'm gonna bring my

Amy Webb (01:37:01):
Glitch. They're not conferring wings. I know you're not conferring wings to you're not an astronauts.

Leo Laporte (01:37:06):
You have to go. So I want go to the ISS. Yeah. I wanna do an experiment to see if synthetic whiskey <laugh>. I dunno, something, something in space and I want to get my wings. Yes. I would

Amy Webb (01:37:18):
Be better get to the ISS fast before it's decommissioned sensors, no funding for it.

Leo Laporte (01:37:24):
No, I would love, I've always wanted since a kid, cuz I grew up watching you know, Gemini and mercury and Apollo. And that to me was the, you know, that was the, the Heights of the future technology. I always wanna do that. Yeah. I'd do that in a minute. Let's take a little break boy. I, I, we haven't. We've got we, I think we did two stories. <Laugh>

Amy Webb (01:37:50):
That's my fault. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:37:51):
Sorry. No, there's no rule that we have to do all the stories. I was a little worried when the show began that we had a light rundown, apparently not. But we will get to, we will get to more

David Spark (01:38:02):
In filling up time is not the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:38:05):
That's not the problem. You're exactly right, David. So what, so between tech TV and your new CISO series series, the the, the CISO series.com. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> what have you been up to?

David Spark (01:38:27):
But that, well, the most interesting thing is what I'm doing right now. CISO series it's you know, if, if anyone's listening, they're in the cybersecurity industry or you want to be,

Leo Laporte (01:38:36):
You don't wanna about talking about your time in the merchant Marine and

David Spark (01:38:40):
I was not in the merchant Marines.

Leo Laporte (01:38:41):
No. Okay.

David Spark (01:38:41):
<Laugh> no, I, no, but no, that's you know,

Leo Laporte (01:38:45):
Fighting in guerilla bars across the globe or in,

David Spark (01:38:48):
You are doing this extraordinarily well in terms of making tech entertaining. Interesting fun. See,

Leo Laporte (01:38:54):
Now you're grooming me and, and

David Spark (01:38:55):
I, I, are you breaking out in hives yet?

Leo Laporte (01:38:57):
Yes. <Laugh>

David Spark (01:38:59):
The, the thing that we're trying to do in cybersecurity specifically, and I know you have your security now show as well. We're we have just, we're just trying to make it fun. We're trying to make it entertaining. We got great community people. Honestly, this whole concept started because I don't know how much you've talked about it on your shows, security vendors and security practitioners are like budding heads

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
Constantly. Yes,

David Spark (01:39:23):
Yes. And you know, the problem is, and it's this weird dichotomy of how the industry works is you've got somewhere and we don't know exactly in how many, but there's somewhere between 3000 to 5,000 security vendors out there. And then they're all

Leo Laporte (01:39:38):
Selling. They all advertise with us.

David Spark (01:39:41):
Thank you would hope <laugh> but they're all selling to CSOs. And so what's happening is just CSOs. Can they gotta run their environment. They gotta secure their environment. They gotta work with the team they're managing and also working, working with the business. And then at the same time, they have to look at new security solutions. So

Leo Laporte (01:40:01):
It's a challenging space. Absolutely.

David Spark (01:40:03):
Very, very challenging. Yeah, absolutely. So we began the network with the original mission of how can we ease this conflict that's going on and stop blaming and figure out a better way to communicate. Love it. And then it's sort of, it's grown out of that. Actually love it is where it came.

Leo Laporte (01:40:24):
So nice to have you see. So series.com of course, Amy Webb the greatest, the futurist, the author of so many good books, including Anna must read the Genesis machine, her latest, which is, it reads like a novel, except it's true, which is so fun. Actually, when we come back, you know this is an important day in my life. May 22nd on the 22nd of each month, I get two new audible credits and you already used up one with cultish. So maybe when we come back, I listen to the audio book. That's how I read. That's what I, that's how I listen to everything. I need a new book. So maybe you guys can can come up with some recommendations. I'll show you what's in my wishlist. You can maybe review those and decide which ones I should read. Our show today brought to you by my new thing, Noom.

Leo Laporte (01:41:13):
It's not new. I've been doing Noom for a year. Lisa my wife to support me. Isn't that great did it too. And she not only supported me. Of course, she laughed me. <Laugh> she's looking great. And what's great about Noom is it's not a diet. It's a, it's, it's a way of life that will lead to greater health. It's not just about losing weight, but nom weight will help you in your path to feeling great, weighing the right amount for you. And most importantly, change the way you think about food. It is not a diet because you don't have to change your lifestyle. Noom doesn't believe in restricting what you can or can't eat. Instead. Noom gives you knowledge. This is of course the secret, isn't it. And the wisdom you need to make informed choices and then gives you the encouragement. You need to stay on that path.

Leo Laporte (01:42:07):
It's a psychological approach based on things like cognitive behavioral therapy, which really, really works with Noom. You get a number of tools. You get the app, you can track everything. You're eating and drinking and all the exercise you're doing. You get a coach, personal coach, you get a group. It helps you understand your relationship with food and build sustainable habits to last a lifetime. When it first started Noom, I went and I told my coach, I said, I feel bad. I had a hot dog. She said, no, there's no bad foods. You can have a hot dog. I said, what, what kind of diet is it? She said, Leo, I've told you again. And again, it's not a diet. There are no bad foods. It's about making informed choices. What I was really doing that was bad that I had to learn to change was fog, eating, eating unconsciously, coming home and stuffing my mouth and Noom has really helped me build sustainable habits that are also fostering.

Leo Laporte (01:42:58):
My health Noom understands building long-term positive habits is hard and yes, it has its ups and downs. They believe in progress, not perfection. Your journey is gonna look different from everybody else, but it is grounded in science and it's the heart of everything they do. They've published more than 30 peer reviewed scientific articles for users, practitioners, scientists in the public about what they're doing and how it works. And I encourage you. If, if you wanna know more to read up on that, you can start at the website, N O O m.com/TWiTt. When I first started Noom, they give you a fairly long questionnaire. They're really digging into what you're doing, your habits, how you feel about stuff. Do you stress eat? Do you fog eat? Do you let the elephant take control all of that? And it's really you, even in the PR onboarding process, a beginning of learning about yourself and knowing what's going on, you don't have to worry about ruining the whole program with one off day.

Leo Laporte (01:44:00):
It helps you get back on track. You fitted into your life. So you decide how much time you wanna spend on noon, how fast you wanna lose weight 5, 10, 15 minutes a day. All of that is, is in your control. And that's really what Newman's about is about being in control. Not forcing anything, I just, I'm such a fan. It works so well. And I, and if, and if you ever, if Lisa ever sees you, you just ask her about Newman prepare because she will tell you how great it is, the whole story. It's really fantastic. It's really fantastic. In fact, you can read it online, go to Noom N O om.com/TWiTt and start building better habits today. Of course they have a trial, so at least do that for yourself. N O om.com/TWiT. See if it works for you. I think, I think you'll see why it is now becoming such a great choice for so many people. And I, you know, I love the community that I had in new and my, and and my coach and we communicate regularly. There's also a great nom subreddit with lots of additional ideas. I just think Noom is fantastic. Noom, N O om.com/TWiT. I want you to sign up fruit trial. If you've been looking for something, this, this may be the thing you're looking for. It was for me, noom.com/TWiTt. Thank you. Noom from the bottom of my heart. Seriously.

Leo Laporte (01:45:25):
Ah, all right. Speak. By the way, one of the things that's kind of a through line in this whole conversation is we were talking even before the show started about Elon again, this week saying we're gonna have fully self-driving cars next year, which he's been saying every year since 20 14, 1 of these years he'll be right. Well, but I think it's also a Testament. I don't think Elon's, I think he, he believes it. I it's a Testament to how hard that last little bit is that last little bit is almost, you know, almost impossible. This is the week that apple, apparently according to Bloomberg and mark Erman showed its its glasses. VR AR I don't know to the board, Apple's got the WWDC keynote coming up June 6th. I imagine they may say something then in a month they may say something in the fall they may, the rumor is we'll sell something. This year, this is a really good example. Google at Google IO showed some thick spectacles that put translations up in your heads up display so that a young woman could talk to her mother. Her mother speaks Mandarin. The woman speaks English and she could see the translation in English, on our glasses. The mother could see the Mandarin translation. They were able to talk to one another. Amy, are you,

David Spark (01:46:56):
Do you think that, do you think that's the killer app? Oh, that's my question is because like, I, I have you know those, you know, quest goggles from Facebook, what do you think is the killer app? What is the tool? That'll get people to buy these units,

Leo Laporte (01:47:10):
Not making people nauseated.

David Spark (01:47:13):
Well, I don't, I think the quest, it doesn't make me nauseated. I must say that exercise apps is what I've used them for,

Leo Laporte (01:47:20):
But there are plenty of people on include myself who do get nauseated. And I think it's hard to

David Spark (01:47:25):
Sell its consumer prior to quest that 

Leo Laporte (01:47:28):
Did bother you a quest doesn't I don't have a quest cause I don't have a Facebook account. So I'm never gonna have a quest. Apple's probably I'll I'll get the apple one, even though it's rumor to be expensive $3,000, because it's like, well, it's, it's a develop. It's not pre-consumer release. It's a developer

David Spark (01:47:44):
Release. It's not the,

Leo Laporte (01:47:45):
Yeah. Okay. I, I want AR badly. I wanna be able to wear glasses around that will give me extra information as I walk around the world.

David Spark (01:47:54):
So you, you want your, your world augmented,

Leo Laporte (01:47:57):
In fact, Amy, I know you believe in it because you consulted, what was the name of that show? I really liked that show.

Amy Webb (01:48:04):
I don't know. There's been a lot of shows.

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
I know the first site. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The first

Amy Webb (01:48:08):
You liked it. You were in a very small number of

Leo Laporte (01:48:11):
I's. What are we talking about? Well, it was canceled. The idea was they were gonna be the first on Mars and, but one of the technologies, and I know it came from you was, you know, the young, woman's wearing some stylish glasses and they're talking about something. She said, well, let me show you. And she gives the glasses to the guy so we can see it on the heads up display the augmented reality. What she's talking about you're you're consulting for this show was to kind of put them in the near future, right?

Amy Webb (01:48:37):
Yeah. I do actually a lot of work on shows and movies that are set in the future. There's one coming out this summer. That is we will talk about offline. I it's a secret. It's pretty terrible. It's a secret.

Leo Laporte (01:48:51):
It's gonna be terrible. Yeah. You, that's not in your control, is it?

Amy Webb (01:48:54):
That's not in my control, but let me tell you about glasses. Yeah. That's the problem. One of the problems

Leo Laporte (01:48:59):
I thought the first was great. That was really sad because it ends in the first season with them launching to Mars. And we're never, they're never gonna get there. <Laugh>

Amy Webb (01:49:06):
Right. Here's the problem. It was, it was marketed. The, the, the talking points were that it was the first group of people to, to live on Mars to make it to Mars. Yeah. And that's not what the story was about. Bill Willman, who did the original showrunner loved will. He's a great storyteller. Yeah, really great. Exceptional

Leo Laporte (01:49:26):
Writer. He did house of cards.

Amy Webb (01:49:28):
He did. He also did a movie called odds of March. He's he's very smart. But the show was about getting to Mars, not being on Mars. Right. So there was this enormous disappointment. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:49:40):
I love Natasha MC alone.

Amy Webb (01:49:41):
Oh, she's great.

Leo Laporte (01:49:42):
I'm not sure. I want Sean Penn to be the first person on Mars, but okay.

Amy Webb (01:49:46):
You have to have a big name attached to, to yeah. Anything anymore to get funding and to get production through. So

Leo Laporte (01:49:52):
Yeah. And I have a lot of respect for him. He's a, you know, rugged. Yeah. Handsome man. <Laugh> I guess, I don't know.

Amy Webb (01:49:59):
He's, he's a name. He's an, he's

Leo Laporte (01:50:00):
A name anyways.

Amy Webb (01:50:01):
Okay. With the glasses. So a lot of people would say, I'm never gonna wear, I'm never gonna use VR. And by the way, VR has a very limited set of use

Leo Laporte (01:50:10):
Cases. I can because they get a significant percentage, at least 10 get nauseated every time they use VR.

Amy Webb (01:50:16):
Right? So let's think about glasses like I'm wearing. And so that's

Leo Laporte (01:50:20):
What I want

Amy Webb (01:50:21):
In 2018. I

Leo Laporte (01:50:22):
Want your glasses.

Amy Webb (01:50:24):
So in 2018 I built this model that seems to be holding, showing the sort of plateau of mobile devices to be replaced by a constellation of other devices that all rely on the cloud. So this

Leo Laporte (01:50:38):
One apples device interest goes away because 52% of their revenue this quarter was the iPhone. They gotta think what's, as this goes away, what's gonna be next.

Amy Webb (01:50:48):
So the model, the math on it is continuing to hold. And so the thing that I've been talking about since 20 16, 20 17, 20 18, is that this is what comes next. Glasses, which is, has been met with abject hostility, or <laugh> like, just you're wrong. Here's

David Spark (01:51:06):
History, history, violence in San Francisco with people literally beating them Google glass beating up the tech bros with Google glass on,

Leo Laporte (01:51:13):
But they deserved

Amy Webb (01:51:15):
The

Leo Laporte (01:51:15):
Glasses. Here's deserved it,

Amy Webb (01:51:17):
But here's the data that

David Spark (01:51:18):
We have. Wait, are you promoting violence against, on a media channel? Yes. Leo, yes. <Laugh>.

Amy Webb (01:51:26):
In the United States,

Leo Laporte (01:51:26):
Two people, you get punch Nazi and glass holes. Go ahead. In the

Amy Webb (01:51:30):
United States. Yes. Always. Yes. In the us. The number of people with myopia, which is the technical term for nearsightedness is like a hockey stick. It's going way up really fast. Is it totally makes sense? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:51:43):
Because we're all staring at screen sense. Is that why

Amy Webb (01:51:45):
We are all staring at screens? And the tech has evolved faster than our biology. Our eyes were built to see long distances so that we didn't get killed by animals coming at us, not short distances. Right. So what we know to be true is most people are gonna need some type of corrective lens anyway. And that is especially true of people who are very young. So kids, especially, and after being through COVID that cause a second bump in acceleration. So we're already gonna need to, to wear glasses. Now, if your choice is you can have analog glasses, you can have like Plano glasses, glasses, like that don't do anything. Or you can have enhanced glasses with these other capabilities. Yeah. And if those capabilities are basically a heads up display yeah. What do you think people are gonna choose it become is it's a, it is a absolute certainty. I mean, I, I'm very, I'm not certain about a lot of things this, if they, but this I'm much more certain on, they have to get the technical limitations over. That's the problem like battery yes. And heat. Yes. Right. And right now that build is happening back and I'm pointing back.

Leo Laporte (01:52:48):
She's showing her airport temple. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:52:50):
Yeah. I'm actually speaking. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
When I wear my hearing aids, it's got a big old battery in the, behind the ear. Yeah. And the little thing

Amy Webb (01:52:57):
In the, yeah. So, and that requires less comp the hearing aids are amazing technology, what they're able to do, but that's not, that's not video. So that's a, that's a different challenge. Right? The optical it, my husband's and I doctors. So like, I've got some background on this. The, the optical limitations are not as challenging as things like battery life and you know, all, all of that, but it's, it will be overcome at some point. So it totally makes sense that apple would be going all in

Leo Laporte (01:53:28):
Amazon and there would be a market for it. Yep. And Qualcomm just announced this week it's gotten a new platform for AR glasses. Yeah. Everybody's

Amy Webb (01:53:36):
Working. So again, I don't think this is about Pokemon. Go on steroids. What I think this is, is a heads up display the kinds of stuff that you would be looking at your phone for like directions. I think translation is more likely to be well, I guess you could have a heads up on translation, but it's that like today I went on a, I do really long distance bike riding.

Leo Laporte (01:53:56):
I saw you got a new bike. Gravel bike. Yeah.

Amy Webb (01:53:58):
Oh my God. That bike is, I don't tell any, don't tell anybody I'm talking quietly. Cuz Brian's in the other room. I totally smoked him like hard <laugh> and he was, it was demoralizing. I pushed him to go an extra six miles and he was like ticked off and then I, I couldn't slow down. It was, I've got so much power. Geometry

David Spark (01:54:17):
Is different leave right now, these geometries right now, recording this at a lower

Leo Laporte (01:54:19):
Level. <Laugh>

Amy Webb (01:54:21):
You can remember at any rate I've got a computer on my bike. I've also got my iPhone. It would be neat if the wraparound super ugly. That's fine. Glasses, you know, showed me all the data. So that I, I wasn't having to look at my computer the whole time. Yeah. I know that's

Leo Laporte (01:54:38):
And here is all of the left pedal, the right pedal. The <laugh> all of the boy you talk about 

Amy Webb (01:54:46):
If you're a, if you're like a data person

Leo Laporte (01:54:49):
Is cyclist. Wow. Yeah,

Amy Webb (01:54:50):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:54:51):
Is that, is that stuff you're wearing or it all from the bike itself

Amy Webb (01:54:55):
I'm wearing, I had a heart rate monitor on. I've got a wristband monitor on. I've got Mike, I've got this really cool system from Garin that I've got sensors on the wheels. I've got sensors on my place. See David

Leo Laporte (01:55:08):
She's living in the future. That's how she can be AIST.

Amy Webb (01:55:11):
It's pretty cool. I felt like Tron today. When

Leo Laporte (01:55:14):
I

Amy Webb (01:55:14):
On the it was amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:55:16):
Now the question is, are you gonna ride it again tomorrow or is it just, is that it? Are

Amy Webb (01:55:19):
You done? No. No. Tomorrow's a recovery day. I, I push it pretty hard today. I've gotta do some recovery rides tomorrow so I can get flush out my system,

Leo Laporte (01:55:26):
The diverge gravel bike from specialized. I like specialized bikes, but I bet it's not electric, right?

Amy Webb (01:55:32):
Oh no. It's not electric. You also can't get them. You're gonna have to wait a year. I actually bought it are

David Spark (01:55:38):
Electric bikes all over the

Leo Laporte (01:55:39):
Place where I, I love my electric bikes. Yeah. They're great. If there weren't so many gosh darn cars around, it'd be great.

David Spark (01:55:46):
Let me ask you what percentage of bikes on the road where you live Leo or electric? What percentage would you say?

Leo Laporte (01:55:53):
Up here in Petaluma, it's probably a third, a quarter to a third. It's not and half

David Spark (01:55:58):
95% of what I say. I moved down to Carl. Where do you live? Carlsbad. I, I move I'm now in Carlsbad. Okay. In San Diego area, I would say 95%. Everything's an electric bike. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:08):
Everything. If you look in our garage, we've got four electric bikes, two sways, three electric cars. <Laugh> we, we are, we're all in on electric. I love

David Spark (01:56:18):
Them have solar panels on the roof.

Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
Lots of them. I got more than 60. I got a ton of them and we got two Tesla power walls. So I, I, I just

Amy Webb (01:56:29):
Let's let's smack about anyone.

Leo Laporte (01:56:31):
Yeah, really. Well. You know, when I was, when I was I got the, like one of the first model Xs, so I got on the list like a year before. And when I was on the list and I thought, I can't say anything bad about Tesla. Cuz there was a blogger who said something about that Elon didn't like, and Elon canceled his reservation. And I thought I better be careful what I say. Now I can say anything I want. Cause I don't drive a Tesla anymore.

Amy Webb (01:57:01):
And also they need people to place orders.

Leo Laporte (01:57:03):
So do they?

Amy Webb (01:57:05):
I think, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:57:05):
Don't they I'll tell you what, I don't know what it's like in Carlsbad or are you in Baltimore right now? Whatever you are me. Yeah, but

Amy Webb (01:57:14):
No, I mean, I,

Leo Laporte (01:57:15):
I see that, but Teslas everywhere. I see nothing but Tesla everywhere. I've never Teslas

David Spark (01:57:20):
The

Leo Laporte (01:57:20):
Place where I am. It's totally dominant. All of a sudden everybody's driving Teslas up here.

Amy Webb (01:57:25):
I thought they, they missed their, I maybe I, I shouldn't say, I thought maybe they missed their, their quarterly

Leo Laporte (01:57:30):
Tour because of cuz of 

Amy Webb (01:57:32):
Supply

Leo Laporte (01:57:32):
Chain, supply chain. You know, I feel like we're never gonna be able to buy anything again. Better take good care of your iPhone kids. It's it's gonna get nasty out here, right?

Amy Webb (01:57:44):
Yeah. Anything with a semiconductor? I guess we're not talking about semiconductors, but that's a whole mess.

Leo Laporte (01:57:49):
We can talk about semiconductors. So you believe AR is a, a real thing. David, are you, can you, I mean you wear spectacles. I wear contacts, but normally I wear spectacles. I can't

David Spark (01:57:59):
Wear, I would I, in fact, I already, when I buy my glasses, I choose all the options of being the, the thinnest lenses. Yeah, me too. It's protection. The Claire, the, this the, that. Yep. I just have to click make it AR

Leo Laporte (01:58:12):
<Laugh> I will definitely make it AR absolutely. But I also think that's in the one that a working one is in the 1%, that hard part,

David Spark (01:58:22):
But I, but I'm but I think what you said, Amy is, is key. Is that what we're already looking on? Our phone will be on our glasses. It obviously it's gonna take some time for that. What that looks like to sort of work itself out because the experience on the phone has taken many years to work itself out too. But I, I still believe there needs to be that one compelling reason as is there is with pretty much all new hardware. What is that one compelling reason we're doing it? I don't exactly know. Do you have a sort of thought on that?

Amy Webb (01:59:00):
Well, again, we've become habituated to talking more than typing. So I think there's some changes that are already underway that become accelerating factors. We're talking more than we type. We already have heads up display in other places, you know, and this one device assign, you know, there's different functions, but some of the, sort of again, everyday functions quantifying some things. So people are in, you know, interested in directions, translation. We don't need

David Spark (01:59:33):
A, but what's a one it's like all I, I agree all, I don't

Amy Webb (01:59:36):
Know if you need a one.

David Spark (01:59:38):
I, I do. I believe you need a one. Yeah. You need a one. Yeah. There's, there's always, you just look at all the history of hardware technology and there's always one something two or three, but there's always a few things that just drive the masses. And I always start with, you know, the story of the television. People didn't buy a television to see television. They bought it so they could watch the Milton barrel show. And so there's the killer sort of evolution. Sorry, what

Leo Laporte (02:00:07):
The killer app theory. You gotta have the killer app

David Spark (02:00:12):
Or, or the killer content, whatever.

Leo Laporte (02:00:14):
It's right. Yeah. So Gary V had a big conference this weekend called

Amy Webb (02:00:22):
Lot of pictures.

Leo Laporte (02:00:23):
Yeah.

Amy Webb (02:00:23):
A lot of pictures from that thing.

Leo Laporte (02:00:24):
Yeah. Everyone bringing together iconic leaders from web three and popular culture. Steve Iki pushed a cake into people's face. 

Amy Webb (02:00:34):
Yep. When I think web three, I definitely think Snoop dog. That

Leo Laporte (02:00:37):
Snoop dog

Amy Webb (02:00:37):
Totally makes sense

Leo Laporte (02:00:38):
To me. The, the, the, the, so Gary V who himself made $90 million last year on NFTs promoting NFTs with big names. Paris Hilton was there. I don't know. She's not a big name anymore. I don't know. 

Amy Webb (02:00:55):
Deepak Chopra.

Leo Laporte (02:00:56):
Deepak Chopra was the keynote. Yeah. Yep. It's all the scammers basically. <Laugh> he said 98% of NFT projects will fail after the gold rush fades. I bet he did not say that when he took the stage at vCAN this weekend maybe he did. Maybe he did are who's. Who is the con here in V con <laugh>. And who is the con 

David Spark (02:01:24):
Isn't con supposed to stand for conference?

Leo Laporte (02:01:26):
Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, I thought it was like con job. Okay.

David Spark (02:01:31):
Well this is what we, this is the second meeting. I don't believe that that's how Gary chose

Leo Laporte (02:01:36):
To sell its event. <Laugh> no, because if got an NFT collection you're selling, which he does, they're currently at $41,000 a piece, but he hopes they go to the moon. Your whole goal in life is to convince the suckers. I mean, everybody else that these are gonna be,

David Spark (02:01:55):
Can we just pause for a moment on the whole NFT on the crypto, which I'm sure you've spent umpteen times on it. This is all based on the theory of convincing enough, enough people hosting events like this, throwing, advertising that something has value even before all this exist. Just like a collectible item, the only reason some collectible item exists, or it has value

Leo Laporte (02:02:20):
To sell on to somebody else. Yeah,

David Spark (02:02:21):
No it's because there's another person who's willing to pay that price, right? For that object, it doesn't intrinsically have value it's because, well, this ISN

Leo Laporte (02:02:30):
Even less. So, cause you don't even get the baseball card or the painting. Well,

David Spark (02:02:35):
You, you do because you get the, the

Leo Laporte (02:02:37):
Certificate you get dragging rights

David Spark (02:02:38):
Says you have the,

Leo Laporte (02:02:39):
You get dragging rights. You don't even get an object. You don't get board apes or SN

David Spark (02:02:46):
Well, there's also the whole royalty payment theory down the line.

Leo Laporte (02:02:49):
It's a speculative currency is what it is. I

David Spark (02:02:52):
Its but it's all based on just think about it. If all the marketing for crypto and NFTs just stopped, they would all taint that's right. They don't produce anything in the

Leo Laporte (02:03:05):
There's there's no value. Yes.

David Spark (02:03:06):
There's nothing. And so they have to have, this is why we solve what four ads on the super bowl. Yep. For crypto. Yep. While you see endless stories, endless marketing, the only way this exists, the product they're selling is endless PR endless marketing, endless getting stories in the news. That is the product you're

Leo Laporte (02:03:27):
Starting to sound like me like a boomer David spark. I bet you, Amy Webb has a different point of view.

Amy Webb (02:03:37):
Yeah. I, I actually had a really interesting conversation with the CTO of Roblox last week who I met a couple weeks ago at something else and I really loved his perspective. I don't think I'm betraying the conversation with him or the conversation we had to repeat what he said. You know, he, his feeling about web three, is that in a way it's kind of like web one, right? Which is to say it's the foundation, it's the, it's the T C P I P it's the initial protocols. It's the beginning. And the application layer really comes in at, at web four. And when I see the FOMO and curiosity and insanity around NFTs I think, I think it's a little like it's,

Leo Laporte (02:04:28):
It's all pretty Bob Metcal said I have just invented TCP. Yeah. And would you like to invest <laugh> oh, I can do that with ethernet. Yeah. I'm sorry. It's 

Amy Webb (02:04:38):
Vince surf, T C P

Leo Laporte (02:04:40):
P, right. UR said for a small amount of money you can get in on web 1.0 baby.

Amy Webb (02:04:46):
I mean, the thing is we, again, like we have to continue to think about these evolutionary and developmental tracks. Right? So I, from the outset didn't I, I understand what's driving the desire to invest it's I think it's the same emotional I think it's the same thing that drives people to do day trading and, and there is a pretty, pretty big crossover in the group that, that day trades and is on like what's the name of that website? What's the name of the website? Where all the day traders hang out, seeking alpha. No, not seeking alpha anyway. I think there's a, there's a ven diagram.

Leo Laporte (02:05:23):
I know because I am not a day trader.

Amy Webb (02:05:26):
No, but there's Robin

David Spark (02:05:27):
A day trading side,

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
Robin hoods one. Yeah.

Amy Webb (02:05:31):
There's this, there's this ven diagram. So I, and I think that the people, I mean, listen, I don't know Gary V at all, but I, I know the people who were invited to speak and it's, you know, there's, there's like this collective of it's

Leo Laporte (02:05:46):
The same

Amy Webb (02:05:46):
People sells people. Yeah. Same people. And they go from event to event. It's like the old people's the fire F revivals. And

David Spark (02:05:52):
Yeah, again, this is going back to my own theory. The product they're selling is marketing and advertising, marketing. That's Carrie V's businesses, all these brand names. Yeah. This, you know, you know, we saw what is what was that? The one ad that was getting everyone's credit. But anyways,

Leo Laporte (02:06:08):
David, Larry, David,

David Spark (02:06:10):
Matt Damon.

Leo Laporte (02:06:11):
Oh, Matt Damon courage favors the brave.

David Spark (02:06:14):
When I saw that, I almost vomited <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:06:16):
That was

David Spark (02:06:16):
Just like, oh my God, that was courage. It's it's the, the thing is everything else in our market that, that it's like in, you know, in the normal stock market, it is a company that is producing a product. It is producing something. There is something tangible. There is something there. And also in just the collectibles market, there is something tradeable now it's up to the community to decide whether that has value or not. The community is not deciding this. It is, we are being told something has value through marketing and advertising and celebrities and whom what, and the more of that goes on. The more they can keep the price up again, this, the, the currency will stay high. As long as the advertising, the PR continues.

Leo Laporte (02:07:01):
I you know, and I have no problem. If those people wanna put their hard-earned dollars in some sort of cryptocurrency or invest in NFTs or, or I don't know how you invest in web three, I don't have a problem if they do that. I just have a problem. If they sucker people who are putting, putting the rent money into it. So,

David Spark (02:07:20):
Well, they, they are, they are, I mean, here's the other thing for everybody who wins or somebody who loses, right. We can't all win. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:07:28):
They, they ain't making something from nothing. And I actually, I'm ashamed to say some of the people who've been on this show, some of the people I really like and know ha and including Gary V have become Shils for this. And because they made, money's almost all of them made a lot of money and, and yeah, you're right. You need tos chill. You need to continue to chill. And I, I, I feel bad about it. I, I don't think it's so normally I would just say live and let live, but I'm starting to feel like there is this avalanche. And I feel like there are a lot of people gonna get buried by it and it's well

Amy Webb (02:08:04):
It's, there are. And so what are the next order impacts, right? What are the next order impacts of a whole bunch of people feeling very emotionally connected and excited, and then losing a lot of money, right. That that's not, that's not, Ooh, it's not gonna be good when that happens and it's gonna happen.

Leo Laporte (02:08:21):
Do you think there'll be a revolution in this country in the next five years? Like a violent,

Amy Webb (02:08:26):
No, I don't. Oh, revolution, revolution. Are we gonna, I think what winds up happening is Leo, what you talked about a couple of books ago the totalitarian, the birth of totalitarianism with the name, the name of that book. Well, that's happening. I think that

Leo Laporte (02:08:39):
That's gonna happen 20, 24.

Amy Webb (02:08:42):
I think people feel very dejected and you wind up with polarization and you wind up with people, desiring certainty and espousing certainty. These things are kind of interconnected. And again, like the government, not that the government should be. I, the, our government was way too slow on this to really, really think about policy Biden's executive order. Whenever that was a couple months ago, like finally telling federal agencies like, Hey, you're gonna have to come up with a policy on crypto. And blockchain was a little, he was a little late to the party on that. 

Leo Laporte (02:09:19):
Why, what do you think the reluctance was to regulate? Just that it's too new. We don't understand it.

Amy Webb (02:09:24):
Because part of there's an existential piece of this. I, this is just my opinion, but like, China's moving pretty quickly with its digital currency. As an alter they're I think creating an alternative to the dollar right now, a lot of other, like the global economy is kind of pegged to the dollar and they're presenting an alternative future in which maybe that doesn't happen or need to be the case.

Leo Laporte (02:09:47):
The European central bank says we wanna create a digital Euro.

Amy Webb (02:09:50):
Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (02:09:51):
Everybody wants to have the dollar though. Everybody wants to have that, that, that currency, that everything else is pegged to. Right. And

Amy Webb (02:09:58):
Right now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
And it may not be the dollar in the long run. It might be the remand be, I don't know. But, but it, it probably will be digital. Yes.

Amy Webb (02:10:09):
It's. There's gonna be your good

Leo Laporte (02:10:11):
Looks, Leo. My good looks, you know what? You

Amy Webb (02:10:15):
Probably staple wins are problems.

Leo Laporte (02:10:17):
Yes. Stable cook tether. Whoa, stand back. We thought they were stable. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> apparently they're not. Yeah. I feel like this is this is not going web three is not going

Amy Webb (02:10:31):
Well again, like all of these things right now are like the metaverse isn't a technology. It's a concept web three. Isn't a technology. It's just the name for the next iteration. Yeah, yeah. Of the web. It's we're all constantly evolving and it, so that's a better way.

Leo Laporte (02:10:47):
The I, the T C P I P of all this is that in your enough, there

Amy Webb (02:10:52):
Are block. I mean, there's a lot of blockchains and they're public blockchains. So I don't know. I'm not like this is an area of tech that I, I sort of float around in, but I don't have any real depth. So I don't know.

Leo Laporte (02:11:04):
Well, nobody does. It's all a interesting mystery. You did say something though, that kind of triggered me there. I think David, you must have noticed my lovely jacket did you? I did

Amy Webb (02:11:16):
Quite, I haven't seen you in that color before. It's close to

Leo Laporte (02:11:18):
Looking like a smoking jacket, but not a smoking jacket. I actually have a smoking jacket also from our sponsor, Indo Chino. This was a hand tailored jacket to fit my perfect body perfectly. Whether you're gonna be a groom and a wedding party. Like our son just was, or a lucky, not a groom. He wasn't a he, so, whoa, hold on. Hold on. Didn't mean to start at L anybody Michael got his first suit, cuz he was in a wedding party and he looked awfully good. And we said, go on out there in that beautiful look, look how good those suits look. Everyone wants to look their best for a wedding or a special event. Well, with a custom fitted suit from in do Chino, you will look great. You will feel confident. You will enjoy the big day without fussing over your clothes. I love it because it's like a constru it's kinda like Roblox for, for clothing.

Leo Laporte (02:12:09):
It's a construction set. You could choose every detail on your suit, on your shirt, on your dinner jacket, affordable prices on custom tailored stuff. This was made for me. And it, by the way, fits perfectly fits perfectly. You can customize every detail monograms fabrics. I love this beautiful purple silk. I got a, a, a kind of a velvet smoking jacket with satin lapels. It looks so good. I'm gonna wear that on the cruise. I just think these are gorgeous. I, I got, I got shirts that fit perfectly monogrammed. You can get statement linings lapel shapes, you know, custom tailored. Look at that. I might get like a, like a red suit or a yellow. I might get something really wild, $429 for suits shirts start 79 bucks. But these are tailored to your exact measurements. They offer completely custom fitted shirts, casual wear and more.

Leo Laporte (02:13:08):
I think your husband would like for father's day, a beautiful new suit or a wardrobe personalized to a style and taste without spending a fortune. Look how there that's, by the way, that's the tuxedo I got, I think on the right there. Doesn't that look nice. I'll wear it. I'll wear it next week. They're always adding new pieces and options so you can stay on trend and in style, they've got a, I think a very nice relaxed, but refined approach to spring suits. I love this jacket. I've always wanted a purple jacket. I just love it. They just, yeah, they have perfect suits. Look at that $50 off any purchase of 3 99 or more when you use the promo code TWiT at, in chino.com I N D O C H I N o.com. If you've got a big day coming up or just a big date, getting the perfect look is no big deal with Indo Chino.

Leo Laporte (02:14:03):
It was really fun. They now, and by the way, now that they've got my measurements and they have, you know, and I've, they've got, they've got me nailed. I love going in there and saying, you know, I'd like to, maybe I get another suit, another jacket, maybe some, some shirts. It's really fun. I N D O C H I N O Indo chino.com. Don't forget that promo code TWiT to save $50 on a purchase of 3 99 or more get a luxury suit or a tuxedo. You know, every, every man should have a, a dark suit in his collection. And I think everyone should have a tuxedo suit in your collection with a nice shirt and collar and stays. And you know, cufflings just, cuz you never know. You never know. Could be your wedding could be somebody else's but you wanna look sharp, don't you? I love this. I have been saving it cuz I didn't wanna show anybody until we were talking about the ad cuz I, but I just love this jacket. It's beautiful. Do chino.com. You're gonna see more of it. On me. We had a great week this week on TWiT. We have a little video for you to watch and enjoy. I can't fit you and Micah into the TV shot. So those of you watch in the video. There

Scott (02:15:18):
He is. There he is. He's still here. He just doesn't. It just doesn't fit in.

Leo Laporte (02:15:24):
I need a super, I need one of those iPhone wide angled cameras

Jim (02:15:28):
Previously on TWiTtter, TWiT live events.

Leo Laporte (02:15:32):
How apple became a trillion dollar company and lost its so guest as the author trip nickel.

Tripp (02:15:38):
Yeah, I think the difference that occurred in, in the wake of Steve job's death was that this became much more of a leadership by committee for somebody like Johnny who didn't particularly enjoy or all of a sudden he was thrust in a world where that was. That was what you had to do.

Jim (02:15:53):
IOS today I am joined by my pal, my good buddy, Dan Mor, who is here to help me talk about apps for tabletop gaming security.

Leo Laporte (02:16:04):
Now

Scott (02:16:05):
When a ransomware gang gets so big for their britches, that they suggest that perhaps a government, which is refusing to pay their ransom should be overthrown. They said if your current government cannot stabilize the situation, maybe it's worth changing it

Jim (02:16:24):
Twit.

Scott (02:16:25):
Oh, like I said, two big for their bridges.

Leo Laporte (02:16:28):
Oh my God. That was an amazing story. David, the KTI gang, well known ransomware gang apparently has really hit Costa Rica, hard mm-hmm <affirmative> and Costa Rica doesn't wanna pay the ransom as, and they shouldn't. So the KTI gang said to the people of Costa Rica over three year government <laugh>

David Spark (02:16:50):
When did that happen?

Leo Laporte (02:16:51):
Just last week? What, what was the aftermath? Well I don't think they overthrow the government. Let me see. I don't know. What's what's Costa KTI shut down. Oh interesting. The ransomware group appears to be offline, but the criminals behind it aren't going anywhere. This is from tech monitor. KTI has taken its infrastructure offline. This is a as of two days ago after the after the show members of the gang, which are currently engaged in a high profile ransomware campaign against Costa Rica are thought to be forming alliances with other smaller groups as a way of rebranding, you know, the probably went to V con and got some ideas, some marketing thoughts. That's another thing, by the way, if we didn't have cryptocurrency ransomware, wouldn't be so prevalent because yeah.

David Spark (02:17:47):
Yeah. Well the that's no, it's interesting. You have a combination. Here's the whole thing with ransomware. Why it's so popular. It's extremely low risk, extremely high reward and takes little to no skill to do it because now they have like ransomware as

Leo Laporte (02:18:02):
A service tools to us. Yeah,

David Spark (02:18:04):
We correct. Yeah. Where, where else in any other kind of crime, any other crime, do you have that wonderful combination? Low risk, high reward, little skill.

Leo Laporte (02:18:15):
<Laugh> in fact you'd have to be an idiot <laugh> to Rob a bank these days.

David Spark (02:18:20):
Yes. Yes. Because it's very high risk. The reward isn't nearly the level and it takes a lot of skill, quite the opposite

Leo Laporte (02:18:29):
I saw and Reddit last week, a picture at a target or somewhere where the, you know, they have the gift card rack and a big handwritten sign saying, do not buy and send these to, to whoever at and T they are not, they are not asking for gift cards. They're but you know what if, if, if the world weren't full of suckers, I guess. 

David Spark (02:18:51):
So it's interesting. One of my hosts Andy Ellis, who former CISO for Akamai for like 20 years he did this experiment where he tried to actually legitimately pie buy gift cards on multiple different sites and astonishingly, he got rejected many times. So gift cards is a, a traditional technique for fishing to try to get money out of a, out of a company. You, you target certain individuals, you know, I often see level people, but even when you try to legitimately purchase gift cards, because this is such a common vector for theft, those get rejected. I didn't even know that it was amazing right by the credit card company, that it was the credit card by. Well, yes, I mean, but it actually, I don't know where the source is coming from, but the, the different sites that are offering gift cards will often reject a lid legitimate purchase. Now more often, if you sign up brand new, you know, you go to walmart.com for the very first time, try to get a gift card for the very first time. This is your first purchase. That will probably be rejected. Interesting. And that what happened to Andy interest?

Leo Laporte (02:20:02):
Interesting. Wow. O this is the new thing with the ransom. What was the ransomware group that disappeared? We thought, oh, it's all over. And instead they just re reemerged rebranded. So this is, if, if it gets a little hot, they're all in Russia, by the way, if it gets a little hot, if Putin says you're not giving me a big enough cut, they just disappear. They keep every, all those, you know, software and everything, and they rebrand get new servers, new name, resume operation.

David Spark (02:20:31):
They run like a normal business. Yeah. There's even customer service at these ransomware. Oh yeah. I, yes.

Leo Laporte (02:20:38):
Hey, I bought a decryption code, but doesn't work. What do I do? <Laugh> what's your customer number? Yeah,

David Spark (02:20:45):
That's

Leo Laporte (02:20:45):
Incredible. Yeah, it is. It is. It's a strange world. We we live in let's see. I don't know. There's so many stories we haven't gotten to. I, I don't wanna let either of you go without recommending books, cuz I got really smart on,

David Spark (02:21:04):
I was gonna do that. Have books for you. Oh good. I got one fiction book. Okay. And the reason I'm recommending it via audible is because the actor who does the read is spectacular.

Leo Laporte (02:21:13):
Okay.

David Spark (02:21:14):
And it's the oh God, I'm gonna, I think it's called hail project. Mandy, the Andy

Leo Laporte (02:21:20):
Project, hail Mary. And I'm way ahead of you cuz we've not only read the book, but interviewed the author. Andy Weir guy who did the Martian and the guy who read it. Ray Porter. I completely agree with you is one of the great

David Spark (02:21:31):
Actor

Leo Laporte (02:21:32):
He is in fact, okay, I'm gonna turn tables on you because I am reading a series I'm in volume four of something called the Bobba verse. Also narrated by Ray Porter. It's a Dennis E. Taylor science fiction series. And that snarky voice that he has is perfect for the premise of the premise of the Bob averse is it is roughly modern times. Guy sells his company gaming company for a lot of money. First thing he does is sign on the dotted line to have his head frozen. If anything should happen to him, cuz he is got money immediately goes out, the door, gets run over and killed. Wakes, wakes up a hundred years later. He's this is what we were talking about. Yeah. He's he's in a box. He is an AGI, but he has all his memories, his personality and it's and, and, and then of course he clones himself and then now hundreds of Bob's, it's really a great story. And listen to this guy's voice. Ray porters is so good.

Ray Porter (02:22:37):
I tried to respond, but what came out was something like a cross between a cough and static for God's sake. That sounded like a voice synthesizer, having a breakdown Freud put down the tablet leaned forward and rested his arms on the desk or

Leo Laporte (02:22:51):
That's that, that same voice as in project hail Mary completely agree with you.

David Spark (02:22:54):
Yeah. He's great. Actor. I, I great. Half of the enjoyment was how good he, he did that really?

Leo Laporte (02:22:58):
I think he works he's I think he's on contract to audible because project hail Mary and this were both done as part of audible original. So I have a feeling that he is like, he's got, he's got an in there with audible. Yeah. Great recommendation though. If you haven't read project hail Mary, you must. And, and

Amy Webb (02:23:15):
I put them both on, I haven't yet I'll put those both

Leo Laporte (02:23:18):
Bob versus just fun. And, and Ray Porter has a long list of books that he's read that I, you know, some nonfiction actually, which is interesting. I think this is one of the things that happens with an audio book is you start to like the reader

David Spark (02:23:31):
Ghost in the wires. I saw you go by. I, I, I, I listened to that

Leo Laporte (02:23:36):
Ghost in the wires. Okay.

David Spark (02:23:37):
That's the Kevin Minnick book.

Leo Laporte (02:23:39):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course we know Kevin very well. Amy, now I, now I gotta show you before you say anything. I have a very lengthy wishlist with some very good books in it that I, I only get one credit now I've already used it. The first one on cultist, cultish, cultish, cultish exploding the phone, the untoward story of the teenagers and Outlaws who hacked mob be. That looks good. Yeah. Doesn't that sound good? I got a couple of novels, Louise. Heritage's newest. I love or Tolles his newest, the Lincoln highway. Anthony DOR has written a book called cloud cuckoo land. I don't know. We'll see. Because internet from Gretchen McCulloch understanding the new rules of language, I'm, I'm pretty close to hitting the buy on that one on tyranny lessons from the 20th century to depressing. So what do you recommend?

Amy Webb (02:24:36):
I can give you a couple, I don't know if they're on audible or not. No,

Leo Laporte (02:24:39):
It don't have to be on audible just to read any anything. I don't. No. Right.

Amy Webb (02:24:41):
So this is

Leo Laporte (02:24:42):
Not an audible ad by the way, this, this is

Amy Webb (02:24:44):
Just us looking. I'll give stuff to

Leo Laporte (02:24:46):
Read.

Amy Webb (02:24:47):
<Laugh> I'll give you three. Okay. the first one is the nineties, so I'm a gen Xer. So Chuck Clausman wrote this book and it's sort of like what happened in the nineties that set the stage for today and what preceded it? Oh I think he got quite a bit wrong including some stuff having to do with like sound garden which I think people know I'm who know me know I'm obsessed with <laugh> he got some details like wrong on some of these things. I,

Leo Laporte (02:25:14):
I think I know you pretty well and I did not know you have so many obsessions. I didn't know sound Gardner

Amy Webb (02:25:20):
My favorite. I love rush. I think everybody who listens to the show probably knows that because I quote a little too much. No. Have

David Spark (02:25:28):
You played the rush pinball machine by the way? Have you played it?

Amy Webb (02:25:32):
Ooh, no, I'm not.

David Spark (02:25:33):
It's the newest pinball machine by stern. It is excellent. Highly recommend. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:25:38):
The skinny

Amy Webb (02:25:38):
Lee, but my hand-eye coordination not great. Oh not great, but anyhow, that book is fun, cuz it's nostalgic, but also will be a little infuriating, but I've kind of enjoyed like hate reading it. Did you ever read

Leo Laporte (02:25:52):
The book in 1968, which was actually a classic work about a year that everything changed dramatically. Yeah. Yeah. Similar idea. Have you read it? Yeah, it's really, really good. Highly.

Amy Webb (02:26:05):
You feel like it's like, okay, I'll put that on my list. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:26:07):
But you know that one, I don't know if you would hate read it, but <laugh> I thought it was quite good.

Amy Webb (02:26:12):
Yeah. Sometimes, you know like you, you just like, I don't know, like I'm having a dialogue in my head while it was, it was a super fast read and he's a pretty good writer.

Leo Laporte (02:26:19):
You're so smart. I bet every book you read, you go like you have this dialogue as you're

Amy Webb (02:26:24):
Reading it. I mean I try to I try to spend a couple hours a day reading and I try to get through a book every couple of days or so, cuz I, you know anyways, yes. And so I usually, I I'm an active reader, so I tend to write while I'm

Leo Laporte (02:26:39):
You take notes?

Amy Webb (02:26:40):
Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:26:41):
You do the zeal casting thing or

Amy Webb (02:26:44):
I do the Amy web thing, which is just,

Leo Laporte (02:26:46):
This is, this is all the rage now with nerds is is, you know, make little slips of paper or digital versions of the,

David Spark (02:26:54):
Do you, either of you use those apps, blink, stir headway to do those sort of abbreviated versions of book.

Amy Webb (02:27:00):
I, I use blank, which I, or blinks, which I like a lot, but I, I treat that more as like a cliffs notes version if the

David Spark (02:27:07):
Right.

Leo Laporte (02:27:08):
Exactly. Yeah. At least

Amy Webb (02:27:09):
It's a very long time for me to sure. Get

Leo Laporte (02:27:11):
Audible has like 15 minute versions of every book and I feel like that's really cheating. The problem I have with blinks is they keep tweeting in my tweet storm, the nine books, Elon Musk read the, and I don't no, I'm not mm-hmm so

Amy Webb (02:27:25):
I, I treat it more like so it takes me a long time to dry my hair in the morning and I have to hang my head upside down to do it. So I read blinks. I read the blinks books while I'm doing that. And then if

Leo Laporte (02:27:38):
I like it a lot, got towels and towel heads. Okay, go ahead. <Laugh>

Amy Webb (02:27:43):
No, it's

Leo Laporte (02:27:43):
Like there's a lot of you wash your every morning, do you?

Amy Webb (02:27:46):
No, I don't. I it's, no, you need a shout, but at any rate,

Leo Laporte (02:27:49):
But then it would cut into your,

Amy Webb (02:27:50):
My point is okay. My point is if I like that, can we

David Spark (02:27:53):
Do a whole show on Amy air regimen?

Leo Laporte (02:27:55):
<Laugh>

Amy Webb (02:27:56):
Yeah, let's do it bad. And AI. Now that's screwy. It's a sample. It's a, it's a sample. And then if I like what's there, I read the rest of the book. Like I read the whole book cause I don't use it as a substitute just

Leo Laporte (02:28:07):
If I like,

Amy Webb (02:28:07):
Or I use it as like a, I did

Leo Laporte (02:28:09):
Read with being mortal a tool go one day amazing book, which I highly recommend about gerontology and end of life. And I listened this books are very long, the short version. And then I said, this is so good. And I read the whole thing. Yeah, it's really

Amy Webb (02:28:23):
Good. He's a wonderful writer anyways. The nineties pull earth by John Markoff, which is about, I

Leo Laporte (02:28:29):
Read everything, John, John's a good friend of the show and he's been on our show.

Amy Webb (02:28:32):
He's a wonderful writer. What's his new ones. Great. So it's called ho earth. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:28:37):
Yeah. It's bio

Amy Webb (02:28:38):
Of Stewart

Leo Laporte (02:28:39):
Brand. It's all about Stewart brand. Yeah. Yeah. I've gotta read that. I know Stewart as well. I was a, I was a regular on the well yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I know. I wanna read all definitely. That's on my list. Yeah. The many lines. So

Amy Webb (02:28:50):
I think those

Leo Laporte (02:28:50):
Are good Stewart brand. Okay. That's a good one. I'm gonna put that one on my list

Amy Webb (02:28:54):
And then for like super dense, heavier reading, but still I think a great book to have is the ideas that created the future by Harry Lewis, which is a collection of the most important academic papers that got written that created the technology we use today. So it's like good to have on your desk.

Leo Laporte (02:29:09):
Is that an older book?

Amy Webb (02:29:11):
Yeah. I've got it over on my shelf on that shelf over there. It's a, yeah, it's the kind of book still find

Leo Laporte (02:29:16):
It that I'd put on the shelf, not read, but put on the shelf to show that I had intellectual heft.

Amy Webb (02:29:23):
No, I, I read it and it's again like it's with all this stuff happening right now with I should read this and some of their, honestly you can go back and like read piece together. How we got to know. I just, I think it's useful.

Leo Laporte (02:29:35):
It's but

Amy Webb (02:29:36):
It's not like a fun weekend reading

Leo Laporte (02:29:38):
46 classic papers in computer science. Although since it has Aristotle and liveness in it, it's not exactly all computer science, but nor Wiener Gordon Moore. Oh, I have to. Oh, you know what I about?

Amy Webb (02:29:49):
I mean, you probably already read most of those, but I think it's just useful to have them in one spot, you know, and sort of,

Leo Laporte (02:29:54):
Yeah, no, I'm gonna order this. Yeah. This is not what you would call light listening for audible.com. This is,

Amy Webb (02:30:00):
This is no, I wouldn't listen. I wouldn't wanna listen to

Leo Laporte (02:30:02):
That. Yeah. And then also I am definitely gonna buy the rush pinball game.

David Spark (02:30:11):
It's a great game.

Amy Webb (02:30:14):
Oh, you don't have to have quarters anymore. You can pay with your phone. That's I'm not that pinball

Leo Laporte (02:30:19):
Person. I gotta fight somewhere.

David Spark (02:30:20):
There's an app called pay range where you pay via for your

Leo Laporte (02:30:24):
Phone. You, you gotta stop the sound or or Getty Lee's estate's gonna 

Amy Webb (02:30:29):
I feel like Getty's cool. I don't feel like they would

Leo Laporte (02:30:31):
Do no. Neil PERTs state maybe though. Yeah. no, I love rush. And now, you know, what, can, can I confess something? I don't think I could recognize a single sound garden song. So I'm gonna have to, I'm sorry. There

David Spark (02:30:43):
Is no sound garden. Pinball

Leo Laporte (02:30:45):
Machine. No

Amy Webb (02:30:46):
Sound garden.

Leo Laporte (02:30:48):
Do they have some hits?

David Spark (02:30:50):
No, here's the thing that, yeah, they're good.

Leo Laporte (02:30:52):
Black hole,

Amy Webb (02:30:53):
Sun, black whole sun. But my, my favorite song of their two favorites outshine, which is wonderful and also rusty cage, which is a very technically complicated song to play. Oh. But Johnny Cash covered it. Oh. And it's a wonderful, crazy, weird,

Leo Laporte (02:31:09):
Interesting. That sounds really

David Spark (02:31:10):
Interesting. I saw them live in years

Leo Laporte (02:31:12):
Ago. Did you?

Amy Webb (02:31:14):
Yeah. Chris Cornell died. Like it was five years ago this past week.

Leo Laporte (02:31:17):
I remember that crazy. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. 

David Spark (02:31:21):
Alright, go play the rush pinball machine Leo

Leo Laporte (02:31:23):
While listening to outshine by sound garden.

David Spark (02:31:27):
Yes. With headphones.

Amy Webb (02:31:28):
I'm about finded. It's a good song.

David Spark (02:31:29):
Yeah. Here's another recommendation for you. Yes. Not book the pinball map. Pinball map.com. You can also get into an app. You can find where all the pinball machines are located near you wherever you

Leo Laporte (02:31:41):
Are. Oh. So I could find that rush pinball game.

David Spark (02:31:43):
You could find, you could, you could literally look up rush pinball and find where, what bar arcade, whatever has a rush pinball machine near you.

Leo Laporte (02:31:52):
Oh my God.

David Spark (02:31:53):
It's a great, great app. Let

Leo Laporte (02:31:54):
Me just quickly type in a rush pinball.

David Spark (02:31:57):
Just type in rush. Just type

Leo Laporte (02:31:58):
In rush. Yeah. Cuz it's all pinball. You don't the pinball it's that would be I'll just search for that here. Not found.

David Spark (02:32:07):
Oh, it's somewhere. It's gotta be.

Leo Laporte (02:32:09):
No, I'm sure it is. That's probably I'm typing the wrong thing.

David Spark (02:32:14):
No. Well rush. Is it, is it finding the the machines in your area?

Leo Laporte (02:32:19):
Rush pro by stern? You need to type in your that's the one I want rush pro by stern. I think I just didn't qualify it sufficiently. Look, it's all over.

David Spark (02:32:26):
Now you can then now zero

Leo Laporte (02:32:27):
In on your yeah. Zero in a Petaluma or Carlsbad. Oh, look at there's this there's this pin. Look at this, this pinball death valley between San Francisco.

David Spark (02:32:36):
No, but you you're only looking up just the one machine. Oh, that's right. You're only looking up the one machine

Leo Laporte (02:32:40):
I might have to go down to the city.

David Spark (02:32:41):
Oh, I know. I know exactly that location in San Francisco

Leo Laporte (02:32:45):
Uptown. Oh, I know the uptown been there many times.

David Spark (02:32:48):
Oh no. I thought it was something up. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:32:50):
That's up

David Spark (02:32:51):
Hill. It's like over

Leo Laporte (02:32:52):
50. Uptown is a great bar on cap street. Used to go there all the time. Okay. Very excited. <Laugh>

David Spark (02:33:01):
Go play it.

Leo Laporte (02:33:01):
You never know what you're gonna learn on this show. Amy Webb. You are fantastic. Enjoy your gravel bike.

Amy Webb (02:33:11):
I will. Thank you, Leo. You are fantastic.

Leo Laporte (02:33:13):
Oh no, no.

Amy Webb (02:33:14):
I love that. And I do. I noticed that jacket right away. Yeah. Cause I haven't seen you. It's not typical. Its wonderful on you. Yeah, that

Leo Laporte (02:33:20):
That's a, I thought I wear it with a black shirt color. Yeah. It's a pretty color. Thank you.

Amy Webb (02:33:24):
Yeah. I like it a lot.

David Spark (02:33:26):
When I to make all of us break out in hives.

Leo Laporte (02:33:30):
I am now you can't tell I am hing <laugh>

Amy Webb (02:33:34):
No that I love. I love that color on you. It looks good. Thank

Leo Laporte (02:33:37):
You. Yeah. The book is the Genesis machine. Definitely if you've not read this yet and I know many of you have cuz we had a great triangulation, which you could go back and listen to Amy web, Andrew Hessel. If you haven't read it yet, get it. It is all about the future of biotech, synthetic, which you call synthetic biology and there's and it's fun. It's a light and easy read with a lot of heavy information and ideas. I love it. 

Amy Webb (02:34:04):
Thanks. And there's actually five, I think actors who read that book because the middle section are scenarios about the future. Yeah. Yeah. Each one is acted out by a different, different actor. Oh

Leo Laporte (02:34:15):
Actor.

Amy Webb (02:34:15):
It's kind of cool the way they did

Leo Laporte (02:34:16):
It. Yeah. And then the tech trends report is out. You can go to future today. Institute.Com. That's Amy's company still. Haven't got the the front page fixed, huh?

Amy Webb (02:34:26):
Yeah. I broke the code pretty badly. And Ben, I destroyed a couple of other plugins and scripts and we're gonna gut the whole thing and start over in a couple weeks.

Leo Laporte (02:34:36):
Don't be messing with the code, Amy. I know, are

Amy Webb (02:34:39):
You a coder? That's not my job. Or

Leo Laporte (02:34:40):
You just thought

Amy Webb (02:34:41):
You yeah. I mean like, I mean sometimes I'm just like, it'll just be faster if I do it rather than yeah. It's a delegation issue. I should not have no, I have a team I just was screwing around and there you

Leo Laporte (02:34:51):
Go. It's your site. You get to screw around the 15th anniversary. Tech trends report is free for download at future today institute.com and of course Amy is available for consulting your fortune 500 firm and steering it in the right direction.

Amy Webb (02:35:10):
Steering it into the flames of hell. No, the apocalyptic that's not hell station.

Leo Laporte (02:35:15):
No that's bad marketing. <Laugh>

Amy Webb (02:35:17):
No, no. Right. We violated David's whole thing about marketing. There you go.

Leo Laporte (02:35:22):
<Laugh> David, it's so great to see my old friend David spark.

David Spark (02:35:26):
Awesome to see you. Leo it's been many, many years since we've first worked at the tech TV days.

Leo Laporte (02:35:32):
Now that you've returned from the dark side, we'll have you on more sys CISOs

David Spark (02:35:37):
CISO series series

Leo Laporte (02:35:39):
For

David Spark (02:35:39):
The, the Australians can call it CSO series. That's

Leo Laporte (02:35:42):
Okay. It's CISO series.com C I S O S E R I E s.com. That's his new endeavor. And great.

David Spark (02:35:51):
What I, what I recommend is you see the, the woman sort of cleaning there at the top, the little logo that's we do a, a really fun event every Friday. Yeah. And just go, go to the, you click on that. You can register for the, that actually we're not doing this Friday because of the holiday weekend, but that's the follow Friday, June 3rd. And we just have a, a great community. They're a ton of fun. You know what, one of the things I love about the cybersecurity community that not a lot of people realize they're actually extraordinarily funny people. I

Leo Laporte (02:36:19):
Do know

David Spark (02:36:19):
That really, really funny.

Leo Laporte (02:36:20):
I do know that Wendy, I did a panel with Wendy naer. She was great.

David Spark (02:36:24):
She's awesome. Oh, I adore Wendy. Yeah. I've interviewed her many times. She's the best.

Leo Laporte (02:36:28):
Yeah. So you

David Spark (02:36:29):
Know, she's the one who coined the term cyber, the security poverty level. Did you talk about that?

Leo Laporte (02:36:36):
Ah, maybe that sounds familiar. Yeah.

David Spark (02:36:38):
She coined that term and it's a great term and I just very briefly I'll mention it's about what the bare bare minimum you need to just be at sort of the poverty level of having a security level. And that is, it's a really important concept. No,

Leo Laporte (02:36:53):
It is. Yeah.

David Spark (02:36:55):
Minimum. We

Leo Laporte (02:36:55):
Have to do

David Spark (02:36:56):
All be at at least do that security poverty level.

Leo Laporte (02:36:58):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We Amy I much rather Wendy and I and a few others did a event at south by a couple, a few years ago before south bay closed for the pandemic. And you were at south by this year. Amy. Did it go well? Was it nice? Was it good to be back?

Amy Webb (02:37:16):
Oh, it was amazing. Yeah. The south bay community is a second family for me. I've been going on and off for 20 years and I think they were, there were fewer people than in the past. And I think it's gonna, sometimes

Leo Laporte (02:37:30):
That's not bad. It's I think there's the right number for any event and most events, if they're good, get too big.

Amy Webb (02:37:38):
Yeah. I mean pre pandemic though. I think they have like a hundred thousand people. Yeah. that's too big. So no, my session. So I always launch our tech trends report there and I'm always humbled and honored that so many people show up to, to, to my session. But I think I opened for Lizzo cuz Lizzo was in the room right after

Leo Laporte (02:37:56):
Me. So jealous. You should just put that on your, your resume. I opened for Lizzo. Well,

Amy Webb (02:38:02):
I was like, I was like, crap, all these people are here to see her. They're gonna have to like grin and bear it through my tech friends. And then it turns out they weren't like most of the people got up and left, so that was

Leo Laporte (02:38:13):
Well that's.

Amy Webb (02:38:13):
That was cool. And then like she totally packed the house and oh, I stayed love Liz and she was amazing. Oh, Liz's awesome. She

Leo Laporte (02:38:19):
Awesome. Fan. She is a goddess. She's cool. Yeah.

David Spark (02:38:23):
I'm a fan of yours, Amy. Yeah. I'm a,

Amy Webb (02:38:26):
A fan of yours. David, stop it.

David Spark (02:38:28):
We, you don't have to just reciprocate for the heck of it. <Laugh> I want you to know that you made me think differently, Amy. Yes. On this show

Leo Laporte (02:38:36):
Every single time she

David Spark (02:38:37):
Does that. That's what was important. I wanted to think I wanted to be challenged and I felt you challenged the audience

Leo Laporte (02:38:43):
Every single

David Spark (02:38:43):
Time and myself personally. And I appreciate that.

Amy Webb (02:38:46):
I appreciate that.

Leo Laporte (02:38:47):
Thank you. This has been really fun. I hate to end it, but we, we must, we do TWiT on a Sunday afternoon. You see why you don't wanna miss an episode every Sunday, about 2:00 PM. Pacific 5:00 PM. Eastern 2100 UTC livestream, audio and video live.Twit.tv. If you're watching live chat, live with us@ircdotTWiT.tv, of course club TWiTt members get their very own <laugh> enhanced chat room, full of animated gifts at at like this <laugh> all you have to do is pay seven bucks a month. You'll get access to the discord where conversations go on all the time about all sorts of geeky subjects. You also get the ad free versions of every show we do every single show we do. And you get access to the trip plus feed, which has shows we don't put anywhere else. That's where we launched this weekend space.

Leo Laporte (02:39:42):
If you will launched it it's where we do the untitled Linux show. Stacy Higginbotham's book club. It's gonna be good this month. It's gonna be Neil Stevenson's termination shock, another good book well worth reading. We also do ask me any things, Alex, Lindsay, you'll be doing an AMA July 14th. There's a lot of reasons to join the club. I think it's a, a great community of smart people and you're obviously one of them. So come on in TWiT.tv/club TWiTt. After the fact of course we put shows out on demand on our website, TWiT.tv on YouTube. There's a TWiTt channel there's channel for all the shows. And and you can subscribe to your favorite podcast in your favorite podcast player, but do us a favor. You know, we've been doing TWiTt now for 17 years. We're in our 18th year. And sometimes when something's been around that long people forget about it. So put a five star review in there. Let remind people about the goodness that is this weekend. Tech. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time. Another TWiT is in the can!