This Week in Tech Episode 885 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.

Jason Howell (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiT this week in tech I'm Jason Howell filling in for Leo LePort and today we've got some awesome guests joining me today is Ashley Skea, Roberto Baldwin and Megan. Morone where you have so much fun. So much news to discuss Amazon buying one medical. What might prime healthcare actually look like? We take some guesses also snap and TWiTtter earnings lagging. That's largely thanks to a diminishing ad spend market. What does it mean for big tech? That's coming up subscriptions for in-car features hot or not? I think not, but we've got a nice discussion there. How Netflix's identity, which is binging content is actually biting its butt plus so much more coming up next on this weekend. Tech

TWiT Intro (00:00:47):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is,

Jason Howell (00:01:01):
This is TWiTt. This weekend tech episode, 885 recorded Sunday, July 24th, 2022 St. Jeff's Memorial hospital. This episode of this weekend, tech is brought to you by zip recruiter. Certain people make my life easier by helping me out. And zip recruiter makes hiring easier because they do the work for you. How ZipRecruiter technology finds great candidates, and you can invite them to apply, go to ziprecruiter.com/TWiT to try it for free and by audible audible, lets you enjoy all of your audio entertainment in one app. Let audible help you discover new ways to laugh. Be inspired or be entertained. New members can try it free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/TWiT or text TWiT to 500, 500 and buy stamps.com. Stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up@stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the page and enter code TWiT for a special offer. That includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. And by express VPN, if you don't like big tech tracking you and selling your personal data for profit, it's time to fight back, get three extra months free with a one year package by going to express vpn.com/TWiTt.

Jason Howell (00:02:27):
It's time for TWiTt this week in tech. And you can already tell it's a different kind of TWiT because I'm your host today. Jason, how filling in for Leo LePort who will be returning soon but not today. And what can I say on a, on all the weeks? Like no matter what with TWiT you're guaranteed to end up on a panel of amazing people, but I've got three of my favorite internet people on with me today, starting with Ashley Skea writer, host internet rock tour. How you doing Ashley?

Ashley Esqueda (00:03:00):
I'm I I'm good gainfully unemployed working on stuff, projects. I'm great. Things are, things are good. Things are weird. Things are good. I like it.

Jason Howell (00:03:09):
Yeah, that sounds, that sounds like the last couple years in a nutshell, things are weird. At least. I don't know.

Ashley Esqueda (00:03:15):
I don't would

Jason Howell (00:03:16):
People could contest with a good part maybe, but

Ashley Esqueda (00:03:18):
Yeah, I might, I might have to just like, I may have to throw a flag there, but, but weird. Yeah, for sure.

Jason Howell (00:03:23):
Okay. Fair. Fair enough. Well, it's great to have you here, Ashley. It's been a while and really appreciate you joining us on this in tech also joining us another person who has not been on the show. Actually. I think everybody that's on the show has been on it quite a while. Roberto Baldwin is here. Co-Host will Barings podcast and man about town man about town <laugh> I I do things around town. Sometimes people pay me for those things. <Laugh> wow. That's awesome. Hey, I heard that you did something around town last night. You had a show, right? Oh yeah. Friday night we had a show at the rich house. Oh that was Friday. Sorry. Two of my like 17 bands had a show that night. So it was a good time. So if you were there, hi, if you weren't, I don't know, go there next time. I guess. Right there will be more. There will be more one of these days. I'm gonna make it to one of your shows. Love it. That's awesome. Welcome back, Roberto. It's good to see you. And then also joining us, someone who folks who are familiar with the TWiTt network are very familiar with, haven't seen in a while on this network, on this show, especially Megan Moroni. Welcome back, Megan.

Megan Morrone (00:04:27):
Thank you. I am so excited to be here. Forgive me if I faint. I got my second booster today. I got the bandaid and everything, dear. So yeah, I I feel, I

Ashley Esqueda (00:04:40):
Feel great.

Jason Howell (00:04:41):
Good. <laugh> good. Well, you look great and it's great to have you on for now until that booster kicks in and just, just give us a heads up. I guess if you start getting dizzy or whatever, I don't. Yeah. Just give us a heads up editor at call course. Sure. Of course. Just so people know what you're up to now. Yes mm-hmm <affirmative> but it is so good to see the three of you. This is gonna be a lot of fun. We've got the keys to the sports car this week. So where should we drive first? We got a doc full of news and I really do not wanna start with Elon Musk. So I don't even know why I said that out loud because it almost makes it happen when you do that.

Ashley Esqueda (00:05:18):
I was gonna say, now I feel like we have to, I feel like you drove us right off the freeway into hometown.

Jason Howell (00:05:25):
It's like, everybody tells you gone wrong. It's like, don't stare at the sun. Don't look at the sun. And then I looked at the sun. This is exactly what I did. Fine real quick.

Ashley Esqueda (00:05:34):
It's something the end that should just be a recurring segment on TWiTtter. It just, Elon did something. And then you just talk about it. Cause it would just, it's like a guarantee every week. There's something going on with Elon Musk.

Jason Howell (00:05:44):
There's, it's a six-sided die. And when you roll it, five of them say Musk and the other one is like a random story. Yeah. So what is the thing that Elon Musk did this time? Well, I guess it, this has to do with his trial, right? There's there's this trial. Oh, okay. And you know, between TWiTtter and Elon Musk, Musk was pushing for it to go to next year, but that's not happening. Apparently TWiTtter was pushing for it to happen. Soon. They want to, you know, get this done, reap whatever reward slash benefit they can from this really just messy, ugly situation. And apparently it's gonna be expedited five day trial gonna happen in October. So we aren't gonna have to wait long. I, I kind of felt like we were gonna wait a lot longer and this whole Musk thing was gonna continue out forever and ever. But I suppose this is good news. What do y'all think?

Ashley Esqueda (00:06:35):
Well that Delaware court of Chancery, like they don't, they don't tend to mess around they're. This is like a very no nonsense court. And yeah, it ended up I think the five days is actually one party wanted a shorter trial. The other wanted a longer one. And then of course like Elon Musk said my legal team would needs more time to prepare. We have to push this until next year. Chancery. Nope, Nope. We're gonna do this in October. It's gonna be five days and that's it. So I think you know, TWiTtter just wants to put all of this to bed, whatever, you know, come what may they would like to move past this. And so I think that, you know, this is a real big win for TWiTtter to not have to kind of drag this out even longer than it needs to be.

Jason Howell (00:07:20):
It's it's odd for Elon to wanna delay something. I've never, that doesn't seem Lynn his in his personality at all. <Laugh> I don't know. <Laugh>

Megan Morrone (00:07:30):
The filing itself is funny because it's sort of designed for TWiTtter. Like it's in, you know, it has the little poop emoji that he tweeted in. It it's like little pieces that it's almost like they did it just like perfect for their platform. Like this is how it's gonna play out. This is the speed at which is gonna play out. If you read it. It's just like little tweets basically in the filing, which is amazing. It's like a little performance art.

Jason Howell (00:07:54):
The, the entire trial is expected to be rolled out in 140 characters per you know, size. I think you're absolutely right. I dunno how they're gonna

Ashley Esqueda (00:08:05):
At all. What at two 80 now, is it two 80 now? Let's let it. Let's

Jason Howell (00:08:08):
That's sure they have expanded on that.

Ashley Esqueda (00:08:09):
Come on. It's expanded. The tweets have been expanded

Jason Howell (00:08:12):
Classics, be,

Ashley Esqueda (00:08:13):
Be one long thread, one long thread <laugh>

Megan Morrone (00:08:15):
And the lawyers are not allowed to edit anything. They're not

Jason Howell (00:08:19):
Got Nope. Sorry.

Ashley Esqueda (00:08:21):
There will be not a single edit made no edit. No, unless they subscribe to TWiTtter blue, in which case you can undo an argument. There you go.

Jason Howell (00:08:29):
Like really? Are you all, are you all using TWiTtter blue these days? I, I signed up for it initially. And then after like a couple of weeks, like I think my credit card, like I had to replace my credit card that was fraud or something like that. And I just never updated it. So apparently I'm not missing it that much, but what about y'all

Ashley Esqueda (00:08:48):
Feature often enough? Yeah. Yeah. I do still. I use TWiTtter so much that I'm like, I feel like I like some of the features it has, so it's like helpful for me, but mm-hmm <affirmative> the undo is really nice. Like the, the undo now, and then it's like, Hey, if you wanna undo this in like 10 seconds, then like, here's your chance, cuz it'll gimme that one last like proof reading, which that's always when I catch it right after I post. So once I hit that tweet button and it's like, oh, there's my typo undo that like, let's just start over. So that's helpful. Right? I like that. That's a, that's a nice feature. I actually do appreciate that feature.

Jason Howell (00:09:21):
Yeah.

Megan Morrone (00:09:22):
Yeah. That was the only feature I used. And for $5 a month, I felt like it was worth it. But I also felt like it kind of trained me a little bit to take that extra look. So I don't, you know, you form a habit in like 30 days point. So like now I do feel like I, I, yeah, I, I, I think a little bit more and then I do that last proofread before I tweet. But in the, the no ads thing never really worked for me. Like I would always click and get at, you know, like I'm supposed to be able to see content with no ads or maybe see it without a subscription. I don't know. Yeah. That was

Ashley Esqueda (00:09:56):
The no ads thing is very weird because it's like for LA times, like if I click on an LA times article, it says you need a subscription. And I guess if I have a subscription, that would be a thing. I wouldn't see other ads on. I it's very odd and it doesn't work and it's weird and bad. And I don't like, I don't like how it's set up. It should just be, here are the partnerships we have. If you click on an article in the TWiTtter app, we will open it in our own proprietary browser and you can read it like in a reader mode or something like that with no ads. And that's it. Like, that should be how it works. But unfortunately that is not the case and it is very annoying.

Jason Howell (00:10:34):
Yeah. And it's not hard to do that. Sorry, go ahead. Oh no, it's not. Yeah. I, I thought about signing up and then I thought I don't care enough. I tweet, oh my God. A lot so much. And they're all full of typos and I'm like, you know, I've gone this far. Why, why, why mess with the why? Why, why mess with the brand? That's my brand. Exactly. Like why mess with it? Just let it go. That's who you are. If I'm, if, if there are, if there are, if five tweets happen and none of them have typos it's people are just gonna assume I've been kidnapped. So <laugh> or

Ashley Esqueda (00:11:06):
Hack. I understand.

Jason Howell (00:11:07):
Or both you spelling just a little bit. That's

Ashley Esqueda (00:11:08):
A good fail, safe set. You've inadvertently created for yourself. I like that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Jason Howell (00:11:12):
Yeah. It's it's my security. It's my info. Sec. <laugh> very nice. Apparently we don't care about Musk cuz we're just talking about TWiTtter and it has nothing to do with the alum Musk and you know what, that's just the way it deserves to be. That actually makes sense. There's so many other things he did this week too. Like today, yesterday day before it's just nonstop. He's just so much of it is just so tabloidy though. So I ended up tuning it out cuz it just feels like noise more than anything, you know, mm-hmm, <affirmative> so much more,

Megan Morrone (00:11:40):
I did almost get canceled on TWiTtter this week. Should we talk about that about really? You tell, oh, <laugh> now I'm gonna get canceled again. So I got home from work and my three teenagers were at the dinner table and I was like, did you see the pictures of Elon Musk without his shirt on? And my daughter said, mom, you cannot body shame anyone including billionaires. She's 19 smarter than me. And so I tweeted that <laugh> and I said, I thought she was wrong. Which you know, if you know me, I was joking. I'm not a body shamer but then someone retweeted it and there was a whole big thing about like, if you body shame a billionaire, anyone with a similar body will feel like now they know, you know what you think about them. It was, it was a big learning moment. But it was one of those moments where I was like, oh yeah, I guess everyone who follows me and follows the people who are gonna retweet me. Don't really know when I'm joking. Right. So yeah. And then somebody retweeted today, like yeah, don't body shame. The rich just eat the rich, which I thought was good. That's a good problem.

Ashley Esqueda (00:12:43):
I tweeted that

Jason Howell (00:12:44):
If you're gonna eat the rich, you shouldn't be body shaming them, if anything, wrong with eating the rich. Right. Nothing wrong with eating the rich or taxiing

Ashley Esqueda (00:12:54):
For there're just so many other ways to like poke fun at them.

Jason Howell (00:12:59):
<Laugh> yeah, he's a,

Ashley Esqueda (00:13:01):
I was like, Elon is like, did you see his El elder ring build it's garbage? Like that's that's thing on

Jason Howell (00:13:07):
Drag until the end

Megan Morrone (00:13:09):
People

Jason Howell (00:13:11):
I'll be careful with that one.

Ashley Esqueda (00:13:12):
I will throw the word made list around without remorse. I have. That's my favorite insult for people now it's just, that's part of my permanent lexicon just made list behavior.

Jason Howell (00:13:25):
<Laugh> well let's I think we did it. We did it move on. We

Ashley Esqueda (00:13:28):
Did

Jason Howell (00:13:29):
Everyone from Elon Musk topless to to just TWiTtter and snap. And the only reason that I'm going here is because I'm seeing kind of like a, a thing happening. I think this is kind of interesting to talk about snap at its weak, weak weakest, quarterly earnings report ever slowing its growth. You know, the slowest growth in history is a public company. And of course the economy right now everything's, you know, in flu everything's you know, upside down, it feels like especially the last six months, things have changed a lot in, in a very short amount of time. And so what we're they're seeing because they rely so heavily on the ad spend is that, you know, the, that money is just being, being removed, right? Not to mention Apple's privacy policy changes, which have had a dramatic effect on snap.

Jason Howell (00:14:18):
These, this is of course the changes that allowed iOS users to opt out of ad tracking. So that's making things more difficult for a company, a poor company like snap shares dropped 25% on the news. And then you got TWiTtter which reported lower than expected earnings for the quarter. They're at ad revenue actually only grew 2% year over year. That's compared to 23% growth last year. And so a lot, you know, a lot of what I was reading about this, you know, has to do with, you know, the ad spend slow down that's happening right now, the economy, of course, with TWiTtter, you've got the the shirtless Elon that we were just talking about. There's probably a lot of blame that can be placed on, on him as far as that's concerned. But, and, and, and actually TWiTtter's, you know, spent out of pocket a, a good amount of money just on that alone, $33 million between April and June, but setting all that aside we're in this time of economic uncertainty, Apple's privacy move is compounding the pain. That's felt by tech companies who are just really, their business is totally reliant on ad spending and data tracking and, and all this crazy stuff. I it just seems like TWiTtter and snap are a couple of examples and I feel like we're gonna be, you know, cascading effect as we move forward further into this year, we're gonna see a lot more companies feeling the effects of this. It's

Ashley Esqueda (00:15:42):
Just not where people are. Well, I mean, TWiTtter is its own thing. I mean, I think TWiTtter has always, like, they've always struggled, right? To turn a profit, to, to make TWiTtter, to like really blow out TWiTtter into something similar to a Facebook or like the, I think TWiTtter is like a weird kind of outlier in its own way. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but that's not where anybody is. And so it's like Snapchat is competing with Instagram and TikTok. And the thing is, is there was a point where <laugh>, you know, the peop there was like a mix of younger and older people on Snapchat. And now it's, it's the younger people have broken off for TikTok and the older people have broken off for reels they're they're over on Instagram. And so there's just nobody there, like, it's not, it's not, who's using the same way that Instagram is being used and that TikTok is being used.

Ashley Esqueda (00:16:33):
And so it's just, I don't know anybody who uses Snapchat as their main mode of conversation with anybody anymore. I mean, used to, but not anymore. Yeah. And I think that that's sort of the, the struggle that they're gonna have is they're gonna find it very difficult because all of the, you know, millennials and older are on Facebook and Instagram and all of the gen Z is all, all the gen Z kids are on TikTok now. And so they've all broken off from Snapchat and they're like, bye. Like, we're, this is much more interesting to us. And also you have apps, like be real, which a lot of influencers who are, you know, in that younger demographic, they're also breaking off to apps like that. So it's just it's a, it's a scenario where like, Snapchat is like not in a great place and I don't know what they can do to bring people back

Jason Howell (00:17:22):
Release more spectacles release, more of selfie drones. Oh,

Ashley Esqueda (00:17:25):
Spectacles

Jason Howell (00:17:25):
For, yeah. Spectacles spectacles. I, I don't think I've opened Snapchat in about four years, so yeah. Yeah. There was a point where like, Hey, we're on Snapchat, but we were all on, you know, MySpace. At some point we were all on ster. At some point we were all on. We were all on Facebook at some point that thing. Yeah. We were all on Facebook. And I mostly, I just get on Facebook to yell about Facebook, about how angry I am with him. Sure. And then, I mean, mostly I'm on Facebook because of the bands, cuz that's where everyone says, Hey, go see a show here on Facebook mm-hmm but even events, even for that it's com it's become completely unusable it's it's just, Facebook is really good at selling ads and that's about it. Snapchat is really good at just, I don't know, sticking around longer than I anticipated. Really. <laugh> Snapchat's really good at not going away. Other than that, it's like, well, what is

Ashley Esqueda (00:18:15):
It? Every generation it's like, even it's not even every generation, it's just every so often you're gonna have this churn where it's like, oh, because no younger generation wants to use the social media platform that the older generations have used. They want their own thing. Yeah. And, and I get that. I totally understand that. I respect it. Like that's what it is. Gen X was big on MySpace. Like then, you know, and then it was, you know, boomers with Facebook. Like now they're like, but it wasn't that way at the beginning. And then it was like, oh, well now we have MySpace. So like buy and they left all the boomers on Facebook. Then it became, oh, well here's like TWiTtter, here's Snapchat. Here's it's just, you know, Instagram for a long time was like very, before it got bought by Facebook, like mm-hmm, <affirmative>, they're just like every single kind of like group that comes up and starts using social media.

Ashley Esqueda (00:19:05):
They want their own thing. They want their own thing. They wanna feel ownership of it. They wanna feel like it's their community, their age group, their demo, because that's like, that's what they want. They wanna interact with people who are like them. And so it's it, it, it, it's very hard. I am surprised most of these companies have survived as long as they have, just because, you know, I guess now it's like, if you look at the demographic use of each one of them, like it skews heavily towards one column. Right. Like, and, and I think, you know, TikTok in particular is like, it's just exploding right now with users. Yeah. Because that's where everyone is and that's where all the trends and the memes are coming from. Like that's the thing.

Jason Howell (00:19:45):
Yeah. And the stuff that's happening on TikTok is ending up on other platforms as well is like just getting

Ashley Esqueda (00:19:49):
Repost

Jason Howell (00:19:51):
Tiktok and yes.

Ashley Esqueda (00:19:53):
And people go, oh, well, why am I using this when I should just be over here? And then I could see it first. Yeah. Be

Jason Howell (00:19:57):
At the

Ashley Esqueda (00:19:57):
Source. Everybody just starts migrating. Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:19:59):
Instagram. So I can see what talks I haven't seen yet. Exactly. Like, oh, this one didn't show up in the, in the algorithm, I'll go over the Instagram and watch it. There <laugh>. Yeah. When my kids borrow my phone because apparently they know my password. Yeah. They're, they're ending up on YouTube watching the talks that are there, you know, <laugh> that's and actually, yeah. And actually so this was a surprise, totally tying with what we're talking about. I was away with my family on a swim meet for a swim meet for my daughter. And while she was there, you know, she was with a couple of friends and she had my phone at one point. And then when I got my phone back, Snapchat was installed and some of her friends from the swim meet were friended. So apparently some people are using Snapchat and you know, younger kids, whatever your friends apparently have Snapchat use it regularly. I don't know

Megan Morrone (00:20:47):
Your friends have. I think it's, it's what your friends have. And it's what your parents don't want you to have. Like Snapchat was the big thing nobody's parents cuz oh. Things just disappear. Like, which actually turns out to be pretty good for kids when things D totally disappear. I totally agree. Totally. A hundred percent. Yeah. So I think, I mean, my kids use it and I will use it sometimes cuz they, you know, we all, like, I like to see their bit emojis, especially when my daughter went a week to college. So I could see like she was all the way in New York. And, but that's really the only way that I used it, but all of these companies are dependent on advertising dollars and those are right now in the toilet. So like that's the other thing that is affecting all of these.

Megan Morrone (00:21:24):
And if they were, if you already like Snapchat lasted this long for whatever reason, but it might be like the change that apple made with tracking, like might be the final, you know, kick in the pants, tossing them off the edge. Cause they can't, you know, they really can't make money right now because it's the a, it's the change of the apple. It's the Warren Ukraine. It's just the general like macro environment, you know, it's, it's all these things. And if you were already not doing that great or you know, if you were, if you were a TWiTtter where someone was like tweeting about how terrible you or platform was, and also I'd like to buy it maybe then you're, <laugh> hypothetically speaking, hypothetically

Jason Howell (00:22:04):
Speaking,

Megan Morrone (00:22:05):
Right? Yeah. So like that's what I think they're all suffering right now. Anyone dependent on advertising is suffering.

Jason Howell (00:22:12):
Yeah, for sure. God, I there's two different directions we could go right now. So I'm gonna go the boring one just real quick. And then we, and then after that I have to take a break and then we're gonna talk about B real because you mentioned B real and I definitely wanna talk about that. Cause I think it's super interesting before we go there. I think this ties in with what you're talking about, Megan, which is this American data privacy and protection act that is basically a new draft going through Washington DC right now, if there was a, there was an original draft in June, many revisions since, and this is focusing on data minimization. So it ties in this whole ad tracking thing. Like what is a, what does a future of big tech look like if the mechanisms that they're used to relying on in order to stay in business and do what they've done for so many years is the rules are completely changed.

Jason Howell (00:23:01):
And apparently this, this draft spells out 17 permitted purposes for data collection and the use of, of the users things like authentication, things like fraud prevention transactional data, that sort of stuff, anything outside of those 17 purposes would be prohibited. So in essence, you can't collect data that you don't actually need. And these are the categories that you might actually need data for. And if they aren't those categories, then you can't. And I think it would be interesting if this is a bipartisan bill that you are that's, that's taking shape right now. And it happens the impacts that this has for the tech companies that really rely on this one, one thing that it points out is target, advertise, targeted advertising and actually people who are really, you know, advocating for privacy say, this is kind of one of the disappointing parts of this bill.

Jason Howell (00:23:57):
It would impose limits on this. But only some not all like, I think data privacy like maximalist would say, get rid of, you know, targeted advertising entirely. And of course like, like I'd be amazed if they actually went in that direction, but instead they're saying, no, you can't do this to minors. You can't have targeted advertising based on sensitive data like health geolocation, private communication, that sort of stuff. And no following people around on the internet, tracking everything they do like dropping, you know, some sort of tracking mechanism that then shows that when I go over to this side, I buy this thing and how it all ties into place. And I don't know, I, I'm curious to see how, if this happens the way it's described, it's going to impact the business model of so many of these companies that are just making money, hand over fist over fist, the way things have been.

Jason Howell (00:24:47):
I mean, Facebook and Google have been just reaping the benefits of our lives for DEC over a deck. Oh my God. So long <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, and, and at some point somebody had to say, because you know, privacy advocates and, and tech reporters and, and a lot of people have been saying, this is too much, you know, too much about us. You, you don't get to know every single little bitty thing that's happening in my life because I search for something that I thought was private and now you're using it to serve me ads because you think I'm pregnant or to serve me ads because you think I enjoy, you know, going to Thailand or, you know, just weird little things that you're searching all the time or you're doing or where you're at. It's it's too much. And if you can bring that or at least squelch it a bit, I think it helps for individuals.

Jason Howell (00:25:40):
And it helps. I mean, the industry as a whole, they just need to figure it out. If they're supposed to be smart people, if they can't figure it out, then I don't know what to tell them. That's that's the thing is they, they they've been, you know, decades of how smart they are and how they're gonna change the world. And anytime there's any little roadblock, they all freak out. Like, we don't know how this is gonna work. I'm like, I thought you were, you were the smart ones. That's what you keep telling us. At least figure it out. Tens of thousands of, of people in that department, it was express job is to figure this out. So why, why aren't you? Yeah. You have billions of dollars and you're upset because apple won't let people track track people. Well, figure it out. You know, you have tens of billions of dollars.

Jason Howell (00:26:19):
I don't know what to tell you. I, I don't feel bad for you and I don't feel bad for your horrible, horrible business practices. <Laugh> amen. Pay for journalism. <Laugh> yeah. Pay for journalism. That's the other day. Oh, we've been building everything on the backs of journalists, but we're not gonna, but we've been stealing, you know, all the ad goes all the ad dollars go to Facebook and Google because yeah. We keep that someone gets on. Yeah. It sits on, you know, people sit on Facebook all day and that's what the ad advertisers want. They don't want the, oh, someone went to a site and they read an article for 30 seconds. They probably didn't see our ad. Meanwhile, over on Facebook, someone was on this site for two hours and our ad was right there while they scrolled up and down and got in a fight with their cousin about whoever was running for office and some small like school district that no one knows anything about. Other than someone made a big fuss about their stupid, stupid ideas. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> tell us how you really feel like it. Oh man. Don't even get me started on advertising. <Laugh> I'm ran myself, ed for the dogs. I don't wanna disturb the dogs. <Laugh> yeah, I understand. It's all. It's all about the dogs. Get it.

Ashley Esqueda (00:27:27):
They get really upset when you talk about privacy laws.

Jason Howell (00:27:30):
They're like, why don't tell em about us. Don't give 'em our real name. I'm like, oh, I have dogs to my dogs. Ah, horrible to the dogs.

Ashley Esqueda (00:27:42):
Don't do it.

Jason Howell (00:27:43):
Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it. All right. Let's let's take a break and we will thank the sponsor of this episode of this weekend in tech. And then when we come back, let's talk a little bit about, be real because I've been using it lately. And I'm curious to know all of your thoughts on, on it. And we'll dive into that. But first this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Certain people just make life so much easier. Wouldn't you agree? You don't know what you would do without them, right? Maybe it's your partner. Maybe it's your friend maybe it's your personal assistant. They all make your life so much easier. It's nice to have someone on your side, right? It's like, if you need to grow your business, ZipRecruiter, is there making, hiring so much easier because they actually do the work for you.

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Jason Howell (00:29:58):
I, Megan, I know you're on B real weird.

Ashley Esqueda (00:30:01):
Yeah. Are you on you're on be real.

Megan Morrone (00:30:03):
I am, yeah, we should be, be real friends. I have, I started being on, be real through my daughter who she was like, you have to get on this. This was, I don't know. It was like right when she like last summer, I don't remember when it was. And then then it was just my kids for a really long time. And then it became now I it's my kids, several of their friends who requested me. And so I felt like that was fair to accept their request. And then four former coworkers, Jason Tom Merritt, Mike ELGAN and will Remus from Washington post. So it's like four guide tech journalists and a bunch of 17 and 19 year olds. That's who I follow <laugh>.

Jason Howell (00:30:48):
Yeah, I I've noticed in my, in my short amount of time with B real, that it is not about amassing, like collecting friends, you know what I mean? Like a lot of services, like when I started Facebook, it was all about like, I don't, I knew you for for two minutes. Sure. You're my friend. And it was about getting that number high, you know, high, as high as possible back in, you know, 2008 or whatever it was be real seems to be a lot more a lot more controlled, I suppose. What about you, Ashley, Roberto? Have you used this at all?

Ashley Esqueda (00:31:16):
Yeah, I love it. I just like the idea of it, which is that for those of you who like, have not used be real if you're listening to this. So it's an app that is I would say it could like Jason, it's a controlled social media, so it's not just posting publicly whenever you feel like it. You know, you gotta basically the app flags, you and says, you got two minutes to post. Like this is the time you get a two. Everybody gets the same two minute window to take a picture of what you're currently doing, which is why it's called. Be real. It's just like no filters, no, just nothing, no AR nothing like that. It's just very straightforward. Takes a picture with your front facing camera and your rear facing camera. And that's what gets posted to your profile.

Ashley Esqueda (00:32:06):
And there are rules that it has. So if you post late, other people will not you won't be able to see other people's photos there, there pictures for the day. If you delete, if you want to delete a be real you have to, you can only delete a picture and you're not allowed to delete the next day's picture. Like the next one that you, oh, wow. They won't let you delete it. Like, it'll say you can't, so we'll let you delete this one, but you can't delete the next one. Like, so whatever that is. And it says and there are, there are things, things where you can say there was a bug or I can't see anything or, you know, what have you, but it's really interesting that it, so I, it feels like be real is the antithesis of what most people think social media is for at this point mm-hmm <affirmative> which I think is what is so appealing about it to a lot of gen Z kids.

Ashley Esqueda (00:33:06):
I read this is like a weird kind of, I, I promise I'm coming back to be real. And this point I read a really interesting ask Reddit the other day, and someone said, I just don't understand gen Z humor. Like, I don't, here's like some examples and they listed some examples and it's like, you know, gen X humor is like very kind of south Parky sort of nihilistic. Then you get into millennial stuff where it's like this existential crisis humor, like, and then you get into gen Z and it's just like, it's, it's insane. Like, you don't know what it even is half the time. And everybody's just kind of like weirdly in on the joke, because it's just a vibe, like the memes are vibes. Like they're not really, they're not at all. Like, they don't make sense a lot of the time, but it's a vibe.

Ashley Esqueda (00:33:48):
And like, I get it. I understand that. And that's cool. Like, I love it. But someone had responded to that ask credit and they said, it's really interesting because gen Z's meme humor specifically is it moves so quickly. Their, their version of the internet moves so fast and evolves. So, so quickly that a millennial or a gen Xer or a, you know, boomer, whatever, what have you might post something. And that meme could live for weeks or months. Like, and in the early times of the internet, a meme would live for a year. Like it's, it was just like, you know, we all are familiar with the meme. Ike has cheeseburger, like that is an iconic longtime meme that doesn't exist for gen Z. It's just like, this is the you're living in the moment from moment to moment meme to meme. And it gets remixed and regurgitated and redone and re like just transformed so many times in the span of 24 hours that it just becomes chaos.

Ashley Esqueda (00:34:52):
Like it's chaotic, but it's a vibe again, like the, the it's funny because it's a vibe. And so it's I thought that was so fascinating and be real to me, seems like it is working very hard against that. And it's just like, no, this is just like show people what you're doing right in this moment. It's the same. Everybody shares the same two minutes. So it's really a little snapshot of like, what's going on in time right now at your phone. There you go. That's it, it's like very simple, very straightforward. And it has it's got bumpers on it, right? It's got guardrails on it to keep you from gaming the system the way so many other social media platforms have been gamed by both influencers, advertisers, everything in between. Just super fascinating. I find be real like the so, so, so fascinating. It's very interesting to me,

Jason Howell (00:35:40):
It, it gets me kinda fascinating flashbacks too early TWiTtter to be honest like early, just that, yeah. Picture picture. Just, just in the sense that when, when TWiTtter first came out, it was kinda like, what do we even use this for? You mean, we're just supposed to share what we're doing right now. I guess I'm eating a sandwich. Does anyone really wanna know that I'm eating a sandwich half the time would be real? What you end up getting? Or at least what I end up getting in my feed is people sitting in front of their computers, right? <Laugh> so you end up seeing like a screen with whatever they're working on, then a shot of them sitting at their computer, which isn't the most exciting thing I realize, Hey, join the social network, where all you see is what people are, you know, that, that they're working at their computers, just like you <laugh>.

Jason Howell (00:36:18):
But, but I think what's, what's interesting or appealing to me about it is that because of the guardrails that you were talking about, Ashley, because of kind of the rules of play, so to speak, and this idea that you can't like there, there's no easy way for you to go all Instagram and show, you know, your luxurious yacht, because you just happen to be standing in front of one, you know, with the two minutes that it happens or whatever, there's no painting your life to be anything, hopefully other than what it actually is. And it's kind of the blandness of life ends up being the appealing factor of be real. For me, it's kinda like, it's kind like confirmation though. Like, oh yeah, my life can be pretty boring, too. Nice. You know, it's, you're not always seeing just the, the really great stuff that someone's doing. You're seeing kind of the boring stuff that they're doing. And that's cool too, because that's what being a human is all about. So there's

Ashley Esqueda (00:37:08):
A, there's a very funny tweet about it that says, I can't believe we're also fake. This is from Connor Connor fr Franta. It says, I can't believe we're also fake. They're now making social media apps. That force us to be ourselves. That's hilarious.

Jason Howell (00:37:20):
<Laugh>

Ashley Esqueda (00:37:21):
It's like,

Jason Howell (00:37:21):
Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's pretty spot on Roberto. What were you gonna say? I, I just like that, there's now a a social media. That'll just Chronicle late stage capitalism of just sitting in front of our computers with the existential dread in our eyes. <Affirmative> how are things going? Well, you know, you know, I'm just staring at this box again. I also just literally signed up for it like two seconds ago. I'm like, yeah, that sounds fine. Whatever

Megan Morrone (00:37:48):
<Laugh> I need a fifth tech reporter guy, so yeah.

Jason Howell (00:37:51):
Oh, I'm it's the same name. S T R N G w I S go ahead. Follow me. Don't follow me. Don't care. So the,

Megan Morrone (00:37:58):
The fatal flaw would be real and I don't know why they didn't think of this. It seems quite obvious is that it, the app is terrible. Yeah. And some people think that's like very unique, but the reason why it almost never works because everyone is using it at the exact same time. And like that is inherent in what you do. Like everybody opens it up and takes the picture. And then so it's like, well, didn't, you know, that like, as you scaled, as you got more users,

Jason Howell (00:38:26):
Like, oh boy, yeah, good point.

Ashley Esqueda (00:38:28):
This data is very bad.

Jason Howell (00:38:32):
So it starts at the same time every day,

Megan Morrone (00:38:35):
Everybody,

Jason Howell (00:38:36):
The same time for

Megan Morrone (00:38:37):
Everyone. But you can change your time zone, like too European time zone or, or like us time zone, but not like us little us time zones, but you can be on a different time zone, but it's basically the same time every day. So what has happened is like I've been using it is like, I don't really do it every you know, every time like, but you could do it at any time in the day. It just shows that you've done it late. Yeah. And then after you do it, you can see everyone's photos. So like, I haven't done mine today and I'm definitely gonna do it of you four to have like a very meta be real situation when you least expect it. But that's the thing it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't really, but I, I do still love it for all the reasons that we've discussed. The other thing that I don't know if you know, this is that you can take, you can retake the picture if you don't like what you look like, but it will notify like doesn't notify, but you can see, can look at people's be reals. And like, if, you know, if I see that Jason had like this lovely picture of his steel cut oats and blueberries and his smiling morning face, I can see like how many times did he take that

Jason Howell (00:39:37):
Picture? Oh,

Megan Morrone (00:39:38):
So it'll say like that you like took it, you know, until you had the exact to right angle. Oh really?

Jason Howell (00:39:44):
I didn, I didn't know that it had that feature. Oh yeah. Yeah. I, no one knew that I retook that shot five times. Oh, with my

Megan Morrone (00:39:51):
It'll on you. If you screenshot too, if you screenshot

Jason Howell (00:39:54):
You out,

Ashley Esqueda (00:39:54):
This is a screenshot. Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:39:56):
It's a snitch. <Laugh> yeah. I travel a lot to Europe. It's

Ashley Esqueda (00:40:00):
Snitch app for sure.

Jason Howell (00:40:02):
Is it, so is it, is it based on the phones time zone or is the app have its own time zone from where you set it up? Because I travel to Europe a lot. And so will it, will it correct as I get over there?

Megan Morrone (00:40:15):
I think it's only,

Jason Howell (00:40:16):
Oh, I guess we'll

Megan Morrone (00:40:16):
Find out. Cause I think, yeah. Yeah. I think it's only,

Jason Howell (00:40:19):
I guess we'll find out and

Megan Morrone (00:40:20):
I'm gonna be real right now.

Jason Howell (00:40:22):
Oh, okay. Oh, oh yeah. Be real. And

Megan Morrone (00:40:25):
<Laugh>,

Jason Howell (00:40:26):
I'm just gonna look dead inside. <Laugh> something like, be real though. It's hard to see at this stage. Like, like it's, it's got activity, it's got movement, obviously, you know, younger generation users, a lot, a lot of like kids using it. I don't want to call 'em kids. A lot of younger people using them. This is what happens when you get your mid forties kids, kids. I start calling the hello kids. I know, get off my lawn for kids, but there, but there's a lot of movement right now. Part of me wonders if an app like be real, has a short lifespan. Right. Cause the past it's interesting. Right, right now. But like what does it have the ability to grow into over time? It's kind of built around these really, you know, like, like we were talking about these, these hard and fast rules, how to like

Ashley Esqueda (00:41:14):
Companies, Facebook

Jason Howell (00:41:15):
Ultimately wanna broaden out and become something more. How do you do that? When you've got these rules and

Ashley Esqueda (00:41:19):
Facebook will just copy this, it'll just be a feature probably where it's like, it'll be like a check-in feature, but it'll just be like, Hey, like here's this fun little, you know, sub menu on Instagram reels or whatever, or on Instagram where you can just choose it. And then it's like, oh, if you'd like to be notified every day to just like snap a picture, we'll take one of the front and back of your camera or whatever. They'll they'll just copy it.

Jason Howell (00:41:41):
Yeah. You're right. That's what, that's what usually happens. You think the front back, remember front, back the app, they took a picture of the front and the back. Remember them? You think they're like, oh, come

Ashley Esqueda (00:41:52):
On peace from back poor one out for front

Jason Howell (00:41:55):
Back or went out our path beach peach

Ashley Esqueda (00:41:57):
Path up path. Peach. Peach. Yeah.

Jason Howell (00:42:01):
Peach. Oh, I forgot about peach. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, I, yeah. I just signed up for all these things. So I keep my screen name and now I'm just like, eh <laugh> but I'm on be real. Now this is the one that's gonna stick. You're gonna be

Ashley Esqueda (00:42:14):
One you're you're ready to

Jason Howell (00:42:15):
Be real, gonna stick around for at least six months. Real next Facebook. You just wait and see

Ashley Esqueda (00:42:20):
Megan's daughter told her about it. Well a year ago. So it's been around exactly. It's it's been chilling

Megan Morrone (00:42:26):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and imagine the data that they can collect. That's the other thing, because if it's like, if it really is us just doing our regular normal things, you know, cause if you were like con if you're constantly posting on Instagram about like the one time you up to you saved enough money to go to Hawaii for the year. For me, like, you're not like that's not gonna be that targeted advertising. Right. But if it's like everything you're doing on a normal day, everything that's in your background. Like, I mean, obviously they have a privacy policy in place and they're not like grabbing all that stuff yet, but it is a pretty interesting trove of data. Just like what you're actually doing in your regular

Jason Howell (00:43:03):
Life. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> gotta go there. See, I was just mindly posting what I, what I'm doing at a random time. And now I gotta think about exactly how all that imagery stuff is being analyzed.

Ashley Esqueda (00:43:16):
Are

Megan Morrone (00:43:16):
You getting a lot of ads for steel cut?

Jason Howell (00:43:20):
Yes. Yes I am. No I don't. Yeah. And I don't even think there's like, there's not even any ads in the app at this point. So that's not pharmaceutical companies will use to sell antidepressants. Everyone's just like, oh God, we go, everyone just looks sad. Or at their desk pharmacy. Yeah. Let's get those people. Some Prozac who knows, maybe Amazon will buy be real. And then they just buy everything. Yeah. They buy everything. In fact, apparently Amazon is getting further and further into the it's it's ambitions of kind of revitalizing the the health industry. They announced its intent to buy one medical, which is in San Francisco chain of primary healthcare clinics. Although one medical, from what I understand, I'm not, I wasn't super familiar with this before kind of hearing about this news and reading up a little bit about it is like technologically powered. So it's not just like primary healthcare clinics. It's, it's got a technical or technological kind of backbone to it. Kind of like a self-service sort of approach to it's kinda forward

Ashley Esqueda (00:44:21):
Primary

Jason Howell (00:44:22):
Care telehealth

Ashley Esqueda (00:44:23):
Is this like forward, there's like a series of, there's like a chain of medical offices that they, they have like very high tech sort of experience when you go in. I would, I think it's, I think it's similar to this. It's like yeah, there's a real heavy focus on like a, you know, forward, I guess, forward trajectory technology and like medicine.

Jason Howell (00:44:45):
Okay. Yeah. I mean, you

Ashley Esqueda (00:44:47):
Know, digital services,

Jason Howell (00:44:49):
Right? 

Megan Morrone (00:44:50):
I think one medical was like aimed at probably like millennials and people like, so it was in addition to health insurance. So when I worked at medium we had this as a benefit, like it was an extra benefit. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> in addition to medical insurance, it was just easier and faster. They got a little bit of trouble because I think like right when vaccines came out, they like sort of offered to have people who had one medical skip the line. Oh yeah. <Laugh> like, oh wow. And so that's ING they're. Yeah, so it's like, they're, they're just like a disruptor, you know, like you know, Uber and taxis or Airbnb and hotels, that's their thing like, right.

Jason Howell (00:45:28):
So Amazon's $3.9 billion, all cash deal to acquire. And of course everyone jumps to, you know, the obvious place, which is okay. Do we trust Amazon to be that hands on with with our medical information, if you happen to be with, you know, one medical saw a lot of saw a lot of people online who are like, oh, seriously, like I'm out. If, if Amazon's in I'm out, I'm not comfortable with that. So yeah, I mean, that's, that's, I mean, undeniably, that's an easy place to go. This is an Amazon's only foray into this either. You know, they bought pill pack however many years ago. And that's the, kind of like the, the automated kind of mail order pill delivery service for medication, of course, whole foods, which, you know, isn't healthcare, but it is healthy living. So Amazon kind of has this whole thing going on right now, but does this concern any of you, as far as Amazon being the puppet master in control of this healthcare wing, so to speak, I mean, you're obviously gonna use your yeah. Anytime company says, like we're not gonna do that. And then they do that and they do, and then they get sort of slapped by the government and they get like a $30,000 fine or something, which is essentially like the executive lunch budget for the day. Yeah. It's, it's always concerning. When, when any of these big companies continue to consolidate more ways to get your data, especially when it comes to healthcare. That's that's mm-hmm <affirmative> I don't know. I don't know if I recall.

Ashley Esqueda (00:47:00):
It's really prickly. Yeah. It's really prickly. It's like just a real thorny kind of place to be in, because the thing is, is, you know, technically they would have to keep that information private, but also, you know, there's the argument that can be made where it's like, oh, we an, we it's, the data is anonymous. We, we make sure that it's anonymous before it's used by Amazon prime or like, you know, but the thing is, is like, it's gonna know it's you, right? Like if you're going to a one medical facility, your phone is there your geolocation, if you have any location services on it and you have the Amazon, Amazon, I mean, it's just, there's a lot of, kind of, there's gonna be a lot of coincidences with your data, right. It's just gonna be it's oh, it's what a coincidence. You, you got diagnosed with diabetes and now Amazon is gonna recommend to you.

Ashley Esqueda (00:47:51):
Like, here's all these sponsored you know, insulin pumps that we could recommend to you and you can use your FSA and like all this other, you know, all this other stuff. So I feel, it always makes me feel icky when like a big tech company buys company that's in a completely different services, vertical. It's just a little, it's a little weird. And it sketches me out a little bit. I mean, I'm not gonna, I hate saying this was like, I'm not gonna stop using Amazon. Like, I need that convenience in a lot of ways. Like, and there's a lot of things that I need, like got my hypocrite. I fully admit it. But also it's just like, yeah, that, that kind of thing is like, Ugh, I, I don't know that I could, I don't know that I could do it. I don't know that I could give my health data to a co a company like Amazon, but then it's like, how much do they already know about you? Right. Like, cuz if you are a diabetic, let's say you buy you buy some supplies on Amazon. They probably know they probably have an idea that you are someone in your household has a certain health condition. So, or is in a bucket of CA you know, a bucket that includes a myriad of health conditions that have similar symptoms or similar care, you know, care instructions. So I it's, it's a, it's a tough one. It's a tough one.

Jason Howell (00:49:00):
Well, and if they do know that about you, what exactly are they doing with that information? If they know that about you. Yeah. Right. Like it's not like they're selling it's Amazon. So their business is not selling that information that we know of to someone else. But it is about like the, their myriad yeah. Myriad ways that all of their services tie into each other. Like, I can almost imagine, you know, going to the front desk after, you know, getting a health checkup. And they're like, do you have the you know, the, the Amazon prime app and you scan the QR code and you get like a discount on the way out or something like that, you know? No,

Ashley Esqueda (00:49:35):
If you have prime, you'll get a discount on for your prescription. That's gonna be the thing, right. It's like, you're gonna get some discount on your prescription or you walk into an, a, a whole foods or an Amazon fresh and it pings you and says, Hey, like you have high cholesterol, you should try these foods or, you know, sponsored foods or whatever. Like, I can see that very easily happening, you know, where it's like, oh, Hey, like you, are you, you, your doctor, does you have keto? Like, here's some keto friendly food options. You know, things like that. I, I can see that happening because you're shopping data. If you're using Amazon already, is that data is already being like sorted out in that way. They know that stuff about you.

Jason Howell (00:50:15):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and there's also the concern that people in the household share an Amazon account. No one has an individual, you know, it's not like five people in the house who all have their individual Amazon account. The entire family uses one Amazon account. But if someone goes to the doctor and they're diagnosed with something that they don't want the rest of the house to know about whether it's their parents or their, their spouse or their partner or whoever the last thing that person wants is for someone else in the family to hop on Amazon and find this like, you know, be, oh, you have hemorrhoids or something, you know, it's just something that's, here's your preparation here? That's, here's your preparation age or something worse, you know, there's, there's pregnancies cancers, or, you know, there's a lot of things that people, you know, you know, we don't know how people's lives are. We don't know like what kind of relationships they're in. A lot of relationships are extremely abusive if you ha if you are pregnant and your abusive partner finds out via an, a, just logging on the Amazon when you were about to go, you know, to have some, you know, take care of the pregnancy, because you do not wanna have a child with this horrible person. Well, now you've just created this whole huge mess for this, for this individual, because you decided you wanted to share data to help people buy stuff.

Ashley Esqueda (00:51:25):
Yeah. And to piggyback on that, I mean, with the Dobbs decision and Roe V Wade you know, now that data, that information becomes like more important than ever. And we all know Amazon hasn't been the greatest at resisting subpoenas from law enforcement with ring doorbells and other ring home devices, smart home devices they have. So yeah, this is like it's a, it's a real kind of, it's a real touchy thing. I mean, I just people's health data is just like one of the most it's like health finances. I mean, there's like some buckets of data that are just really sensitive. So I, I mean, they they're really, I think I would hope that regulators would make sure that they, you know, really kinda locked it down. But again, like, like you said, Roberto, it's like, you know, they'll just be like, oh, well, we did it. And like, oops, whoop mishandling the data this whole time. And it's just like, you know, these, if we see this over and over and over again, it's just, it's a,

Jason Howell (00:52:21):
It's a pattern. It's

Ashley Esqueda (00:52:22):
A, it's a pattern. It's, it's a pattern of behavior. It's not a thing that's like, oh, well they made a one mistake. Like they messed up this time. And it's like, no, this is, this is pretty regular across so much of the industry.

Jason Howell (00:52:32):
Right? Right. Well, Amazon in buying one medical definitely signals at least their understanding that they, you know, that they are going to be placed under a lot of scrutiny, a lot of regulatory oversight as a result of this, but you know, how much impact is that actually gonna have? The other thing that you know, we talked about the story briefly on tech news weekly me and Mica Sergeant on Thursday. And one of the things that we ended up talking about is like, you know, we live in a country where healthcare is just so so filled with, with holes. Like it's just a, it's a horrible situation here for healthcare, for a large, you know, swath of the population compared to other countries where healthcare is paid for, for everyone. And you know, here, you have to pay through your teeth. If something like an Amazon buy of a primary care health, you know, business like this is able to offer healthcare that enables people who couldn't have afforded it prior to now suddenly afford it.

Jason Howell (00:53:31):
And, you know, obviously there is the caveat of okay. Yeah. But the data, you know, complications around that and everything, but that's also that, that is a benefit, right? Like being able to, to enable people who couldn't have afforded healthcare before to suddenly do that in a country where it's just a broken system, at least there's something there, but who knows if that's what we're even gonna see from Amazon, I'm just kind of reading the tea leaves from you know, kind of the prime ethos as it were. My Amazon prime comes with dental, one tooth for free and one free tooth for every $200 I spend I'm like, oh, I,

Ashley Esqueda (00:54:14):
If you have prime, they'll upgrade your crown from from metal to just porcelain. That'll be so nice. Prime porcelain

Jason Howell (00:54:22):
Prime PO

Ashley Esqueda (00:54:25):
I would rather not have Jeff Bezo solve our healthcare crisis. Like

Jason Howell (00:54:29):
Yeah, I know. Right. Totally.

Ashley Esqueda (00:54:32):
I'm sure that's really what it boils down to. Right.

Jason Howell (00:54:35):
<Laugh> and he is not building super yachts or buying places with 50 something toilets. He's like, you know what? I should fix healthcare. Well, but Megan allow me to to, to re release that, that kind of that tension that you have around Bezos, because it's not Bezos it's jazzy. So do you,

Ashley Esqueda (00:54:54):
Trust's true. True. You're right.

Jason Howell (00:54:56):
You can trust jazzy. <Laugh> yeah. With healthcare like new Coke, I feel better. It's IICA knows. So little about chassis. Not that I know a ton about Bezos, but I feel like I do compared to chassis. I don't know. Do I want

Ashley Esqueda (00:55:12):
Jesse? I don't wanna, I don't wanna know anything about billionaires or super rich people anymore. Like, I'm just like, I don't wanna hear about you just, just go just, you have so much money. Just please leave the internet and go and just do whatever with your money. You're good. Bad and different. Just leave us all alone. We're all just trying to enjoy, enjoy being online until it ends

Jason Howell (00:55:33):
<Laugh> until the collapse society. Can you just go away until

Ashley Esqueda (00:55:37):
It, it ends. That's it to

Jason Howell (00:55:40):
Like, well, right before society collapses, just give us your location so we can go steal your boats and your houses and we can eat all your food I'll need because you're one person

Ashley Esqueda (00:55:49):
For water world. When that happens, like that's our mad max, like I'll need some crawlers, some desert crawler. That's like 50 bedrooms, fine. Whatever. A sand crawler, need a jaw, a sand crawler. That's what I need.

Jason Howell (00:56:00):
That's

Ashley Esqueda (00:56:00):
All we need until then. Just please. Just billionaires. If you're listening, stay off. Just get off the internet, please. Just don't don't be on the internet. I'm begging you

Jason Howell (00:56:10):
Hands off. Be real. Okay. Seriously. <Laugh> oh, no, just be real alone. You just ruin be real for me. Just the anticipation. Just the anticipation. Just you wait. Oh, it's yeah, it's gonna happen. Maybe. I don't know. Oh, well it was a good 30 seconds. <Laugh> at least it was a good, you had a good run. You had a good run. Good run. <Laugh> let's take a break and thank the sponsor this episode of this weekend tech and then we'll get back and we got plenty, more news to, to walk through. So we'll get back to that in a second. But first this episode of this in tech has brought you by audible. And you know, I, man, how many years have I been with audible? Not as long as Leo, Leo, when he, when he starts rattling off his stats, I'm always like, man, you, you, you could probably listen for like a hundred years, the amount of hours that you have in your audible library.

Jason Howell (00:56:57):
I don't know, but I have a lot, not quite that much, but it's awesome. Like all of my spare time filled listening to audio books. I love it. And you know, our schedules, they're busy. We're always on the go. I feel like I'm always on the go. I don't have a ton of times to do the things that I want to do, but you know I can, I can find the time if I'm walking my dog, I can find time to listen to an audio book. That's why I love audible. Audible offers an incredible selection of audiobooks across every genre. And you go on there, you search for any author any, any genre, you're gonna find so many options and all presented in a way where you can really kind of get to the, the root of, you know, the suggestions and the reviews and everything to really kind of figure out exactly where you wanna spend your time listening to best sellers, new releases, celebrity memoirs mysteries thrillers, motivation, a lot of really good self-help wellness business, everything you name it.

Jason Howell (00:57:56):
You're gonna discover exclusive audible originals from top celebrities renowned experts, of course, and exciting new voices in audio. As an audible member, you can choose one title a month and that's to keep you get to keep that from their entire catalog, you choose one a month. It's yours including the latest best sellers and new releases. And then all audible members actually get access also to a growing selection of audiobooks, audible, originals, and podcasts that are included with your membership. So you can listen to all you want and more are getting added every single month. And you can listen to the audible app anytime, anywhere. I have it on my phone. It's always, you know, up and, and ready to go. I've got my, my audio book downloaded so that when I'm on the plane and I don't have connectivity, let's say my audio book is there waiting for me.

Jason Howell (00:58:48):
So when you're traveling, when you're working out, walking, doing chores big time into that, you decide one audio book that I have been actually listening to a second time. I listen to this audio book called untangled by Lisa Deora guiding teenage girls through the seven transitions into adulthood because I have a, a daughter who is almost a teenager. And let me tell you, life's starting to get a little crazy around here. So I'm trying to do my best to, to be informed, to understand where she is at and to be able to assist her and help her in any way that I possibly can. And this audio book is just fantastic. Like I said, this is my second time listening to it's untangled by Lisa devour. She is just an amazing author on this topic, and I've learned so much through listening to it.

Jason Howell (00:59:41):
So, and that's just one example, right? Like a lot of, a lot of TWiT fans, big into sci-fi, you're gonna find tons of sci-fi on audible and and everything else under the sun. So let audible help you discover new ways to laugh, to be inspired, to be entertained. New members can try it free for 30 days, visit audible.com/TWiT or text TWiT to 500, 500 that's audible.com/TWiT or text TWiT to 500, 500 to try audible free for 30 days. And you're gonna love it. I mean, you're, you're already listening to podcasts. You're already used to consuming information through your ears while you're doing other things, right. This is a way to allow you to keep reading, but with your ears, it's awesome. Audible.Com/TWiT, and we thank audible for their support of this weekend tech. All right. Did anyone get their invites for Dolly Dolly two? Now that things are kind of like expanding out anybody use this?

Ashley Esqueda (01:00:45):
I still want mine, but I haven't gotten it yet.

Jason Howell (01:00:47):
I want, yeah. I want mine too.

Ashley Esqueda (01:00:50):
Send our invites. I'm on the wait list. I'm ready to type in my crazy prompts and get wild AI art. I need it.

Jason Howell (01:01:02):
<Laugh> I do too. This is, this is so cool. I, I love any any, and almost all examples of how artificial intelligence is intersecting with with kind of the creative arts. There's some things about AI. That's, that's kind of frightening to me. <Laugh> in certain ways, you know suppo you know, behind the scenes of, of the tech companies and what they're doing and how AI is making decisions, that's, you know, promoting hate or, you know, those are the things that I don't like AI for, right? Like there's a lot to be worked on, but I'm fascinated by this idea that AI is powering this like new generation of apps and services that can create art, be it music, be it visual art that right now let's, let's say that it's not perfect. It's not, it's not always that I could look at an image and say, oh yeah, a that's, that's a hu a human made that. And then it actually, it was a computer. Like, it's not always that way, but it's happening more often now than it was when they started doing this sort of thing. And I feel like that's only gonna continue to improve in Dolly, too, everything. I mean, everything that, you know, all the examples that you see from Dolly are just, I don't know, it's mind blowing me, use words, how to create it.

Ashley Esqueda (01:02:17):
French fries dressed up up as Dolly Parton. Like these are the things that I need. Why

Jason Howell (01:02:21):
Don't you want that?

Ashley Esqueda (01:02:23):
I like why where's my invite?

Jason Howell (01:02:27):
The world needs that. And I'm not gonna learn how to draw the world

Ashley Esqueda (01:02:30):
Needs it immediately. And I, yeah, I'll never learn how to draw. I need AI to help me realize my creative visions.

Jason Howell (01:02:40):
Yes. Because, because you don't actually have to have the creative, like the, the creative follow through on, on what it actually looks like, all you gotta do is come up with a couple of words and let the computer draw it for you. I mean, who wouldn't love that

Ashley Esqueda (01:02:53):
Somebody, somebody said the other day, if you're really good at Googling, you'll be really good at Dolly because like, you know how to type in the right keywords. And that made so much sense to me. It was just such a good explanation of like, yes, that's

Jason Howell (01:03:07):
A great explanation.

Ashley Esqueda (01:03:08):
Great analogy. Thank you. Like that's exactly right. It is ex if you are really good at finding things on Google using keywords, you can be good at art on Dolly too. Like that's I think that's really a great way to explain it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>,

Jason Howell (01:03:24):
Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, it's a fun artistic parlor trick is what the AI is right now. Yeah. It's just like, Hey, I made a funny thing. It's more it's really for, Hey, look at this weird thing I thought up and then it made it, and now it's on TWiTtter or Instagram or TikTok, or be, I guess not be real, unless take a picture of another phone unless you're, unless you're sitting in front of it right now, and then

Ashley Esqueda (01:03:44):
It'll tell on you, it'll flag you for that.

Jason Howell (01:03:47):
It's like, Hey, what are you doing?

Ashley Esqueda (01:03:49):
Gonna like this,

Jason Howell (01:03:51):
Like this? Yeah. And every time I hear the AI generated music always is like, oh my God. <Laugh> yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always kind ways to go for sure. It's yeah, I think it's the, you know, the artwork, the drawings I think are, are, are a bit better, but it's, it's, it's always fun to see the monstrosity that it creates. It's the monstrosity that makes it fun. It's the, the, the, the, the merging together of two hor it's like, it is like artistic. Shaira it's just like, yeah. There's a certain chaos to it.

Ashley Esqueda (01:04:22):
Frankenstein factor. There's a Frankenstein factor happening, or I guess Frankenstein's monster. So Frankenstein monster.

Jason Howell (01:04:29):
Oh, you don't want, yeah. You don't want those Mary Shelley people after you.

Ashley Esqueda (01:04:32):
Nope. I don't. Mary Shelley stands are very serious people.

Jason Howell (01:04:37):
The Shelley nation will come down hard on you.

Ashley Esqueda (01:04:40):
Shelley stands are not messing around everybody. They don't mess

Jason Howell (01:04:44):
Around. No, <laugh>

Megan Morrone (01:04:46):
The uncanny valley. Part of it is still interesting. Cause it's like what you said, Jason, like, it's, it's easy to like to look at something and think like, oh, like, I, I am surprised that an AI made that or, you know, that, that wasn't made by a person. Yeah. The art, like I'm surprised the art itself, but then there's just something slightly off. And and it's disturbing. I had, so some, a former coworker has access and just tweeted, like tell me something to Dolly. And I said, this was when my internet wasn't working. And I thought it was because a squirrel had eaten through the cables and the ground somewhere. And so I was like, squirrel eating my internet. And it's like a squirrel, like eating like a, a laptop. <Laugh>

Jason Howell (01:05:30):
Just

Megan Morrone (01:05:31):
Like, and it's just like, okay, well, yeah, like internet equals laptop. And it's just like, it's was just disturbing enough. But yeah,

Jason Howell (01:05:40):
<Laugh>, it's gonna be great for horror movies. Like if you're making a low budget horror movie and you're like, oh, I need you know, a lamb eating a lion while like wearing, you know, a Dr. Pepper hat. Like, that's like, that's a piece of art they're gonna put in the background of a horror movie and the people are gonna walk in, like, what is this? That's, that's what Dolly's gonna be really great for. I mean, I, I think you're, you're touching on one thing that actually Dolly will be really good for is, is generating ideas for actual design or dev like designers to work from

Ashley Esqueda (01:06:16):
Like really concept art. 

Jason Howell (01:06:18):
Yeah, totally. It's

Ashley Esqueda (01:06:18):
Like phases of concept. Art could be really cool.

Jason Howell (01:06:21):
Yeah. Someone gives you that prompt. They're like, well, we're looking for is, you know, and then exactly what you said, Roberto. I can't, I can't recite it word for word, but what, what we're looking for is that, and as a designer, like I'm not a visual arts designer, so I don't know how the, how the mind works in that regard. But I had to imagine that certain concepts come to you or, or, you know, or you want to pursue, but you have no idea where to begin. And you know, if Dolly gives you three or nine different ideas, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There you go. Maybe that's the foundation. Oh. You know, I didn't think to put the pancake on her head like that. That's interesting, you know, or whatever.

Ashley Esqueda (01:06:57):
It could also be interesting if you're an artist to like run it through, like, so you have a kind of base thing. So let's say you have a, you know, possessed bear or what have you, let's, we'll stick with the horror movie stuff. You have possessed bear, but you're not really sure if you want it to be like gangrenous or if you want it to kind of be like less gory. And so you could run it through something like Dolly to sort of like give you different options without having to draw out, you know, do a draw over and then render it yourself. Right? Like it could be something used for kind of that where it's like, I just wanna see the different iterations of this that I have ideas for and get it spitted out very quickly and then decide what I wanna go forward with. And then, then you go and, you know, as an artist, you would, you would go ahead and do the actual concept, art yourself.

Jason Howell (01:07:43):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> as a former designer. What we typically do is you just draw a lot. You'd make, you have a lot, bunch of little squares on a piece of paper and you just start like doodling, a ton of little ideas of like what you think like the design should be or what the concept should be, or which art should be. And then from there you're like, oh, okay. So I like this bear. And I like it with bloody face. You know what, what if I, and sometimes you want reference art. So Dolly would be actually, might be pretty good for reference art because you're like, okay, I need a picture of a bear eating a cow. Now finding that photo out in the world is gonna be difficult. So you'll, you'll what you'll typically do is find a picture of a bear and find a picture of a cow and then maybe a picture of a bear eating like something else.

Jason Howell (01:08:26):
And then you sort of merge those together as you're drawing. If you could tell Dolly to like, Hey, show me a bear, eating a cow that might help you when you're coming, because you take those like 12, 15, 60 pieces of thumbnail art, and then you narrow it down to like the five or six good ideas. And now you want something that looks a little bit better, so you can sort of, you know, sketch it out. And if you need some reference of a buried in the cow in this instance, then you might be able to do that with Dolly, which will help, which is helpful. Yeah. Yeah. It's making me think using Dolly as like a, a way to God, what, what is the word? It's it's it's escaping me right now when you're, when you're making a movie and you gotta do all the different little images, the different show, story, boarding, story, story board.

Jason Howell (01:09:08):
Thank you. Story board. Using Dolly is like a story boarding tool would actually be, oh yeah. H it would be horrible for that. Actually it would, would be horrible for story. Cause you need control. Cause you need, you need control. You need the, you need control. Yeah. Yeah. I was just thinking if somebody did storyboard a fictional, you know, like a, a totally out off the cuff, like you could do a short story with this storyboard, something with Dolly and all the randomness that it gives you and then try and make a film out of what it gives you. You'll probably get some tech, some headlines at least. So there's an idea for you. That's gonna be, I dunno, what you come up with. That's gonna be expensive. Yeah. <Laugh> it's gonna be expensive is what it's gonna be. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> like, oh, now I gotta go buy this and do this effect.

Jason Howell (01:09:52):
Ah, this was a bad idea. Yeah, this is, this is horrible. This is horrible. One thing that's interesting about getting access to Dolly though, is that you get full usage rights. So commercialization, reprint, you could sell it merchandise rights. I just think it's interesting that you could use, you know, their platform to create something that you aren't actually creating the system is for you, but it becomes an original piece that, that sits on its own and that you can then sell. I, I just, I see many people going to this site and just making tons and tons of stuff, filling Etsy with all of this crazy merchandise and everything. I don't know. So you own the copyright to the, to the item. When I, once you create it, you own the copyright. Like if I created a piece of artwork, I immediately own the copyright to that artwork unless I'm stealing it from somebody.

Jason Howell (01:10:38):
So if I go to Dolly and I create something, which with my words, and they gives me a picture, I now own the copyright or they're giving me rights to use that image to usage rights. Yeah. Usage rights. But, but it, okay. So what I read usage rights, including commercialization. So God of those two different, but they can use it too, so they can use it. They use it too. It's not. So you don't have, have your yeah. So they own the copyright likely, but they give you usage rights. So they, yeah. If they see that you've taken something and you're making a mug and you're making $200,000 a year with your bear eating a cow mug, Dolly can be like, you know what?

Ashley Esqueda (01:11:16):
We wanna we'll have

Jason Howell (01:11:17):
A cow. Maybe we'll make some Tumblrs with a bear eating a cow. <Laugh> we're selling our mug too. Yeah. We'll sell that mug too. <Laugh> I'm sorry for putting, it'll be interesting to see if they

Ashley Esqueda (01:11:29):
It'll be interesting to see if they have some type of annual subscription model. Yeah. For people who want to just like own exclusive rights to their own like generated images. Mm. There's some like legal, there's some like interesting legal gray area there where it's like, yes, it's transformative. But also technically I would be the creator of it because I use the keywords to generate the images. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so I like, I'm very curious how all that sort of shakes out.

Jason Howell (01:11:58):
Right? Yeah. It, but I

Ashley Esqueda (01:12:00):
Wonder if it'll be something like creative cloud or you know, shutter stock or whatever, where it's like, you're, you're basically paying to license your own, your own AI generated to phrases or whatever. And it's like, okay, well, if you pay this fee, if you're a professional, here's the fee you can pay. You can either pay per image. Like they do on stock photo websites, you can say, oh, I wanna license this for, you know, a hundred dollars or whatever. And maybe they change the pricing based on like what's popular in SEO at the time. Like, what are people searching for? What's like really hot right now. That's a thing that costs more money. And then, you know, things that are less searched for costs, less money to to license out. So I, I'll be very curious to see how they end up trying to monetize Dolly too. And I'm sure that's coming. But it, I have a feeling maybe they will ask artists for like an annual subscription fee for unlimited licensing of, you know, however many images.

Jason Howell (01:12:57):
I mean, they've started, they've started monetizing it actually with this announcement. It's so it's a credit based system. So basically if you are a free user from the beginning, you get 50 credits for the first month free. And then every month thereafter you get 15 credits. So that's 15 text prompts that you get for free every month, right. That you could use you can purchase additional credits at $15 for 115 credits. So 15 bucks, you get a hundred

Ashley Esqueda (01:13:23):
Kind of similar to the stock photo system. Like very kind of similar to that. That's interesting. I wonder they'll, I wonder if they'll offer a professional option where it's just an annual subscription fee. Yeah.

Jason Howell (01:13:32):
At some point I wouldn't be surprised because I, I be, and, and this is, I think one, one of the things that this is gonna be used for a lot is, you know, people who, who are writing their own content for their site, you know, would normally go to if they needed an image, go to a stock photo thing and try and find the thing that closely closest matches what they're writing about, but that's not always possible. So you end up picking from what you have, at least with Dolly, you can say, this is exactly what I need. The, the challenge will be, how quickly can you get to that image that you're willing to accept. Right. Because, I mean, even though you have 15 tries, 15 credits, I, I mean on the system that I used, which I can't, what was it called?

Jason Howell (01:14:14):
The Dolly mini, whatever that was from like a month ago where all the faces looked like they were mm-hmm, <affirmative> like toxic Avenger. <Laugh> yeah, yeah. On, on that system, you know, you put in a prompt and you weren't always guaranteed that the result of that prompt was gonna be great. You know, you might have to do it two or three times to find the one that you're like, all right, that's, that's a winner right there. So, you know, people are gonna be burning through credits probably just to find the thing that they actually want to use in the end. But, but I think it'll be really useful for that. So time will tell we'll certainly find out let's see here. Should we talk about selling, I mean, speaking of subscriptions, BMW's heated seat subscriptions, which apparently, and you know, when I saw this headline, I was like, are you kidding me?

Jason Howell (01:15:04):
Apparently BMW's been doing this since 2020. So this is not the first example of a subscription model in vehicle sale, you know, features as it were Roberto, you're probably the, the best one on the panel to, to talk about this a little bit. What do you, what do you think about subscription model coming to the inside of a vehicle? What do you think about that? Well, I mean, we we've, people, auto makers have been talking about subscription models for a long time. Cause they're trying to figure out how to make more money from vehicles. Yeah. Cause right now like a truck in an SUV, those are just cash cows for the automotive industry. Like the gas powered ones, as we move to EVs that's the, the margins are much lower just because trucks and SUVs, that they don't have all the same regulatory issues.

Jason Howell (01:15:50):
They can charge more, they make more money. It's the, again, the Mar the margins are crazy. So they're trying to figure out like, well, how can we make money? Can we make money from subscriptions? Because most people have become accustomed to subscriptions. We have Netflix, we have Spotify and for a little, for a few years BMW offered CarPlay as a, which I mean, and the automotive press and owners just hammered them forever. And this is in the United States for this. And they finally just relented and said, fine, you're buying a BMW. You pay this much for CarPlay and you just get CarPlay in your vehicle, which everyone's like, yay, cuz you know, cars are expensive, but that doesn't stop. Auto makers from figuring out how to do it still here in the United States, but also in other markets where there, they might be a bit more open to a subscription service.

Jason Howell (01:16:41):
Like the, I believe the, the, the heated seats is in South Korea. It's not even here in the United States, but all the headlines were like, oh, BMW's United bank. Well, that's not here. And, and you know, but a lot of the us press, well, there you go see Jonathan Aland. He knows <laugh> mm-hmm, <affirmative>, mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, all the press here is, is like, oh, it's, it's a, it's a fun, you know, easy click for people to get angry at something because anger sells that's we've all learned that we've learned that through social media is that if you have something that is gonna make people angry and click, boom, that's how you're gonna get the that's how you're gonna get all the page views, which with ad sales, the way they are, I don't know how well that's, that's working out for us anymore.

Jason Howell (01:17:21):
<Laugh> but you know, you, you know Tesla is going to make FSD a subscription. So there are all these subscriptions and there's, I can see where you, if there's a, a feature that you don't use all the time, let's say like GM's super crews, which is a hands free driver's assistance system. It's not, it's not, it's not automated driving. It's not, you know, don't, that's not a thing you can buy, don't think that's, but it's a hands free system. You don't need that. Let's say 99% of your life. And then one day you and your family are gonna go on this long trip. You're gonna be on the interstate for hours and hours and hours. And you're like, you know, what, what if I just subscribe to this for one month? So for this trip, we have super cruises, hands free driver's assistance.

Jason Howell (01:18:10):
And so during that, you know, eight hour drive to, you know, your grandmother's house or whatever, or Wally world, and that, you know, eight hour drive back, you have this extra driver's assistance system for that. I can see it, but for things like, you know, features in the vehicle like heated seats or radio stations, or, you know, access to the in infotainment stuff, that's, that's, that's really nickel and D people who are buying cars and cars are already expensive, regardless of whether or not you're buying a gas car or you're buying a an EV I mean, the median prices over it's in the forties, 40, 45, 40 something thousand dollars. That's so much money. I can't afford a $40,000 car. I don't know. People are getting five year loans. And now there's all these defaults coming, you know, 23% of mm-hmm <affirmative> of vehicles that are financed in Washington, DC are, are in default.

Jason Howell (01:19:04):
It's yeah, it's, it's a crazy, crazy world. And the auto makers are trying to figure out how to continue to make money in this new EV world. But it's, it's, you know, they have to tread lightly because, you know, again, BMW for years got hammered for charging subscriptions for, for, for CarPlay, which is, which is, so it just, it was just ridiculous is what it was. There's kind of a, a, a disconnect for me too in the, and I don't know if it's semantics or what, but I, you know, I can buy a car. I can choose to pay for an option, right. When I buy a car. So I buy a, and that's kind of the model that like, I'm used to, I buy a car. Do you, do you want the upgrade to the blah, blah, blah. Yeah, sure. I'll get the upgrade or, no, I don't want that.

Jason Howell (01:19:47):
You know, and if I don't want, it's not in there, but this is kind of like, yeah, we put that in there. We're just not letting you have it until you pay us a little bit more. And I don't know, I don't know why the disconnects doesn't work for me there. Like, it's kind of the same thing, but it's kind of different, you know, <laugh>, it's like, it's already, what what's happening is this happens with with Teslas is Teslas are built with all the hardware for FSD or the FSD betas full self-driving, which isn't actually full self-driving, but all the hardware is already built into the vehicle. So if you don't buy FSD Tesla that reduces their margins on the sale of that vehicle. So they're always pushing you like, Hey, you wanna do this? You wanna do this, you wanna do this.

Jason Howell (01:20:28):
And so much of what is coming out in vehicles now is software based. So the software, the hardware's already built into the vehicles. It's, you know, if you can reduce the amount of trim levels or that you're building, that makes it easier to build cars. If you're building just two trim levels and they have one has all the hardware for, and all the software for this, and one has all the, all the hardware and all the software for this trim level, and you just push 'em through. And then there are features that you can either add when you add, when you buy it or add later on that's, you know, that's extra money for them, cuz they've already built it in. It's easier just to bake it in, especially when it comes to software into the vehicle, as opposed to like piecemeal it, oh, this person wants this.

Jason Howell (01:21:07):
This person wants that this person wants this. So that's where it's changing. And you know, vehicles are now evolving because of over the air updates. So you can buy a car now that in three months, six months, it, especially if it's an EV it might have better range because they figured out, you know, you know, with all the driving that people are doing with the vehicles, they're like, oh, you know, if we adjust this in the acceleration, or if we adjust this with the way that the it's charging and discharging, we can give people an extra five miles. And so that's great, but it also open again, it opens up for this idea. We're like, well, if you want this feature, we'll charge you a subscription, but you can also like go out and buy a car and be like, you know, I don't want this. And then later on change your mind, which you can't do with, you know, you couldn't do, that's true traditionally with cars. So it's, it's sort of give and take. And for, for every good thing, there's always gonna be something you're like, oh my God really

Ashley Esqueda (01:21:58):
<Laugh>. I mean, I've got three. I like in my, so in my Tesla lab, but right there, I've got three available. I've got acceleration boost. I can get enhanced autopilot, which I didn't have an option for before. That's a new one that they they used to have and then they didn't have it. And now that apparently they have it again and then full self driving. So it's sorry. It's my, my poor camera is very sad. There we go. But yeah. And then, and then you have the subscription stuff where it's like, you know, Hey, here's your $200 a month or whatever, if you wanna just subscribe. So that's yeah. And they're constantly like I'll get a little notification or whatever from my Tesla app. And it'll be like, Hey friend how are you feeling about you just, just take a look at these upgrades that we might have for you.

Ashley Esqueda (01:22:43):
Like just, just, just look, no, no pressure, no pressure. But also if you wanna drive your car a little bit faster, we could do that for you for $2,000 for the low, low price of two grand. And so, yeah, they, they really, like, I will say they, it's not annoying. I don't have like constant, it's not constant in-app advertising for, from my car manufacturer. Thank God I, that would drive me crazy. But yeah, but it is, but it is there every now and again, I get a little, little notification that's like, Hey, you should, you should check the upgrade section. There's some new stuff in there, like, or, or I don't know if you forgot, but you didn't buy full self-driving and you might wanna check that out now. Maybe it's maybe now you're interested in it. And so they just sort of like remind you that it exists every, every now and again.

Ashley Esqueda (01:23:28):
So that's yeah, it's, it is very interesting how cars especially EVs are just becoming so much more software based which I know drive my dad crazy because he has a he has an ionic and they did a software update and it changed like the entire UI, very similarly to how Tesla changes UI, like a year and a half ago, a couple years ago. And and he, he was like, oh, I have to relearn where everything is. It's drive me crazy. Like he's, and he's just mad. Like, he's furious about it. He's in his early sixties. He's just so mad about it. He's just like, oh, I had to re I had to look for everything. I didn't know where anything was and you know, it's just, yeah, that, that is frustrating. It's like, you know, you really have like all of your dials and everything else, you know, your, your, your screen dials, whatever.

Ashley Esqueda (01:24:10):
I don't have any dials on that car except for the sort two little wheels. But but yeah, and then it's, you know, you use your screen and and then all of a sudden everything's different. Some stuff that you use kind of one touch is now buried under two or three sub menus. There's like, I mean, it's a whole is a whole ordeal. And I know it actually like, is better. Like, I know that that UI is more efficient in a lot of ways, but it's just, I'm so used to the previous one that it, you kind of grate against it. You're sort of begrudging on get having to learn this new UI. So I'm sure they'll change it again. And they'll do a big revamp of it it's someday. But but yeah, it's like very annoying for a lot of people who are just used to traditional cars where you have just gauges and dials and like, that's it. And it's oh, okay. Well, and then you got your screen that has sort of your, your phone apps or whatever on it, your infotainment, but everything else is just right in front of you and it's always there and it's never gonna change. Yeah. So it's very it's very difficult for a lot of folks who are not used to that to like start getting used to that.

Jason Howell (01:25:07):
Yeah. It is just a big thing about muscle memory and how we've, you know, after you've driven a car for a long time, you know, where the volume control is, you know, where the climate control is, you know, where this is. And even with, if you have an infotainment screen, you know, where things are because you've been using it, like, you know, your dad got used to the way the ionic was set, laid out, and then they're like, oh yeah. Know what? <Laugh>, we're just gonna change it. And again, maybe they change it for the better, but maybe they change it for the worse. I mean, again, it's, you know, building a UI for a vehicle that's flying down the road at 70 miles an hour is difficult. But you know, when you change, that must mean now it's like getting in into a rental car. You're like, where is everything? And, you know, yeah. That's that, and that's literally my life all my, every week I get a new car and every week I'm like, oh, okay.

Jason Howell (01:25:51):
How do I turn on the wipers? Like I'm flashing lights at people or <laugh>, oh yeah. I'm a, I'm a professional automotive journalist. And I'm just flashing high beams at people all the time, trying to figure out how to turn on the, the, the, the, the windshield wipers on, because sometimes people are like, oh, it's right here, but you don't pull it to do this. You do, you know, you do this, or it's way over here in the infotainment system, which is just don't even get me started in windshield wipers in infotainment. But yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, again, there's, there's, there's a, there's a good and the bad of the whole, like, you know, the, the tech, the, the, the rise of tech end vehicles and for the most part, it's good, but there are, there are some things that are just, just painfully frustrating.

Jason Howell (01:26:29):
Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, there's something that concerns me though, about tech in, in vehicles. And I don't know if this is just outdated thinking or what, but I have a neighbor who has a Tesla model X got it very early on, and we've had the opportunity to, you know, drive it, borrow it long story, but we trade trailers for Teslas. Sometimes when they need to, you know, pull their trailer, they borrow our Sequoia and we get their Tesla. So it's kind of an kind of a sweet deal. Anyways, my point is, anytime I'm in his vehicle, which at this point, if I had to guess probably like six years old, let's say somewhere around there, the, the in in dash system is like crazy laggy. Like every time you do anything, things are slow. It just makes me think, like, as we kind of pursue further, this, this world filled with, you know, vehicles who are half computer, half vehicle and more and more of that technology is, is infused inside of the vehicle. Will we run into what we run into now with our desktop computers and our laptops, which is that, you know, six to eight years, some somewhere down the line, this, this thing that was once very, very capable is can now Kia sure can do it, but it's just a lot slower. And like, same thing. What is it gonna be in 20 years?

Ashley Esqueda (01:27:47):
See, I like, I disagree with this. This is the same thing as having like a, you know, a transmission replaced. You're just gonna go and get your computer chip upgraded, just

Jason Howell (01:27:56):
Swap, swap out

Ashley Esqueda (01:27:57):
The chip. That's see it'll cost, it'll cost you a, a arm and a leg, but you'll just be able to swap. Chip's get it upgraded.

Jason Howell (01:28:03):
That's actually quite, quite difficult because those they're, they're so integrated with the entire they'll. So it's, but they'll figure out how to do, do it. It's less likely they're gonna do that. And it's, it's, I mean, it's most part I'll by new car. Those vehicles are, you know, they're more and more, the auto makers are using you know, quicker and quicker GPS from, in mostly it's Invidia, to be honest, I mean, videos built a, a whole new, a whole new headquarters just from all the money they're making from auto makers. And I think for the, you know, auto makers are, are they realize that these infotainment systems need to be quick day one and you know, 15 years later. So at some point you vehicle will still get upgrades. But at that point they're just fixes. You're not getting new. Yeah. You're not getting new features. You're not getting yeah, like an old iPhone.

Ashley Esqueda (01:28:51):
So I'll say you're not compatible with the newest software upgrade. Like you're gonna stay at this version or whatever. Yeah. I do think,

Jason Howell (01:28:58):
Which is way more than what a traditional car

Ashley Esqueda (01:29:01):
It does feel like. At some point we may get to a, a place where we could upgrade the way we do a computer, but I don't think that that is close by like, under, by any means. But I do think that that would be like, because that's just more money, right. That, that a car company could get out of you, if you were not planning on buying a new car, every, you know, eight to 10 years,

Jason Howell (01:29:24):
They'll just say,

Ashley Esqueda (01:29:24):
Wasn't that what you already do with Tesla? Yeah. That's like, that's true.

Jason Howell (01:29:28):
Yeah. It's, you know, it, it, especially the early days, the last like 10 years, you know, you've had what people want versus what the auto makers could deliver. And Tesla had the same problem when it comes to the speed of their, their infotainment system. You have lagging, you have, yeah. You have screens that just turn off, you have screens that are half dead. You know, automakers would put in features or they would have code that just wasn't, you know, optimized for the for the hardware. So you have, you know, you have screens that, you know, you end up with this latency issue and it's software is really difficult. Just ask Volkswagen. They, they released the ID three and the ID four, and both of those, the, the hardware was fine. The software just wasn't up, wasn't ready. And they released these vehicles and people had these cars for a year before Volkswagen updated them.

Jason Howell (01:30:15):
So that the entertainment system, wasn't just a lagging mess. Like that was really the number one, like issue with that vehicle was that the software wasn't ready for the infotainment system. So you're telling people like, Hey, you can buy this car. Sure. But when you do this, expect the screen to wait and then move, expect that to happen because the software's not ready yet. And now, you know, they've upgraded it. But I mean, how embarrassing is that for one of the world's largest automakers in the, in the world, they make, they, they Lamborghini Audi <laugh> sciat. I mean, they own a ton of of, of companies and they that's how hard software is, is that this company couldn't get their first real big, like, you know their real big current generation EV onto the road with infotainment that wasn't laggy it's. Yeah. It's it's mm-hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm

Ashley Esqueda (01:31:07):
<Affirmative> yeah. Megan, what were you saying? Like you were asking about Tesla. Yeah.

Megan Morrone (01:31:10):
Like, I mean, isn't that similar to how you upgrade a computer? Like you just upgrade it, like, you know, pressing the button and you upgrade. Is that what you were talking about?

Ashley Esqueda (01:31:18):
Oh, I mean, like switching out the actual chip, like, so getting hardware, you know, which is a, yeah. The hardware. I know that there were some hardware updates, like for some of the older, was it the model esses, Roberto, where it was like the older

Jason Howell (01:31:31):
Model S was

Ashley Esqueda (01:31:32):
Who had paid for full self driving, but had not, they did not have the capacity <laugh>. So then there was, that was like, they will. Okay, cool. But we also you're really old Teslas. Like, don't actually, they can't actually run this, so we need to upgrade some of your stuff. It's there was like a whole about like, maybe I'm misremembering, some of the specifics here,

Jason Howell (01:31:52):
There was a, there was a whole upgrade you could do in order to yeah, it was

Ashley Esqueda (01:31:54):
A hard, it was

Jason Howell (01:31:55):
A part package. It was a hardware thing. It was like $1,500 or $1,800 or $2,400.

Ashley Esqueda (01:32:01):
So mad because they were like, I already paid $10,000 for full self driving. And now you're gonna ask me for another 1500 bucks.

Jason Howell (01:32:08):
Yeah. It's it's and that's where it gets really weird because you're selling thing. And, and Tesla does this a lot where they're selling future, they're selling something for the future, as opposed to something that you're buying now. So you, when you buy FSD and then the price just keeps going up, which is, you know, they just need money is, is essentially what they need. That's why the price continues to go up. Cuz most things, when, as technology gets better, the price goes down. But for FSD it's like the other direction. You're just like, all right, fine. Whatever. But yeah, you're paying for a future product. You're not paying for something. That's, that's really, that's really at usable as a, what it's supposed to do right now. You're paying for yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (01:32:47):
It's like, you're paying to be a beta tester. You're paying to be a beta tester. Yeah. And that's like, look, if you wanna do that, that's fine. I didn't I just would rent. I

Jason Howell (01:32:54):
Wanted a car,

Ashley Esqueda (01:32:55):
I just wanted a car. And I like, I liked my model three a lot and I just didn't wanna fold my very giant toddler in half to put 'em in the back seat. So I decided to get a model. Y but but yeah, it's just, I just, we don't, we don't even have the infrastructure to really support full self-driving. Like in California, it it's, our roads are bonkers. Like I don't has anybody, like we have bottles everywhere. I was just, I don't know. I don't, I I'm not, I feel like our state, it's not necessarily even the cars. It's just, there are so many variables on side roads that I'm just like, nah, nah, I'm good. I think I'll just,

Jason Howell (01:33:30):
Well, that's, that's the thing is it is cars

Ashley Esqueda (01:33:32):
Itself. It's fine. Like, you know, it is the

Jason Howell (01:33:34):
Cars, the cars have to understand all these edge cases and everyone thought they could do it five years ago and then they got 90% there. And then they realized, oh no, this is really hard. Oh this is really, really, really hard. It's

Ashley Esqueda (01:33:46):
Like almost infinite edge cases. Oh, it's just, it's so difficult. It's a really hard problem to solve. And that's why we consistently have this like, oh, we're five years away from full self-driving. We're 10 years away from a like true AI passing the turning test. It's just like, you get to that point. And then you realize there's so much more that you didn't realize or know before that now you have to account for and factor in for, and then, and then program for, and so it just keeps getting pushed out little by little. I mean, we've been, I, I feel like humans have been saying, oh, we're gonna have robots that are se you know, sent in AI since like the fifties. They're like, oh, in 20 years we'll have robots that service it's and like all this stuff. Yeah. It's always 20 years away. And so, you know, maybe someday we'll close that gap, but for right now it feels like it's still kind of in a similar, similar space. Yeah.

Jason Howell (01:34:32):
It's like the broad strokes are, are a little bit or a lot easier than the fine details. Once you get to the fine detail point, there's just a myriad of problems in there to solve. And it just,

Ashley Esqueda (01:34:43):
It's just hard. Its a hard problem. It's like they say about space. Yeah,

Jason Howell (01:34:46):
Yeah, yeah. It's like we we've, we've just barely got them to make bears that can eat cows. Like we let's let's AI is good for making bears that eat cows, serving you ads and that's really about it. <Laugh> stealing your helmet, share information, steal. Remember we were right, right. Remember we were all supposed to lose our jobs as writers because AI was going to write all of our articles and then they did it and they're like, oh yeah, this is hilarious. But it's completely not usable. <Laugh> not yet at yeah. That's what they keep saying. Everything's not yet. And at some point you're like, you know what? It's just easier just to have a human ride. It <laugh>. Yep. It's it's easier than who me drive a car. It's just easier to let a human draw a picture. It's just yeah. They all appreciate having jobs.

Jason Howell (01:35:31):
So that's good too. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. <Laugh> all right. Let's take a break. This is so much fun. Love doing this show with the three of you Ashley Skea Roberto Baldwin, Megan Moroni. I just, I completely lucked out with having you three on the show today. So thank you. This episode is brought to you by stamps.com. When you are running a small business, you already know every second counts, right? You can't afford to waste a single moment. Business just moves too fast. So why are you still taking time outta your day to go to the post office when you could be using stamps.com instead, literally it's gonna save you a trip. It's gonna save you many trips. Stamps.Com makes mailing and shipping quick, easy, and cost effective. And not only that, we, you know, we put our money where our mouth is.

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Megan Morrone (01:39:13):
I just a story. I <laugh>, I just put a story in there that one of my reporters, a protocol wrote just a little push Lizzy Lawrence wrote about yes, a email program called gated. I don't know if you've heard of it, but what, how it works is if someone wants to email you, they have to donate to charity in order to get into your inbox. So the idea is to shift the onus, cuz like at this point, spammers can spam us. They can send us email you know, and we have to go through and delete it. You know, sometimes our, our spam filter works, you know, sometimes it doesn't, but basically like the onus is on us, not on the spammer. So like this is a new program that would be like, you know, if you really want access to me, you have to pay.

Megan Morrone (01:40:00):
And she interviewed a couple experts on like how they felt about that. Like just the idea that, you know, you would like it, it seems a little bit elitist. And kind of a little bit like calendar Calendarly, like the idea around Calendly, there was like a little bit of an uproar because it's like, oh, well yeah, if you wanna access to me, you have to like, you know, do this so didn't have money. But so yeah, I thought it was an interesting thing to discuss, cuz I, I am not as annoyed by Sam as I used to be. It's just sort of a like delete, delete, delete. Like I know what I'm gonna keep and what I'm not. And I don't know that I would use this. But curious if either, if any of you would,

Jason Howell (01:40:38):
Can you whitelist people? Like if I, while whitelist like my mom, so my mom doesn't have to give a quarter every time to she works <laugh>

Megan Morrone (01:40:45):
You can actually whitelist anyone. Like yeah. <Laugh> your mom has to pay extra.

Jason Howell (01:40:50):
Right? Sorry. Can

Megan Morrone (01:40:51):
You, can you actually force someone

Ashley Esqueda (01:40:52):
To pay extra? That's my que that's my next question. I ask my follow up question also. Where is the gated version of gated where people have to just directly pay me? Like it, gush goes right into my cell and it's a quarter. Every time someone wants email me, I just get a quarter like just please email me and pay for the privilege of being in my inbox. That's what I, that I'll deal with it. Whatever spams, whatever. Fine. Just pay it directly to just cut me a check. That's the charity I need.

Jason Howell (01:41:21):
<Laugh> well, you're gonna to read

Megan Morrone (01:41:24):
You is like

Jason Howell (01:41:25):
The AE AE foundation. They're like, what's this for? It's just a, it's just a, it'll go to a good cause.

Ashley Esqueda (01:41:31):
Very small goes to a good cause. Some very thin dogs that are very needy that you have a lot of food needs. Just my Italian grey. They're thin by they're thin by default. So that's how they are. They were born that way. But it's your,

Megan Morrone (01:41:46):
It's your time? Like your time much my time. Like it should be like, that's what? Yeah. She talked to Extradis and he was like, invest in email programs like this before and said like, you should not feel bad about like asking people to pay for your time. It's like being, you know, asking to be paid, to write for free or do anything for free. Yeah, there

Ashley Esqueda (01:42:04):
Should be me a quarter to read your email. That's what I, there you go. 10 cents, whatever, whatever it is, just do that. Like that's what I'm, I'm I'm all about that system. Just deposit it right into my bank account. That seems good.

Jason Howell (01:42:17):
If you wanted to mail me back in the nineties or the eighties, you had to put a, like a dime, you had to buy a stamp. So mm-hmm

Ashley Esqueda (01:42:24):
<Affirmative>

Jason Howell (01:42:24):
Yeah. This is like

Ashley Esqueda (01:42:26):
A stamp for email. Yeah. It's it's basically a stamp for email, but a co put a, but capitalism gets it, not the government <laugh>

Jason Howell (01:42:32):
Right, right. Well, the tagline for this service is noise. Canceling headphones for email. I like that. Cuz I could, I could do a little noise canceling on, on my email as well. Yeah. I, I mean, same with you, Megan, when it comes to spam in my inbox, I guess we've been living with spam for however many years at this point that, you know, 20 plus years at this point I just like, I don't even really think about it. I just kind of like batch delete and, and move on. It's I don't know. I, I realize I probably shouldn't have to do that, but I mean, it's not that difficult either. So yeah, I don't, I don't know that that I would use this. I'd be curious to see what kind of impact it would have on, on people who I actually want to hear from, but I guess you can set that all up. So it probably wouldn't impact them very much. I'd like it more for phone calls and texts because that's, what's really annoying. Cause I'm like, oh a text and I'll go and I'll look at that. Cause I'm assuming it's from someone I know. And it's instead like, oh Viagra. Oh, well, oh wow. From Germany. Let's see where they <laugh>. That must be European. Viagra.

Ashley Esqueda (01:43:39):
I want $10 every time someone robo calls me about my car's extended warranty. That's

Jason Howell (01:43:45):
Just, oh man,

Ashley Esqueda (01:43:46):
Fast track me to $10 per phone call. Thank you. That's what I need. We should all get it. We all deserve it for putting up with these cars for so long. We have, we have earned, we have earned that money for answering these ridiculous calls about our car's extended warranty.

Jason Howell (01:44:03):
Well touching on what you just mentioned, that's

Ashley Esqueda (01:44:06):
Super interesting, Megan. That's like really interesting. I've never heard of that before.

Jason Howell (01:44:09):
Yeah. Ashley, just, just so you know that is actually the number one complaint by consumers. And there is an, there is action in the FCC. Pay us to somehow pay us, stop these robocalls for somehow for, with these warranties. Yeah. The warranty scam as, as they write

Ashley Esqueda (01:44:26):
Infuriating driver,

Jason Howell (01:44:28):
But it's a scam.

Ashley Esqueda (01:44:29):
How many people, how many people? Yeah. See I was yeah. Roberta. Oh no, Roberto. I like how many people are they actually sweeping up in this drag net? Cuz that's my question. Cause I'm like hoops hoops among us is out there going, you know what? I need an except you know, you're so right. I had not thought about my car's extended warranty and it is coming to Ann net. Like who, who is that? Someone not even my grandpa who is in his eighties is like, oh my car's extended warranty. Of course like, he's like, no, this is clearly ridiculous. Like who, how many people could possibly be falling for this every year? I don't know. How is it so lucrative? Why is it so prevalent?

Jason Howell (01:45:11):
So the numbers game, right? Like if, if you get that number of tries high enough, you're gonna find that tiny little percentage of people that will fall for it. So they not know it's a thing who just haven't answered the phone in two years and then one day they answer the phone. They're like, hello. Oh my God. Or they have, yeah, they have been. And now they're like, you know, you've convinced me, it's taken a while, but I've decided you're right. Finally, this is the time

Ashley Esqueda (01:45:38):
Warranty finally expired. It's about to expire finally. Right? I will. Yeah. It's I like it's so bizarre. I just, yeah, I don't. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around that one. I don't know.

Jason Howell (01:45:48):
Yeah. Yeah. That is interesting though. What about Netflix? Do how, how is Netflix doing? What's the, what's the pulse on Netflix? This was the second quarter consecutive quarter of losses. Not doing good. They lost 970,000 paid subscribers for the quarter. They expected to lose 2 million. So, you know, they didn't lose as much as they thought they were going to, but still not good at all. Are, is anyone here worried about Netflix or is this just kind of like had to imagine it was gonna happen? Eventually Netflix is gonna weather this storm, which y'all think how many people would, would cancel like a TV station if they could in their regular cable. Like if they were just like, oh, if I never have to see, I don't know ESPN, I don't care about like the golf, like personally I don't yeah. The golf channel.

Jason Howell (01:46:39):
I don't personally, I don't care about, I don't care about sports. So any sports channel, if they could like get rid of it when I had cable, I would've been happy, but you can't. Yeah. And that's the that's, that's the, I mean, that's the, the great thing for us as consumers with over the, with, with streaming services is that, you know what, I'm, I've watched everything I want on paramount plus unsubscribe, you can't do that on TV cuz everything's bundled and there's carriage fees mm-hmm and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, I think, you know, because of that, people like, okay, I watched all the things I wanna watch on Netflix. I'm gonna unsubscribe until something cool comes back. And, and I know people who do that. I mean, I've done that with, with Showtime. I've done it with epic. I've done it. Yeah. I just like, oh, okay, I'm done with this show. I'm done with, I, I watched the show I wanted to watch and now I'm gonna unsubscribe and I don't come back later. I think that's that? I think that's just the new reality. I mean, it's tough for Netflix cause of the, you know, they're the big people on the big dog, big, I don't know, whatever you call them on the block. So their, their changes is gonna be way larger than anyone else.

Ashley Esqueda (01:47:40):
I think they, so I think Netflix really believed for a long time in the binge model and that it would keep if they just churn out as much content as possible, they're spending billions of dollars on content every year. And it it's like if they just kept churn out content, then people would stay on Netflix to watch something, right. Like there would always be something for them to binge watch. But now we have such a, a, an embarrassment of riches in terms of streaming services and high quality programming across all of them. Pretty much like I think I could tell you the name of a prestige show on just about any of the top. Yes. One streaming services. I think you know, Netflix is realizing they are unable to capture the zeitgeist the way that they used to when they were the, you know, when, when, as you were saying, they were like the big dog on the street and they're not able to capture the zeitgeist anymore because, so here's a great example, stranger things literally came and went in my social, feeds it, it just came and went, people binge watched it for about two weeks and then it was gone and then it came back and people talked about it for another like few days, because it was only two really big episodes.

Ashley Esqueda (01:49:02):
And that was it. And I still see like some Eddie Munson memes and like some other, you know, running up that hill memes and stuff like that, like kind of offshoot memes from it. But really it is not, it's not a water cooler moment anymore. And, and you can't make that anymore with a binge model because people are either spoiled so early that they don't bother. They'll say, ah, just watch it on my own time. Now that I've been spoiled or they watch it immediately talk about it immediately. And then they're on to the next. And so this has kind of created a problem with Netflix because like you were saying, Roberto, you can't just like you binge something and you say, okay, I'm good. I don't need this right now. I'll wait until stranger things. Like the thing that I care about comes back squid game.

Ashley Esqueda (01:49:46):
Like I'll just get rid of it for now. And companies like Disney are, you know, being very methodical about capturing the zeitgeist, making water cooler moments. So they're releasing, if you look at their release schedule, it's literally like star wars, Marvel show star wars, Marvel show. It's just like one after the other, after the other, but they're all just week by week by week so that people can have time to catch the episode digest, talk about it. Then you've got a fresh episode to talk about and they've done a much better job of capturing that, feeling that zeitgeist of having water cooler moments to discuss every single week. And I think HBO max did this really well with shows like game of Thrones and you know, AMC with breaking bad and, and better call Saul. They're still having these moments where it's like the gated release schedule works for a reason. It keeps people talking about your show mm-hmm <affirmative> and in, in a world where there is so much white noise, Netflix is learning that it can't just rest on its laurels and say, oh, well, we're just gonna put out so much content that you're, you're just gonna be a subscriber because this is a great default service to have like a lot of people are realizing that's just not the case.

Jason Howell (01:51:01):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. I mean, I watch the boys. I like that show bad, horrible people who are superheroes, but it was released every week and I'm like, no, that's fine. I'm fine with that. And if I missed it one week, it's, it's not like the olden days where like, we didn't have ti and they're like, well, I guess I don't know what happens, but you can like, you, you know, we watch it, me and my wife will sit and watch it on Friday or Saturday or Sunday. And we're like, oh, okay, cool. Then we'll go on we'll binge watch, whatever random thing has already been out for six months. And then, oh, Hey, then do this new episode of the boys. That's something it's it is it's it's it's appointment television, which sort of went, it went away with Netflix and now everyone else is doing it, but Netflix and they think they really need to figure out how to, how to do that.

Jason Howell (01:51:40):
Even if they dropped like three episodes, like the first of the first three drop it, then just sort of like, you know, keep us around. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of their identity is, is the binge model, right model. They really leaned into the binge model as part, as a huge part of their identity. And I think what's, what's kind of interesting right now, like hearing, hearing you, both of you talk about kind of weekly, you know, release schedules on, on shows. Is that no one at least. And I totally agree, but the two of you talking about it, no, one's disappointed when it's a weekly release. I like, I'm fine. If I don't have to binge it's it's fine. Like of course there's like, there's the, there's the desire within me that if I have a full season, I will binge if it's there, but if it's not there and I have to come back next week, I'm not disappointed.

Jason Howell (01:52:29):
I actually really end up enjoying those shows a little bit more kind of, because of exactly what you're talking about. So if that was, Netflix's kind of you know, model that it, that it really painted its business around. It's kind of something that I think maybe people are, are, you know, realizing, oh, well, you know, it's nice to have that, but it's not a necessary, it's not a have to have. And there's something appealing about that staggered release too. It, I don't know. I end up, yeah. I just end up appreciating the show more because you have the time to digest it. You have the time to talk about it and share and all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (01:53:03):
That's fun.

Megan Morrone (01:53:04):
I think also the last about it, two also the last two years are everyone was home all the time. Yeah. So it's like, there's all these comp and Netflix is just one of many like pandemic darling companies that really like, all we did was watch Netflix. All we wanted to do was binge. Like, we didn't do anything for the last two years and now we're not anymore. Now we're out and in the world. And so like binging just, doesn't like, you know, doesn't compare to actually being able to like go to a restaurant and go to a bar, go on vacation, like go outside, be with a group of people. Like all those things that we, you know, stop doing for two years. We're doing now again.

Jason Howell (01:53:43):
Yeah. Yeah. I it's, it's interesting because I remember when, when the binge started with Netflix, like that was like, I'm like, this is how we're gonna do it forever. And that was all about, I'm like, oh, you have, have to wait every week. I wish I could binge things. Yeah. But as time broke goes on and I think this like people just in general, I be like, you know what? There's so much, I can't, I just can't absorb everything so quickly. Just let me give me a week. Just, you know, some shows are like, okay, fine. I'll binge watch it. But for the most part, I'm like, just let me breathe. Let me breathe. And you know, when you think about like old shows that, you know, the appointment television you know, the, the, the TWiTn peaks or Seinfeld or all these things where you had a nice week to sort of breathe on these, these television shows and sort of like get in, okay. What, what, what did this mean? What did this mean? Whereas suppose where, if it's just all at once, everyone's, it's staggered, it's all over the place. It's hard to sort of talk about it because you don't wanna ruin it for somebody else because yeah. It's, I think, I think as, as society, we were like, you know what? Just give, give us a minute, just a minute. All we need a minute. Yeah. And

Ashley Esqueda (01:54:48):
It worked because there wasn't the, the level of content we have for streaming just wasn't there in the early days of like Netflix and so, or streaming on Netflix. And now it's, everybody's streaming you, you can't, you know, you, you would watch Disney stuff on the Disney channel or you'd watch it on ABC or you, you know, and now it's like, this is all, they're all on a level playing field. And so this idea of having, you know, a binge model, it's really hard because like you said, when you wanna talk about it with people, you wanna capture that moment, that water cooler moment. It's it's, you don't know what episode someone else is on. You don't wanna spoil it for them. Maybe you're farther ahead than all of your other friends. Maybe you're the, the farthest behind. It's just, and it depends on any given week, right?

Ashley Esqueda (01:55:38):
Like maybe you just had a really busy week and then all of a sudden, oh, here's stranger things. Last two episodes of it are the fourth season. Okay. Here's, you know, season four, part two, and you can't get to it that weekend. And it's just like, okay, well I guess all my friends are done talking about it. So I will just watch it whenever I watch it. Like I like, you know, there's always that moment where it just, that model doesn't quite work anymore because there is so much out there. It just doesn't work. And I'm somebody, I remember someone in the industry was excoriated in comments in, I, people were just dunking on this, this kind of media consultants or media analyst who said, I predict Netflix will have ads on it at some point, like, and people, this was probably eight.

Ashley Esqueda (01:56:26):
This is probably eight years ago. And people are just like, oh, that is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard of. This is the new model it's gonna be, you know, no ads, this, that, and the other thing. And now that person looks like noro Adamas. So I, yeah. You know, they, they're certainly feeling pretty SMU about themselves right now because Netflix is like, oh, I think we might have to add ads, right? Travel, like kind of a base, same thing as Hulu, where you have like ads, no ads, right. But it's like, Netflix is gonna have to pivot. They have to, they have to change in some capacity either to continue to keep up that, that revenue stream and continue to make as much content as they do, which they, they really do. I think if I'm not mistaken, they are the number one spender when it comes to original content of all the streamers and that like that is a big deal. The fact that they spend the most and I, if it, if it isn't today, it was for a long time that they were the number one spender in terms of original content. And so for them to keep up that amount of spending to make as much as they do to license, as much as they do it will be very interesting to see how the ads versus subscribers stuff shakes out for them.

Jason Howell (01:57:37):
Cause we have so many things to pay for. There's so many streaming services and I know that they've already called they, they shut down. Like I believe they shut down the Netflix animation, which a lot of my friends are in animation and so much, you know, they have friends who lost their, you know, they lost their jobs because Netflix is like, you know what, let's not, not make all of our own animation or at least let's cut back on it. And so you're just like, oh, oh, oh, oh. So it's not just a gravy train that we thought it was gonna be forever and ever it's it's they gotta figure out how to, how to, to, to adjust their, just their, their business for a sort of changing world.

Megan Morrone (01:58:11):
Yeah. They did. They laid off all of the people who were working on like all the shows. They had this like huge diversity push, like real like black creators and LGBTQ plus creators. And they like just laid all of them off too. Like, it was just like, oh, all the editorial people. Yeah. People bought, bought houses. Yeah. That like left their jobs. And so yeah.

Jason Howell (01:58:35):
Hmm. Entertainment was, and these

Ashley Esqueda (01:58:38):
Like creatives that they had, they had literally like, I mean, they had gone outta their way to, to get a lot of these really high profile people to come right. For like their editorial arm and all this stuff. And then it was like six months, like the turnaround was so fast and they were just like, oh, sorry, you like left your whole entire life. Like, we're gonna shut this down now. So it's just, yeah, it's really volatile. Like the space is, I think Netflix is it definitely is struggling under its own weight right now. And I think it has to figure something out quickly.

Jason Howell (01:59:10):
Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah. I do appreciate the flexibility though, of, of the streaming services like you were talking about earlier. And the example that I always come around to is the Olympics, right? Like I don't, I don't have an ongoing subscription to any sort of live TV, anything but YouTube TV, you know, I will drop into that for the Olympics for just that month. The BA the fact that I could do that. Whereas however many years ago, when we actually had like direct TV for years, I mean, there was no such thing as dropping in and out. It was so complicated. So that's, this is what you got it for consumers now

Megan Morrone (01:59:44):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and YouTube and Hulu, both YouTube and Hulu, both like made it okay to pay for a subscription and also have ads like that. Like that was unheard of. That's true for a really long time. Like Netflix was like, we no ads subscription. And, you know, unless you're part of a big, giant other company like HBO or Disney, you know, it's like, why not do both?

Jason Howell (02:00:06):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> well, we will ly watch Roku, the Roku channel, cuz I have like weird eighties movies. My wife will put on and I'll have ads. And they're like, man, whatever ads,

Ashley Esqueda (02:00:14):
<Laugh>, I'm a big Pluto TV person for like background TV. You can put on, you know, the, the Kung Fu channel or you can put on drag race. There's a whole channel dedicated to RuPaul's drag race that just plays ran. It's a, just a shuffle on every, you know, every season that has existed since like I think season 12 and back, and it's great. It's great. You just throw it on and you it's in the background and you can have, you know, whatever you want, whatever your tickles, your fancy and it's free Pluto, TV's all free and everything. Nice. Pretty cool. But

Jason Howell (02:00:42):
It is, it is the same three ads over and over again though. <Laugh> yeah, of course. It's not like, it's not like every station break is like three different ads. No, it's three same three ads over and over and over. This is

Ashley Esqueda (02:00:55):
Where this is where privacy laws need to like do me wrong a little bit, do me a little dirty and be like, I know what you're interested in. And so here's some ads about it cuz like, man, I just really wanna see like a toy cool toy commercial. And there's just not like, I don't see that anymore. It's just all like, you know, Hey, are you interested in NFTs? And it's just like, eh, like I don't

Jason Howell (02:01:14):
Want this. It's like

Ashley Esqueda (02:01:15):
No. Or like, Hey try try some new medication. Like it's always just the same prescription ad like four times, like throughout this, you know, whatever the show is like the marvelous Mrs. Mazel. It's just like, Hey, here's this new prescription. You should try if you have heartburn. And it's just like, Ugh, this is so boring. Why can't the ads be good? <Laugh>

Jason Howell (02:01:36):
Yeah, we, well, you know, they, they need to have, have like a classic ads channel that just gets inserted in there. So at least, you know, keeps things interesting. And you could watch from new ad new ad

Ashley Esqueda (02:01:49):
Classic,

Jason Howell (02:01:50):
A transformers ad classic. Yeah. New ad, new ad classic ads,

Ashley Esqueda (02:01:53):
Just classic. I'd actually been like the fifties to the nineties. Just that would be really fun.

Jason Howell (02:01:59):
<Laugh> there you go. And you have

Ashley Esqueda (02:02:02):
My attention. Just put it in like a sandwich

Jason Howell (02:02:04):
There,

Ashley Esqueda (02:02:05):
Like radio DJs, right. Where it's like, you have the, you know, you got the two, two things that are new and fresh things you wanna sell and you have like that classic. You have the classic ad and you're like, oh, Hey, I remember this. And you're watching. So you're actually paying attention.

Jason Howell (02:02:15):
Yeah. Yes. Yes. Well, speaking of ads, <laugh>, let's take a break. And I don't have a classic ad to play for you right now. I do have, well, I guess it's classic if you've been listening to this weekend tech for a number of years, because this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by express VPN. They've been with us for a while. So let's consider 'em a classic profiling surveillance data harvesting. There are a lot of things not to like about tech giants, right? And we talk about these things on the network all the time, but what can you actually do about it when you rely on so many of their products? We don't all have $44 billion to go buying up TWiTtter, but the good news is you don't need to be a billionaire to take a stand. That's why I use express VPN.

Jason Howell (02:03:02):
I use it on all my devices for less than seven bucks a month. You can join me and actually, you know, resist fight back against big tech by using express VPN, not to mention, just fight back at protecting your data all around, not just from big tech, you wanna have good control over your data. That's, that's really why I use express VPN. And especially if I go traveling anywhere, you better believe I've got express VPN running on my smartphone. You know, if I'm in that, you know, the often used, you know, example is in that coffee shop, but that you you've got free wifi all over the map at this point, not just coffee shops. And if you're using that free wifi, probably a pretty good idea to activate express VPN. That's certainly what I do. How do you think big tech companies make all their money?

Jason Howell (02:03:50):
They do it by tracking your searches, your video history and everything you click on. And then they're selling your personal data as a result. Well express VPN helps you anonymize much of your online presence by hiding your IP address. It's a, which as you know is a unique identifier that really identifies your specific device. And you know, that allows big tech to match your activity back to you. You know what that best part is, how easy it is to use express VPN. The app is just super easy. I just tap one button on my phone or my computer to turn it on. And that's all it takes to keep people out the business. And I, and actually, I should also mention on Android, especially, you don't need to use the app. Android has a little quick settings area that when you have the app installed and have it all set up, I just go into my quick settings and I tap on connect to VPN.

Jason Howell (02:04:41):
There's a, there's one there for express VPN and boo, it's going, I didn't even need to launch the app. It's that easy if you don't like big tech tracking you and selling your personal data for profit, it's time to fight back, visit express vpn.com/TWiTt. Do that right now. And you will get three months of express VPN for free that's right for free that's express, vpn.com/TWiTt. Check it out. Awesome. VPN doesn't slow anything down either. That's like a common complaint about VPN is like when I use VPN, everything slows to a crawl, you don't get that with express VPN. I certainly don't express vpn.com/TWiT, and we thank them for their support of this week in tech. All right, before we get to the last stories of the show, let's take a look back at the previous week on TWiT.

Ant (02:05:28):
Fi wanted to share a bit of a, a oops moment if you will, in the world of photography.

Ant Pruitt (02:05:35):
Well, that got cut short because I ended up stepping in a yellow jacket and that's and got stronger. Hum. A handful of times, shoot. They still out here. And I've got a fire

Jason Howell (02:05:49):
Safety

Jim  (02:05:51):
Previously on the TWiT windows weekly

Zac (02:05:55):
Essentially found out for multiple sources at this point that Microsoft is moving away from its annual sort of major release of windows and is moving to a major release every three years with feature jobs in between. Now they call the feature jobs moments,

Jim  (02:06:09):
Mac break weekly.

Jason Snell (02:06:10):
You forget if you've been living on an M one MacBook air for a while, how slow in comparison those Intel MacBook errors were M two is faster than M one. There's no doubt about it. And having MagSafe come back having that extra port. Now

Jim  (02:06:25):
This weekend, Google

Jason Howell (02:06:26):
At Google IO. If you remember, Google was talking about kind of the next iteration of AR glasses that Google is working on, gonna put out at some point, but apparently they're gonna start beta testing these suckers, I think next month, starting in August

Jeff Jarvis (02:06:41):
Because they learned the lesson with glass. That if you give it to just everyday ordinary schmucks like me, we're gonna end up making fun of it. And it's not only gonna work. So they, they realize that the real use of it was for trades people and doctors and so on and so forth. Mr.

Ant (02:06:57):
Jar is someone that has their own theme song. You're not an everyday person. My man

Jason Howell (02:07:02):
<Laugh> to it. I, wasn't definitely not a schmuck.

Jason Howell (02:07:09):
What y'all think about Google's AR glasses. They're gonna be beta testing these so it's possible. I mean, not, not to the degree that they did with Google glass, of course, but it's possible that you might encounter someone wearing Google's translating AR glasses. That's kind of a neat feature. I don't know. Are you guys interested? Crickets? I made a, I made a big stink about Google glass once on the show. And then someone was kind of mad at me about it. And then I pointed to things I'm like wrong. You're wrong. I'm right. But I was very nice about it. So <laugh> with Google glass, they oversold what that thing was gonna be. And then it came out and then everyone bought it and then everyone's like, oh, this is dumb. You know, everyone's doing this the whole time. Just like half rolling their eyes. It's just, I don't know. Do I need AR glasses? Do I need glasses? Just to translate if I, I, I travel to other that's good question countries a lot. That's like part of my job is to leave America pretty often. And I I'm doing okay. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> I don't need AR glasses.

Ashley Esqueda (02:08:18):
I feel like I would rent them for a vacation. There

Jason Howell (02:08:21):
You go. Yeah. That's good.

Ashley Esqueda (02:08:23):
You go like renting seems like a, if you like a vacation rental.

Jason Howell (02:08:28):
Yeah. Like you go to Japan and like it's part of your Airbnb. Because if, when I went to high pay, I'm like, I don't know. There's nothing. I, I have no frame of reference for what's going on in this side. <Laugh> right. Whereas Europe I'm like, okay, I kind of figure it out

Ashley Esqueda (02:08:40):
For Latin based languages. For me, I'm able to like maybe suss out some stuff. And like, that's like, I can kind of find my way around, like over time. But then yeah, if I was going to a country where I just had no frame of reference for the language, then having them would be nice. But yeah, this, see, yeah, this is the thing where it's like, I feel like if I was gonna stay at a hotel, maybe I could add it on to my stay. Or if I was staying at an Airbnb, it would be a very nice perk where it's like, okay, and you have the option to use Google AR glasses. They can translate for you live while you're here. Please just make sure that you take care of them. And if you break them, you have to buy them or whatever.

Ashley Esqueda (02:09:19):
And then that's, that's it. Like, you just you're using them and then you're responsible for them. And then you put them back and then you leave. And it's like that to me, seems like the better sort of way to do it. Or like, if you're going to a business conference, you know, the, the, and you're going to a foreign country where you don't speak the language or you can't read the language, then you know, your company provides you with you know, Google glass AR glasses to, to go for the conference. But the thing again, like it's sort of a, it's a weird like rental thing. It feels like it would be a thing that would be owned and, and loaned out to, to use for a specific use case. I don't know that I would use it every day.

Jason Howell (02:09:59):
Yeah. It's like, how often do you use Google translate? I use, I've used it in Korea and in Taipei and then like maybe a few times in Germany. That's it? Yeah. I mean, I do wonder if these glasses, I mean, it can't just be, they can't just be translating glasses. Like that's the only thing they do. And if, if that is, that's a very specialized thing very, very limited. Right. But if they are bro, you know, kind of broad strokes, AR glasses, translation is one thing. What are those other things? What is the killer app? Cause that's really, that's really cool, but that's a short term kind of drop in sort of thing. I only need this a handful of times and I need in very specific situations, but yeah. I wonder if there

Megan Morrone (02:10:39):
Would be like mapping

Jason Howell (02:10:40):
Functionality. Yeah. Mapping.

Megan Morrone (02:10:41):
Yeah. It's like, I'd love to be able to get around without looking at my phone. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. Like walking.

Ashley Esqueda (02:10:47):
Yeah. But again, like it's not, you feel like that's like a tourist thing right. Where it's like, you're you, it would be a place that you're unfamiliar with a, a language you're unfamiliar with something you're unfamiliar with. You would wanna use it. So it would be by definition, a temporary use case, it would be a per long term use case.

Jason Howell (02:11:04):
Yeah.

Megan Morrone (02:11:05):
I'm very bad at directions. So I would use it all the time, go over, walking around my neighborhood. Well, there

Jason Howell (02:11:10):
You,

Ashley Esqueda (02:11:10):
My husband would too. Yeah, he he's. Absolutely. He, he would get lost. He would get lost in a wet paper bag. Like he's, he's terrible. He has no sense of direction. No, he knows it. He'll admit it to you. He,

Jason Howell (02:11:19):
No, it'd be great. The mall. Yeah. I can never find anything in the mall to the

Ashley Esqueda (02:11:24):
Mall.

Jason Howell (02:11:25):
Yeah. You, you go to the mall, you put your Google, I'm gonna find aunt Annies to get myself a pretzel. I'm not gonna walk for 30 minutes. The mall.

Ashley Esqueda (02:11:32):
If I just had a pair of Google AR glasses, that only directed me to the nearest hot pretzel I would pay for that. Actually that

Jason Howell (02:11:40):
Would be the hot pretzel app. That's only I with the hot,

Ashley Esqueda (02:11:44):
Just hot pretzels only this is I'm gonna set it to that setting. Just please do not show me anything, but where I can find a hot pretzel with cheese. That's that's what I

Jason Howell (02:11:53):
Don ESA. Wetzels that's all I care. Yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (02:11:56):
Wetzel pretzels or anti aunts. Like that's, that's it. That's all I want. Just show me where the kiosks are.

Jason Howell (02:12:02):
So you're wearing these at the mall and sure. It, it, it tells you how to get to the pretzel, but on the way you look in that clothing store, you look over in the clothing store and there's a little call out. That's pointing to a rack with a pair with a, a whole series of pants there. It says 50 cent or 50% off while supplies last or whatever, would you be open to that kind of AR

Ashley Esqueda (02:12:26):
No, cuz that's an ad. But what I would be interested in is if I were, let's say at a Macy's and I was looking at a designer handbag and I looked at it and AR was able to scan it and say, Hey, this bag is available for 50% off on this website or the designer's website or, you know, Zs or whatever. <Laugh> that, that I'm interested in. That I'm very interested. Yeah. Show me how to get the best deal on something while I'm actively looking at it. Because I do that already. Right? You, you, you price compare when you're at a, you're at a big box retail store, you look at something, you go, oh, can I get this cheaper somewhere else? Let me just double check. And you check on your phone. Like if I could get that information quickly without having to type in a bunch of stuff, like it just scans the item and says, I know what this is. This is a this is an iPad from 20, you know, 2020 or whatever. And, and here's where you can find it cheaper. Like great. That, that I'm too.

Megan Morrone (02:13:21):
Can you do that with Google lens? Now? It

Ashley Esqueda (02:13:24):
Doesn't. That's like a great question. Question. I use it.

Megan Morrone (02:13:27):
Take a picture.

Ashley Esqueda (02:13:29):
Yeah. I like, but I mean, just that, that live parsing of it where it's like, there's no real process to it. If it's just wearing the glasses and it tells me, oh, Hey, I see them. This says, it's, you know, 2 99, but you can actually get it for $99 over here. Like, you know, for this camera lens or whatever, it's a thousand dollars here and it's half price over at B and H like, I need to know that information. Like, that's very helpful to me.

Jason Howell (02:13:53):
It's, it's waiting for your hot word. That is something along the lines of, Ooh, I like this. And then it's like, okay, let's get to work. Let's it out. Help me with scanning everything.

Ashley Esqueda (02:14:03):
Help me impulse by like help me with my anxiety spending. That's that is what I need. The AR is for anxiety reality. That's what I need. I need anxiety reality to help me spend money.

Jason Howell (02:14:16):
I feel like AR is more anxiety inducing than

Ashley Esqueda (02:14:19):
Anxious reality. Yeah. Yeah. It's not augmented. It's it's anxious. It's it's anxious. Reality.

Jason Howell (02:14:24):
Anxiety ridden. Yeah, no maybe AR would be helpful if you were if you were looking for I don't know how to tie it into the story. Prototypes of an original apple, one being auction

Ashley Esqueda (02:14:37):
Could try. Jason could try.

Jason Howell (02:14:38):
Yeah, I tried. Yeah. Try trying to get those expert transitions in, but not quite could try, could

Ashley Esqueda (02:14:42):
Try

Jason Howell (02:14:43):
Apparently though, the original prototype of the apple one, Steve jobs, original apple computer, a prototype is being an auction right now. And I think last I checked, it was around $305,000 if you wanted to get it. So yeah, still 300, $5,000. See, it's not moving. You got until August 18th. If you wanna let's for money. I got 20 bucks. You

Ashley Esqueda (02:15:13):
An apple one in this economy. No,

Jason Howell (02:15:16):
No, I can it run collectors on them.

Ashley Esqueda (02:15:21):
Can it run doom? That's the question. You've gotta ask

Jason Howell (02:15:24):
Yourself. Does

Ashley Esqueda (02:15:25):
It run doom? You should get a discount. You should get a discount.

Jason Howell (02:15:27):
Yeah, probably not. No,

Ashley Esqueda (02:15:30):
No. One's giving anybody a discount on that. No. And also, yeah, probably not. It cannot, it probably cannot renew, but you know what? Stranger things have happened. I love when people put Dom on things like pregnancy tests, it's like the coolest thing in the world too.

Jason Howell (02:15:43):
<Laugh> <laugh> I haven't seen that one.

Ashley Esqueda (02:15:47):
The things people have run doom on is it's actually just like legendary status. At this point. People have worked very hard to make doom run on just about anything. If it has a tin screen, even at the tiniest of screens, you can make doom run on it.

Jason Howell (02:16:02):
Also

Ashley Esqueda (02:16:03):
Begs the question. Why a pregnancy test has a tin screen? Like it's just a question, right?

Jason Howell (02:16:08):
Yeah. Everything's app, everything needs an app now

Ashley Esqueda (02:16:12):
Gotta have the app. Gotta have the words. It can't just be two lines. That's confusing. It's gotta be like,

Jason Howell (02:16:17):
Can be like the plus of the man.

Ashley Esqueda (02:16:19):
Yeah, no,

Jason Howell (02:16:20):
It's really just, it's gotta be a dancing baby.

Ashley Esqueda (02:16:22):
People are like, is that a PO? Is it, does that mean like, oh what great news. You're not pregnant. Like that's positive. Like it's positive news or positive, positive news. You are pregnant. Like it's confusing. People get confused. Yeah. Like the COVID test. It's like positive.

Jason Howell (02:16:35):
It's not positive.

Ashley Esqueda (02:16:36):
Yeah. Oh

Jason Howell (02:16:37):
Wow. This is episode of the office.

Ashley Esqueda (02:16:39):
<Laugh> I'm sure its yeah. I'm sure it is

Jason Howell (02:16:41):
Michael. Like it's positive. It's negative. And he's like, oh no, no negative is good. He's like good

Ashley Esqueda (02:16:46):
Thing. Yeah.

Jason Howell (02:16:48):
<Laugh> sorry. I went down the the doom on a P pregnancy test rabbit hole and found an article in popular mechanics that kind of showed it off. I put the link in the chat room if anyone wants to check it out. But that's impressive even though it's pretty low res, but you know, technically it works still do technically

Ashley Esqueda (02:17:05):
It works and that's what matters.

Jason Howell (02:17:08):
And that's what matters <laugh> you are technically correct. Which is the best kind of correct. <Laugh> well, speaking of doom, I mean, you know, there, there aren't a whole lot of opportunities to talk about doom co-creator John Romero apparently working on a new first person shooter. So if you would like, boom I mean this, this isn't the first time that they've made some sort of a follow up. So I don't know. I'm I'm not much of a gamer anymore. Is this, is this news? I don't care. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Ashley Esqueda (02:17:37):
<Laugh> I mean, you know, it's, that's, it's always exciting when somebody who's sort of a, an icon in games is doing something new. It's, that's nice. You know, but it's a, they've got a major publisher obviously. I mean, there's a lot of cache there, his name, John Barrett's like, oh yeah, Hey sure. I I help make doom. Like that's kind of a big deal. So seems like, seems like it'd be pretty easy to find a publisher, which barely that's the case. And but yeah, they they've published other stuff before they had a strategy game. And I think they talked about this. This shooter is gonna be powered by unreal engine. So it'll be the, the newest UE five. So this'll be like, you know, a whole, it's gonna be a whole thing. I'm sure. I mean, I'm all about a new single player shooting, man.

Ashley Esqueda (02:18:24):
The new I, the new dooms are so good. I mean out outrageously good. If you have not played, if you were a fan of original doom. Yeah. And you have not played the new ones, the 2016 doom the, the ones that Bethesda and it, the ones that they're making incredible, so good. The pacing is so good. The, the man, the power fantasy is so good. The graphics are amazing. The music is incredibly. It's just like just the, the way that game just keeps you moving forward and you have so much fun playing. It's just great. It's so, so good. I can't recommend it enough.

Jason Howell (02:18:57):
Nice. I'll have to look into that. So I, along the, the game tip though discord coming to Xbox like this again, I put this in here thinking like, well, that sounds significant cuz I know, you know, there's a lot of crossover there. I'm kind of surprised that discord wasn't on Xbox prior to this, but apparently that's the case. I just have to hook a keyboard to my Xbox now <laugh>

Ashley Esqueda (02:19:24):
So no, you can just do a

Jason Howell (02:19:25):
Discord. I have to use,

Ashley Esqueda (02:19:26):
It's a call call. It's a, it's a, it's a voice call. Usually voice calls. I

Jason Howell (02:19:30):
Could do that. Here's the guys,

Ashley Esqueda (02:19:31):
Here's the, here's the problem. So I love my series. It's great. I love game pass. I think it's an incredible like value for what it is. This $15 subscription. You get access. So many games one setting up this whole thing is a process and a half like you've gotta connect, you've gotta get the mobile app. Then you have to transfer discord. You have to use your phone to transfer discord calls to the Xbox. You have to connect the Xbox account to your discord account. It it's a whole, it's very convoluted. There's a lot going on here. A lot of gamers you discord though. So this may prove to be very useful. And the other, the other thing that I should mention is I have a PS five and an Xbox series S and my best friend and I play video games on both.

Ashley Esqueda (02:20:26):
We play co-op games on both. We play on the switch as well. And in order of ease of use PS five, like blows the other two out of the water in terms of just joining a voice chat, it's like very simple. You literally just click on your friend's name and it says, join voice chat. And you, you just join that's it. And on Xbox, it's like more complicated, but it's at least on device. And then on the switch, it's like, you have to do it through an app that connects to a specific game that you might be playing at that time and it's just not even worth it. So in that regard that it's a little bit more complicated and not as easy to join a voice chat on mm-hmm <affirmative> Xboxs dashboard. This is a good thing. This will be a good thing. And I think a lot of gamers who are really into discord and, and use it very heavily will find this like a minor inconvenience to connect your accounts and get everything set up and then we'll be very happy with it going forward.

Jason Howell (02:21:22):
Yeah, finally. Yeah. Yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (02:21:25):
But this kind of stuff should just be done across all consoles. You should just be able to yeah. That's plug into, you know, totally plug into your discord plug into, you know, we used to have back in the day when I was rating in raffle Lich game, we should have team speak as just, you know, now he's new stuff, but it's, you should be able to plug into all these voice chat apps and, and just be able to like talk to people. And it's just easy. Shouldn't make it difficult. The whole point of gaming and so many aspects at this point are, you know, even when you're playing a single player game, you can be in voice chat, talking to your friends, like you're hanging out with them. It's very social experience. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so to make it difficult, does it make sense now? So maybe if they streamline this process, that would be great. But for now it's, it's still, it's still a good thing.

Jason Howell (02:22:06):
Yeah, yeah. That was kind of part of the reason why I put it in there. I was just really surprised that it hadn't happened before. So that's good. And then finally about to wrap things up, but finally, meta that's meta the installation art company that you can find@meta.is, is apparently suing meta the Facebook company for trade trademark violation. Meta.Is, has been around for about 12 years. They hold a valid trademark for the name and actually their business has to do with multi. And this is from their site multisensory live experiences that ignite the human spirit with technology, design music and storytelling. So I don't know if that's a perfect overlay over the top of the, you know, the metaverse ambitions that Facebook has, but they've been trying to negotiate with MEA for about eight months now saying, Hey, you guys are embroiled in all of these privacy scandals, and now our name is tarnished.

Jason Howell (02:23:00):
And it's impossible to share the name with the company. So they're suing MEA probably <laugh>. I can't imagine it's gonna amount to very much, but I feel bad for them cuz that's, that's quite a, you know they, they have all that, all that background, 12 years of building up their own name and reputation only to have Facebook come along and by the name and woo tarnish it, tarnish it. You have, you have tarnished our good name. Yeah. Tarnished. It's like the mark Zuckerberg, general hospital people are, were concerned about going to the mark Zuckerberg hospital. Cause they were afraid in San. This is in San Francisco. They were afraid that their data would be sold to Facebook. That's that process when your name, when your name is, is, is that tarnished? Maybe you shouldn't put it on things, especially with healthcare.

Ashley Esqueda (02:23:50):
Yeah. Amazon's not gonna call it the Jeff Bezos hospital.

Jason Howell (02:23:55):
That's true. Not that we know anyways. Probably

Ashley Esqueda (02:23:57):
I, yeah, so far,

Jason Howell (02:23:59):
Yeah. He's probably got his own hospital. It's just for him 40 rooms. Yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (02:24:05):
Takes

Jason Howell (02:24:05):
It's

Ashley Esqueda (02:24:06):
Like Barbara Streisand has a mall. Like, you know, Barbara Streisand has like a mall, like under her house. It's like a mall. Wow

Jason Howell (02:24:13):
Scores. Does it have, does it have a Wetzel pretzels?

Ashley Esqueda (02:24:17):
You know what? That wouldn't surprise me. If

Jason Howell (02:24:19):
It doesn't point. Yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (02:24:21):
But seriously. So interestingly enough, like I, I think about that when I think about like even more rich people. So yeah. He probably does have his own hospital. Probably just has a doc like literally like a doctor on call all the time. Like within, you know, just on retainer, just pays him just to call him and be like, Hey, I got this weird. I got this weird like bunion I needed. Can you just look at it? Just like text him. He's like, Hey, I was lifting weights the other day. I think EST strained my, I think iest strained my bicep help. Like it's just, you know, he's just got some doctor on call all the time.

Jason Howell (02:24:53):
Yeah. He has multiple hospitals. One is on his yacht. It's a traveling hospital that follows oh yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (02:25:00):
Floating hospital. Totally. Yeah. He has more than one yacht,

Jason Howell (02:25:04):
Which he that true. He he's got a hospital

Ashley Esqueda (02:25:06):
Yacht know he's therefore, which therefore yes, he has more than one hospital. That's we can just extrapolate the data.

Jason Howell (02:25:13):
The Bezos healthcare system is, is far more effecti <laugh> in advanced than one medical <laugh> yeah. Well maybe that's no, we have to look forward to

Ashley Esqueda (02:25:24):
A hundred percent. He has called it St. Jeff's like it's

Jason Howell (02:25:27):
St Joe's. Yeah. Memorial ST's

Ashley Esqueda (02:25:30):
Memorial. Like we, we all know that's gotta be the name. He's like anointed him with St. Jeff's Memorial hospital.

Jason Howell (02:25:37):
St. Joseph's quit trying to make that happen. Bezos, quit trying to make that happen.

Ashley Esqueda (02:25:41):
I just want you to know Jeff Bezos, if you are in fact gonna name your weird, like one medical stuff St. Jeff's you owe me so much money

Jason Howell (02:25:49):
<Laugh>

Ashley Esqueda (02:25:50):
You have to cut me a massive check

Jason Howell (02:25:53):
<Laugh> and and all he has to do to, to get in touch with you is go to Ashley skea.com because why? Because you are awesome. Ashley, thank you so much for hopping on this episode of this weekend tech this week, it's been a lot of fun.

Ashley Esqueda (02:26:08):
It has been a lot of fun. Can I plug my book?

Jason Howell (02:26:10):
Absolutely. Please do. This is your opportunity. What you got.

Ashley Esqueda (02:26:13):
It's like the one thing that I've, it's the one thing I'm doing right now. So I am I'm, I'm excited to tell people I'm writing the, the art of psycho nots too with IM eight bit. So if you go to IM eight bit.com there is, well, first of all, they have a ton of really awesome psycho nots, two they have a collection, so they have a physical collectors edition that they're gonna release later this year. And yeah, it's gonna be this gorgeous, like, well laid out art book. You can see there's the, that's our, that's our, it's not final, but this mock cover that we have is absolutely beautiful. We are working with Loston cult who makes a prestigious very high quality gaming journal. It's not even really a magazine, it's sort of a collector's item.

Ashley Esqueda (02:27:00):
They're gonna be doing the book design. And I have been drowning in beautiful concept art and interviewing a lot of the developers at double fine about their work on psycho nots too. And and so if you are a fan of the game you can pre-order it, and it will be out soon as I'm done writing it, which who knows when that will be. No, it's supposed to be out in quarter one of next year. So please make me look good. And pre-order, pre-order this book that I'm writing that I am so excited to be involved with. I'm really so, so, so excited about it.

Jason Howell (02:27:32):
Yeah, that looks really cool. That's some pretty catching artwork there as well. Yeah.

Ashley Esqueda (02:27:37):
Gorgeous,

Jason Howell (02:27:37):
Gorgeous stuff. Yeah. Beautiful. Right on. Congratulations. That's a, an accomplishment.

Ashley Esqueda (02:27:43):
I was very excited when they asked me if I wanted to be the person to write it.

Jason Howell (02:27:47):
That's amazing. Well, Ashley, we will be following and we will definitely, you'll pro you'll be hearing from me as the person who books this show. So probably the future to bring you back. And then of course, as you get closer to the release of that, get in touch, we would love to bring you back and give you the chance to, to plug it. So show it off Ashley, show it off. That's right. Thanks for having me. That's right. Yeah. And Roberto Baldwin, thank you so much, man, for hopping on today and and bringing the man about town to this panel today. What do you wanna leave people with man about town? I don't know. I write a bunch of stuff for a bunch of people. <Laugh> oh, wait, you know what? I have a, if you're in the bay area and if you like the talking heads in Divo, this hasn't even been announced yet, but at September 10th, two bands, two of my band, I have so many anyway, we're doing a Divo in a talking head show.

Jason Howell (02:28:38):
It's September 10th at Rick shall stop at San Francisco. Nice. And I don't think there's anything else. I, I don't know. Be nice to be your friends. I guess that's my big plug for the day. There you go. And and to your pets as well, and to your pets, especially your, I mean, who is it? Nice to their pets? Come on. Yeah. Some people need a reminder probably somewhere out there. They're circle. The dogs are circling me like sharks, cuz they want to go outside. <Laugh> dude. Dun dun dun. Well, thank they can feel the show coming to an end. Thank you for yes. They can feel it. It's in the air. Yeah. It's pleasure. It's a lot of fun hanging out with you today. And of course Megan Moroni, I have missed podcasting with you. It's so good to have you on this show today. Megan. Thank you for hopping on.

Megan Morrone (02:29:24):
It's good to be here. We should go to celebrate your birthday to Robbie's show, which is the day before your birthday.

Jason Howell (02:29:31):
Good memory. <Laugh> there you go. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> wow. Thank you for remembering that.

Megan Morrone (02:29:38):
You're welcome. You know, my birthday <laugh> <laugh> you on the swap.

Jason Howell (02:29:43):
Yeah. God, I'll tell you off. I'll tell you in a second. Tell us what you're working on, Megan. <Laugh>

Megan Morrone (02:29:49):
OK. I am so I cover the workplace at protocol protocols, part of Politico and we are we cover power and politics and tech. So just how, how technology works as a force of power right now. And so covering the workplace. So talking about back to work, remote work, hybrid work labor organizing DEI, everything that involves working. So you can check that out@proprotocol.com and I do a weekly newsletter about the workplace. So sign up for that. And then you can get me in your inbox, me and my team Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday. So yeah, that's what I'm doing

Jason Howell (02:30:37):
Right on, but, but not on March 15th on that day, you're celebrating your birthday. <Laugh> see. Yes. See, yeah, I, I got there eventually. <Laugh> there you go. I'm embarrassed. All right. Thank you, Megan. Always a pleasure. So great to see you today. Appreciate it. Thank you. And me, while you can find me all over the TWiT network, as evidenced by this very show sitting in for Leo Leo should be back next week. So look forward to that. But you can find me at Jason Howell on TWiTtter, doing all about Android, TWiT TV slash AA, every Tuesday, doing tech news weekly with mic Sergeant every Thursday, that's an interviews show. We have a lot of fun with that TWiT.tv/tnw. So check that out. Let's see here club TWiTtch. We talk a little bit about this TWiT.tv/club TWiT. You may or may not have heard, but we have a subscription ad free tier service for all of our shows, no ads.

Jason Howell (02:31:38):
If you go to TWiTt.tv/club TWiT, you can see all about it. You get all of our shows with no ads. You also get exclusive TWiT plus podcast feed content. So a lot of, you know, some of the behind the scenes stuff that we do before and after shows gets put in there aunt Pruitt of course, community manager of club TWiTt is just he's. You know, there's a book club that he and Stacy do. There's all sorts of, you know, awesome stuff happening just in the club as well. So TWiT TV slash club TWiT, get that as well as access to the members only discord channel seven bucks a month, or you can pay for the entire year for $84 for for the year. So do check that out and we think you will love what you find there as for this show, TWiT.tv/uh TWiT ISS, pretty easy go there.

Jason Howell (02:32:24):
You'll find all the information you need to know about this week in tech. We do this show every Sunday, five 5:15 PM, Eastern 2:15 PM, Pacific 21, 15 UTC. So if you happen to be around a computer and you wanna watch live, you can certainly do that TWiT.tv/live. But I would say subscribe in your podcaster of choice, all that information on the site, and then you'll get the episode like magic. You won't even have to think about it. It'll be there waiting for you as soon as it's ready. Thank you so much for the opportunity to sit in for Leo today I've just had such a blast doing this and I can kind of check that off my list, hosted an episode of TWiT and thanks to everyone out there for watching listening. Another TWiT is in the can. We'll see you later.