This Week in Tech Episode 890 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for TWiT this week in tech. Oh, you're gonna like this week's panel. Becky Warley from ABC news is here will Harris from the UK and rod pile sits in our space expert because there's so much space news to talk about. But first we're gonna talk about the TWiTtter whistle blower. We'll also talk about the last pass hack and whether it's anything you should worry about mark Zuckerberg's interview with Joe Rogan and then a look at Artis one as America returns to the moon, it's all coming up next on TWiT podcasts. You love
TWiT Intro (00:00:37):
From people you trust. This
Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
Is TWiT. This is TWiT. This weekend tech episode 890 recorded Sunday, August 28th, 2022 jail or Olympics.
Leo Laporte (00:01:00):
This week, a tech is brought to you by policy genius. If someone relies on your financial support, whether it's a child, a parent, even a business partner, you need life insurance, head to policygenius.com/TWiT to get your free life insurance quotes and see how much you could save. And by user way.org user way, the world's number one accessibility solution. And it's committed to enabling the fundamental human right of digital accessibility for everyone. When you are ready to make your site compliant, deciding which solution to use is an easy choice to make, go to user way.org/TWiT for 30% off user ways. AI powered accessibility solution and buy Wealthfront. Get a bonus $50 when you start investing with Wealthfront. Sign up today, visit wealthfront.com/TWiTt and buy the new and recently updated TriCaster two elite by NewTech the most complete live production system on the planet. There's a TriCaster for every production, including yours. Visit go.new tech.com/TWiT-tv for an interactive guide that can advise you on which TriCaster is right for you. It's time for TWiT this week at tech to show we cover the week's tech news. You're gonna be very happy. You tuned in this show today because it's OG TWiTt time. Becky Warley is here. My dear friend from ages gone by ABC news technology and consumer correspondent. You see her all the time on good morning, America elsewhere on ABC. Hello, Becky.
Becky Worley (00:02:45):
Hello. I was just trying to think, how long have we known each other 98? So going on 24 years,
Leo Laporte (00:02:51):
That's kinda insane. That's amazing. Yeah. We first met when you produced both the screensavers and call for help. I tech TV's debut, it was ZD TV back then. And and you produced a call for help for most of the show, I think. Yes.
Becky Worley (00:03:06):
Yeah. And yeah. And you wrote the, my recommendation letter to go to grad
Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
School. I had to get rid of her. So we sent her to Stanford <laugh> and you always give me credit for that, which is sad because I'm sure it didn't have anything to do with that, but I'm so glad you went, you studied educational technology, right?
Becky Worley (00:03:24):
Yep. And haven't really used much of it. Not
Leo Laporte (00:03:26):
At all. All.
Becky Worley (00:03:27):
No. But it was, it was a good experience. It was certainly good to be in that environment. And, you know, I took a ton of computer science classes and human computing interface and in a way, coming from a liberal arts background, it gave me sort of the deep breath. Yeah. I can hang in the, in this space and I can, I can participate. And I learned a lot about cognition, which is huge when you're trying to communicate in any medium. So in the minute and a half that I get for an ABC GMA story knowing how to get my message across that, I learned a lot in grad school.
Leo Laporte (00:04:01):
So they make you do some strange things. Last thing I saw you were, you had all these sensors on you, you were all wired up for what you were gonna, what they was it sleep testing? What was it?
Becky Worley (00:04:11):
Yes. I was testing the aura Fitbit and the Samsung galaxy watch how they monitor your sleep and report your REM stages. Your deep, how long you slept, how long it took you to fall asleep. And we tested those against a standard sleep study. What something you might go do if you have restless leg syndrome or sleep apnea to see how those mirrored up. And it was super interesting. That's what I love about my job is that I get access to these incredible tools, facilities, institutions, and can use them to get information about consumer tech that you wouldn't normally get.
Leo Laporte (00:04:48):
Yeah, this is something I, for instance, we always would like to do, but don't have the resources to do it. So how accurate are those devices?
Becky Worley (00:04:56):
Well, it hasn't aired yet, so I can't give you the same details,
Leo Laporte (00:05:00):
But
Becky Worley (00:05:00):
Thank you for the tease.
Leo Laporte (00:05:02):
When is that gonna be is it gonna be on this week?
Becky Worley (00:05:05):
It's gonna be on, I think in October we've been doing these series about biohacking called the science of you. Right. And I have loved it. And I wanna talk a little bit later if you want to about continuous glucose monitoring apps. Oh.
Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
And I'm wearing one, I'm wearing a CGM right now. And see, see, and you know, what's interesting. It's not, was not prescribed by my doctor. It was something I saw on Instagram. We'll talk about great. We'll talk about that.
Becky Worley (00:05:35):
Okay. Yeah. Who was, yeah. I wanna
Leo Laporte (00:05:36):
Hear about into this, the Instagram ads. Yeah. I'm a sucker for those, but I am type two diabetes diagnosed a few years ago and I've been doing finger pricks just every once in a while. And I thought that's kind of cool if I could continuously monitor this this is the Abbot product mm-hmm <affirmative> and it is kind, it is. It's very it's well, we'll talk about it. That's cool. Anyway, it's great to see Becky.
Wil Harris (00:05:58):
So we'll talk
Leo Laporte (00:05:59):
About it. Becky's always here when I'm not here. She's our kind of our, our preferred fill-in host. So it's nice to have us both in the same room at the same time. People were starting to be with suspect that perhaps we were the same person, but same, same. Yeah. Now we know <laugh> also with us. Hey, I haven't seen will Harris in a, in a long time. He's got a new job every week. <Laugh> every time I see will, he's got a new job. Hi, will welcome back.
Wil Harris (00:06:26):
Hey, it's good to be with you. It's a fabulous Sunday evening here. I always love doing TWiT. Obviously we kick off about sort of it's
Leo Laporte (00:06:34):
Middle of the night. Yeah,
Wil Harris (00:06:36):
Yeah. Over here in London. Yeah. So tomorrow is a national holiday, so I get to stay in bed in the morning. Oh. So, you know, we, we can go for however long, you know, it's all good.
Leo Laporte (00:06:43):
What day is tomorrow?
Wil Harris (00:06:45):
Monday, Leah.
Leo Laporte (00:06:46):
Is that a national holiday now?
Wil Harris (00:06:48):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:06:50):
I think that's a great idea idea.
Wil Harris (00:06:52):
We have like a national holiday for the end of summer. It officially is like, you know, when the misery begins,
Leo Laporte (00:06:58):
Is it like St. Stevens Midsummer day or something like that? I mean, what's the,
Wil Harris (00:07:02):
Yeah. It means something like that. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:07:04):
Okay. <Laugh>
Becky Worley (00:07:04):
I like that you're translating will and calling it a national holiday and not a bank holiday.
Wil Harris (00:07:10):
<Laugh>, you know, I know my audience <laugh>. But yeah, as, as as Leo said, I think every time I come on, I've not quite every time I come on. But it's, it's lovely to be here. I, yeah, I have a fantastic new gig at unbound.com.
Leo Laporte (00:07:26):
This is really cool,
Wil Harris (00:07:27):
Really interesting books.
Leo Laporte (00:07:28):
Oh, this is so cool. So it's a, you're a publisher and the, the books are very nerdy, very interesting and crowdfunded,
Wil Harris (00:07:40):
But yeah. So the kind of idea is that like, whereas most publishers, you know, they publish quite mainstream stuff cuz you need to be able to guarantee the return that you'll get and guarantee that you're gonna get it into bonds and noble. We are able to do much more interesting and some slightly geeky things because we, we crowd fund the first printing of all the books that we do. So you've got some fantastic books around the, the making of res the resident evil series, the making of alien isolation, which I think most people consider to be the scariest video game ever made
Leo Laporte (00:08:12):
The Gothic cookbook,
Wil Harris (00:08:14):
The Gothic cookbook, if you're feeling a little bit miserable, but also kind of kitchen
Leo Laporte (00:08:20):
A, but this is the one, the audit, our audience is gonna be most interested in Douglas Adams who passed away some years ago, creator of Hitchhiker's guy to the galaxy. We didn't expect any new Douglas Adams books, but there is one.
Wil Harris (00:08:33):
Yeah. So we we worked with the Douglas Adams estate. So we have a book called 42 and it's all the kind of stuff that was left, lying around Douglas Allen's office when he died. Oh Lord. So there were post-it notes. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:08:47):
This, oh, this is my worst nightmare.
Wil Harris (00:08:49):
Unpublished. Yeah. Unpublished kind of memos, some wedding speeches papers that he had kind of kicking around. So he collated this sort of each page is a F similarly of something interesting from his office scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do list bows.
Leo Laporte (00:09:04):
Oh, Douglass. This is kind
Wil Harris (00:09:05):
The last
Leo Laporte (00:09:06):
Would flip
Wil Harris (00:09:07):
Over. Yeah. Douglass fans. It's the, it's the, it's the last kind of trove of, of material from him. So we, we have that coming out. You can pre-order it now and, and get it get supporter additions at the beginning of next
Leo Laporte (00:09:20):
Year. I just wanna say, if you do this after my death and you find the Bitcoin password, I would really appreciate it if you would not publish that until my my estate got ahold of it. Okay. Just saying, just say, this looks cool. You are offering our audience a, an offer code. I just wanted to mention this up upfront.
Wil Harris (00:09:36):
Yeah. Well, thank you. You're very kind. If anybody wants to go and grab a book, if they wanna grab a 42 or or the resident evil or alien books TWiT 15 will get you 15% off from any pledge. Nice of the checkout. So, so go and stick that in and, and enjoy some nice books.
Leo Laporte (00:09:53):
Thank you. Unbound.Com. I, every time you here, you have a different job, but they're always great. Right? You're always doing some very interesting things. This seems like a really interesting company to work for unbound.com and look who the cat drug in a third host rod made it. Yeah. Rod, your sunburn from the north pole. Yeah. Well the sun doesn't set there. Rod pile, he is a regular on our show, a radio show, the tech guy, a space reporter. He's the host of this week in space. Our, our program with te Mallek, who is the editor in chief space.com. Rod is the editor in chief at, at Astro, which is the national publication of the it is the publication of the national space society, ns.org written great many books. I'll bring the pile in. I'll have the pile brought in the pile file for later in the show.
Leo Laporte (00:10:46):
Okay. That's fair. But the pile pile we call it. But you just came back from a month on Mars. That's what I called it. Yeah. And it was it was extraordinary. You're up in the Arctic circle, right? Yeah. So we were up at about 15 degrees or 75 degrees. Yeah. So, sorry. It's 15 degrees south of the pole, which sounds like it's a fair distance away, but the sun never set kind of skirt to the horizon, which as I was mentioning to you earlier for a photographer, you got sunset for three, four hours a night and NASA goes up there because it's like Mars. Yeah. So it's, it's so close. I mean, there's no, perchlorate, you know, the soil is oxidizing like Mars, but it's gritty. Won't kill you. You instantly is what you're saying. It not like Mars. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:11:33):
But it it's, it's cold all the time. The soil's very sharp and gritty gets into everything. So it's a great place to test hardware. Look at this it's space suits. <Laugh> this, this is this is I Mars, like, I guess. Yeah. There cuz there's no animals or anything and you guys are writing instead of rovers. You're writing little Kawasaki ATVs. Yeah. Because you know, they had two rovers up there, but they kept getting bogged down in the saw soil and so forth. Oh, so Pascal Lee, who, who runs this in conjunction with NASA, he's a, got a doctorate in planetary geology works down at Ames. The city Institute is a big advocate of using some kind of alternative ATV on Mars. Nice. The idea being the astronaut would have some of their life support on the ATV. So when you sat on the ATV, you'd have your space suit plugged in and when you got off, it kind of follow you everywhere you go.
Leo Laporte (00:12:28):
So that's why they experiment with at, they were testing that. Yeah. And here's the gang up at where the sun never says this guy on the right. John shoot looks like he actually lives up there. He's an amazing guy. He's Crested four of the highest mountains on planet. Wow. He's done 34 seasons in the Antarctic. Yeah. He looks like it as an expedition leader. Final meteor rights. And he just he's this regular, if you didn't ask him about it, you'd figure he's just some guy on a bus stop, you know? Yeah. But you start talking to him and he's astonishing. What fun. Yeah. Anyway, rod is here because there's a lot of space to talk about, including tomorrow's big, well at hoped, big launch crossing fingers, crossing our fingers. <Laugh> anyway, what a great panel rod pile me will Harris Becky Worley. Welcome to all three of you.
Leo Laporte (00:13:15):
I guess we'll kick off. There's so many stories we could start with. I think we should kick off with the TWiTtter whistle blower much who worked briefly for for, I think for a year and a half for TWiTtter. Is there yeah. Banging on two years, almost two years, Peter Zco. He was very well known. He he was one of the members of the cult of the dead cow hacker group testified to Congress as one of the members there about hacking, he was at loft L O PT, very well known hacking group later on worked for the department of defense and other very respectable organizations in cyber security was hired by TWiTtter right after they were hacked. Remember when Elon Musk and Barack Obama and Steve Tim cook rather accounts were hacked saying, Hey, we wanna give back.
Leo Laporte (00:14:13):
So if you give us your some crypto, we will double it and give it back to you. Like any idiot would fall for that. But it was a massive hack of some of the best known accounts on TWiTtter, TWiTtter freaked out hired Zco he was there almost two years fired at the beginning of the year, according to agro wall, after he did the whistle blowing, he said, well, he was fired cuz he wasn't any good. He says that TWiTtter's security is terrible. He said, he tried for a long time to tell him they didn't listen. So six months after his firing, he, he became a, a whistle blower sending information to the FTC, the S E C and others. Lots of stories have come out of that. I have to say, as soon as I read it, I said, I wanna know more before I believe everything he says,
Becky Worley (00:15:10):
Can I ask a question?
Leo Laporte (00:15:11):
I think, go ahead, Becky,
Becky Worley (00:15:12):
Because I was reading this and, and something that's, you know, I was curious what exactly are the allegations that are being made around the security breaches and problems. And so he said there were no logs. And he specifically called out around January 6th. Yes. That there were no logs that nobody knew where the data lived, whether it was critical. All engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment. And if an internal engineer wanted to take over the platform, they could, and they wouldn't know where the, where the attack was coming from. And there was no way to close that down. Is that something that you think most companies do have? No.
Leo Laporte (00:15:58):
I mean, well maybe, I mean, here's the irony of this. That was what he was hired to fix.
Wil Harris (00:16:05):
This is exactly it Leo, so you've got it nail on the head. So he comes in in 2020 in order to fix, you know,
Leo Laporte (00:16:12):
Exactly
Wil Harris (00:16:13):
That we can probably all appreciate is a lot of TWiTtter security problems, right. As he pointed out the hacking of Tim cook or the cyber security stuff, he then makes a big stink about the fact that following January 6th, you know, he was worried that somebody who was sympathetic to the January 6th, you know, quote unquote insurrection, cause could take over the platform and do something. And you're like, well, dude, you've been there for a year and a half. Why isn't that, that what you were supposed to be doing,
Leo Laporte (00:16:40):
You literally brought
Wil Harris (00:16:41):
In, you work that out a year and a half ago. That was, that was your job.
Leo Laporte (00:16:45):
So I mean, really the, his complaint might be, well, I tried and they wouldn't let me, I don't know if he said
Wil Harris (00:16:54):
Remember. So I think what I think what he says is that a lot of the complaints that he had in a lot of the queries that he had were ignore, basically got tied up in the kind of TWiTtter executive board, which was nonfunctioning because of the Dorothy.
Leo Laporte (00:17:06):
We knew this TWiTtters had the most dysfunctional board
Wil Harris (00:17:09):
Initially, right?
Leo Laporte (00:17:10):
Yeah. That is TWiTtter. In a nutshell, <laugh>, that's our, our little dysfunctional friend. He said that TWiTtter was in violation of its FTC consent decree in 2011. The FTC, after a number of security problems said, you must establish and maintain a comprehensive information security program that will be assessed by an outside auditor. And you must not, this is the best part. You must not lie <laugh> to your users about your security. And he says, well, they didn't do either. Again. He was there. It's hard to know. I mean, mud is respectable and respected. So it, you know, there's some concern that maybe the timing of this so close to, to Elon Musk's trial in Chancery court in December, I mean, in October in, in Delaware that maybe it was to support Elon's contention, that there were too many bots on TWiTtter. Actually. There's a very good piece, which I recommend from our good friend, Mike Masick on tech dirt in which he explains why the whistleblower report actually does not support Musk, even though it might seem to it, it supports TWiTtter.
Wil Harris (00:18:29):
So I think, I mean, there is, I don't wanna get too met about this, but but Becky will know as somebody who works in a, in a media outlet, I, and I don't know Mike and I don't know tech it very well, but it's very interesting to see like what outlets run with what version of that story. And you can kind of guess like who got the internal briefing from the TWiTtter PR <laugh> who got the internal briefing from the PR that that much clearly hired because the different angles on this story are like really distinct. Mike Mike is it's either, you know, this guy was fighting his hardest to try and fix a broken culture within TWiTtter or it's this guy was absolutely, you know, an idiot who couldn't, you know, tie shoelaces together and certainly couldn't fix anything, you know, inside a major corporation and you go, well, those two things, you know, two perspectives on possibly the same set of facts. But it's interesting to see who runs with rock with what
Leo Laporte (00:19:26):
I, I will defend my is not, he knows what he is talking.
Becky Worley (00:19:29):
Yeah. I didn't understand the story. Will you explain why it, I still don't understand why it supports TWiTtter.
Leo Laporte (00:19:35):
So that's because you're in the media. Okay. <laugh> Hey,
Wil Harris (00:19:39):
Hey, the lane stream media is not telling the truth.
Leo Laporte (00:19:42):
Masick says the media is unfortunately falling for the spin. So what masic explains, and this is, this is God's truth. He's not making something up. It, it revolves around a misunder or either misunderstanding intentional or accidental that Elon has about bots. And, and then Elon has intentionally confused the world about it sounds like Elon is saying that the platform is more than 5% fake and that TWiTtter has been lying about that. That is in fact not what TWiTtter has ever said. Twittter's counting something called monthly daily active users. And this is not monthly, sorry. That would make no sense. Monthly, daily active users. What is MW monetizeable monetizeable they even better? Thank you for correcting that. So M Dows Mon monetizable daily active users is a number that TWiTtter gives its advertisers so that when they buy ads, it's in effect saying, well, every day, this many people who could click on your ad are watching.
Leo Laporte (00:20:47):
They also say very clearly, they said this to the E C. They said it to the FTC. They say it to advertisers. This is an estimate because it's hard to tell who's real. And who's not real. We estimate about 5% of that M down number, very important, not of the total, but of the M down number could still be bots. We try to filter them out, but we may as maybe be off by 5%. That is, they never say how many of all of TWiTtter is bots. The whole point of calculating MW is to tell advertisers, this is how many people could click on your ad. And we might be off by 5%. So Elon is intentionally or unintentionally conflating bots on the total platform with this very important number that TWiTtter's using. It's the number they use to monetize. And TWiTtter's always said it exactly. Right. And in fact, the whistleblower much confirms it.
Wil Harris (00:21:43):
I mean, that's exactly right. I mean I think to say whether Elon is doing it intentionally and unintentionally, he will look, is there that much question?
Leo Laporte (00:21:52):
We don't know his intent, but he, it looks like he's trying to get out of the deal, right? So he is looking whatever he can find to get out of the deal.
Wil Harris (00:21:58):
But I think the, the more important point, rather than, you know, this, the spam and the bot thing is kind of a tangent. The question is, you know, did everybody who is basically an engineer at TWiTtter have access to basically mess with the platform with no logs that described you with the platform, right? I mean, that's bad, that's bad. If you've gotta commit code, if you've gotta mess with the platform, that's something that you should put your name to. And he is basically alleging that anybody, you know, but half the engineering team could commit anything without having to put their name to
Leo Laporte (00:22:31):
It. Here's why this whole MDO thing is, is relevant to that because much is misstating this in, in Elon's favor, showing a misunderstanding of what's going on, which then cast in my opinion, into doubt, the entire whistle blowing account. If he doesn't understand this, we don't know how much of this is accurate. How much of this is he thought supporting Musk? It, it puts the whole thing in doubt. So I'm not saying it's not true. I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying what we have to do is wait for an investigation. The S sec, and the FTC will investigate and see what they come.
Wil Harris (00:23:09):
That'll be pretty quick, right? Run pretty quickly.
Leo Laporte (00:23:12):
<Laugh> and then in 10 years, we'll know what happened.
Becky Worley (00:23:16):
I looked at this from a different perspective, which was follow the money and so much in the federal whistleblower policy much there's
Leo Laporte (00:23:24):
A reward. Yes.
Becky Worley (00:23:25):
10 million is the reward. Yeah. But if you look at the sec filings on top executives at TWiTtter, they're getting huge amounts of their compensation in stock. So I don't know the exact amounts that he was compensated in stock or how much he currently holds, but you're thinking that he would sabotage his own net worth by undermining the platform. So both of those things could be true. And
Leo Laporte (00:23:53):
So is he gonna make more money from the reward than he would lose from the failing stock? We don't know that. Right. what we don't know is is if Elon Musk made a call and said, Hey, you know, it really be helpful. I mean, that's really a, a, a scarless. That's
Becky Worley (00:24:08):
Very conspirator.
Leo Laporte (00:24:08):
That's, it's scarless accusation, but I'm just, I'm I think my point is there's a lot. We don't know. And it's it. I don't think you can just say, well, Mudge, isn't lying. This is true. If it is it's, it's horrific, it's bad, but there is some areas in this, including the MDO where he doesn't understand what's going on. There's also this question of, well, it's that bad? Why didn't you fix it? I mean, that's something he could have fixed. He was in charge of security. He could said no, from now on, we gotta log access simply.
Wil Harris (00:24:35):
Well, I think, I think the thing that it really comes down to, and the thing that it just highlights and I mean, in a sense, the, the sad thing about this is that it isn't really news, which is TWiTtter. Leadership is just an absolute shoot show. Like it's terrible. Nobody can, you know, really take responsibility for anything. You know, we are in a situation where the board is trying to force a sale of a company at a stock price that was, you know, 30% lower than it was nine months ago in order to get out of what seems like a grim situation. Like this is not a company that's, that's got its head screwed on straight. No, that,
Leo Laporte (00:25:13):
And so,
Wil Harris (00:25:13):
But
Leo Laporte (00:25:14):
We've always, like you said, this is not news.
Wil Harris (00:25:17):
It's always been a mess. It's not news, but it is sort of crazy that this, you know, TWiTtter has almost become a, a utility for a certain section of the internet. So then, and it's kind of mad that it's run. So insanely,
Leo Laporte (00:25:29):
It, it, this is the real question then for you all as the panel, and I'd love to know what you think, Becky and I love will, and I love Roger way on this. How important is TWiTtter? So what if it's a shoot show, right. Who cares?
Wil Harris (00:25:47):
So I think
Leo Laporte (00:25:48):
Show,
Wil Harris (00:25:48):
So I think the answer is it's, it's really important to a certain segment of the population journalists, we way O yeah. We way overestimate, how much of the population that is. It's like a hundred percent of journalists are on TWiTtter. And so TWiT. And so journalists think that a hundred percent of the world is TWiTtter. Right. And I say that as a former journalist, I can, I, you know, I understand the bubble the, how important is it to real life? I mean, what percentage of the us population is on TWiTtter? Like 7%, 9% small, less than,
Becky Worley (00:26:19):
Yeah. But think about it this way. You know, a lot of people assert that TWiTtter is the public square right. Of, of the digital.
Leo Laporte (00:26:25):
Yeah, that's my question.
Becky Worley (00:26:26):
Is it? But I, I like the, I like the metaphor that it's more the Coliseum.
Wil Harris (00:26:31):
<Laugh> a
Becky Worley (00:26:32):
Lot of people, and this is not my original idea, but ah, this
Wil Harris (00:26:35):
Is brilliant,
Becky Worley (00:26:36):
But that the, the idea is that there's so much viewership of the blood sport that's taking place on TWiTtter and that is important. And it's a proxy for the public square. Now that's just one thought another thing, this is, I was, I, this question really was front of mind for me also Leo. So I did a little research and listened to this, the Senate judiciary committee's top Republican, Chuck Grassley said that all of these complaints, the whistleblower complaint raised serious national security concerns and privacy issues that need to be investigated. And he said, take a tech platform that collects massive amounts of user data, combine it with what appears to be an incredibly weak security infrastructure and infuse it with foreign state actors with an agenda. And you've got a recipe for disaster. I actually thought that was pretty intelligent,
Leo Laporte (00:27:26):
Except the foreign state actors. Aren't getting the data that TWiTtter collects, what data does TWiTtter collect? Really? It's not, not doesn't collect the same quality of data that Google and Facebook collect incidentally. I mean, what information anybody give
Wil Harris (00:27:42):
With the trend topics to know that, right?
Leo Laporte (00:27:44):
<Laugh> yeah. I mean, what information do you give TWiTtter? Not much. In fact, they did misuse the information. We know this, they, when you give them email and phone numbers for two factor, we found out and they've pleaded guilty to this, that they would use it for advertising. Okay. But that's not a national security issue. Remember the Republicans don't like TWiTtter cuz they banned Donald Trump. And so I think there's a certain amount of piling on from the Republicans because they would, they just don't like TWiTtter. Can TWiT, so let me ask you this. Becky, do you think TWiTtter could be used by foreign adversaries as a potent propaganda tool?
Becky Worley (00:28:26):
I don't know. I mean, I, I guess I would only just extrapolate in the thought experiment based on the, the complaint and the whistleblower complaint, which is what would be a scenario where it could have caused more destructive actions say during the January 6th insurrection, what if certain accounts were suppressed and others were promoted would that have really changed history?
Leo Laporte (00:28:51):
I'm not sure. I don't think so. I mean, maybe it was used to organize, but if, if it didn't work, they could have gone WhatsApp. They could have gone to signal, they could have gone to any number of message.
Becky Worley (00:29:00):
Platforms, network.
Leo Laporte (00:29:01):
True, true social apparently is about to go bankrupt by the way. That's another, but
Wil Harris (00:29:06):
I think that's matter entirely you, you you've hit the nail on the head with the Coliseum thing, right? It's about a group of people wanting, you know, a certain amount of, of spectacle and enjoying this spectacle. But I think the fact that we're even discussing this you know, this, this evening is okay. Tech network. Yeah. We're gonna discuss it because the, and, and the, the quote comes to mind of, you know, Leo, are you not entertained? Yes,
Leo Laporte (00:29:30):
<Laugh> well, I have heard from many of our most avid fans that they are not entertained by discussions of TWiTtter. So <laugh>, I am taking great risk doing this, but I think, think it's important. I, so my
Becky Worley (00:29:42):
Point is a
Leo Laporte (00:29:43):
Little more nuggets. My point with Grassley is he's bringing in two separate things, the privacy violations and foreign actors, they they're, they're two completely separate. They're not, there's no intersection, even though he's acting as if there's an intersection. I think the private actors thing is reasonable nuggets, more nuggets for more,
Becky Worley (00:30:00):
Two, two nuggets that I think are interesting. The attorney for mud is Deborah Kaz. And I thought, gosh, I know that name. Yeah. And I looked her up. She represented Christine Blasey Ford in the Kavanaugh hearings. Yeah. And the chief whistleblower in the Harvey Weinstein debacle.
Leo Laporte (00:30:18):
So she's a, and the important whistleblower attorney,
Becky Worley (00:30:22):
She's a heavy hitter. So she, this is not, these are not small actors here. So I thought that was super interesting.
Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
Can we ask a macro question, rod pile, macro questioner rod finally speaks up, so I've missed wisely avoiding it cuz you for the last month you've been in, in the Arctic. Well, no, I haven't gotten any news cuz I couldn't listen to you up there. It was horrible. And I mean literally the only com coms we had were 144 character texts on our GPS units. But that brought me to thinking about TWiTtter while I was up there because of a similar character count. And so stupid macro question, but has anybody figured out what his game Musks game plan might have been? Just, just stepping back to the beginning of this, this crazy story to almost by TWiTtter as opposed to actually be serious about it. I mean, I know there was talk about, well he was gonna do this and then do that and drive the price down to get it for less and all that.
Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
But this is a guy who love him or like him crazy or not. You know, it has been on this kind of crusade, somewhat cooks out in some, some cases to build electric cars, to save the environment, to build massive ever larger rockets. He tells us to set up a backup population on Mars. Although I think most of us who don't get to go probably wouldn't be that supportive of that. But we like the idea. And in theory, you know, for 44 billion, he could have condominiums on the rings of Saturn right now. So what is the point if he's really doing that? Is there some other agenda here? Does he really think that it is such a big chunk of the public conversation that he's going to use that to drive his other agenda? I'm confused.
Wil Harris (00:32:03):
Can I, can I give the conspiratorial answer from the other side of pond? Oh
Leo Laporte (00:32:06):
Please. I love conspiracies and we never flew to the moon. You're gonna tell me.
Wil Harris (00:32:09):
So the conspiracy that we have over here,
Leo Laporte (00:32:11):
There was a guy used to be on the show that said that, and we don't have, we don't have any money anymore. <Laugh> banned him.
Wil Harris (00:32:17):
Go ahead. Is that Elon obviously has an enormous stake in, in Tesla, which is to a greater or lesser degree, heavily dependent on government grants. And part of the you know, if you look at the, the inflation reduction act gives a lot of credits to auto makers that make electric
Leo Laporte (00:32:35):
Cars, it restores Tesla's credits, which he had lost.
Wil Harris (00:32:38):
Yeah. He has enormous contracts with the space agency and NASA, which are government bodies. And that all of this is a very long play on the expectation that Donald Trump will win in 2024. And in order to restore access to Donald Trump's TWiTtter account in 2024, well, there might be a little quid pro quo. El,
Leo Laporte (00:33:02):
Do you wait a minute people across the pond? Think that,
Wil Harris (00:33:07):
I mean, when it comes to your it's crazy talk, think about most things. Is it, I mean, is it it crazy? Is it crazy to think that Elon would Bartter Donald Trump's account?
Leo Laporte (00:33:16):
I think there's a simpler AUMs razor here. I think there's a simpler explanation for all of this, that the Elon Musk who founded didn't find bought Tesla and built it. Yeah. Did he found SpaceX or did he buy it, found it space? Yeah. He bought it with a couple other engineers and built it is not the Elon Musk of late that we've seen primarily on TWiTtter. His latest thing by the way is the biggest crisis coming to the world is under population, which is why I have 10 children. <Laugh> he's off his rocker now. He's not the same guy he's off his rocker and he's also shoot, he's a ready fire aim kind of guy who ready, fired aim 44 billion to buy TWiTtter and then realized, oh, that was a bad idea. And has been trying to get out of it ever since that's
Wil Harris (00:34:07):
Aums racing fire was how he caught his 10 kids. Wasn't he?
Leo Laporte (00:34:09):
<Laugh> what do you think Becky <laugh>?
Becky Worley (00:34:13):
Yeah, I mean, I, I think he shoots from the hip and it's done. It's worked well for him for a long time. And this, you know, there are there's times when it doesn't work and you wanna back out and he really got into it and is in a now in a big legal brew haha. Which is gonna take up a lot of his time and energy and,
Leo Laporte (00:34:31):
And cost him money cuz yeah. I don't, I don't think there's any way that Delaware court doesn't say, well you gotta make TWiTtter at least a little bit whole, I don't think they're gonna make, 'em buy it. But I think that they're gonna say more than a billion, the more, more than the billion dollar breakup fee, it's gonna cost him several billions. And by the way, I
Becky Worley (00:34:47):
Also think the market changing in the middle of all this offer
Leo Laporte (00:34:50):
Didn't
Becky Worley (00:34:50):
Help. I mean, didn't help and might have given him cold feet if he was sort of on the edge. And so maybe
Wil Harris (00:34:56):
If you look at the amount of Tesla stock minor,
Leo Laporte (00:34:58):
He's had his sold yeah. The
Wil Harris (00:34:59):
Amount of Tesla stock that he sold to to try and make that happen. Right. And saying I'm not gonna sell any more Tesla stock and then two months later, yeah. Eh, more Tesla stock.
Leo Laporte (00:35:08):
Well, there is another conspiracy theory on that one Tesla, as you know, just did a three for one stock swap. And the thinking was that he was gonna sell the stock there. It was a tax manipulation essentially, and then buy it back at a lower cost after the split. So it, and in fact, there's, there's some people who even think that was the play all along. I'm trying to remember who it was not Jim Kramer, another stock guru who says, you know, know what this really was all about a Tesla stock and nothing about TWiTtter, nothing to do with TWiTtter. So
Becky Worley (00:35:44):
I actually thought Elon looked really normal this week at the SpaceX T-Mobile event when he was talking about you know, satellite coverage and how that's gonna
Leo Laporte (00:35:55):
Be, let's talk about this because that's gonna be a great story for the next segment. Cuz it ties in with what Apple's about to do a week from Tuesday or week from Wednesday. I, are we done? Are we done with this TWiT? Yes. We're so done. <Laugh> we're so done. I would say correct me if I'm wrong. Bottom line on this interesting whistle blower, fascinating. Gonna have to withhold judgment till I see more evidence. The EU is also gonna get to an investigation. There's a lot there's investigations, galore being launched by this. I will. I personally gonna wait and see, I'm not gonna believe or disbelieve. I'm just gonna wait and see. Does that seem reasonable?
Becky Worley (00:36:35):
Yeah. There's there's lots of signals pointing in both directions. Yeah. And I think it's fair to hold, hold your judgment until time plays out
Leo Laporte (00:36:43):
In about 20, 28.
Wil Harris (00:36:45):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:36:47):
ALA I think he just loves achieving in chaos. I think he loves attention. I think he's at this point in attention whore mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. Well and
Wil Harris (00:36:55):
Yeah, it's a very him. Well, I mean anything around Elon is a very high signal to noise ratio, right? Or very low what's the right way. Low signal to noise ratio. It's
Leo Laporte (00:37:03):
One of those it's either high or, or low.
Wil Harris (00:37:05):
Well what's the right one. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:37:08):
The lot of noise, little signal, high noise. Yes. So that'd be
Wil Harris (00:37:13):
Depends
Leo Laporte (00:37:13):
On your math
Wil Harris (00:37:15):
Slow. You got it. Slow
Leo Laporte (00:37:15):
People who know you start to say right. People who know Elon well seemed to feel that that money really has been this sort of late arrival of concerns to him. And I mean, he was so close to totally winking out when SpaceX was first failed. Not the first time he's done the he with he's overthrown his entire yeah. Fortune into Tesla, risking the loss of everything. So, and, and did it again with SpaceX at least two or three times. And if it wasn't for external investment, they'd be done. But, and again, these are just people who know him. Well, I don't at all. But their feeling is that this concern about money has become kind of a late arrival. This, you know, emperor Elon thing that we're beginning to see on TWiTtter is also a bit of a late arrival. And they're confused. So when I ask 'em what they feel their feeling is, he's still not that concerned about it.
Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
He's really just concerned about this achievement within chaos kind of lifestyle that he loves. He's done amazing things. The chop sticks, revolutionize the launches, the chopstick thing that catches the SpaceX capsule as it's coming back, it catches it, then repositions it on top of the next rocket. Yeah. What who and who thought that was a good idea, but it works. You know, he took on these major, sorry, I'm getting off the space angle again. I can't Albert, but he took on these major prime contractors that NASA and especially the air force have been working with for decades. Well, that's what we're gonna see tomorrow with Artis, which is essentially a Boeing launch on a SpaceX launch, much delayed six years delayed. Well, depends on how you slice that. You know, start counting. You could say more like 20 years, if you look back to constellation, but he took on all these contractors and said, I can do it better than you and I can bring them off.
Leo Laporte (00:39:00):
And he did back and wash 'em off and empty the Ash trays and launch 'em again. And he did cuz it's just not that hard. So I talked a few years ago to Tori Bruno. Who's the CEO of United launch Alliance. And he said, yeah, he cleaned our clock and we had to go out and figure out how to do this cheaper. And SpaceX now controls over half the world's launch industry. And that includes all this stuff. China does so amazing stuff. He's obviously a genius, but there's, there's a little loose part. Rally. I think honest I've always thought this. If we'd had TWiTtter for 500 years, we would've known they're all freaking nuts. Edison, nuts, Ford nuts. These guys are all nuts. We just didn't know it. Cuz there was no TWiTtter. So thank God for recording. Well, the spectrum hadn't been defined yet. Yeah. Yeah. Are they, is it a spectrum issue? I don't know what Elon says. So and certainly for some of the, you know what, that's convenient for Elon. I don't, I don't, I don't. Yeah, but if you've ever seen him in person, it wouldn't shock me. He claims he's on the autistic spectrum does. Yeah. And he does have those kind of little mental pops where it does seem like it. But like I said, I don't know him. Well else I can't say yeah. I I
Wil Harris (00:40:05):
All, all the geniuses are crazy Laport. No
Leo Laporte (00:40:09):
<Laugh> yeah. Put me put me in that. He's not DD guy or he wouldn't be here. I'm definitely a D yeah.
Becky Worley (00:40:16):
Well when I, when I, I coach and when I coach kids, I often have kids who I look at them and I try and assess who they are and what they're about. And then I imagine their future and some kids they're either jail or Olympics <laugh> and that's kind of,
Leo Laporte (00:40:32):
And the same kid though, that's the point, right? Yeah. Same
Becky Worley (00:40:34):
Kid. You don't know if that kid is going to jail or going to the Olympics, you have no ideas, a go
Wil Harris (00:40:39):
That's a great episode. Title jailer Olympics episode eight 90.
Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
Yeah. <Laugh>
Becky Worley (00:40:45):
So
Leo Laporte (00:40:45):
That's Elon. He's you know what, that's the Olympics, that's the definition of genius. Maybe mm-hmm <affirmative> jailer Olympics, right? No, really seriously. That's the definition. Bell prize. I mean, let's, you know, the genius, I'm not the geniuses of the world are com are a different species. I'm not a, I'm not. And so I'm, you know, I'm just gonna put along <laugh> but, but the geniuses to, to sort that level, there is this great risk that you will go the other way. And I think that that's actually the, the most astute thing we've said today, Becky. Well,
Wil Harris (00:41:18):
It's the, it's the, it's the Hemingway Oscar wild hunters Thompson model, right?
Leo Laporte (00:41:23):
You be a genius. Look at Steve. Josh.
Wil Harris (00:41:25):
You're mad to be a genius.
Leo Laporte (00:41:25):
You can go on and on and on. Look at a till of the hun nice guy. <Laugh> but you
Becky Worley (00:41:32):
Really wouldn't want him as a neighbor. He was a nice, he was nice guy. He was a nice
Leo Laporte (00:41:37):
Guy, Greg cook. He was fun to be what were, were eating at that barbecue. But you wouldn't wanna move next door. Yeah, exactly. Well, and I, I say, you know, just in following up what you're talking about, I worked at Caltech for a year, so I'd go down to the cafeteria for lunch every day. And you're surrounded by these Nobel prize, winning multi doctorate, brilliant people from all over the country. But the cafeteria is the most dysfunctional yeah. Logistics, nightmare you've ever seen because people walk, literally walk into each other lunches, flying everywhere. I mean, I would try and walk with my tray with the sandwich. And you'd sort of carved this path between people that are staring over your right shoulder, never in your eye, over your right shoulder and walking right towards you. Like you can't be there. You're not allowed in that same dimension they're in or something.
Leo Laporte (00:42:22):
It wasn't arrogance. It was just just personality. You have to be a rule breaker. If you're going to achieve to that. I mean, clearly Eli, these, these weren't rules, they were breaking. This was just their condition. Those was just their condition they were on. And it was really cool to be around those people. They were the the at spectrum, the at, till the hunt spectrum. <Laugh> yeah, I think we've got a new one. We've got a new one. All long pork for lunch. Okay. O nice guy, but you wouldn't want go to the barbecue. Wouldn't wanna go to the barbecue. I, I know what you's saying. We do have to take a break. We will come back and, and then we will talk about whatever that thing was. About five minutes ago, you said we should talk about, but we're gonna get to that. <Laugh> you bet. Soon as somebody
Becky Worley (00:43:00):
Remembers T-Mobile in space. Thank you doing it. Thank you. I'm here for you. I'm still your producer. There's
Leo Laporte (00:43:04):
Still my producer. <Laugh> she remember Mo move your mouse.
Becky Worley (00:43:10):
Remember that? Yes.
Leo Laporte (00:43:11):
We're doing call for help. I've told this so many times, but if so, I apologize. If you heard it, we're doing call for help. I have Becky in my ear, which is the best thing in the world is to have Becky Worley in the control room. And she's the producer. She's the line producer. She's in your ear. And she says, move your mouth.
Becky Worley (00:43:26):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:43:27):
And I thought she said, move your mouth. She meant my mouth pointer was on something on the screen. She meant move your mouse. But I like an idiot start going like this. <Laugh>
Becky Worley (00:43:41):
That was the control. And how wonderfully collaborative you
Leo Laporte (00:43:52):
Mouse, mouse. There's a fine line between mouth and mouse. I'm just saying like, there is between could get you in realtor, the Olympics and jail. Our show today brought to you by policy genius. Now this is true genius. Here. We pay hundreds of dollars a year for insurance to protect our homes, our cars, our phones do what are you doing to protect your family? Right? My phone's insured my family. Wait a minute. What mortgage payments schools, colleges, those kind of debts don't disappear. If something happens to you, a life insurance policy is the, is the best way. The only way to protect your loved ones with, with a financial cushion, they can use to cover those costs. And I know no one wants to think about the worst case scenario, but let me tell you it's important for peace of mind. It's the first thing I did when the kids were born.
Leo Laporte (00:44:42):
I said, you know what? Responsible I gotta, I have to get life insurance and I still have it, which probably I could stop now. But I, I think it was a very important thing to do. We also have insurance on me for the company. We have key what they call key man insurance, right? Having life insurance through your job, which I always had, probably not enough, maybe enough, you know, to buy a nice earn, but that's about it. Most people need about 10 times more coverage than their job provides to properly provide for your families. Now I gotta tell you, life insurance gets more expensive as you age. I'm glad I got it in my thirties. You always wanna get the policy sooner than later. Here's the way to do it. I wish this had had been around when I was getting my policy policy genius.
Leo Laporte (00:45:29):
It's not an insurer. It's an insurance marketplace. Okay. So that's what you want. You wanna make it easy to compare quotes from top companies, but the big ones I Prudential, but you wanna do it in one place to find the lowest price in life insurance, by comparing quotes with policy genius, you can say 50% or more on life insurance. That's the market is very inefficient. And so, and so the cost of life insurance for you could vary 50%, even more, right? You can go to policy genius, get a op, get a policy for say, let's say half a million dollars in coverage. That's probably what you'd wanna start with as little as $17 a month. Isn't it your family worth that? Click the link on the show page, or go to policygenius.com/TWiT. You can get personalized quotes in minutes, no obligation, no cost find the right policy for your needs.
Leo Laporte (00:46:19):
In order advise you on this and help you with this. The the people of policy genius have to be licensed agents. That doesn't mean they're selling you their life insurance, but they have to be licensed agents to, to advise you. So they, and they're working for, I wanna make this really clear. They're working for you. They are not employees of insurance companies. They're on hand for the whole process so that you have somebody trusted, you can ask, well, what's this mean? What is it? What should I do? They want you to understand your options? So you can make decisions with confidence and they're not paid by the insurance companies. Policy genius does not add on extra fees. They don't sell your info to third parties. I know we're all very sensitive about that. These days, just check you know, Google or trust pilot, and look at the reviews.
Leo Laporte (00:47:02):
Thousands of five star reviews. People use it. They love it. You can get coverage and as little as a week, if you want, you can avoid unnecessary medical exams. You know, just, it depends, but you can go there and say, that's one of the things I'm looking for since 2014, policy geniuses helped get this over 30 million people shop for insurance. They've placed 150 billion in coverage of the biggest insurance companies. The best insurance companies they do of course have home auto disability renters. They have all the insurance. So anytime you need insurance, policygenius.com/TWiTt. But I, I wanted to really emphasize the life insurance cuz that's something I think a lot of people forget about go to policygenius.com/TWiTt, get your free life insurance quotes. See how much you could save. Thank you, policy genius for supporting the show. We appreciate it. And you support the show. And I, I always say this, but please take it seriously when you go to that special address, cuz that they're looking for that to see if you saw it here, policy genius.com/TWiT. I'm gonna get to your story, but I'm gonna do it in a circuitous fashion. Becky Worley. Okay. Because the apple event is we find we've got the in, I didn't get an invitation. The in invitations went out. Are you gonna go, Becky? Do you get to go to,
Becky Worley (00:48:24):
I'm not sure I got the invitation to stream, but
Leo Laporte (00:48:27):
Oh yeah, but that doesn't count
Becky Worley (00:48:29):
Or may not. But see, I think we get one invitation for ABC. So yeah, I
Leo Laporte (00:48:34):
They're about
Becky Worley (00:48:34):
Sending me. I'm not
Leo Laporte (00:48:35):
Sure everybody in Northern California gets one invitation and I'm not on that list. No.
Becky Worley (00:48:40):
No. Well you and I were both banned. I'm just, were you banned? Yes, because of,
Leo Laporte (00:48:46):
Oh this is when you accosted Steve jobs.
Becky Worley (00:48:49):
He came to me.
Leo Laporte (00:48:50):
Okay. On the record, tell us what happened.
Becky Worley (00:48:52):
I was, I was live streaming to you from the event, from the magic room where you get to touch all the
Leo Laporte (00:48:58):
Goodies, the demo room. Yes.
Becky Worley (00:48:59):
Yeah. And I was just showing everything that was there and I was live streaming and then I had a one of those headsets on it. Let
Leo Laporte (00:49:06):
Let's let's let's run the let's run the tape here. Here we go. Turn up my sound. Do you have my sound? All right. I don't know why I'm plugging into the phone. I guess that's the only way I could where's where's so
Becky Worley (00:49:17):
I'm this is from my phone and I'm just looking at everything. And then Steve walked over and he walked up to me and said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm live streaming. And we're looking at all the great gadgets. And then I asked him a question that he didn't like, and then his lady handler got real. That that's her and Katie. Yeah, she got, she got real unhappy with me.
Leo Laporte (00:49:42):
Yeah. Pushed you away. And you asked him, when are you gonna open FaceTime? You promised FaceTime would be open source, right?
Becky Worley (00:49:49):
Yep.
Leo Laporte (00:49:49):
Yeah. Why am I not getting sound? Are you, are you doing, am I what's going on on your side? It's on my end. He says I don't think it's on. Would you
Becky Worley (00:49:59):
Please check? Well, he didn't like that question very much. And, and Katie
Leo Laporte (00:50:02):
He's look at his face. Oh, he's grumpy
Becky Worley (00:50:06):
Video conferencing.
Leo Laporte (00:50:07):
Oh, wait a minute. Let me go back me. Go back. We okay. Just I magically fix the sound. It
Becky Worley (00:50:11):
Fits in the bag and you take it up with
Leo Laporte (00:50:13):
You every, okay. Here's Becky a costing. Say that again. The greatest man who ever lived
Becky Worley (00:50:19):
Great. You like it a lot, a lot fits in the bag and you take it up with you everywhere.
Steve Jobs (00:50:23):
You don't even need a bag.
Becky Worley (00:50:28):
2.39 pounds. Can I, can I ask you one other question? Does the fact that we now have FaceTime just on the Mac mean we won't see APIs for other video conferencing. We didn't say any such. Okay. Just check.
Becky Worley (00:50:40):
We didn't say any such
Leo Laporte (00:50:41):
Thing. Yeah, he did. There you go. No, he did. It's our first, that's a first on the TWiTt live action. And, and so you haven't been invited back since then, huh?
Becky Worley (00:50:50):
A couple years. Once they kind of, once Katie left, once Katie
Leo Laporte (00:50:53):
Left, then did Katie cotton ever at any point say, do you know Leola port?
Becky Worley (00:50:56):
No. <laugh> okay. No.
Leo Laporte (00:50:58):
Okay. Just
Wil Harris (00:50:59):
Check.
Becky Worley (00:50:59):
So in love, I didn't write you out. I'm just saying,
Wil Harris (00:51:03):
I love just the, the, the mild casual sexes and of like, can you put this in a bag? And it's like, no, no, no, you don't even need a bag. You can put it in your pocket. It's like many dresses have pockets. Come on,
Leo Laporte (00:51:13):
Man. <Laugh>
Wil Harris (00:51:16):
This is the, this is the major complaint of all the women in my life. None of my dresses have pockets. What are you doing?
Leo Laporte (00:51:21):
This is the purse. Of course.
Becky Worley (00:51:22):
I think in hindsight, I like the fact that we were talking about like, oh, it's so light and casual. Can you put it in the pocket? Hey, are, were those APIs coming out? Yeah. Where
Leo Laporte (00:51:29):
About FaceTime? Open source. <Laugh> use that. You sand. You're a sandbagger you are so good. You are so good. Oh, thank you for doing that. We funny. I have such respect for you, Becky. That was
Wil Harris (00:51:44):
Fun.
Becky Worley (00:51:44):
Well, that was a debacle.
Wil Harris (00:51:45):
It was, you was amazing about that. Clip is man. That is an old ass iPhone. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:51:50):
Oh yeah. I don't know why. I don't know why we're playing it off an iPhone. I don't know what was going on there, but anyway so,
Wil Harris (00:51:57):
But the new apple event is going out. It's happening September the seventh,
Leo Laporte (00:52:01):
September 7th. And the invite has this the Alka seltzer, apple. I call it plot, plot, fizz, fizz. Oh, what an iPhone. It is the tag is far out, which means me think this is supposed to be space. These are galaxies, right? Yeah. This is
Becky Worley (00:52:19):
The apple looks like stars and the galaxy. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:52:22):
So that makes me think about the rumors from a couple of years ago that the iPhone would have satellite connectivity, which then leads me to the story you were referring to because weirdly just this week T-Mobile and SpaceX announced there would be satellite connectivity for T-Mobile subscribers coming next year. Hmm. Through what, what system? Well, that's an interesting question. Starlink with the Starlink Starlink. Now I don't understand they say you don't need anything special in your phone.
Becky Worley (00:53:02):
They said a piece of T-Mobile mid band, two and a half gigahertz spectrum, and a view clear view of the sky is all you need. And that it will use the existing hardware that's already in your phone.
Leo Laporte (00:53:16):
Well, really
Wil Harris (00:53:17):
Cause that two and a half gig Hert spectrum has been like, just kicking like ages. That was the, that was the slightly lane spectrum that people had to give up for 5g.
Leo Laporte (00:53:27):
I'm
Becky Worley (00:53:28):
Confused. They said you'll be able to, you'll be able to text send images. And if there aren't that many people in your area you'll possibly be able to do video and specifically said works with existing cell phones. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:53:42):
It's, it's it I'm gathering. And certainly the apple solution is intended for areas where there's no coverage, but you need, it used an emergency. It's like a spot phone. Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> but that didn't sound like what T-Mobile
Becky Worley (00:54:00):
No, the apple one was exclusively an SOS communication, right. Was the rumor. But the T-Mobile one is, they said it'll be free for premium or mid-range accounts. Low cost accounts probably won't have it.
Leo Laporte (00:54:14):
It's and Musk said it's meant to provide basic coverage to areas that are completely dead.
Becky Worley (00:54:20):
Hawaii, Alaska. This is one of the ocean parts.
Leo Laporte (00:54:23):
<Laugh> ocean park.
Wil Harris (00:54:24):
Yeah. This is one of those things where it's like, it feels like I don't wanna say like it's almost too localized to be an apple event, but it's like Europe doesn't have that problem right there. There, there aren't places in Europe really where you can go where you can't get good cell.
Leo Laporte (00:54:44):
Oh, come on coverage. There are places in Sylvania where you cannot get cell coverage.
Wil Harris (00:54:50):
It feels like a very American thing. My, I have, I have an alternative theory. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:54:55):
This is a wait. This is, I'm gonna news to me. I did not realize that only in America you lose cell phone coverage. <Laugh>
Wil Harris (00:55:00):
Yeah. You know you, anywhere in England, you're gonna get decent 4g. Interesting. you know, that, that that's, that's what happens when you get Brexit, you know, you <laugh> Brexit happens when you get the amazing coverage.
Leo Laporte (00:55:12):
All right.
Wil Harris (00:55:13):
Okay. Okay. What about, what about what about if it's a camera that has like a space mode? Because everyone wants to take proper photos of
Leo Laporte (00:55:22):
Space. Oh, this is you're talking about the apple.
Wil Harris (00:55:23):
You never get good ones.
Leo Laporte (00:55:24):
Yeah. That was the other speculation is that these are Astro photography stars. My first hit on that'd
Wil Harris (00:55:32):
Be
Leo Laporte (00:55:32):
Cool. Right. Something you might get off the web and that you could then make the illusion to well, and they're selling all these great. If you look at Celestron now they're really answering on the iPhone six, which has excellent Astro photography. Yeah. There's a lot came out a year ago. They've sold seven of those since you came in. Yeah, but I'm one of 'em. So <laugh> there you go. No, but they're really, that's very apple though. Isn't it? And now for the first time Astro photography on a phone,
Wil Harris (00:55:59):
Well, yeah, because those seven people that bought that phone don't count. It's you gonna bring space photography to the mainstream. Okay. We're gonna make space photography accessible to people for the first time you can come up with all sorts of apple blurb, it'll be called you know, face space, face space, an apple app. And there'll be an open API for it for everyone else.
Becky Worley (00:56:19):
Thank God.
Leo Laporte (00:56:20):
So is that, is that the panel's you know, or just sense that this is, or just cause it's I often web decade now on Mac break weekly, we often say the designers at apple are just laughing their ass off when they see all the speculation from media. Oh, this must mean satellite phones. No, no, it's just a good picture. Yeah.
Becky Worley (00:56:42):
Maybe it's just to tie into Artis. Maybe the timing's close to the launch. Who
Leo Laporte (00:56:46):
Knows? Yeah. Or J w S T. Yeah, that just looks like moon dust. That's kind of weird looking isn't it. Okay. Scruffy, if it's supposed to be Artis, but I, I do buy the web thing. Maybe I'm looking at it and it does look a little bit like James Webb galaxy. See there's it does. Yeah. There's some on the side, there, there diamond, you know, cat, cat eye, but then what's inside nothing. That's gravitational lens and that's the power. Oh, are they gonna use gravitational lens for, for the web <laugh> they did for that first picture. So use it for the web. I know, but I, can you do that with your, that crummy little home telescope? That, that I doubt, but, okay, so you don't think this is the ALCA seltzer apple <laugh> cause it could look like that. I mean, I could be that too well after paying 800 bucks for a new lid for this computer a month after it went out a warranty, ALCA, seltzer, apple would've been appropriate.
Leo Laporte (00:57:35):
So when you were up in the Arctic circle, yes, sir. You had no phone service. You had to use satellite. Yeah. We had to actually use our GPS units and the, and they had garments have, but it's alpha numeric. So it was like a trip back to 1991. So it was going, you mean it nine? You have to yes. Oh my tap, tap, tap, tap, tap up, tap up. I did it backwards. Where's the delete. If you want the letter C you have to tap AA. It wasn't quite that bad, but, but they basically had a display on, on mine. Anyway. Now supposedly get this. You can hook it up to your phone, right? You can you're reading Bluetooth it to your phone. Yeah, no, the, the GPS, GPS the garment. So you can then go in on your phone and use that keyboard. So I brought up a Bluetooth keyboard, so I could Bluetooth to my phone, which would then Bluetooth to the garment.
Leo Laporte (00:58:24):
But unfortunately I got up to the north pole effectively and got ready to sign everything up or to, to get going. Cuz I had already signed it up when I was down here and it said, Hey, I can't find the domain server, the domain server. Why would you have to do that for something is designed to operate out in the wild. So domain server. Yeah. Oh, well it's really upsetting. And you called us we, we heard from you every week via Iridium, which is a satellite phone service. Yeah. How many of those are left? I don't know. Cause our service was, was abysmal. So when Iridium launched, it failed pretty. It was Motorola. I feel like, I think so it failed pretty quickly and it was like a batch of 16 and then another 16, there are 66 satellites. 66. Okay. And they're geos stationary.
Leo Laporte (00:59:12):
I think they're floating right above you at all today. Right. But they still kind of bump along the horizon over the day. Oh, so they're not geos stationary so well, so we, we had time of day issues. Now it could have been weather, but certainly, you know, standing outside under a clear blue sky, they would connect and disconnect and connect. Here's a bit of, of history. The Iridium communication service launched in 1998. Becky, we know that year very well. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> the first Iridium call was made by vice president Al gore to the great grandson of Alexander Graham bell, Gilbert Groner who was the chairman of the national geographic society. Motorola yeah. Provided the technology. But I remember yeah. Nine months after the launch, they went into bankruptcy <laugh> wow. The handsets could not operate as promoted until the entire constellation of satellites was in place.
Leo Laporte (01:00:03):
And that was gonna cost so much money that they just folded, which of course means nobody bought. It was one of those catch 20 twos, which means nobody bought the phones, which means they couldn't do anything more. Apparently was also fairly mismanaged. But eventually in fact, the 2000 Motorola said, we're gonna have to deorbit these. We're gonna have to bring them back. They good? Yeah, no that's I was, they remained in orbit in operational the government, the us government, as opposed to the queen stepped into save arid by providing $72 million in exchange for a two year contract. I'm waiting for Ricky EDIA and approving the fire sale of the company that erased 4 billion in debt. It was restarted in 2001 by the new, the Iridium satellite LLC owned by a group of private investors. So that's why you could use that. They replaced the original constellation. They sent 75 new satellites up on space, X, Falcon, nine rockets again, Musk. Yeah. It all roads lead to Elon.
Becky Worley (01:01:08):
I love this concept. I really hope it succeeds. And I hope apple brings it into their technology. This could save so many lives. I think about all the people who are
Leo Laporte (01:01:17):
James Kim, our dear, dear James Kim.
Becky Worley (01:01:20):
My first thought was James Kim who got lost in the, in the Oregon mountains, trapped in the snow. Nobody could find him for 10 days and he died. And it, I just think about all the back country skiers. Yeah. All the anybody who's in the, in nature, you know, there's so many times where you're off the grid and off that, that coverage. And it's a little nerve wracking. I'll say as a mom, I would want my kids to have that on their phones.
Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
You, I mean, you spend a lot of time. You're from Hawaii. You spend a lot of time. I think stand up paddle boarding. I don't know, doing stuff, doing stuff in wilderness. You probably would use this. Yeah.
Becky Worley (01:01:59):
Oh yeah. And I fish a lot. And so, you know, to be out, especially now with the fires oh yeah. You know, you, you could get, I mean, place, I went fishing on the Tual river this summer with my son and we went down this really tiny road one way in one way out a week later, the fire started in Yosemite and we could have been trapped in there like that
Leo Laporte (01:02:22):
Easy.
Becky Worley (01:02:24):
Yeah. And so having that kind of access it just in it's funny because you think about it when I used to before cell phones used to never think about this stuff, but now you, you just that access to help. And, and first responders is a nice thing to have. You
Leo Laporte (01:02:39):
Really get used to it. Well, and, and you bring up the point of two-way communication because you could get the warning that the fire's closing in on you, whereas, right. I was just thinking about it with the garment. Well, I got an SOS button. That's all I need to do. And somebody mentioned on, on the chat, by the way in Marsat we had an Inmarsat box as well, and it worked for about an hour a day. Oh wow. And it was cuz the geos sync satellites were down close to south of you. Yeah. Cuz they're used more for Marine communication I guess. But you know, we walked up to the mountain, so we'd have a signal, but what's weird is it would be fine for like an hour. And then it kind of vanished for the rest of the, of the day when the sun didn't go down. The sad thing on the James Kim story was he was an early user of GPS and his GPS map led him to a place that was, he shouldn't have led him to, he,
Becky Worley (01:03:28):
It showed a logging road as a true through pass from the highway five to cut over to the coastal route a shortcut. It was just a, a logging road that wasn't open in the winter.
Leo Laporte (01:03:41):
So he, and he had his kids with him and his wife and they were stranded in the car. He went to, you know, they were, I think they were burning their tires to stay warm. I mean burned
Becky Worley (01:03:52):
Their tires. They had a couple snacks and she was breastfeeding and that's how the kids made it. And then after 10 days, James just felt like they weren't gonna get found snow on the ground. And he went out and, and did died, breaks my heart thermia
Leo Laporte (01:04:08):
Yeah. Breaks my heart. Yeah. Yeah. So technology failed him where let's hope technology could save people going forward.
Wil Harris (01:04:17):
You know, what's gonna save people live.
Leo Laporte (01:04:21):
If you say I'm gonna get rid of com
Wil Harris (01:04:23):
For the counter cut.
Leo Laporte (01:04:25):
That's it? Yeah. The whole punch.
Wil Harris (01:04:29):
Yeah. I mean, how did you transition after that? <Laugh>
Becky Worley (01:04:32):
Thank you for that.
Leo Laporte (01:04:33):
Thank you for helping us
Wil Harris (01:04:35):
Facto producer of the show.
Becky Worley (01:04:36):
Thank you for that segue.
Leo Laporte (01:04:37):
A terrible, terrible segue. But thank you. <Laugh>
Wil Harris (01:04:42):
The event rumors. Are the notches going? Yes. We're gonna have an Android S camera cut out for the 14. Yes. Yes. we're gonna have a pro watch, which has a two inch watch face.
Leo Laporte (01:04:53):
No, two inches 46 millimeters, just a two millimeters bigger. That's like,
Wil Harris (01:05:00):
<Laugh> two. I'm all for, you know what two weeks know. I see lots of friends who have the, the enormous Rolexs or the enormous kind of, you know, protects or whatever. Sure. I just want, I want, I want apple watch. That's just gonna like, you know, obscure my wrist.
Leo Laporte (01:05:13):
How about when you could hang around your neck?
Wil Harris (01:05:17):
Like, like like biggies the dude with the flavor FLA
Leo Laporte (01:05:21):
Flavor
Wil Harris (01:05:22):
Flavor. I want the, I want the flavor FLA apple watch and airports pro airports pro to get what is described as a beat esque redesign. I dunno what that means.
Leo Laporte (01:05:36):
Esque, you talked on this show about why men wear huge watches. Well, let's ask flavor flavor, especially. Why do they wear it? Cuz they're big. There is. Yeah. Yeah. Well cause yeah. What men wear watches to show their masculinity, big watches masculine, but I always found it that it's gotta be big with lots of little dials and tiny numbers
Wil Harris (01:05:57):
We can. Yeah. But here here's the thing. So so I can, I can almost exactly tell you this. So as Leo will know from one of my former jobs, as Leo likes to point out when I worked at con asked working on GQ and Vogue and that kind of thing oh you're
Leo Laporte (01:06:12):
An expert
Wil Harris (01:06:13):
Men like big watches because it's the very few one of the very few things that we get to wear is jewelry.
Leo Laporte (01:06:19):
We don't have any
Wil Harris (01:06:20):
Choices can wear earrings, necklaces, nose, piercing, rings, all that kind of thing. Men basically have watches as the only thing that's socially acceptable to wear
Leo Laporte (01:06:28):
Is it's so funny decoration
Leo Laporte (01:06:30):
That you're saying this because I had lunch or dinner with Ben par, who's been in our shows used to be at Mashable. He's a startup guy and he's wearing, I, he's not wearing an apple watch. He's wearing a Movado big old Mo. And I said, why aren't you wearing an apple watch? You're a geek. He said, because we don't have many chances for accessorizing and this is it. Or if you're a physician red noses, colorful ties and strange socks, there, aren't a lot of choices. We all, we all wear a uniform. Yeah. Well it's interesting cuz the, I, the apple watch is kind of one of those great. Democratizer sort of like the Prius was you can live in Los Angeles in west Los Angeles, no less. And drive a Prius and wear crumby jeans and a $500 t-shirt and people, people take out how much money you make. Yeah. They assume you're loaded. And the same thing as once they see my nipple ring, they know. Ow. Ow. Just kidding. I'll see. I stole that from the chat
Wil Harris (01:07:25):
Room. Leo. No.
Leo Laporte (01:07:27):
Wow. But have you ever had a big chronograph, a big what? You know, one of those big, oh, I thought you were talking about no. Ooh. No. because yes, I've had big watches. This is, but the apple watch is pretty is, is a big watch. No, but I mean like the, the detailed, you know yeah. I've the whole big planet earth on that kind of thing. And I, I bought one just cuz it was on sale. It was on prime day. It was a psycho Cordura or something. Those are beautiful. I think they look like a bling, you know, of quick glance. And I thought, well, I'll take that to the events where I have to, you know, try and build up my, my stubby stature and I cannot learn how to use the thing. It took me an hour to figure out how to set the time zone.
Leo Laporte (01:08:07):
Yeah. And now it's got all this other stuff on it and then, oh, I'm in a different, I have to set the, and I had to get out the instruction book to figure out how to use. And then the second hand doesn't CA it just drives me bats. So I went back to wearing my little Chinese workout watch instead. My watch is well, I'll show you my my new watch, which is, I, I think I might be a little too big. I don't know. I'm just, I'm just thinking it just might be a little too large. John's bringing it in. I don't even think I could wear this around my neck. Actually. I
Becky Worley (01:08:38):
<Laugh> <laugh>
Leo Laporte (01:08:40):
Well, I've never seen one of these metal before. They're usually ting. Oh no, these are nice. This is the real deal. Wow. Wow.
Becky Worley (01:08:47):
Yeah, that might be a little, little big flavor flavor. Leo
Leo Laporte (01:08:50):
Might wear this. It's
Wil Harris (01:08:52):
Anderson Leo. I can see you holding it and just sort of, you know, you you're in the middle of a shot in a, we Anderson movie.
Leo Laporte (01:08:58):
I've never had a watch who had to roll on its side. Roll it here. Alright, moving, moving right along anyway, with the apple event a week from Wednesday, we will stream it live. Micah Sergeant got an invitation, so he will be going down there. Interesting thing about the invitation. It did say the Steve jobs theater. So we were,
Wil Harris (01:09:17):
It's gonna be in person,
Leo Laporte (01:09:18):
Right? Not only is it in person it's gonna be inside. So the last thing apple did WWDC, they did it at the campus, but they did it outside. There's lots of room outside there. It, the invitation specifically says the Steve jobs theater.
Wil Harris (01:09:31):
Well, it kind of goes along with the, with the Tim cook three days back to work, right? Yeah. So Apple's clearly like, this is it. We are all back to normality. Right? It's
Leo Laporte (01:09:39):
Over, CO's over, but I'm sort of stuck on Micah getting the invite cuz surely they know he's the up and coming rising star. Apparently they don't don't mention that apple. He doesn't know me. Never met me. Never met
Becky Worley (01:09:53):
The name. Dan's over. You're good to go.
Leo Laporte (01:09:55):
If you know, it's funny cuz it's, Gizmoto got invited back. Becky Worley got invited back. Seems like, did you do any penance, Becky? Did you kiss the ring or anything?
Becky Worley (01:10:07):
<Laugh> I have kissed the ring. You've
Leo Laporte (01:10:09):
Kissed the ring. No I don't. I have kissed the, I don't care because somebody has to these things, in fact more and more I'm thinking these are just big adverts. Why do we cover them? Like we do.
Becky Worley (01:10:22):
Well, there was a great article about how tech products are no longer announced they're dropped. Yeah. And the product drop is now an event. Just like an album launching. Yeah. And so it's just the opportunity to, to just bring the hype basically.
Leo Laporte (01:10:38):
Yeah. And I don't wanna be complicit in that. So what we do is we stream it, but we then comment on it and try to give it some grounded and some reality. Mm. I don't know. I I'm wondering. Go ahead. Well,
Wil Harris (01:10:53):
Well I was just gonna say my, my grandmother bless her soul at 98 years old, just once had the insight she was saying, you know, I was sort of explaining what I was doing, what I was working on. And she said, you know, nothing can ever just appear in a shop these days. It has to be launched. <Laugh> everything has to happen. Launch. I love her. And my 98 year old grandmother grasped this idea of everything needs a launch. And I think you know, whatever Apple's gonna do on September the seventh, it will well and truly be launched.
Leo Laporte (01:11:26):
You know what else will be launched? Lieutenant rah. Oh, her ashes. That's a segue. Right? Michelle Nichols ashes. Wow. Wow, sure. <Laugh> I didn't know this there's a company that does this, this, this is their business of, of taking remains into space, a sample. So they take just a thin of you. They don't take your a little bit. Yeah. Michelle Nichols, who recently passed of course, Lieutenant <inaudible> from star Trek will be on the next flight. She won't be alone by the way. She will be accompanied by ashes from Scotty James doen ashes from Jean Roddenberry and Jean's wife, Magel, Roddenberry, but it's not the first time any of those others have been in space. I was gonna say, Scotty already went all of them. That's kind of weird. All of them. Okay. and so they had some leftovers you're saying, well, that's why I think it really isn't.
Leo Laporte (01:12:30):
Well, they had some conflict. It's like a little tiny bit. Yeah. Do they go back to the earn and say, can we have a little bit more, we want to, we want, I don't know. You don't have to ask the urn, you just take it. Okay. I've got a couple of those, those things. So her, the, the Celest Voyager Memorial space flight launch from a Cape Canaveral is it a SpaceX? Rocket? I know I, it wasn't, this one might be, yeah. You know, for, for my money, if, if I'm gonna do something like that, I wanna launch a whole bone <laugh> you know? Okay. That's creepy. Not cremated. Sorry, but there's a reason. So, so first of all, you get that 2001 moment of the bone drifting in space. Oh geez. Stanley Kubrick did. Yes. But then you aim it for reentry.
Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
So my kid can come out and laugh and clap while my bone burns, burns up up. And you can watch it. I mean, that'd be much cooler than just the idea that, oh, you know, dad's pinky ashes are in orbit, so I'm, I'm, I, this is more than orbit by the way, they will be sent out beyond the Lara two point where James Webb is. Oh, so, so now we're gonna have these impacting James Webner in space, more damage on top of what we're doing. Yeah. In space. That must be te Doura it's pounded powered by United launch Alliance. I looked it up vCAN sentar yeah. U I of Vulcan get it. Will host gene robury major Barrett, Roddenberry, James Doon. Not their first time up there. According to vanity fair. Right? The first time Jean and ma went up into space.
Leo Laporte (01:13:58):
Am I saying that right? Ma Meel ma ma was when Jim Weatherby secretly took them up in the space shuttle, Columbia 1992. Oh, cool. Is that in 19, 19 97, gene was loaded into a Pegasus XL rocket in the Canary islands from which ashes were launched orbited earth for five years before reentering. So we are all, there's a little bit of which didn't see gene Roddenberry and all of us now. And then through Celest gene and major had some of their remains set up two more times. So this their fifth time in 2013 their ashes were joined by Scotty and a strand of hair from Arthur C. Clark. This time, this company launches DNA as well as ashes. Yeah. I, I knew they were moving that direction. So you could just, I would just send up a skin cell, I guess there's a great science fiction story that needs to be written here about James doing and the shell Nichols coming back to earth, cuz somebody cloned their DNA.
Leo Laporte (01:15:02):
We sent it to the aliens. They clone it and sent it back. Like, I don't know. There seems like a story there. I'll leave that open to you. <Laugh> it. There is by the way, a chance to join them. You have to be dead first. I was gonna freeze that's bit. Isn't it get in the way of doing that whole thing. Yeah, no, no. Cuz you could send a pinky, just freeze the head and send the rest. Okay. Reservations are still open. Starts at pricing starts at $12,500. I don't know. And that's respect. See if they were gonna launch all of the cremated, we need a Falcon heavy. So I don't think it's gonna happen. Starting at this is so curious, starting at starting it. What do you think? The bargain price? Well, maybe that's lower in the, in the faring and you come last upsell. What's the upsell on your, what is the, you can get a Memorial service, a launchpad tour. Doesn't really help the ashes. Much of Val lower Ash holder holder. Yeah. There's Jean and major Hugh Daniel drew a, the,
Wil Harris (01:15:59):
I was really disturbed by the fact that the font on that website is basically the halo font, which makes it seem very like,
Leo Laporte (01:16:05):
Wow,
Wil Harris (01:16:06):
Xbox,
Leo Laporte (01:16:07):
This is gonna be yeah. Is that really the halo font? That's a stir.
Wil Harris (01:16:12):
Yeah. It's very, very similar.
Leo Laporte (01:16:13):
Is there a date on this cuz the V's not flying yet? Well did they say when launch schedule? They had scheduled delays. If they Memorial flights, the Aurora flight, the tranquility flight, the destiny flight, the enterprise flight and the Excel year flight. Yeah, they're all scheduled. They're all scheduled later 20, 22 for some of these November, 2022, Q4 2023 February 20, 23, this our most popular Memorial space flight service. <Laugh> really all the dozens of people that have done it since 2000. When we started, this reminds me of this very cool service that that was coming outta Japan about three years ago, four years ago, maybe where they were launching. I think it was before I came in your show, it was, they were launching little cans of Tungston ball bearings. Yeah. Coded in different chemicals. So you could have a bespoke meteor shower.
Leo Laporte (01:17:12):
So if you're having a wedding reception, it's outside, it's sunset. This thing's going overhead at that exact moment. And it would have a little explosive charge that would blast all these tongues and balls out. And they'd reenter in this big plume of different colors. That's like special fireworks, something little expensive. Yeah. A little questionable environmentally to some, but I thought it was a really cool idea. If you want to go up reservations close August 31st for the enterprise flight, which will be later this year or as soon as can get a space launch vehicle up and running. Yeah. And they will stream the Memorial service in the launch live via webcast. Okay. Payment plan is available. Let's sign right up. Let's take a little break. Our show today brought to you by user way.org user way.org. I'm talking about making your website, ADA compliant accessible.
Leo Laporte (01:18:08):
Not only is it the right thing to do because you're opening up your website to a much larger group, 60 million plus people, you have a responsibility to make your site accessible. It's a public entity. So you gotta make it accessible. And with user way it's easy. That was my biggest concern was, oh, I can't afford it. Or it's gonna be too hard. No user way's really affordable. And it's really easy. An incredible it's AI powered that tirelessly enforces all the accessibility guidelines, the w C a G WCA guidelines. And I love this. So do our engineers. It's one line of JavaScript, that's it? Because user weighs so good. It's used by more than a million websites, including the big guys Coca-Cola Disney eBay. These are companies that really have to be accessible and user way can do that. As you get bigger, they scale with you.
Leo Laporte (01:18:57):
If they can handle Disney, absolutely they can handle you. They make best in class enterprise level accessibility tools available to you, your small or medium sized business. And then as you scale, you need user way and you're ready. It just makes business sense. Some of the biggest problems, nav menus, very difficult. So the way this works, if you're blind or you're using accessibility tools, there is what they call an accessibility layer. That's what the screen reader sees. So really what user way does, is make sure that all the information available to the front page to the site user is available to the browser in the accessibility layer. It changes colors. Now you've got your Pantone color for your business. Of course we do too. Doesn't change that, but it adjusts hu luminance. So it's easier for people with vision issues to read. So user way will generate all tags.
Leo Laporte (01:19:47):
That's one of the reasons it needs AI. It can actually see the picture and generate an all tag that matches the picture automatically. You can go in if you want, you can modify it. Of course it fixes violations like vague links, fixes, broken links makes sure that your website uses accessible colors and you'll get a detailed report of all the violations that were fixed on your, your website. So you know exactly what it did. Plus you can work with it user way, integrates seamlessly with your site builder software, let user way help your business. Meet its compliance goals. Improve the experience for your users user way can make any website fully accessible, ADA compliant and everyone who visits can browse seamlessly, customize it to fit their needs. It's a great way to show your brand's commitment to the millions of people with disabilities. It's the right thing to do user way can make any website fully accessible in ADA compliant.
Leo Laporte (01:20:40):
Fact, if you wanna see how it works, we've got a running on TWiT.tv. Just look at the lower right corner with user way. Everyone who visits your site can browse seamlessly, customize it to fit their needs. Great way to show your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities, go to user way.org/TWiTt. You'll get 30% off user ways. AI powered accessibility solution. So book a short call, get their accessibility guide, learn all about it. It really is nice to know you can, you could do the right thing. You can be legally compliant in such an easy and affordable way, user way, making the internet accessible for everyone. Visit user way.org/TWiTt.
Leo Laporte (01:21:21):
I, we got a lot of space news. Actually. It's really good. You're here Rodd. Because it's, there's tons of space news this week, James. We, how long has the web been up now? It's like a a month. It's not long. A couple months. Well, yeah, it's been eight or nine months to say launched it, but it's only been commissioned for like six weeks. Something like that. Yeah. Lot of waits. So I was gone for almost a month. <Laugh> anyway, so yeah, about two months, two months. That's when we did our, our thing hard to believe that it is already. So one of the things web is looking at, by the way we saw Jupiter, which was cool. So that was, they can, they can look back at our solar system, but they found the first exo planet, non solar system planet with carbon dioxide, which is a big deal.
Leo Laporte (01:22:10):
Well, it, it helps them understand how the planet was formed. And apparently the, the large part of it is the differential between solids and gases. When it's in it's it's not somewhere you'd you'd wanna live. It's it's 1600 degrees Fahrenheit. Unless the bummer about these first exo observations are the ones we've been seeing for years is they're all the ones that are a lot of them are Jupi sized or larger. And they're practically skimming the surface of the star. They're go. Some of these things orbit in hours. Yeah. This one is a four day year. Yeah. It's so close to its sun and it's, that's why it's so hot. So it's almost like a two like a Berry center, two star system in, in a sense they call it puffy <laugh> yeah. That's kind of insulting. Isn't it? <Laugh> the Buffy planet. They're having trouble seeing some of the light through it, which leads to believe there's a quote, mystery molecule helping include some of the frequencies, but you know, anything they find at this point it's such Virgin, actually being able to see the spectrum from these exo plans is such Virgin territory.
Leo Laporte (01:23:05):
It's all gonna be exciting for a while. That's actually why this is important. Not so much that this planet has carbon dioxide, but it means they can, it looks good that they can detect atmospheres. Yeah. On, on smaller, more, more maybe terrestrial side. Well, so that's what we want us to, to see these Rocky planets and try and figure out what's going on there. Yeah. Cause then if you see a lot of a certain kind of gas, you could begin saying, well, maybe something's going on here, like technology or plants or animals or something. I love it again. I'm thinking science fiction. When I first read this, I thought, oh great. We found a planet that killed itself through climate change. Fantastic. The first thing it's like, oh, Venus, what? A nice place to have vacation. Yeah. Yeah. 900 degrees and 900. Anyway, the James web, a gift that keeps on oh, and will giving it's really great.
Leo Laporte (01:23:52):
Last pass which was for many years, a sponsor of our shows. It is one of the most used if not the most used password manager out there has admitted, they were hacked Lawrence Abrams at believing computer had this story two weeks ago. He asked them they didn't, they clammed up. But finally this week admitted that they were in fact hacked. But to reassure you, if you use last pass, there's no evidence that customer data or password vaults were compromised. The threat actors stole portions of the last pass source code and something last pass calls, proprietary last pass, technical information. Hmm, Hmm, Hmm.
Becky Worley (01:24:44):
It, it did force me to go check my security settings and turn on two-factor authentication, which I hadn't done. Ooh,
Leo Laporte (01:24:51):
Yes.
Becky Worley (01:24:52):
Changed my password. Yes. Which I hadn't done for a while. And so if nothing else, it at least lit a fire under my butt, cuz this one scared me.
Leo Laporte (01:24:59):
Yeah. And I guess the worst case scenario, they don't have the passwords and clear the worst case scenario would be though that they got the vaults, which most people who's used last pass store on last pass servers and then could at their leisure attempt to brute force them. And if so, if you didn't have a good master password, you might be vulnerable at that point. Since we all put you know, the keys to the kingdom in our password, false, I don't use last pass anymore, but no matter what you use, that's got everything in it. It would behoove you <laugh> to use one, a good long password. It's just hard because you have to remember that one. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> for your master password. I'm sure. Becky, you did not use monkey 1, 2, 3.
Becky Worley (01:25:44):
No, it was password 1, 2, 3,
Leo Laporte (01:25:46):
Much better. And make sure the OS are zeros. Okay. Little. Oh yeah. Little elite tip there for you. No. Use a good long, strong somewhat. You know what I do, I'm not gonna use a 28 character random password. Nobody's got time to memorize that. I ch I take I don't wanna be too explicit about what I'm doing, cause I don't want you to reverse engineer it, but let's say you took maybe you memorized will. I know because you had a good public school education, you have memorized many great poems. Let's say you had a Lord tenon poem committed to memory, half a league, half a league, half a league onward. The, the light brigade, right?
Wil Harris (01:26:31):
Yeah. So a great, great for
Leo Laporte (01:26:34):
Your bit. I don't use that. Yeah. That's what I use.
Wil Harris (01:26:36):
Yeah. Yeah. Should we be so I think there are, I think there are two interesting things to,
Leo Laporte (01:26:40):
No, let me explain what I do before we, you do that. So I would, my password, half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all rolled into the valley of death. I would make it H AAL, H a L H a L O. And maybe I would do upper cases on certain kinds of words. Maybe I'd add punctuation and then just to make it really good. So then I can remember, because I remember the poem and I can reconstruct the beginning part. I will add something else that I know. For instance, what I like to use is my childhood telephone number, which I memorized as a little kid, but is not in a phone book anywhere anymore. I hope <laugh> so by adding those seven or 10 extra let digits, I think that's a pretty good password. Not likely to be.
Wil Harris (01:27:26):
Yeah. So, so, so most security experts say that the best password is not a password, but a either a phrase or a mnemonic. So a mnemonic is a great is a
Leo Laporte (01:27:37):
Yeah. That's what I'm using as a
Wil Harris (01:27:38):
Monic. Yeah. So, so take let's take for example, because I'm here William Shakespeare and Julia Caesar says the fault, dear Brutus is not in our stars, but in ourselves. So you would have capital T F D capital B I N I O S comma or exclamation point. Let's have a special character. B I O. And that is absolutely, you know, crackable because nobody's going, that's, you know, it's not a real word, but it's something that's easy to remember. It's a selection of random things. That's completely easy to remember. And that's a great way of
Leo Laporte (01:28:16):
Doing it to remember. I'm confused. Cause you know, though, I've forgotten you phrase,
Wil Harris (01:28:21):
This is not in our stars, but
Leo Laporte (01:28:22):
To come on favorite, did you ever memorize anything in your life? I wasn't a great elementary school student. <Laugh> I was the one throwing desks out the window in eight. Do you know, did you, did you, do you know a Shakespeare? Do you like to be or not to be? That is the question. Well, that's super easy. Okay. Yeah. Well you're right. That's probably not a good one. Go ahead.
Becky Worley (01:28:39):
I got another, another way of thinking about this is a Steve Gibson trick, which is to use a password that, you know, pretty well, that might be short and then pack it with symbols. Yes. Or
Leo Laporte (01:28:51):
Characters. That's why I do that phone number. He calls it password haystacks. That's right. Length makes it harder to brute force. Even if you add length in a kind of, of trivial way.
Becky Worley (01:29:02):
But if you use characters because there's so many of them, most, he says that most brute force attack they don't use as many characters because it's harder and it creates more variables, right?
Leo Laporte (01:29:12):
So clearly the best password is completely long, random strings of alpha numerics and, and special characters. But nobody can memorize that. So that's why for your master
Wil Harris (01:29:23):
Password, this Beck, Becky, this this Steve Gibson guy, is, is there anywhere I can listen to a, a podcast? Yeah. I, where can I get more of him?
Leo Laporte (01:29:32):
Unbound books.com. No, no, that's wrong. You're talking about the host of security now, which is now in its 18th year as a podcast. Wow. That just, he just crossed the 18 year old mark and at grc.com/haystack.htm. He describes this and shows, you know, how the larger, the space that you have to search, the more powerful it is. In fact, it looks like K C produced a terrific and succinct two and a half minute explanation that you can watch.
Becky Worley (01:30:03):
That might actually be my story on this, that K a C re cause I did it. I bet.
Leo Laporte (01:30:08):
I bet you. I thought it was
Becky Worley (01:30:08):
Great. Yeah, but he, I, I just thought it was such a smart idea. That was simple. Passwords are so hard for people. The thing I also worry about is that if somebody's been PND in a previous attack and they've used the same password as their master password,
Leo Laporte (01:30:23):
That's the real problem do not that's I worry about what passwords yes.
Becky Worley (01:30:26):
With this attack on last pass.
Wil Harris (01:30:30):
But I think, I think the key takeaways that security now is legal to drink in England. Right?
Leo Laporte (01:30:34):
<Laugh> <laugh> yes, it can, but it can vote yet. No, no, it can't vote. It can't drink. No,
Wil Harris (01:30:40):
It can vote. It can vote. It can drink. It can drink England. It could drink. It's all happening over here. It can't drink. It's steam over here. Quick.
Leo Laporte (01:30:46):
It can no longer drink in the United States of America. Yeah. So I, I wouldn't worry about the last pass hack, although, you know, companies historically have not been very forthcoming the fact that they took two weeks to confirm this is cause for concern. And we don't know, you know, if they know everything that happened. So yeah. I think that was prudent. Becky, change your password and put, if you're not using, not using two-factor at least on your password vault do
Becky Worley (01:31:16):
Well. That wasn't a choice. I don't recall that being a choice that I didn't opt for it. So that kind of surprises me that it wasn't on by
Leo Laporte (01:31:23):
Detail. Yeah. They should make you turn it on. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, given what it means to them, for this to come out, what would be an appropriate period of time? Cuz some of those, I think you were talking about, was it Yahoo or who was it that took like three years? Yeah. Tell us. Yeah. So a couple of weeks isn't really that bad. Is it there are regulations now about how quickly you have to report breaches Cal in California, for instance, I think it's 72 hours. You have to, you have no time at all. And that's a good thing. Let me just see the CC. So even if you're not absolutely sure you have to California law requires a business or agency to notify any California resident who's unencrypted personal information was acquired. It actually, this does not have a timer, but there are some with timers, maybe GDPR there certainly are requirements. And and I think that it makes sense. There are so many breaches now though that we don't report them anymore. I don't. If I were to do all the breaches this week, this breaches
Wil Harris (01:32:21):
Have a whole whole breaches.
Leo Laporte (01:32:22):
It'd
Wil Harris (01:32:22):
Be so great. It could be half security breaches, half new pants.
Leo Laporte (01:32:26):
<Laugh> it'd be yeah, exactly. You may need new pants for this one plex.tv this week was half this
Wil Harris (01:32:34):
Week in breaches,
Leo Laporte (01:32:37):
Breached breaches or breaches actually breaches aren't bridges.
Wil Harris (01:32:40):
So breaches are breaches. So, so Leo, can you cuz I'm looking at the rundown. Can you explain the E theory emerge to me?
Leo Laporte (01:32:49):
Oh my God.
Wil Harris (01:32:51):
Struggling.
Leo Laporte (01:32:52):
Is there enough time in the world to talk about this? Yeah, I think this is actually a important, so I, how far back do I have to go? Have you ever heard of cryptocurrency?
Wil Harris (01:33:03):
<Laugh> <laugh> I have myself lost much money on cryptocurrency.
Leo Laporte (01:33:09):
<Laugh> you've heard of that. Have you? So the promise, you know, it all goes back to the first cryptocurrency, which was Bitcoin and the invention of something called a blockchain. The easiest way to understand blockchain is it's a database, but unlike a database that you're probably mostly familiar with where there's a central place for it, the blockchain is a distributed database. Everybody can have a copy of it, which make gives you some advantages. You can't it's harder to fake an ex you know, a transaction on the blockchain or any entry, by the way, it doesn't have to be a transaction. Any entry in that database. In fact, one of the problems with blockchain is there's a lot of crap in there. That's not, there's all sorts of stuff in there. If, for instance, and I think it's, it's think it's thought to be the case.
Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
There were some child pornography in the blockchain. You couldn't actually get rid of it. It's it's, it's preserved forever and it's, it's distributed forever. The block, the current Bitcoin blockchain is huge hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes. So that's the central technology and cryptocurrency in general in order to make that transaction, you have to have something called a proof of work and that's what the mins are doing. So I want to give rod a Bitcoin congratulations rod, the way I transact that is I, as I go to the, I use my Bitcoin wallet. I could, you don't, this doesn't require a third party. You don't need buy or somebody to do this. I can do this. I go to my wallet, say, send, I have Rod's address. I send, send rod this coin, what will then happen is it will then be sent out to all the mins and they all at once try to solve a difficult math problem, a a prime number factor factorization problem.
Leo Laporte (01:35:00):
The first to solve it gets a reward, gets a percentage of that transaction. And the transaction goes through when they solve it, they add it to the blockchain is now part of the blockchain. So the problem with that proof of work situ you know, set up is it's very, very energy costly because you have all these Bitcoin miners, all racing to solve this problem. And it, when you solve it, it's a lot of energy. It's designed to be increasing amount of energy as the, as the currency ages. And so this has historically been a problem. I mean, currently cryptocurrency transactions are using more power than some nations. I mean, it's a massive amount of power. That's how proof of work works. And it's not ideal early on. There was a cryptocurrency called Ethereum invented by a teenager of all things. And he proposed that when this, when you know that Ethereum ultimately could use something called proof of stake, this is back in 2014, instead of proof of work, proof of stake, just assigns one minor. The job doesn't use nearly as much energy.
Becky Worley (01:36:14):
For, I like this description in proof of stake systems, computers, don't burn energy racing to verify transactions. Instead, crypto investors deposit a certain number of digital coins in a shared pool. And that enters them in a lottery. The winner of the lottery is the one who gets to verify the transaction wins the reward.
Leo Laporte (01:36:33):
Yeah. That's how they choose this, whoever this is
Wil Harris (01:36:36):
That sounds like, kind of like you win the lottery and then get to do the work. <Laugh> congratulations. Congratulations. You get to, you get to verify this, but
Becky Worley (01:36:45):
You get, but you get a percentage of the transaction
Leo Laporte (01:36:47):
That's right. But that's what you would get. Anyway, the difference is only one. Person's trying to do that instead of everybody trying to do that, they say that I'll cut the use by of energy by 99%. This has been something that Ethereum has been pro promising for years. It's finally, we think gonna happen at September 15th, that's called the merge where Ethereum changes the fundamental transaction backbone for all Ethereum coins. Now, as you might imagine, a, this is technologically incredibly complicated and error prone B there is a large number. There are a large number of people who do not want this to happen, cuz they make money as crypto miners, right? So they're not happy about this. In fact, the merge will probably also be simultaneous with a fork where some, some number of Ethereum users change to a proof of work form of Ethereum and that's probably gonna happen as well.
Leo Laporte (01:37:51):
So there, the article that, that you had just read from Becky, a very, very good piece, unusually good piece from the New York times about the merge written by David Yaffee Melanie, very, very detailed talks about the whole thing. I I've been wanting to talk about this for some time because it's, it's just a few weeks off and it, you know, it, it could be crazy. It's probably a good thing. Plenty of other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin will continue to use proof of work. So it's not gonna singlehandedly solve the energy problem. How utilities feel about it. Well, you know, how do they find this to be inconvenient? Or is it a great profit center for them? No, no, no, because the way these things work as more coins are generated as more transactions happen, the, the difficulty of doing it goes up, which means they use more power mm-hmm <affirmative>. So nobody at this point, who's trying to make money. Bitcoin mining is doing it off the normal grid because it's too, you, you won't make money. Electricity costs too much. So for a long time, all the Bitcoin miners were on hydroelectric dams in China and other places where the cost of electricity was effectively zero. China shut that down, by the way, that was a big blip in the, one of the reasons Bitcoin dropped so dramatically a couple of years ago. So, and I described this accurately anybody wanna? Yeah,
Becky Worley (01:39:12):
I think so. I have a couple questions though, follow up. So if I'm reading this right, there's 179 billion worth of ether right now, based on today's price. And so this shouldn't impact anyone's holdings crap.
Leo Laporte (01:39:26):
No, no, no, no. Not at all. Unless right. <Laugh> unless it all goes to hell <laugh>. I mean, there's also a cryptocurrency veteran quoted by in the times Chandler quote says it's flying the jet and changing the engine in the sky. It's very difficult. It's very dangerous. So it, it could go belly up. I mean,
Becky Worley (01:39:50):
But, but even if this, if this crashes in some way, it doesn't take down the database because obviously that's replicated. But the point is you couldn't maybe do some transactions until they figure out how to well, make this.
Leo Laporte (01:40:04):
There are so many problems with cryptocurrency, including the amount of the cost of the transaction and the amount of time Ethereum gas fees, the cost of those transactions are wildly unpredictable, often are more than the transaction. So if I gave you a, you know, a hundredth of an E and it cost me $200 to give it to you, that would be a net loss overall. And we've seen this with NFTs where it's actually, it could be a money loser or trying to get your money back, or there's all sorts of problems with the sub. Remember with the Dow, one of the big Dows didn't go through, they were gonna, they were gonna buy the constitution and they failed. But then the cost of getting your money out of that constitution Dow was higher than the amount of money you would get back cuz of gas fees. So this is a big problem. There are lots of problems with cryptocurrency El Salvador, which, which left the American dollar as its ancy and went to Bitcoin a year ago is in deep financial due to because they can't pay any bills anymore because there's
Wil Harris (01:41:15):
Gas transaction fees to, to do every transaction. It's like if you went to the bank and said, I want to withdraw $10 and withdrawing $10 costs you $20 exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:41:24):
Further more. You don't know how long it's gonna take and unless, and this is the weird thing. Bitcoin, if you pay enough, you can choose how much you're gonna pay for the transaction. The more you pay, the more miners will work on it. The more likely it'll go through. But if you say, no, I want the minimum. It may be days before the trans weeks before the transaction goes through all of this unpredictability is not in my opinion. Good for a monetary system. It's
Becky Worley (01:41:49):
No. And the it's point of, of Ethereum is the thing that I like about it is that it's really tied into the smart contract concept. And so if you are thinking that you're gonna have automatic transactions, automated transactions that are done through the blockchain, but you don't know how much that transaction fee is gonna be. That seems like a fundamental problem with the concept plus,
Leo Laporte (01:42:10):
But look at the volatility in the value of the coin. You don't know what you're, you know, you buy a pizza one day, eh, for 50 bucks and it was $12 million. The next day is not good.
Wil Harris (01:42:21):
Yeah. Although Becky, the, I think the larger problem with, with smart contracts and the kind of thing that you were talking about there is that when we talk about, you know, people stealing things off the blockchain, people stealing other people's NFTs, the kind of fraud that goes on with with DAOs, you know, it's really reasonable to argue that if the, the smart contract is law, right, the smart contract is what governs what can and cannot be done. And so if the smart contract allows it and you fraudulently exploited it, then that's technically sort of legal by the smart contract, right? So the, the bigger problem, the smart contracts is that if you exploit them then any exploitation is legal because the, the code is law, right?
Becky Worley (01:43:08):
Mm man, that's new subset.
Leo Laporte (01:43:11):
We have seen huge effect. All you have to do is go to the website, web three is, is going great. Have you, have you seen this website?
Wil Harris (01:43:19):
<Laugh> no, what's this Leah
Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
Web three is going just great is a Chronicle of scams ripoffs fraud. And it is an en endless story. And as you scrolling through it, by the way, look in the lower right hand corner, cuz that shows you how much the losses are right now. You know, as I go, it, it gets higher and higher and higher. It is, it is, I I'm, I'm stunned that people still think this is a good idea that they think web three is a good idea. That think NFTs are a good idea that they think blockchain is a good idea. It is so a technology that has some use a distributed database. Yeah. It's not changing the world. And all it's really doing is relieving people of their money. So is that is thatt
Wil Harris (01:44:10):
In Ben Evans write really well on this, on TWiTtter, which is, he says, you know, the really interesting prospect, which is that, you know, the whole point of web three, if you think about it from the sort of point of view of the evangelizers is it's distributed, it's away from the banking system you know, the community rights, the rules, the consumer is the, you know, is the owner. All those things are really important. On the other hand, if something goes wrong, then by design, there is no one to complain to, right? And if you have your things stolen or if you have your account hacked, then there is no one to go to because specifically you own it. It was your fault. And the idea that, you know, to make web three and those kind of things useful to the general public. Like if you want to make web three cryptocurrency ethere emerge, whatever useful to the general public, you have to have some degree of centralization. You have to have someone to complain to and something goes wrong. But that defeats the entire purpose of the web three experiment, which is to decentralize everything. Right. so it's really going back to an era of like, you know, you, you break it, you bought it you screw it up, you lose your money. Yeah. And there's nobody to complain to.
Leo Laporte (01:45:25):
And of course the people who have invested heavily in all of this require that somebody come along and give them real dollars for their investments. So there's a lot of fraud going on. There's a lot of cheerleading going on because people can't let this pyramid scheme collapse. And that's in my opinion, what it is. So it was a bad idea to begin with good news. Ethereum won't burn the planet up anymore. Maybe, but it's, you know, and it's not, I think in the long run, this is not a good idea. So do you think the NFTs based on creative works, cuz being involved with the organizations I'm involved with of course were constantly byed by brokers who wanna sell us, you guys, you use our services and we'll do an NFT of a, of a picture of Mars and we'll make you tons of money and we're not falling for it cuz only people making money. I suspect to the brokers. But do you think this whole NFTs based on kind of spurious creative works thing is, well, I think it started logical because there were a lot of Bitcoin bros who needed make launder their money. But I think the real problem, right now is that the people who are approaching you are not, are the people who are minting the NFTs and just like Levi's during the gold rush, they made all the money selling dunes, not
Wil Harris (01:46:47):
You make money selling the pickaxes, not the gold.
Leo Laporte (01:46:49):
I'm sure they know how to do that. They're advising. So people are approaching you about, this are the ones who stand to make money. Yeah. That's kind of what I thought. And also, I wouldn't wanna, you know, we've often thought about doing that ourselves. I wouldn't want to capitalize on our audience taking their money if they buy an a lot of people, buy NFTs, just wanna support the artist. That's great. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> you could just donate instead. That's what Patriots for, right? Yeah. But if I think a lot of people buy NT NFTs, buy it as a speculative vehicle, as a security that they're gonna sell back at some point and make money on. And that's something that bothers me. They, we are really close to the S E C saying that these are securities and that's that, which
Wil Harris (01:47:36):
Is always what they've been. Right? Yes. And, and, and your good friend in mine. Jason Keis HARs on about this on TWiTtter, a lot about the fact that, you know, crypto currency NFTs they're securities, they're just not currently recognized as such. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
And if they are then the S sec regulates it, there are many who, who are true believers in crypto who say, yes, we need that. We need some regulation. We need, we need to understand what the rules are, at least so we can go forward. But there are many who fear that as well, and regulation usually means taxation. Some people don't like that idea, the whole idea of some of this is an anonymity. Right. But as we've learned again and again, you're not really anonymous. <Laugh> in fact, I, I, yeah. Ever. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Well, that's too bad. I wanted do an NFT of my Mars flag that I took up to the Arctic, but let me see. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> oh, this is the flag you designed. Is that on the space.com? Well, design quote unquote. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me, tell me about the flag story.
Leo Laporte (01:48:38):
What is every season? Is there a new flag? So this was based on the notion that the, the Explorer polar explorers of the heroic era all took along their battle flags, right? So Shackleton had his family crest and Robert Scott, who was not a very good leader as he trudged his men into death and oblivion had his family crest and then they'd have a larger, so that what you're seeing there is a picture of, of Pascal who runs the place and owns it putting up a flag, which I had made for him of the first long Shackleton expedition that was 1907 to try and reach his south pole. When that Shackleton family crest on kind of a standard that's cool bearing background or something. And I thought, well, we should have something like that. Yeah. So I, there was one on the whole internet there, one image of that Shackleton flag from the original thing.
Leo Laporte (01:49:34):
So I had a graphic artist redo it for me. And then I thought, well, I wanted something for me. So I decided to have the Martian war machines taking out the planet earth with Mar rising of the background. This is from HG Wells war of the world. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, we left it up there. So we're gonna go back next year and see how many taters are left. Does it, does it survive the winter pretty well or no, it's, it's brutal up there. Yeah. It's brutal enough. In the summer, we were getting 50 mile an hour gusts and temperatures with chill down the twenties, which, you know, there's a lot of people in Minnesota that would say, oh, the twenties, eh, isn't this a bad, but up there with the grit and the constant UV, cuz there's a, now there's no zone hole up there and so forth.
Leo Laporte (01:50:14):
It's a whole different deal. This and I I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pull this back. You did get burned a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A little bit. Yeah. And, and we, we tried to be careful. I didn't realize there was a hole there. Yeah. So that means your really goes and that's on top of the ice melting and now the polar bears are more hungry. So you gotta constantly looking out for them cuz they're prowling around saying, Hey, I haven't had a seal to eat for a week. You look like five seals. I'll eat you <laugh> so wow. You have to carry a shotgun everywhere you go. Yeah. Becky, while Becky, what is, what a kind of reporting do you do on cryptocurrency? I'm sure that people are very interested in this
Becky Worley (01:50:48):
Zip non zero.
Leo Laporte (01:50:51):
But is that your idea or ABC's idea?
Becky Worley (01:50:54):
A little bit of both. I'm much more in the everyday practical news you can use consumer. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I'm really interested in Venmo. I'm, you know, the cash app story this week is crazy to me that, you know, you're seeing people having their accounts strained and those are the kind of stories that really catch my attention. The ones that are much more in the hands of the everyday user. And it makes me super nervous to talk about crypto at the broad, broad broadcasting levels. Yeah. In terms of try this,
Leo Laporte (01:51:27):
This is actually, we've been kind of getting into this on the radio show because there's a well known radio guy, finance guy who says don't use Venmo cash app and really don't use Zelle. They're dangerous. And and I'm saying, well, I use 'em all the time. They're, they're no more dangerous than your bank or cash, but their point is, and I guess this is true. Probably even you're reporting your audience. People don't understand that they're tied directly to your bank account
Becky Worley (01:52:03):
Tied directly to your bank account. And you have far less recourse if something goes wrong. But
Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
As you, you know, if I gave, if I took a hundred bucks outta the bank and gave it to you, it's not the bank's responsibility to make it good. You know, if I get scammed that way, it's not. So people somehow think that if you use Zelle or cash app or Venmo and get scammed, it's the responsibility of the bank.
Wil Harris (01:52:25):
But is it the difference between if you use a credit card, if you get scammed, your credit card will reimburse you. Right? That's part
Leo Laporte (01:52:33):
Of the, they had to do that cuz no one would've used credit cards, but I don't.
Wil Harris (01:52:37):
Yeah. So it's the difference between doing a credit card transaction where you are gonna get reimbursed. If you get scammed and a direct bank transaction where you are not going to which I guess is the difference between going to a, a merchant and giving them casual credit. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
Well, and I was really saying no, Clark Howard Clark, Howard's the guy Clark, Howard's wrong. And Zelle is fine. Go ahead. In fact, somebody called the radio show. I said, no, because she'd heard this. I said, no, it's fine. But it's like cash. If don't give it to somebody, you don't know, they
Becky Worley (01:53:08):
Might have the hacks aren't
Leo Laporte (01:53:09):
Well, the hacks are different. Just the hacks are different. We actually wanna talk about the hacks in a second, but separate from the hacks, which are an issue. Just be careful cuz it's like cash and you're not gonna get made whole, if you give it to somebody and the reason I mention this, you know, Jennifer very well. My ex-wife the mother of my children
Becky Worley (01:53:28):
Fought me a miniskirt once.
Leo Laporte (01:53:30):
Did she really?
Becky Worley (01:53:31):
Yeah. She bought me a great miniskirt once at the outlets in Petaluma, it was so sweet
Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
Just out of, for no reasons that here's a minis skirt.
Becky Worley (01:53:39):
She said she was shopping. She saw it and she thought I'd like, it, it was the cutest thing.
Leo Laporte (01:53:43):
Wow. I don't think I ever saw you in it, but that's probably good for the best. Yeah. so
Becky Worley (01:53:48):
Anyways, I totally hijacked your
Leo Laporte (01:53:50):
Story. I love Jennifer. I'm so sorry. And I like
Wil Harris (01:53:52):
I was wearing, are we just gonna go into things that the port family has bought? Because Leo bought me a really nice bottle of reds INEL once. Oh
Becky Worley (01:53:59):
Wow. I really nice.
Wil Harris (01:54:00):
I've I've ever since bought Petaluma. INEL whenever I'm gonna get a respectable London
Leo Laporte (01:54:06):
Ether anyway, I'm
Becky Worley (01:54:07):
Gonna, but did he buy you a lemon drop?
Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
Oh his that's that's
Becky Worley (01:54:11):
His drink of
Leo Laporte (01:54:11):
Choice. That was a big mistake. I've stopped with the lemon drops. So too many horrible things have happened at my, at my home. <Laugh>
Becky Worley (01:54:19):
We will not go into,
Leo Laporte (01:54:22):
But, but which Becky, I will mention if I'm required to do your eulogy, I will bring that up. I'm just gonna tell you right now. I'm sure you will outlive me by hundreds of years. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but if for some reason you get lost on a kayak, you disappear on a standup panel board. You can tell the story. I'm going to tell this. Well, I have many stories. I have so many stories. I probably I'll have to pick and choose <laugh>.
Becky Worley (01:54:47):
I need to know. So anyways, as I
Wil Harris (01:54:50):
Off to talk,
Leo Laporte (01:54:51):
None of them reflecting poorly on Becky, I might have all, as we're launching your little finger into space will be telling us about the mini skirt. She,
Becky Worley (01:55:00):
Anyway, girl, like to have some F N
Leo Laporte (01:55:02):
Jennifer and I both use Zel to, to send money to her kids and stuff, but she got scammed. And once you get scammed outta money on Zelle, you're right. You ain't getting back mm-hmm so, so you really have to treat it. And so, and she's a smart person. So that really opened my eyes as to how easy it is to, to say, oh, I need to send this person money. I've got, they said, Zelle, no problem. I've been using this to send money to our kids. I'll just send 'em that money and that's it. It's gone. So I know it's a different process, but is PayPal a step safer than that? Same. No, same thing. Same issue. It's is Venmo is PayPal. So it's the same thing. You know, you, and I think the only reason credit cards back up your stupidity is because no one would've used them in the early days and they, so they kind of gotten the habit of it. I wish we'd made Zelle and cash to app and all that do the same, but we didn't. Apple pay is the same. Well, anything you're sending money from your bank account, you're at risk. Now the hacks are a big problem because if I do hack your account, I got it all. I got everything that's in your bank account. And again, with no recourse so you need to use good passwords, all the same things you always do.
Becky Worley (01:56:14):
So after this cash app story came up, basically the story was that multiple people are reporting on social, that their accounts have been drained when they haven't made any payments to anyone. And there's, there are reports of passwords of, of user account names and information associated with the accounts being listed on the dark web with people, some people saying that may or may not be good data. Other people saying, yeah, I got a lot of money out of this reviewers on the dark web. Right. But what's interesting is I signed up for the cash app this morning and it's, you don't put a password in it's it uses your email or your phone number, but there's the security by default is pretty lean. There's no pin number turned on. You have to go into the settings and turn the, the, the pin number on. And there's no authenticator turned on by default. So I can think of a bunch of scams, like the Google voice scams. I don't know if you've heard about those where people can basically get access to your phone number and therefore take over your two, two factor authentication where this could be a real problem. And this is the kind of stuff that makes me very nervous and that I end up reporting on a lot
Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
As you should. And I have to say, I have amended my, my recommendation. It's not that they're inherently unsafe. Although that cash app does sound like it's inherently unsafe, but the risk is so much higher because it's tied to your bank account. And because there's no recourse, that's probably best not to use theses. I guess, right. Doesn't sound like you should use CA I have, I use cash app all the time. That's that's Jack Dorsey's company. That's blocked. It
Becky Worley (01:57:56):
Is. Yeah. I just wouldn't assume that it's secure by default. And that's a lot to ask for the average consumer. That would be my, my request is that there was a lot more default security, two factor authentication and beyond, and a pin number to actually access the
Leo Laporte (01:58:11):
Fact it should, it should have all of those secure things, but then it's harder to use, right? And they want you to use it. So, so what's the big picture solution to this other than DNA sampling or something. I mean, well, this is actually, this is of such a fundamental thing in technology is the idea of authentication. How do you even prior to technology, how do you prove you are who you are? That's why we have passwords. That's way we have pins that we have all these things. And I think that there are gonna be better ways to do this, this Fido two pass PAs key's solution that we've been talking about, the Microsoft, Google and apple now are actively supporting. I think that's gonna be a, an improvement over passwords. The problem is there's always a trade off, or it seems like almost always a trade off between security and convenience and most companies who are trying to do business with you are gonna err on the side of convenience cause they want you to do business. So I think that's part of the problem. I'm sure cash app knows how to make itself a hundred percent secure, but they fear it'll be too hard to use.
Becky Worley (01:59:10):
I also think some of the big players will absorb cash transfers into their ecosystems because their authentication is more robust in their devices. So take apple for exist. For example, if I'm gonna text money to my kids, I have to use facial recognition to text it from my phone to theirs, but they've got a password on the phone. So do I, and you have to double up with some sort of pin or facial recognition to send the money. So that's built into the ecosystem and I can see that being a strong case for security by device security built in on that's like a three factor
Leo Laporte (01:59:45):
That's and that's what PAs keys is, is all about. Is that your device, because it's using biometrics, fingerprint face is really can, can somewhat be trusted to be a, a proof that you are, who you say you are, as long as you're using those biometrics. Anyway, how
Wil Harris (02:00:00):
I mean is the definition of security versus convenience, right?
Leo Laporte (02:00:03):
Yes, exactly. But it is more convenient if you're using touch ID or face ID on a device that's pretty convenient. That's not a password. So that's why
Becky Worley (02:00:14):
And think about something like mint, which is tied to all my accounts and that has not only is it on my device and I have to use facial recognition to open it up. But then when I open the app itself, it acts for a secondary yeah. Facial check. Right. So that makes a lot of sense to me. It doesn't help on the web, but you know, in terms of, on my browser, on my computer, but I think there's a lot to be said for that.
Leo Laporte (02:00:34):
That's what Pasky does though. Cuz now when you're on your computer on a site, it'll say, okay, open your phone log in. Ah, and so it is tying that device with biometric to websites there.
Wil Harris (02:00:46):
Yeah. Do you guys have two, two factor authentication for just general credit card transactions on the web? Cause that's one thing that's become increasingly normalized over here, which is you can be on Amazon, you can be on any old website in the world. You put your credit card details in and it will insist on texting you a, a six digit
Leo Laporte (02:01:07):
Code. No, we don't do that here. We have the, the, the number on the back of your credit card <laugh>
Wil Harris (02:01:13):
Oh, which, which everybody's written down anyway. So I mean it never, it never fails to amaze me. The somebody wants joked that the, the surefire way to create a billion dollar American startup is to take European or, or British bank technology from 10 years ago and, and bring it to America, America that's that's right, because it is so poor. So one of the things that we do over here is if you use your card anywhere that you haven't used it in the last two or three days online it will 100% ask you to put in your phone number. And if it's the phone number that they have matched on your account at your credit card thing they will send you a text message with a six digit code and you've gotta put your six digit code into the web app or the, you know, iPhone app or whatever it is you are using in order to authenticate the transaction. So two a has just become like almost absolutely standard for credit card transactions over here. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:02:10):
Well you didn't just show your credit card number, right? <Laugh>
Wil Harris (02:02:14):
4 1 6 9,
Leo Laporte (02:02:17):
Just don't show the three digit code on the back. Okay, please. I beg of you. We're gonna take a little break. We have to we're way behind I, the problem is I, when I have a panel like this, it's just hard to stay on. I just have so much fun. It's so nice. Having Becky Warley here from ABC. No, that's not Becky that's Becky <laugh>. Becky has not yet. Facial hair. No, no, you don't wanna look like me.
Wil Harris (02:02:42):
Becky you go. The peach fuzz is fantastic. You're
Becky Worley (02:02:45):
I kind of do that's being over 50. That happens friends. I hate you.
Leo Laporte (02:02:49):
Oh, she is not over 50. Look how young way people were saying in the she's not, not age
Wil Harris (02:02:54):
Two. Get lost.
Leo Laporte (02:02:55):
How does she not age? She looks Fanta. Do you look, turn off those filters so we can see gorgeous rights have fun. Your kids are in high school, high
Becky Worley (02:03:02):
School.
Wil Harris (02:03:04):
Crazy.
Leo Laporte (02:03:05):
Wow. Great pictures on Instagram. I thank you for letting me follow you on Instagram, cuz I just it's how I stay up with you. I know. Great to see you.
Becky Worley (02:03:14):
The pros of social media. I love it. You
Leo Laporte (02:03:16):
It's the only good there's lots
Becky Worley (02:03:17):
Of cons, but there's lots
Leo Laporte (02:03:18):
Of good. No, it's the only good thing about it. And I hate that Instagram's turning into TikTok cuz I really just want to see pictures of my friends. That's all. I really care about pictures by my friends or of my friends. Mr. Will Harris. Ooh. Unbound.Com is the awesome idea in book publishing 15% off Unbound titles, including the new Douglas Adams 42 if quit
Wil Harris (02:03:44):
15,
Leo Laporte (02:03:45):
If you use the code T w I T one five, that's very generous of you. But boy, I look at all this stuff. Well,
Wil Harris (02:03:52):
It's just a pleasure to be back here for
Leo Laporte (02:03:53):
Always. We love you. And I wanna, I can't
Wil Harris (02:03:55):
Pretend that I'm not aging in the same way that that Becky isn't aging, but you know, getting slightly better with age maybe.
Leo Laporte (02:04:02):
Oh, you look great. I'll never forget Lisa and I are in London for five days and we're walking down the street. We were running the will. It's like the biggest cities in the world and we just run into you. You go, hi,
Wil Harris (02:04:15):
Fantastic.
Leo Laporte (02:04:18):
You here. I know one guy in London and that's and I ran into him anyway. Great to have you unbound.com. And of course my spaceman rod pile editor in chief of a Astra magazine space, dots.org and the author of you come the books. Yeah, I
Rod Pyle (02:04:36):
Got the pile pile,
Leo Laporte (02:04:38):
All the pile books. That's a, this is my favorite one. Those aren't all of them. Those are only quarter. No they're close. Yeah. I couldn't lift. It was all of them. This is my best. The best one though, which came out a couple of years ago on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 first on the moon. And I never get to show this on the radio show, but it's a picture book about Apollo 11 and it's incredible. You did such a nice job of this. Thanks. I love it. And that's, and it may be one of the last pictures books cuz they're, they're so expensive. They're not doing 'em anymore. No. Yeah. That Nope. Nope. Inter planetary robots, amazing stories of the space, age blue print for a was gonna be a death star, but they had to change it to battle star. Thanks. And of course thanks, Disney.
Leo Laporte (02:05:19):
And the a Astra magazine. If you wanna read about his trip to Mars on planet earth, space.com has a lot of the stories, but also they'll appear on in ad Astra, the magazine in coming issues. And of course Rod's the host of this weekend space. Thank with Terry Malik of space.com who is at the Artis launch. Is he? Yeah. Oh, I, I tried to message him to see if we could get him on for a couple of seconds. Oh, it would've been fun. All right. Well keep your eye peeled. He might might show up our show today brought to you by wealth front. We were just talking about finances, wealth, friends of financial services company that were founded in 2008 with the goal to make building long term wealth, delightfully easy. Look, if you saw the market lately, you probably don't like what you saw.
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Wil Harris (02:08:14):
Oh yes. Oh
Leo Laporte (02:08:15):
Yes. Oh, you have HBO in, in, in the UK.
Wil Harris (02:08:19):
No, it is over here on sky, sky. We don't have HPO over here, but H it is on, it is on sky. All
Leo Laporte (02:08:25):
Right. Did you watch it, Becky? Are you a game of Thrones fan?
Becky Worley (02:08:30):
I, I cannot explain this, but despite the fact that I love full contact sports, like football have played rugby. I can't stomach that has it's too violent, too violent.
Leo Laporte (02:08:41):
Well, and this, by the way, this premier episode last Sunday. Oh yeah, it was very controversial. There's a, a childbirth scene, which is extremely graphic and gory. And a lot of people said, I didn't need to see that the, the, you know, the traditional HBO house of ill repute, bro, Bravo, romp. That's fine. But you gotta do that. But
Wil Harris (02:09:08):
Everyone needs a little, you need little, you need a little broth, Bravo. What are you really doing? Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:09:13):
That's kind of my middle name. Bravo. No, no. I shouldn't have said wow, not true. Not true. It's
Wil Harris (02:09:19):
Not true. Leo Broel, rum Laur. That's what we call him.
Leo Laporte (02:09:22):
Yeah. There is no Tyrion. Becky's got the funniest look on her face through this whole thing. She doesn't, she, what is going on? She knows me better than that. That's
Wil Harris (02:09:31):
He's not a brothel romper.
Leo Laporte (02:09:32):
I'm not a brothel romper. No, I, I have never been a brothel romper. How many times have you tried to get me to romp in a brothel, but no, I say no every time.
Wil Harris (02:09:40):
No, he says no over time. It's it's it's infuriating.
Becky Worley (02:09:45):
He prefers he's the
Wil Harris (02:09:47):
Childr. He's the Matt Smith. I like corner miserable. He's having a Bravo rum.
Leo Laporte (02:09:52):
So HBO I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. They shouldn't allow me on live anything. Right. It's just a mistake. HBO said 10 million viewers watched the episode. That is a very big number. In fact, the biggest start for a series in HBO history. When we talked about it last week, there was some concern that people cuz of the, kind of the bitter taste from the end of the, a game of Thrones people wouldn't watch this. Like I'm done with that series. Apparently not. In fact it did so well. They immediately green lit it for a second season and I didn't know this, but HBO has five other spinoffs in, in development.
Wil Harris (02:10:30):
Wow. Well, and not only, not only do they have the spinoffs and development, but they have the Easter eggs of the spinoffs in the house of the dragon opening.
Leo Laporte (02:10:39):
Oh, now wait a minute. So you watched this more closely than I did. Tell me,
Wil Harris (02:10:44):
So one of the so yeah, I am a bit of a geek for this stuff. One of the reasons that I love watching it is so I can listen to podcasts afterwards where you get deconstruct it. Right?
Leo Laporte (02:10:54):
HBO has its official one. Is that the good one? Which is no,
Wil Harris (02:10:57):
It's, it's quite good. I would say the best one is a chap that usually know a chap called Dave Chen, who has a website called decoding TV where he does breakdowns of all of this stuff. And one of the things they talk about is the, the main sort of princess in it. Yeah. Gives a little a, a minor law dump in the middle of the episode about a queen called NAIA who sails to Dawn and then burns all her ships off the coast of Dawn. Yes. In order to say that she's, you know, there, people are running no longer that we are gonna burn the ships cuz we're staying here, come hell or high water. And the story of Mia, the queen is one of the other spinoffs that is in development. Yeah. At HBO. And of course Mia as a strong woman was the name of aria Starks Wolf
Leo Laporte (02:11:56):
Dial NAIA series of
Wil Harris (02:11:58):
Game of Thrones.
Leo Laporte (02:11:59):
You're right. I knew, I knew that
Wil Harris (02:12:01):
It's all, it's almost like there's a, you know, a little Glan,
Leo Laporte (02:12:05):
You know, there's a moment in it. They have a joust brutal vicious. I mean
Wil Harris (02:12:10):
Also, sorry, what are the rules of that jazz? At what point do you club the guy's head in versus just go, oh I
Leo Laporte (02:12:17):
Yield. Sometimes you go that's my battle. No. And yeah. Right. Sometimes you,
Wil Harris (02:12:20):
Oh my bad. I'm not up for it. There was, I didn't really feel like the guy who got his club, his head clubbed in really had the chance to
Leo Laporte (02:12:26):
Yield, yield, get a fair, a fair chance to yield. No he'd immediately. But at the, at the end of it, when it's over night who won, takes his helmet off and there's this moment where the two princesses look at each other, knowing meaningfully and say, oh, he's Dornish. And I thought, oh crap, what does that mean? <Laugh> I gotta watch all eight F seasons of, I can't remember Dornish what does that mean? So I'm sure there's some stuff. Listen to
Wil Harris (02:12:52):
The recap.
Leo Laporte (02:12:52):
I have to listen to the reason I bring this up a little bit of no, no, you,
Becky Worley (02:12:59):
I was just doing the math on the, how much, this thing cost.
Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
Yes. That's the reason I bring it up
Becky Worley (02:13:05):
20 million in episode for what is this thing called? House of the dragon house
Leo Laporte (02:13:10):
Of the dragon. Yeah. What is it called
Becky Worley (02:13:12):
Now? That sounds like a lot, right? Yeah. But get this 30 million in episode for stranger things. Right. And 40 million in episode for the Lord of the rings.
Leo Laporte (02:13:20):
Preco get ready cuz that's coming next week. And this is the real battle. It's Amazon and streaming versus Warner brothers and traditional filmmaking television HBO. I mean, admittedly HBO is now as much as streamer as they are a cable channel, but really that's the battle cuz Amazon essentially has unlimited funds. They're they're they don't have to make the money back in the streaming.
Becky Worley (02:13:45):
Is this a loss leader for them? I mean that
Leo Laporte (02:13:47):
Okay. I think it can be yes.
Wil Harris (02:13:48):
Yeah. So the way that someone explained it to me, which I thought was like a really good analogy and, and maybe will resonate with your American audience is the Lakers, the Los Angeles Lakers, right in NBA, like the premium MBA franchise. Like everybody wants to work for the Lakers, but the, the bus family that owns the Lakers that's their business. Right, right. So they have to make good business decisions for the Lakers. Are
Leo Laporte (02:14:14):
You gonna compare this to the Lakers? The mighty ducks <laugh>
Wil Harris (02:14:18):
No, no, no, no. What we're gonna go with is cause that's HBO. So HBO has to make sensible decisions and good money. Cause
Leo Laporte (02:14:26):
They're like the Lakers they're like the bus fans because
Wil Harris (02:14:28):
Yes, because that's their
Becky Worley (02:14:29):
Own money.
Leo Laporte (02:14:30):
Yes.
Wil Harris (02:14:31):
Yeah. Whereas Amazon, Amazon ironically is the Steve baller. Steve baller owns the Los Angeles Clippers and could just spend however much money he wants because the Clippers aren't his money. That's like the side hustle, the Clippers of the side hobby for Amazon prime video. And the Lord of the rings is just like, ah, a few hundred million there, a few hundred million here. That's not gonna impact on the core business. And it's the difference between operating a streamer as your core business or a streamer as your little side hustle on the,
Leo Laporte (02:15:01):
I would actually compare it to the Anaheim ducks, which is
Wil Harris (02:15:07):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:15:09):
It's the LA Lakers and the Anaheim ducks. The ducks are owned by Disney, which made a movie called the mighty ducks. They make money off of the merchandising, the branding. They don't have to make money off the hockey team. So it's like that though. You're right. They don't have to make money off the prime.
Wil Harris (02:15:26):
I didn't get, I didn't get hyperlocal enough. I should have gone.
Leo Laporte (02:15:29):
You need hyper. No one in England has ever heard of the Anaheim ducks. So I don't blame you. What's it
Becky Worley (02:15:34):
Also, the other thing is, is that the Amazon play, the difference is they can end Disney with the, with the mighty ducks is the cross promotion that can exist exactly between their properties. So exactly not only is it it can be a loss leader for other things, but they can use it to cross promote other things that are more profitable.
Leo Laporte (02:15:52):
So
Wil Harris (02:15:53):
Whereas HBO can't really have Matt Smith in house of the dragon sort of catching up on an episode of sex in the city.
Leo Laporte (02:16:01):
Wow. Now we've really gone too far afield for me. I don't understand anything that's happening at some point, do these, these these serial serializations or, or spinoffs from game of Thrones start becoming like the whole law and order thing. And if so, game of throws specials that is unit. Yeah. Right. As awful as that gets, you know, if you're looking at a third or fourth tier spinoff, and I'm just thinking of this cuz of my time with star Trek and watching that whole thing fracture into the, the, the weirdness that it has, what are the budget limits become then? Because I mean, you hear these numbers for stranger things. I heard that number. I think when I was working on Trek, a big show for us was like 1,000,001. Oh yeah. That was expensive. 40 million in episode. Right. So, but it looks like a movie. So it, part of my brain is saying, well, that kind of makes sense cuz you know, when you're producing, you have a money meter running in the back of your mind all the time. Right. Part of that makes sense for the kind of visuals they're getting, but you've gotta commit to making what would be a whole franchise of movies in one season. What's the average eight to 10, I guess. Yeah. That's
Wil Harris (02:17:03):
What
Leo Laporte (02:17:03):
Most of these are. And then you start doing these spins well, can the fifth or six tier spinoff from, you know, well not to the game of Thrones, N C I S have the same budget as the, the first one, the in order to acquire all of these at and T and took on 50 billion in debt. So HBO Warner is deep in debt. They should buy Yahoo. That'd be yeah. Right. Huge debt. So they don't have a lot of runway. They they've canceled a bunch of shows. They canceled bat girl 90 million investment because they could write it off. Sorry, what taxes bat girl. You, oh, you have been away. Yeah. <laugh> Hey, you heard of this. Like what, what you, no, they did another, they got a month. They shot a movie for $90 million and then canceled it Lord back, girl. You probably dunno about scoop the Christmas show either. But I think that that's what you're seeing now is big, big money and Netflix even, which is still the king of streamers, 8% of all streams, our Netflix streams is running against headwinds. Their stuff is very expensive.
Wil Harris (02:18:11):
And what you are seeing is the if you look at the news today, which is the, the, the increasing, or is this the word streamer of cinema? Oh, I like it. Yeah. Which is the new, you know, the big, hot Marvel property that everyone's wondering what's gonna happen to is fantastic. Four. And we heard the news, I think this morning or yesterday that Matt Shackman who hem one division for Disney is gonna be the person in charge of fantastic four. And a lot of the film TWiTtter commentary was, well, I guess we are not hiring film directors to, to make films anymore. We're we, we are TV Ising film, right. Which is effectively what Disney has done. If you look at the star wars series the, the Marvel series, which are all shot in the volume, it's the, it's the TV ization, the streaming ization of of cinema.
Becky Worley (02:19:06):
Well, this is the hypothesis that we're at peak TV, right? That because of COVID because of streaming because of multitiered pricing options that peak TV is now and whether this can last or not is the question. And we're seeing that with the financial troubles being experienced by the likes of Netflix and others. So you know, is this the peak of peak TV?
Leo Laporte (02:19:30):
Maybe this is the article from the financial times, which is hidden behind a very expensive paywall that in fact, the guy who coined the term peak TV, John Lamb graph has been predicting it since 2016, but he said this year,
Wil Harris (02:19:47):
Well, if you predicted every year, you're gonna be
Leo Laporte (02:19:49):
Right one year, right. He said this year, it really is the peak of the peak TV era. He is chair of Disney's FX network, Amazon prime Lord of the rings at 465 million budget. They could make top gun Maverick three times over house of dragons to drag the dragon 200 million for 10 episodes. Disney plus has star wars and, or she Hulk attorney at law, which is probably the best name of any many of them. That's like shark, NATO. That's good. All the thing is that companies like Amazon, apple are subsidizing it with their profits, vast profits from other arenas, but Netflix, HBO well
Wil Harris (02:20:38):
Mean meantime Leah in the rundown, we've got the Netflix ad advertising plan, which will be about half the current price, seven to $9 a month with four minutes of ads per hour.
Leo Laporte (02:20:50):
Doesn't that feel like a hail Mary, like it's this is it. But that's what Amazon's doing with free V free V. But they tell you this is free. It's crappy TV <laugh> yeah. Well, product
Wil Harris (02:21:05):
Is an add on is sort of like is not Amazon prime.
Leo Laporte (02:21:08):
It's kinda like what happened with cable TV where, I mean, we all remember because we're older, that cable was originally, you sent it out to the hinterlands for people that couldn't get real television. Right. And then it became this thing with all this cool programming and you paid for it. So you wouldn't have ads. And then suddenly it was filled with ads, just like everything else. And I feel like we're being hit with that again. And yaw in our chat room says free V is Amazon's subprime video. <Laugh> it's so bad. <Laugh> and of course
Wil Harris (02:21:35):
It's a full swap video.
Leo Laporte (02:21:37):
You remember network television from the day <laugh> and again, thinking back on track episodes, you had four or five ad breaks, depending on what era it was. They were programmed in, they were written into the script. So at the end of each act, you did the closeup of the, I know you don't the best thing in the world off camera, but now they just drop the ads in with a battle act. It's awful. The best thing in the world though, is to binge a show that was ads supported and then character off and, and it goes black and then it comes back and you didn't on again. I love that,
Wil Harris (02:22:07):
But that's but Leo that's, that's how we experienced. Yes. So much TV over here, growing up,
Leo Laporte (02:22:12):
You now realize how unnatural that
Wil Harris (02:22:14):
Was watching star Trek, the next generation on BBC. Yeah. And you would get the moment where Picard is suddenly sort of looking into the distance, very meaningfully and you'd think, oh God, what's about to happen. And you'd get a fade to black. And then a fade fade back up,
Leo Laporte (02:22:30):
Back in again. And now we know,
Wil Harris (02:22:31):
And you had, it was only, you know, as, as a, you know, nine year old watching star Trek, you have no idea why that was the case.
Leo Laporte (02:22:38):
Brits have a very different relationship to advertisement. When we do our ads, I always hear from people who listen in the UK saying, wait a minute, you're the host of the show. And you're doing the ad. <Laugh> like, that's like apparently verboten in, well, that's probably not the right word to use, but they have
Wil Harris (02:22:53):
This thing in the UK called you're sort of in the right geographical area. Yeah. That's, you know, you were a few thousand miles bad rugby. Yeah, it's, it's very strange cuz we have a very weird relationship to the BBC, which obviously is, is not as supported. But which therefore kind of skews our thoughts on advertising.
Leo Laporte (02:23:14):
We were talking about that very helpful in the TWiT forums at TWiT community because big D lives in Germany where there's a very robust public television. People still watch TV, you know, broadcast TV there because of it here in the us public television has been eviscerated and, and you know, and runs everything but commercials at this point and constant pledge breaks. But the good news is there's such a diversity in a, a rich ecosystem of streaming stuff. When you throw YouTube in, which is streaming that there's, I don't think we need public TV. We've got, you know, anybody who wants to do something can do
Wil Harris (02:23:51):
It, although it's fascinating to listen to the kind of you know, and, and you guys included the media ecosystem talk about, you know, the different streaming services that are available, you know one of the films that I was really keen to watch in the last few weeks has been prey.
Leo Laporte (02:24:06):
Yeah. What a good movie.
Wil Harris (02:24:07):
It's a, Preco directed by friend of the show, friend of the show, Dan Trachtenberg, right? Yeah. Which is a, which is a Hulu streaming original. And then you go, oh, Hulu doesn't exist outside of the United States in the United States. It's a Disney plus origin in the United Kingdom. It's a Disney plus original. And you realize how much of this sort of conversation is, is based on one market being the us. And we talk about the sort of the cable infrastructure and the advertising infrastructure actually, you know, that is just one market. And actually the rest of the world doesn't operate in quite the same way.
Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
We don't even know. I don't know. And I imagine most viewers don't know did was pre made as a movie. Was it made for a network? Was it made just for Hulu? I think it was made just for Hulu, right?
Wil Harris (02:24:56):
No. So it's an incredible story. It was a Fox picture which was due to go to cinemas theaters, as you would say.
Leo Laporte (02:25:07):
Oh, you mean movie palaces?
Wil Harris (02:25:08):
Yeah. Movie palaces. And then when Disney bought Fox Fox had a deal whereby anything that went to theaters would then first streaming rights go to Netflix. Right. And so rather than put it in theaters and have the streaming rights go to Netflix, they chose to stream it on Hulu as first run.
Leo Laporte (02:25:32):
I have never seen a predator movie before. I'm ashamed to admit John's really
Wil Harris (02:25:38):
Don't get the chopper.
Leo Laporte (02:25:41):
John John Sina said, pray is great. I, I said, I've never seen a predator movie. He says, it's okay. You'll understand. It's an alien. And they gotta kill it before it kills them. And I loved it. What I loved was the native American angle on this. Well,
Wil Harris (02:25:56):
And there's an entire version of the movie that's in Comanche. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:25:59):
Yeah. That's wild. It's wild. You get to watch it without, and of course it's posturing of predator, which was kind of, yes. That I was not that between him and the other leads. It was just grim.
Wil Harris (02:26:10):
Yeah. You know, and it's our old friend, you know, Dan Trachtenberg of totally rad Alex Albrecht and Jeff canal. So it's a, it's a little homegrown production. It's
Leo Laporte (02:26:19):
Kind of neat. He's doing good. It's a, what was the budget on this $50? $53 and 22 cents. <Laugh> I actually watched the, yeah,
Wil Harris (02:26:28):
I think, I think the budget was my seven pounds, 99. I pay a month for Disney plus
Leo Laporte (02:26:32):
I watch the, make the making of it. It's very cool. But yeah, I don't think it was a big budget film. I mean, mostly they made it, it was,
Wil Harris (02:26:40):
It was, it was quite chunky cuz it was, it was, it was going to be a proper Fox picture. Yeah. But before, before Disney people,
Leo Laporte (02:26:46):
I'm glad it aired.
Wil Harris (02:26:47):
I hope it's worth to watch if you, if anybody's watching it,
Leo Laporte (02:26:50):
Even if you've never seen a predator movie, it's quite good. Yeah.
Wil Harris (02:26:54):
Like the,
Leo Laporte (02:26:55):
You won't like it Becky's very violent. You won't. Well,
Becky Worley (02:26:58):
I like the predator movies. They were good. So much bicep.
Leo Laporte (02:27:01):
There's no bicep. Our hero. Which bison is a native American girl.
Wil Harris (02:27:06):
Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Leo Laporte (02:27:07):
No bicep
Wil Harris (02:27:08):
Got the guns out.
Leo Laporte (02:27:09):
Actually. Predator's the best looking guy in the whole show. Well, he's got that. Coody catcher mouth, right? Yeah. That's a little bad. That's off putting, but he's got, he's got six pack actually. He's got like a 12 pack cuz he's an alien.
Becky Worley (02:27:21):
Hey, you know, rod, I wanted to circle back to your question about all these derivative works and how all these prequels and sequels and everything like that. And how can we, they continue to monetize these. And one interesting thing that I actually learned in grad school was when blues clues, the kids show first came out. Oh great
Leo Laporte (02:27:37):
Show. Yeah.
Becky Worley (02:27:38):
They, they only had enough money on PBS to make one episode a week. But the time slot was for five episodes a week and they decided, okay, we're just gonna air it and know that on Monday we're gonna get the big ratings. And then the kids will turn in, tune in on Tuesday and realize, oh, I've already seen this one. And the ratings will gradually go down as the week progresses. The exact opposite happened. The kids watched on Monday, they tuned in on Tuesday and said, oh I know this, watched it. And then they wanted to come back again on Wednesday because they wanted something predictable. Right. Something they knew the template of right. That the world was so chaotic. Yeah. And they could predict how the storyline was gonna end. So actually Friday had the highest ratings and I kind of had this hypothesis, that in the world we live in now, it's really nice to watch a show that's kind of new, but you basically know what's gonna happen.
Leo Laporte (02:28:31):
Cause bunch of back, that's a really taking notes to what she just said. Yeah. So what I want to know, and this is stepping back a bit, but anybody here at top gear fan, the original BBC mm-hmm <affirmative> show. Yep. You bet. How did that become the most watch, highest grossing film in the show in the English language for a decade. It's three fat middle-aged guys blown up cars, you know? I mean, I wanna know that secret I'm past middle-aged but I mean, it sounds really like a great idea. Same recipe, different ingredients. I love it. But I still don't understand the same show over and over. Yeah, yeah,
Wil Harris (02:29:06):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So there are, there are, I mean there are not to take this show on too much of a, a rat hole <laugh> but there are yeah, there are, there are, there are two answers, which is one every middle-aged man wishes, they could hang out with all those.
Leo Laporte (02:29:23):
They all wanna be German. We all wanna be German parts. Exactly.
Wil Harris (02:29:26):
You don't wanna be that person, but you wanna be able to hang out with those people. And two is the familiarity of it's a show every week. That's not about cars. It's about friendship. Yes. And to be to Becky's. Wow. one of the
Leo Laporte (02:29:40):
Right to the heart, he goes
Wil Harris (02:29:42):
One of the, the hot shows right now that I am absolutely obsessed with which a lot of my dad, friends have clued me into is bluey. Which if you haven't watched bluey, holy smokes. It is one of the greatest shows on television. It's Australian. It's a cartoon. It's about a little family of, of, of two, two parents and two kids. And every show is seven to nine minutes and you will learn something. You will laugh. You will cry. It will. Whether or not you have kids, it doesn't matter. It's got that. The, the, the, that wonderful sort of aesthetic of kids watching it will get the very textual text and the parents watching it will get the, the super text and subtext.
Leo Laporte (02:30:31):
The weird thing is you can, you don't even have kids and you're watching this show. It's kind of amazing.
Wil Harris (02:30:36):
Oh my word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So all my, all my dad, friends are saying, this is the best thing that they're watching. Whether or not they've got kids. So I thought, well, I have to watch it. And it's yeah. Somebody who doesn't have kids, you are watching it going. This is
Leo Laporte (02:30:47):
Fantastic. Okay. Tell the truth. How many, how many glasses of Irish whiskey in, are you when you're watching? <Laugh> when you're watching this?
Becky Worley (02:30:55):
No, no. The chat room agrees with him. Chumley in the chat room says, KA, you needs a beat down with a rubber hose, but Lou is life
Leo Laporte (02:31:03):
<Laugh>. So they
Wil Harris (02:31:04):
Is amazing.
Leo Laporte (02:31:05):
I've never seen this. I don't know if I would enjoy it
Wil Harris (02:31:08):
Harder while about Louie. He,
Leo Laporte (02:31:10):
Well, he has a little kid. He knows. Yeah. Yeah. Our kids are almost the same age. Did you get into the first two seasons of SpongeBob? No, I had never done LSD, but it was as close to LSD watching television as I can imagine, but it was brilliant. Well, and then the network stepped in and took control. One of our, one of our hosts here on the network's wife is starring in the stage. Play of SpongeBob. Oh no, here in Petaluma. And we are all going to see it. Anne. I hope, you know, queen Pruitt is gonna have a, a, a applauding audience, a cl in there cheering her on. What character does she play?
Speaker 8 (02:31:50):
Sandy
Leo Laporte (02:31:51):
Cheeks. Sandy cheeks. Woo. Yeah. Pretty good role. That's a good role. That is a good role. I don't know. I've never, we like Sandy cheeks. Yeah. Okay. Just, oh, we do. Don't get stuck as Patrick. We do. We don't wanna be Patrick. We do. Becky and I are saying, we're glad our kids are grown. We don't have to watch more Barney. Oh my God. Oh my God. You're my specially <laugh> alright. I, we gotta take a break. We are going way over time. I gotta take a break. We will come back. We'll talk more wrap this thing up because what a great panel with Becky Warley and rod pile and will Harris. You guys are my best friends, man, straight from the heart. That's what this show is a bunch of friends getting together, talking about cars. It's the top gear of tech.
Leo Laporte (02:32:33):
That's the top gear of tech. One of the ways we bring this show to you ever since day one, when we started shooting video was with our new tech TriCaster two elite, the most complete live production system on the planet. And what an empowering technology for us as podcasters. When we first started video, I said, well, how am I gonna switch it? What am I gonna do? You know, when we were at tech TV, Becky, we had $2 million control rooms with grass valley switchers. And we had very, very expensive cameras and all that. The TriCaster two elite, any TriCaster product has allowed me to do with TWiTt for a fraction of the cost, better, better than, than tech TV ever did. It's a lot. It's actually more than just a live video production system. It's an all encompassing digital media solution that lets us create content.
Leo Laporte (02:33:27):
And you create content for the internet for mobile. Yay. Even TV now uses new tech late in 2001, new tech unleashed, an updated version of the TriCaster. Two elite with lots of new features, the live call connect feature, which means you can call in. We're gonna actually, I think maybe that's what we need to do where we're gonna launch a new fall in show in January with call-ins. And I think that might be the solution. It now supports Facebook messenger, WhatsApp and FaceTime as inputs to any production, selectable, audio and video returns enable the TriCaster to elite operators to view an audio return like any other output, which means it's so much more flexible. Benito is the king of the TriCaster, right? Benito, you understand all this stuff? I it's a mystery to me, but our, our technical directors love it. The all new neural voice isolation tool, which cleans audio uses AI to cancel or reduce background noise automatically detects voices and says the rest of it, throw it out.
Leo Laporte (02:34:24):
Audio is so important to video it's and it's, and, and you know, I love it. That the folks at new tech understand that you get increased power, flexibility, and simplicity. We use the macros like crazy. Now they support variables, which is really kind of cool. It's like becoming a programming system. The system offers dynamic and powerful tools to allow operators to nest macros, to deliver complex productions more easily. You could encode up to three channels all the same time. They've got the live panel builder now, and the TriCaster meaning users can create bespoke user interfaces, customize the presets within the user interface, making your distributed workflows simpler, more cohesive without compromising on quality. The NDI genlock two, by the way, really is important. And that's a new feature in the TriCaster two elite, which allows you to match outputs to a common sync pulse.
Leo Laporte (02:35:19):
Perfect for remote workflows operators can now send alpha channel through one of the mix outs. I mean, I can go on and on. It is really an impressive tool. Operators can see the resolution and frame rate of every video source coming into the TriCaster. So, you know exactly before you put it on the air, what you're gonna get since its arrival in 2020 TriCaster, two elite has offered incredibly powerful live production systems to people in every area of video. I know so many churches and schools, broadcasters who use TriCaster it's transformative, the TriCaster one pro also an excellent choice for producers, content, creators, and publishers. It has live call connect support for 4k UD streaming live streaming. It's kind of amazing what we can do these days. There's a whole TriCaster family, the best thing to do visit the website, go.new tech.com/TWiT-tv, where you'll find an easy to use interactive guide that offers advice on which TriCaster is right for you. That's what got us started many years ago, and it's what keeps us on the air every single day. Go.New tech E WT k.com/TWiT-tv. A real tip of the hat to NewTech for that technology has been so important for us. Thank you. New tech. We appreciate it. What? We, we were shooting Becky in SD, right? I mean that wasn't high deaf, even though we were doing tech TV
Becky Worley (02:36:47):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> four by three. It was, it was old school.
Leo Laporte (02:36:49):
It's amazing. You know how
Becky Worley (02:36:51):
Resolution was low, especially that time that you streaked the set of internet tonight. Thank
Leo Laporte (02:36:57):
Goodness you couldn't see a thing <laugh> I was moving far too fast.
Becky Worley (02:37:03):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:37:05):
I think I, I think I was what
Becky Worley (02:37:09):
You, you were wearing pants. You just had them down very low. Thank you. Okay. I'm just down. Very re resolution was low, but the
Wil Harris (02:37:14):
Quality was high.
Leo Laporte (02:37:16):
<Laugh> hi. Oh Lord. Oh Lord. Hey, take a look at some of the things we did this week using our new tech TriCaster. Here's the best of for you? Why? Hey <laugh> what are you laughing at? Well, Hey, Hey, it it's time for the tech guy show. I thought I'd try something new, but I guess you don't like it.
Speaker 9 (02:37:35):
It it felt a little odd. <Laugh> I'll say that
Leo Laporte (02:37:40):
Yo
Speaker 9 (02:37:42):
Previously on TWiTtter iOS today, Rosemary orchard is back and we are talking about taking your devices offline. Yes, there are times when it is time to step away from the wifi, the cellular data,
Leo Laporte (02:37:56):
All about Android.
Speaker 10 (02:37:58):
It's a very important day to happen for us. Android developers back in may, 2017. Oh, this week Google's celebrating it. They've got their hashtag high five Kolin on Android. And they're just taking time to celebrate and look back on five years of having Kotlin B a first party development language for Android
Leo Laporte (02:38:17):
This weekend, Google, you know, we all know about Dolly too. I have this. Should I, should we just do one podcast? Legend having lunch. That's good. I like it. <Laugh> oh, here it is. <Laugh> podcast legend having lunch. <Laugh> that awesome. AI generated. I think that's art. AI generated even better. Oh my God. I love it. <Laugh> that's what it looks like. That's awesome. <Laugh> look at this one. It looks like me and Joe Rogan having lunch. I love that. Did any of you, speaking of Joe Rogan, listen to three hours of Joe Rogan interviewing mark Zuckerberg. Anybody show of hands no, you missed it. You were in the Arctic <laugh>. Yeah. Was it great? I don't know. I didn't listen to it either. I, I, I have to go with the the summaries publish by some of the, some of the tech reporters who were willing to sit through three hours of it. Among other things mark said owning, being in charge of meta means that he wakes up every morning. It's like being punched in the stomach. Poor mark, poor mark. It
Wil Harris (02:39:35):
Sounds like the kind of work experience I want. Right. <laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:39:41):
He says that there's, you know, he'll wake up in the morning and and you know, all of the messages that came in overnight, all of the problems that Facebook's facing, come rushing back to him and it's, it's like being punched in stomach. Then he clarified, by the way, he said, that's not bad. I'm really happy to be one of the wealthiest men in the world. I just,
Wil Harris (02:40:07):
I mean, the whole, the whole interview is basically is that classic Zuckerberg thing of, of saying lots without saying anything at all. Yeah. If you read the I'm gonna, I'm gonna be unashamedly British here and, and pick the BBC summary of the interview. Good
Leo Laporte (02:40:23):
Idea.
Wil Harris (02:40:23):
Zuckerberg said that getting the decision wrong, quote sucks. When we take something down that we are not supposed to that's eloquent. That's the worst.
Leo Laporte (02:40:36):
So this was something that,
Wil Harris (02:40:37):
Oh, wow. What, what an incredible insight. Thank you, mark. He says, and he says D depending on what side of the political spectrum you are on you either think we didn't censor it enough, or we CED it way too much. I mean, what
Leo Laporte (02:40:52):
Both are, right?
Wil Harris (02:40:54):
The insight, the insight. These
Becky Worley (02:40:56):
Are the highlights too. I can't imagine the filler works
Leo Laporte (02:40:59):
To grow a conscience. Is that what he said? The, the, this was about the hunter Biden web web laptop story that was published in the New York post, which Facebook and mark admitted. This did push down. They said we didn't block it, but we, we lowered the temperature on it. We, and, and there was some, he mentioned that the FBI had contacted him. The FBI later clarified. They said, we, we are not allowed to. And we did not say to him, take down this story. In fact, we didn't even mention the hunter Biden laptop story. We mentioned that there is misinformation from inter you know, foreign actors showing up. And you know, you might wanna do something about that. We can't tell you what to do. You might wanna do something about that.
Wil Harris (02:41:43):
Also he talks, he talks about, and I just love this because the, it, the irony of when you go back to the origin, the origins of Facebook is incredible. He talks about how it's difficult to deal with sort of thorny issues around personal lives. And he says, I didn't get into this to basically judge these things. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And you're like, didn't you get into this entirely to just judge women based on their appearance in Harvard,
Leo Laporte (02:42:08):
Not, or not
Wil Harris (02:42:08):
The entire point you literally got into this to judge things. Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:42:12):
That's I didn't even think of that. Oh boy. He also let us know that he's big in a mixed martial arts now jujitsu the whole family big into juujitsu. Is he gonna become another body freak? Like Bezos? I don't know. Wow. Alright.
Becky Worley (02:42:29):
Is he done with the motorized foil? No. So far. Is he done with that?
Leo Laporte (02:42:34):
No. No, no big into that. He plans to do a lot more surfing and, and foiling
Wil Harris (02:42:39):
<Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (02:42:39):
Okay. But he does say ju
Wil Harris (02:42:41):
A more
Leo Laporte (02:42:41):
Sun cream and a lot more sun cream. He does say ju JSU is quote, a big part of who I am.
Becky Worley (02:42:47):
Hmm.
Leo Laporte (02:42:48):
Okay. I guess I didn't miss anything. I, I literally, every day since that interview, I've been getting up saying, you know, I really should listen to the, the Zuckerberg interview and
Wil Harris (02:43:00):
Then I, and then you just realize he's one of the most powerful yet boring people on the so,
Becky Worley (02:43:06):
Well, he's a boring communicator. He's a boring communicator. And I think it's important to very distinguish that you can have a lot of brilliant people or a lot of powerful people who don't express themselves well, and he knows this about himself. I think back to that interview with Kara Swisher, where he just sweated his way through
Leo Laporte (02:43:23):
It. Oh my God. Talk about floes.
Wil Harris (02:43:25):
I also think Becky, Becky's your point? I don't think it's that he doesn't express himself. Well, I think he chooses not to express himself.
Leo Laporte (02:43:33):
Yeah. Yeah. He may be smart
Wil Harris (02:43:34):
Enough. I think he's a very interesting
Leo Laporte (02:43:35):
Person.
Wil Harris (02:43:36):
He just doesn't put itself out there.
Leo Laporte (02:43:37):
Yeah, honestly, it's funny. Cuz we began this show bemoaning how expressive Elon Musk is just think of it, how much he says too much. And now we're talking about Z and how little he says we can. You just can't win with us I guess. But Elon probably had a girlfriend before he got rich, which might have made a difference. You know, having some social let's let's experience. Let's correct. That let's correct. That right here. Sorry. The social network got it. Wrong. Zuck was with Priscilla Chan before Facebook, he ended up marrying her. He's still with her. They have kids. Well kudos to him. Yeah, no. He had a girlfriend then that, that didn't stop him. She should have done more doing what he was doing.
Wil Harris (02:44:16):
Look as somebody whose love life was a disaster before I got rich, I'm just not gonna judge him way. You know, come on guys. Gimme
Leo Laporte (02:44:24):
A break. California has announced it's banning the sale of new gasoline cars in 2035.
Becky Worley (02:44:31):
I love this.
Leo Laporte (02:44:32):
I loved it. Do you drive an electric vehicle? Miss
Becky Worley (02:44:35):
Wooley? I sure do. What
Leo Laporte (02:44:36):
Do you drive? And I
Becky Worley (02:44:36):
Can't. I have the Volvo XC 40
Leo Laporte (02:44:40):
It's. Oh nice. Small's pretty car. All
Becky Worley (02:44:42):
Electric. Love it. Love it. Love it. Not super expensive. I mean they're all a little bit expensive and you could get cheaper,
Leo Laporte (02:44:49):
But you know what? Our Chevy bull all electric $20,000 after.
Becky Worley (02:44:53):
Okay. That's a good
Leo Laporte (02:44:54):
Price. So they aren't that expensive. Just half what it was five years ago, which is amazing. We bought it two years ago. And we got the $7,500 tax break, which is now back, but it was gone for a while. And I think there was a state $2,500 tax break. So I think we, it was $30,000, but after we paid for it was ended up being 20,000 in breaks. That's a good, that's not an out of people's reach. No. And it's a great EV I drive a Mustang, mock the, we gave the bolt to our son 19 year old. And Lisa has an electric mini. So you think it's a good thing, Becky?
Becky Worley (02:45:30):
I, well, I also want the Ford F-150, but the SUV version, they have the lightning right now, which I would like to have, but I schlep kids and so anything to get rid of my mini limo. So sick of my minivan <laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:45:44):
God, you know what I want the VW buzz. Yeah, yeah. That would be for a little family. Yeah. It's the old VW bus in electric form.
Becky Worley (02:45:55):
So yes, I think it's a really good thing. And I go back to the California air resources board, changing the world with their emission standards back in the early two thousands when they set the emission standards for California and as California goes, so goes the country. And hopefully we, you know, if the country doesn't have the will to do it, California's big enough to have an impact. And so I see this as hugely positive. I know there are, the good news is it's only as you know, the obvious thing is it's new electric cars. That's what must be sold in California. And it corresponds with 2035 is when GM says their all their cars will be electric. And you know, that gives time for the infrastructure, the charging infrastructure to come in. And I think people will get much more comfortable with range, anxiety and realizing I actually don't drive 300 miles very often. And by then, hopefully you'll have fast charge stations.
Leo Laporte (02:46:51):
Nice. Here's our our operations guy in his Ford lightning. Yeah. With license plate hat y'all you could tell he's from Texas hat. Here I come. Am I
Becky Worley (02:47:05):
Latin? I, I want that. Isn't that nice. I love a truck now. You know, what I'm waiting for us to do in California is to ban gas powered leafblower
Leo Laporte (02:47:15):
Oh God, please. That's what we need to get please.
Becky Worley (02:47:18):
And not only is it a noise pollution, but a leaf blower has more carbon dioxide emissions pollutants than a 2010. Yes. Like F-150
Leo Laporte (02:47:32):
Because there's still two strokes. They're two strokes. Yeah. We, we all remember two strokes. What we really need is four stroke leaf blowers. They make smoother, they'd be quieter. They'd be more, they make them. And they, if you go to the hunting food library, humer Samino humer leaf blows have great big lunar backpack, size leaf blowers go, but there's still gas, power, I think electric. So my question question is just to play the other side of the political fence for a minute, which I don't ever live comfortably. There's still this discussion about the calculus of, okay. Here's what it takes to build an electric car. Here's what it takes to manufacture batteries. Here's what it takes to cycle all that stuff out of the ecosystem later. How long do you have to convert to all electric before that plays out into a net win? Or do you, I mean, I've read a bunch of different accounts of this and I haven't yet seen one that really convinced me one way or the other, because it's really resource intensive and well, it's tough on got
Wil Harris (02:48:28):
Well, it's, it's, it's also desperately different depending on where you live,
Leo Laporte (02:48:32):
Where is it? How's EV in the UK, are, are people doing
Wil Harris (02:48:35):
Evs? So EV in UK is is interesting again, depending on where you live because in California, you know, or in America generally, like people have houses that have driveways. Yes. And that means can charge a car on your driveway. Yeah. Right. You live in London, you know, 90% of places that you live in London don't have driveways you park on the street. So you are relying on the government to provide charging infrastructure on the street where you live which is very difficult. On the other hand, you are probably driving much shorter distances, which is either better or worse, depending on your point of view. I will say that I think I was, I was in Brighton, which is TWiTned with Santa Monica in the states. So that gives you an idea of what kind of place it is. And this weekend they had a, do you guys know vespers the little Italian scooters that were kind of like the
Leo Laporte (02:49:30):
Always wanted one
Wil Harris (02:49:31):
Of the
Leo Laporte (02:49:32):
Sixties always wanted one of those. Yeah.
Wil Harris (02:49:34):
So they had a little mod festival and it was, and there were hundreds of these bikes all along the coastline of, of Brighton beach
Leo Laporte (02:49:42):
Mods
Wil Harris (02:49:43):
Mods. And I was there, oh yeah, the mods and rockers. And I was there and I was thinking, what is, you know, the mods were the seventies, we're in the twenties, in the 2070s, what is going to be the equivalent of the mods on their vesters now, is it going to be anybody driving a, a gas powered car? <Laugh> is it going to be, you know,
Leo Laporte (02:50:10):
His
Wil Harris (02:50:10):
Farmer, what are we gonna have nostalgia for in 50 years where we think actually that's probably not very good for the environment, but it's quite cute at the moment.
Leo Laporte (02:50:18):
Remember when you could go outside without having your hair burn off.
Wil Harris (02:50:22):
And I would say so my, my, my my point of view is I love, so I, I love cars and I love, you know unlike Americans, the British have some history. So we have, we have nice cars in our, in our backfill. Who, who yeah, sorry. So I have a lovely little 1970s sports
Leo Laporte (02:50:46):
Car, I'm jealous, but do you have an mg or triumph? What do you have?
Wil Harris (02:50:50):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little 1970 mg drop
Leo Laporte (02:50:52):
Off. Oh, I'm so just, that was the very end of the, for those,
Wil Harris (02:50:56):
Yeah. As the, as the flip side to
Leo Laporte (02:50:58):
How often of you
Wil Harris (02:51:00):
Very Austin Powers, but because I'm turning 40 next week and I, and I have a
Leo Laporte (02:51:04):
Happy birthday midlife,
Wil Harris (02:51:06):
A midlife crisis, I've bought an electric motorbike.
Leo Laporte (02:51:10):
Perfect.
Wil Harris (02:51:12):
And it's like for, if you are in London, that's a perfect choice. And all you wanna do is 40, you know, range, anxiety. The range on this thing is 40 miles, but in London, that's about, you know, four weeks of, of riding. So I've bought a there's a great brand called maing, M a E V I N g.com. And they make very classically British inspired sort of triumph. It's all triumph engineers that
Leo Laporte (02:51:42):
Doesn't work.
Wil Harris (02:51:43):
Electric bikes.
Leo Laporte (02:51:45):
First of flames, is that, excuse me. I had, look, wait a minute. This is, I know this is not a bicycle. This is a, a motorcycle electric.
Wil Harris (02:51:53):
No, no, no. It's a motorbike.
Leo Laporte (02:51:54):
Yeah.
Wil Harris (02:51:55):
But from, and so that as a little commuter Villa around London, and obviously, you know, it's, it's not gonna be amazing in LA or or Puma, but you ski around New York or any sort of, of urban area in that. It's gonna be fantastic.
Leo Laporte (02:52:07):
Oh, how what's the top speed on this?
Wil Harris (02:52:10):
It does about 60.
Leo Laporte (02:52:11):
That's beautiful. And how much is it?
Wil Harris (02:52:15):
About five, five UK pounds.
Leo Laporte (02:52:19):
Five
Wil Harris (02:52:19):
Quid. About, so about six and a
Leo Laporte (02:52:23):
Thousand.
Wil Harris (02:52:24):
Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:52:25):
Yeah, yeah. Okay. You left in your American rose. I was getting excited. <Laugh> well, it's only five pens, Kevin, that that's bad though. And where's it made, so
Wil Harris (02:52:33):
It's especially right
Becky Worley (02:52:33):
Now with the dollar so strong.
Leo Laporte (02:52:35):
Yeah. Where's
Wil Harris (02:52:35):
It made well, exactly. So it's kind of like, well, what is going to be the equivalent of, you know, we are looking at all these electric things and it's great, but what is gonna be the equivalent in 20 or 30 years time of, of driving around a vintage car? Is it gonna be, are we gonna have a new fantasy plumbers?
Leo Laporte (02:52:54):
You look like Lawrence of Arabia riding this around. Right. That's fantastic.
Wil Harris (02:52:58):
<Laugh> Steve McQueen. I'm going for Leo. Steve
Leo Laporte (02:53:01):
Mcqueen. All right. Okay. Yeah, probably better. This is, this is so cute. I'm actually te I wonder if I can get this in the us I'm tempted, but you've ordered it or are you just looking at it?
Wil Harris (02:53:10):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's coming a week after my
Leo Laporte (02:53:12):
Birthday. Oh, happy birthday. What a perfect thing. Okay. Can I just,
Wil Harris (02:53:16):
Just in time, my midlife crisis.
Leo Laporte (02:53:18):
Yeah. There you go. That and your triumph you're set. <Laugh> maing. It's great. Right around. You're just like a Mo rock
Wil Harris (02:53:28):
Maer.
Leo Laporte (02:53:29):
Oh, <laugh> is that a stir? Do you put your foot in that thing, Jack? Yeah, sure. It's like a horse. Jack Dorsey says my biggest regret is that I turned TWiTtter into a company. Huh.
Becky Worley (02:53:47):
So does he mean, like, it could have been like Craigslist and he could have been like, Craig.
Leo Laporte (02:53:51):
Yeah. Somebody asked him on TWiTtter, Jack. Wondering what was your intent on TWiTtter and has it turned out the way you wanted it? See, it feels a bit skewed, left word right now. How do we straighten it? It seems an inordinate amount of right word leaning. Twittter users are being banned or kicked off. Well, this guy obviously has an agenda. It can't be good for MW. The biggest issue. And my biggest regret is that it became a company. I think what he meant. And it's interesting to read the replies is I wish it had been a protocol. And Kevin mark says, well, I might point out we are treating it as a protocol. Cuz you had an API right up until chirp when TWiTtter rug pulled that killed all third party clients in most apps. Oh, I remember that the winter, the TWiTtter winter. So I mean, it's
Wil Harris (02:54:41):
Really good for, for Jack to talk about, oh, I really wish I'd made it open. I really wish I'd done this, that and the other. It's like dude, a, you made an absolute shoot term of money. So it's very easy to look back and say, I wish I'd done it a different way. From a perspective of immense privilege and immense money and B, at every point you had the opportunity to make TWiTtter open. You repeatedly chose to not do that. Right. You,
Leo Laporte (02:55:06):
You, you bought, so he has regrets.
Wil Harris (02:55:07):
You, you bought tweet deck, you bought, you know, every single thing that was successful, you killed it all off. So I mean, sure have regrets, but it's very hard to have regrets over things that you consciously repeatedly chose to do. It's like maybe I have regret over this one thing that I did once occasionally, but if you keep doing something, can you really regret it? It's more like, well that point you kind of made a life choice.
Leo Laporte (02:55:33):
You could say I was a jerk. Well
Wil Harris (02:55:36):
Like the five times that I shut down every client and every API and I rate limited everything that accessed TWiTtter and I refuse to build a decent desktop client and I refuse to build a mobile app that, I mean, how much he's learned his lesson really have,
Leo Laporte (02:55:52):
Maybe he's learned his lesson.
Wil Harris (02:55:54):
Well, a few billion dollars will give everyone perspective right
Leo Laporte (02:55:57):
Here is a final story that I think has a happy ending. A Unix legend, Brian Carnahan, who was instrumental in writing Lenox and I'm sorry, Unix. I have his book, the C programming language, brilliant guy, Princeton professor he's now 80 years old. He realized that the, a program that he wrote that is widely used on a, on Unix, like platforms didn't support Unicode. So he wrote it. He added he and, and because he says, I don't really understand get, I'm just gonna email you. <Laugh> I'm gonna email you the code uncode support for a at the age of 80, I've tested this a fair amount clearly means more tests. He wrote in an email to the one true a repo posted by longtime maintainer, Arnold Robbins. Once I figure out how I will try to submit a poll request, I wish I understood get better. <Laugh> but in spite of your help, I still don't have a proper understanding. So this may take a while it made me pull out my old C programming language book, which I got in 1982 and realized that that was Carnahan was 40 back then. And I was a, a mere sprout of a 25. Aw. But it's a beautiful story.
Wil Harris (02:57:20):
What a legend
Leo Laporte (02:57:21):
Carnahan. Yes. Just
Wil Harris (02:57:22):
Absolute legend. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:57:23):
And a wonderful story. Wonderful story.
Wil Harris (02:57:26):
And a real example of how we can really venerate all the sort of, you know, incredible web three entrepreneurs and all the, you know, the, the incredible sort of people that are doing the new, but how we are all standing on the shoulders of giants.
Leo Laporte (02:57:40):
Yeah.
Becky Worley (02:57:42):
And that, that sort of for, you know, that generation of early computer scientists and engineers are hitting that, you know, golden age. Yeah. And we're gonna, we're gonna see them in their retirement. You know, the service core of retired executives <laugh> is now the service core of retired engineers or something similar.
Leo Laporte (02:58:00):
Well, his, his co-author on the CEO programming language passed several years ago Richie, and that was a big deal when he passed cuz yeah, we started to real, we we've realized, I mean, I've realized it for some time that the we've walked amongst legends, like Becky Warley of well, and I will be telling such stories about you.
Becky Worley (02:58:23):
I'm not a legend yet.
Leo Laporte (02:58:24):
When we launch, I've been working on my legend legend during this,
Becky Worley (02:58:26):
There you go, Hey, I have two quick updates. I know you're trying to wrap this, but MIT says when it comes to clean technologies, like the electric cars, even the dirtiest batteries emit less CO2 than using no batter at all. So that's, that's the answer to Rod's question. And during this show, Elon Musk tweeted God's speed Artemis. So as we look forward to the week and the possible launch, let's just keep our fingers
Leo Laporte (02:58:53):
Crossed. All right. We didn't really talk about that, but that's tomorrow morning at five 30 Pacific, eight 30 during yeah. Yeah. If it goes off you know, it's turn it on the background and if you don't hear a countdown, hold at 30 seconds, you can probably assume it's gonna go. The NASA stream is in 4k on YouTube. If you have access to a 4k set that will be worth watching. It is unmanned. There's only a manic in a board Munich, Munin, Campos who is named after Campos is, was Capcom. Right. Or I can't, he was an astronaut. Yeah. This is NASA trying to popularize things better. And Monkin because, but Munn just hurts. <Laugh> why not? He'll be sitting in the command seat. So you you'll see him with a speaker in his mouth talking to the Amazon Alexa system.
Leo Laporte (02:59:44):
Yeah. Apparently they got some money from Jeff Bezos. Yeah. And and from it turns out Cisco, WebEx, Cisco, and Amazon partnered to do a test of the Amazon echo and space because astronauts really need to be able to talk to the I can remember one time that didn't work so well. How open the pod bay doors? How well open the pod bay doors, how and, and do they really have to now I, I, as she said, I know you're trying to wrap up, but there's so much available on glass panel controls. You know, it's not the push buttons and toggle switches of the Apollo and shuttle era. Do they really need that? I mean, I guess it could be handy, especially if you're at space walk, they need, it makes sense. They needed the money from Amazon. I need more electric. Cool. They're
Becky Worley (03:00:30):
Wiring cable.
Leo Laporte (03:00:32):
I'm glad you like Motley crew. I'll be happy to play this song for you. <Laugh> you know, tell a joke. Yeah. Yeah. Mo our, our Touro Campo was a NASA electrical power subsystem manager who was called upon Houston. We have a problem with Apollo 13 and helped get Apollo 13 safely back to earth. So I think a very appropriate tribute to he probably wouldn't be thrilled to know the first name Monkin but <laugh> but, but there you go. It is wearing the Orion crew survival suit system. Yeah. There, there you go. Nice. cuz they don't have an EBA suit yet. Yeah. Looks like they're bringing a child mannequin along. I don't know what that's all about, but okay.
Becky Worley (03:01:14):
Well this will be the first woman to go to the moon. So maybe it's a smaller,
Leo Laporte (03:01:19):
Oh, maybe that's the lady.
Becky Worley (03:01:22):
Although two of the ladies are rugby players who could snap you in half.
Leo Laporte (03:01:27):
Ah, yeah. So that's
Wil Harris (03:01:28):
Exciting. I don't feel like they need any compensation, this mission be quite competent filling what
Leo Laporte (03:01:35):
I'm saying. This is the first of three AOUS missions. The first one will go actually 40,000 miles past the moon and then yeah, come back. So this is a really long because it's on crew. They're going out for about 40 days. Yeah. So they're going in this really weird, big halo orbit. So it's different orbit. Any of the Apollo missions used and it's to accommodate, you know, part of what's wrong with Artemis. If I may is that the upper stage is so under power that even though the first, the main part of the rocket is more powerful than the Saturn five. It doesn't have the lifting capability, the moon, the Saturn five have, which is why we have all this, you know, we gotta meet Elon's rocket out in Luna orbit to get people down the surface. So it's a very right now the, the physics of this are really weird.
Leo Laporte (03:02:21):
Basically. They're gonna, so this is the first unru one. Next one will be a loop around the moon mission like Apollo eight. And then the third one, art is three, which will happen in 2025, maybe seven, somewhere in there will carry the first three people, which is when we get, you know, the first woman in first person of color to the moon. But by law you have to launch them on the SLS, which is the big government rocket. God bless em. I hope it works in an Orion capsule, which is a third bigger than the Paula capsule. Three people. You gotta go to lunar parking orbit, where you meet up with Elon Musks, lunar Starship, and then two of those three get in the nose of the Starship, taking up about 3% of his total volume with this enormous chasm of an RV behind them and LT tail first on the moon. So it's a little weird. It's a, but is the step a dog's breakfast of a launch
Wil Harris (03:03:18):
A month lunch?
Leo Laporte (03:03:19):
Well, we know what dogs eat. So yeah, that's a Snoopy will be going along for the ride three mannequins toys and an Amazon echo and an iPad, iPad and an iPad. I thought the iPad was the one talking to the echo. What's the iPad up there for, I I'm sure. I thought, wait,
Wil Harris (03:03:36):
If we got Siri talking to a Alexa, is that what we
Leo Laporte (03:03:39):
Would be very interesting. See. Yeah, but maybe they, maybe they ended up mounting the iPad there, but I mean, God bless them. They've been working on this rocket since 2002 in one form or another. And you know, it's supposed to be easy because this recycled shuttle parts. So we know they're gonna fly at at least four times cuz they have that many shuttle engines. I got 16 of 'em sitting around a warehouse. Do they have to use 'em up? Well, yeah, that's Congress. That's how we're saving money at 4 billion to launch with a B. Yeah. And then, you know, we'll see what happens after that. But you know, it's good to have a moon rocket. Elon could wake up one morning and say, this space stuff is for the birds. I don't want to do it anymore. So it's good to have a government program.
Leo Laporte (03:04:17):
So more power to 'em. It is an Elon touch, you know, they've in the past on Elon launches had a zero gravity indicator, which is like a puppet or something floating around this time. It would drag Snoopy be. So yeah, this'll be a Snoopy in a in a space suit floating around. That'll be the quote zero gravity indicator. Maybe next time Elon will carry something from the new, what is the house of dragons? Is that what you said? This new show is? Yeah. Oh, and just as a so to will Sean, the sheep will be aboard <laugh> Aw, Aw. Very. That's from that's the, that's the contribution of the European space agency ESA and I'm not joking. He's wearing an ESA. He's from Wallace and grommet. Okay. There you go. All right. Should be a lot of fun. There's also basement at its worst.
Leo Laporte (03:05:03):
A bunch of Apollo 11 crap. Hey <laugh> they're sticking in there. You're getting it all in baby. Look, here's a bolt from the Apollo 11 F one engine that will be flying on Artemis. Wouldn't it be ironic if like it, it broke the Artemis one broke Munn came to life and repaired it with the bolt from Apollo's F one NNG following instructions from Amazon's echo or echo. Sorry. Yeah, I said the word. Yeah. It's okay. Alright. The bolt to the right you idiot. I'm glad I forgot. We completely forgot. We that's the whole reason you're here. Rod pile. So thank you. That's that's how I remind you. Can I add one quick thing? Yeah. September 26th, the dart mission reaches didymo and the dart mission is double asteroid redirect test. This is NASA's little heralded test to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if we actually can knock them off course.
Leo Laporte (03:05:59):
Should they be on their move to take out a major city kind of important? So it's a very small rock, but it's, it's a valid test. And if the physics of it work out as they plan, then we start building bigger ones and we'll protect ourselves. We hope in the event that should ever occur. And the Chinese two to form have decided they're gonna run their own mission with the same general design in about two years using technology that looks hauntingly like ours. And this is the stuff you learn on this weekend space on this space, on TWiT on the TWiT network rod. And thank you so much for being here. Thanks rod pile space, dots.org. If you wanna subscribe to a Astra, look for his books in the bookstore, Becky Warley. What are you working on for ABC? Anything exciting besides the sleep study thing?
Becky Worley (03:06:48):
I did have a lot of tech stuff going on apple stuff and then waterproof mascara.
Leo Laporte (03:06:53):
Awesome. I've been looking for that for years. Me too. I know
Becky Worley (03:06:57):
Because
Leo Laporte (03:06:58):
I cry a lot on camera, Tammy Faye. Would've loved this.
Becky Worley (03:07:02):
Yeah. I did magnetic eyelashes a couple months ago. How do like this? So this is out cropping. They're incredible technology in a great innovation.
Leo Laporte (03:07:10):
Do they snap onto your eyelid or something?
Becky Worley (03:07:12):
Yeah, you, you use a a metallic eyeliner and then you snap the lashes onto it. And we did a open top bus going across the golden gate bridge to test if they made it or not. And two of the eight lashes went, but six lashes holding on pretty damn good.
Leo Laporte (03:07:29):
You have a cooler life than me. That is. And now unfortunately Becky has been labeled the eyelash reporter and anytime that's it is an eyelash products. I'm here. Worley gets it. I love you, Becky. It it's so great to see you. Oh, I love spending time. Congratulations on the kids on everything. It's going great for you on, on ABC. You always a pleasure.
Becky Worley (03:07:49):
I'd love to Lisa. Thank
Leo Laporte (03:07:50):
You.
Becky Worley (03:07:51):
And the crew.
Leo Laporte (03:07:52):
Come, come see us sometimes soon.
Becky Worley (03:07:54):
I would. I'd love to
Leo Laporte (03:07:55):
Good will Harris. I'm going to see you cuz you are in jolly old England and I love London where it is the middle of the night. Go wander on down to the the Greenwich observatory and just check and see for us. Will you
Wil Harris (03:08:10):
I'll I'll just check what time it is right now.
Leo Laporte (03:08:12):
Just let
Wil Harris (03:08:13):
I'll jump outta the apartment and just run down and check.
Leo Laporte (03:08:15):
He's apparently a hundred yards away from Greenwich. The Greenwich Meridian. Wow. Yeah.
Wil Harris (03:08:22):
We've we are very close. We're very close. So I can tell you that it is, although you say that I never really believe in the concept of anything other than apple time. I mean the time is just what the apple servers tell me it is on whatever device I happen to be looking at. Fair enough. So I mean the Greenwich Meridian could be hours out, but if apple tells me it's one 40, it's one 40. Oh
Leo Laporte (03:08:42):
Well, but at least at a hundred meters away, your mg might make it. So there's something to be said
Wil Harris (03:08:48):
For
Leo Laporte (03:08:48):
You only need one tuneup on the way. No
Wil Harris (03:08:50):
British manufacturing
Leo Laporte (03:08:52):
Energy. It's not that it's it's I like it on cars that came from the rainiest country on earth that don't run in the rain
Wil Harris (03:08:58):
<Laugh> yeah, no, you don't wanna take that car around
Leo Laporte (03:09:01):
The rain. I'm jealous. I'm jealous. What a great car. I'm so jealous. Thank you will. It's great to see you. Unbound.Com 42, the Douglas Adams book, all sorts of great stuff. You're doing really interesting publishing. I love this. Some
Wil Harris (03:09:14):
Really great geeky books, loads of stuff that you're gonna love. We've got an entire book on the buts of characters and video games. It's all about starts with the concept of Mario's but how did you invent Mario's butt? Great question. Is that bot so
Leo Laporte (03:09:30):
No, I think so.
Wil Harris (03:09:30):
Anybody who wants
Leo Laporte (03:09:31):
To, we almost got all the way through without talking about Mario's bottom
Wil Harris (03:09:36):
Without any bots <laugh> well I thought I'd save you at the end. So yeah. If anybody wants to go to one barr.com tweet 15 or get you 15% off a a nice old book. So, so enjoy Mario's but <laugh>
Leo Laporte (03:09:48):
Oh God. Well from all the other thread, bear authors, I know know, thank you very much for what you're doing. Yes. I agree. Please burn down Amazon publishing for me. I agree. Appreciate it. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, you guys rock, you put up with the, I think that the longest show we've ever done, <laugh> honest to God. Patrick Delehanty will tell me, but at three hours and 12 minutes, I think it's the longest show we've ever done. You deserve a break. Thank sorry. You're apologizing to me. I'm the one who kept you. Thank you for being here. I really appreciate it. Goodnight will. What's he doing? He's he's he's he's miming something. Another TWiT is in the can!
