TWiT 1006: Underwater Alien Civilizations - Bluesky Growth, Tyson Vs. Paul, AI Granny

It's time for Twent this week in Tech. Alex Kaptru is here from the big technology podcast, Daniel Rabino from Windows Central Ian Thompson. From the register, we're going to talk about aliens. Yes, we are the congressional testimony about unidentified aerial phenomenon. We'll also talk about Microsoft.

Was it criminal that they offered the government one year of security services free? Why did Netflix stumble when it streamed Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson? And will they stumble again? Come Christmas Eve? And the onion in a fight with Elon Musk over Alex Jones info wars. Who will win? We'll talk about all that and a lot more next on Twitter. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

This is Twit. This is Twit, this weekend tech, episode 1006 recorded Sunday, November 17, 2024. Underwater alien civilizations.

It's time for Twit this week at Tech, the show we cover the latest tech news with a round table of esteemed distinguished good looking and mighty smart panelists. Always love to get Alex Cantor wits on from the big technology podcast. Great to see you Alex. Great to see you Leo. Thanks for having me on. You I always ask Alex who he's going to be interviewing for the show because you get the best

Guests, you're getting the guy who was the first Neuralink patient. Yeah, I can't wait for that. I'm flying out to Phoenix in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to sit down with Nolan Arba, the first patient of Neuralink. He can control computers with his mind. So we're going to talk all about that and whether he wants to merge with AI eventually. Wow. That'll be awesome.

Also here, Daniel Rubino, Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. Daniel, great to see you. Thanks for having me, Chris, you guys, too. Always a pleasure. And our friend Ian Thompson from the register.com. Hi, Ian. Hey there, how's it going? Our local Brit.

We had our Brexit moment last couple of weeks ago. Now we're right all together now. Yeah, yes. That has yet to be determined. But that's all together now. You asked for your blue sky handle up there. This seems to be the thing now. Everybody's moving to blue sky. I think New York Times, of course, is on it.

With a kind of a snarky story, how blue sky alternative to exit Facebook is handling explosive growth. It hasn't all been easy. Mike Isaac writes.

Honestly, they've dealt with it fantastically. If you're dealing with a million new users a day, in terms of the difficulty of scaling, this is a classic use case. In six months' time, I'm going back to these people and saying, right, how did you handle it? Because this is really quite something. Remember the first five years of Twitter, the fail well was more common than

Yeah, anything else, right? Exactly. Yes. And, you know, it's like, yes, there've been ups and downs. The service has gone out. The services stayed up for a while. But I think they're dealing with it appropriately. Maybe Jay Graber's experience at Twitter helped. I mean, the blue sky was funded by Jack Dorsey early on.

He put up 15 million dollars because he wanted to do a federated kind of version of Twitter. Smart. He was actually thinking ahead, I think. He is no longer associated with Blue Sky. Blue Sky has seems to be a threads has also grown considerably since X is. Yeah, maybe tried threads. I mean, it's the worst kind of meta, you know, platform. It's Instagram followers and an algorithmally challenged platform to put it politely. I don't know. How have the rest of the crew found it?

It's like TikTok and Twitter had a baby. I don't mind it in some ways. After a bad one night stand. My feed when I go on to it is literally just like happy stuff. It's just cats. Can you tell me threads are blue sky now? Threads. Yeah. And so it's just like videos. It's TikTok videos I'm like a week ago, but it's just all like cats and dogs doing fun things. So at least while I'm scrolling through it, I'm literally like just laughing and kind of enjoying a social network for once.

So in that sense, it's not bad. There are a lot of people that I follow and vice versa on it. So it does have that going forward, but I do agree with you in that like the algorithm. It's a very different network and they stated purposefully it was going to be a different network. So this isn't a network for breaking news, right? Or to lay this stuff. In fact, the algorithm is hilariously like surface you like information from like two days ago. That's on a post, you know, and that's kind of joke.

And they've purposely downplayed news and politics and all that stuff, which I respect. They're trying to do something not Twitter 2.0, create their own network. So I think that's cool.

I'm also biased here. I'm kind of against all social networks a little bit. I don't know what's happened the last two years. I just don't kind of care anymore. But I still use them and I'm on blue sky as well. So it's interesting to watch blue sky because as people move from Twitter to blue sky, it's starting to look more and more like Twitter, which is both good and

I guess, but that's probably an illusion and I don't think the one to pour the cold water on but I'll just do it. What Blue Sky reminds me of is clubhouse and we all remember in the middle of the pandemic people ran to clubhouse. It was the place where all the interesting people were and people put a ton of effort into it.

And this is what happens in the beginning of every new social network is there's a spike in activity as people try to be super active to grab as many followers as they can. And then only then after a couple of months, they decide whether it's worthwhile or whether they go back to the standard platforms. And in clubhouse, people have millions of followers. They don't log on anymore because the activity is just not there anymore. And that's because after most of the middle of clubhouse,

Cloud you know they scratched and clawed and they saw doesn't get them very much they left. I just get the sense of this going to happen to blue sky as well and it's certainly going to happen to threads because what you're seeing is this enthusiasm it's a lot of users that have just not found a place on twitter anymore and.

There's energy, but I think what most users on threads and most users on blue sky are going to find is that it's just not the mass network that they used to that were used to in with when it was coming to Twitter and x and I don't think it's going to be worth it for most people and then you go to users and users are going to say, okay, well, we're not finding as good information we're having less of these influencers posting on these networks than we did.

on X, and they're gonna leave. So this is what happens with these social networks. There's a spike of activity in the beginning, and then they tend to go in a death spiral. And I think that's definitely gonna happen in a blue sky. And metal will prop up threads into this boring, you know, kind of benign social network like it is. It seems like it's just a place for people to complain about threads, at least that's what my feed is. And it will be this sort of zombie social network that will operate alongside the two of them. But I also think X is not, yeah, with X,

our Twitter, it's not going away. I'm sorry, I called it Twitter. I don't know. I call it Twitter all the time. Otherwise, what is that? No, it's interesting, Leo. It's people call it X now, but they still call a post a tweet. The tweet has not gone away. You're tweeting on X. Very confusing. But ultimately, it has the massive users and it has the influential users. And when you want to know what's going on in your life, you go there and I had

Ron John Roy, who comes on big technology podcast with me on Fridays, he said it's something really interesting this past week where there was a top of a building that went on fire in Manhattan. He's not looking at, yeah, exactly. Not looking at threads. He's not looking at blue sky for it. He knows the place where he's going to find information for it is going to be X. And Mark Zuckerberg said that X was, or when it was Twitter, it was, they drove a clown car into a gold mine.

And what he's saying is basically they built the experience. There wasn't a lot of brains behind it. And it just became this internet standard for people. And that's what it is. It's an internet standard. It's changed a little bit, I think, degraded under mask to an extent. But ultimately, X is X, Twitter is Twitter, whatever you want to call it. And it's going to be very, very hard to display to this place.

But haven't you seen this? Sorry, please, after you. I was going to say with X that the issue is that fewer people are definitely using it. You know, as running Windows Central, I can tell you it's influence in terms of sharing articles is all but disappeared. But they're naturally, they are degrading links there. So you might you might not be seeing the same traffic from links, but that's a platform decision they've made. Just as Facebook has made the same decision.

We I see a lot of people say I don't I don't have any direct experience because I'm not on any of those I'm on mastodon, but I see a lot of people saying That they get more engagement from blue sky personally more engagement from blue sky than they do from x is that you think that that's because of something x is up to

Alex? Well, look, X has more users. And this is the thing. No, but I'm saying that, yes, X has more users and many of these people have more followers on X, but they still get more engagement elsewhere. And I guess the implication is that a lot of the engagement on X is phony. It's bots. It's not.

No, I don't think so. Here's sort of what the progression that a social network usually goes through, which is that it has this feel of blue sky like blue sky has right now. And then so many more people come on and start posting. And then every single social network, you hear the same complaint from everyone, which is that organic reach has gone down.

And why has organic reach gone down? Now, a lot of people say it's because the social networks throttle the reach so they can put advertisers on. And if you want to reach people, you have to advertise. But the truth is that the feed is making a decision of how to rank every post within the network. And as a network grows, it's going to get a much more difficult for content to be ranked high.

So your views goes down. And it doesn't mean that there's less people using it. It just means that you have more competition in the feed. And that is, of course, when power laws start to take over, where you're going to have a handful of users that will get a tremendous amount of engagement. And the rest will have to call for whatever's left. And that's especially true in the case of X, where Elon Musk has rigged the feed to give himself more reach. Yeah, the engagement you're getting on X is

It's not purely algorithmic, shall we say? I think throttling is a polite term on this, but I mean, it's all social networks go through or up until now have gone through the same cycle, rapid rise, and then fall away. We've had Friendster, we've had MySpace, we've got Facebook, we've got to scale. The question is whether Blue Sky can do that.

I don't know. It's still work in progress. I think there's also the question of do we even need this question. Does it need to replace Twitter, right? Like the word these networks are going as far as I can tell it's Federation.

And I think this is a better system. You know, there's open vibe now that app that connects to Mastodon threads and blue sky all at once. So you get one single feed and you can cross post to all three at the same time. Like this might actually be sort of the future. And it might exclude a lot of

the normal people that used to go on to these networks, because there are barriers. Macedon is definitely tricky to get on to these guys easier. Threads is the easiest, I would say. But you know, this may be kind of the way things are going. I think that's actually fine. I don't really use X anymore simply because my own personal account, the people I follow don't post anymore. When I do post my engagement as well. So there's no real reason to follow it. As far as breaking news, drug reports still works just fine for most things.

No, I still read drudges the plate of it now. I must have missed the memo when When is the place to go on fire during the election? It was yeah, some of the funniest front page stuff. He wrote he was trolling Trump so hard But like I showed up like breaking news from that and I was it was fine like I don't know like I feel like I get my breaking news from Yahoo news Google news

Like, you're not normal sources, right? You're not running an RSS reader anymore. And I run an RSS reader, but I do that for mostly for tech news, because that's my work feeds, right? So that's not the only one here that gets their news from X.

I think so. That's what you're saying, yeah. I do. And I think that one thing that we should... Wait a minute, you go to... So do you go to X every hour, every five hours, every day? Not every hour, but I'm on there. It's probably a time healthy amount of time. And you go there specifically to see what's going on. Yeah, exactly. I think it's really good to follow a breaking news. Sorry? Like in terms of what news? Like national news, local news. There's a test.

Where did you go last night to find out who won the Tyson Jake Paul fight? I was on Netflix watching it.

Oh my gosh, you managed to watch it then. I watched it. I stayed up till past midnight watching this. But hold on, I just want to make this one point. The thing about Twitter is that it has a sense of urgency and because there is news there, you can follow the news there. And so it doesn't follow the pattern of most social networks. Like Twitter should be dead if you think about the management, but it remains relevant the same way the New York Times remains relevant because

It has that urgency of breaking news. And just to go full circle with your thought about Blue Sky Ian, that's why I'm bearish on it is because it just won't have the urgency unless the news apparatus moves there. And I just don't see it happen. Well, I think one of the triggering events of this past week was the Guardian announcing it was no longer to post. Oh my God.

Yeah, sorry. By the way, the Guardian was like, we're going to still have our reporters on Twitter. We want our you to share our reporting on Twitter. It's just that the official account is not going to be on Twitter. So yeah, put it down. I think it helped people go OK.

It had like 30 accounts. It wasn't just one, which I would found surprising. There's a lot of like sub guardian things, but they said their reporters can post, not that they're required to post. They're just, they're saying they're not forbidding the reporter, some posting if they want to. Well, I'll say though, I use, there's a cool tool out there now that fridges Twitter to blue sky. So what it does is it looks at who you're following and matches it on blue sky. And you can just one click.

do it all. Every major news institution I follow on Twitter is now on Blue Sky. And in fact, there's a tech, what's really cool about Blue Sky is the custom feeds that you can do. So I have one just called tech. And if I click that feed, it's literally just a stream like an RSS feed of just tech news in real time as it's happening. But there's also regular news. There's the default view, of course, it's chronological, which is what everybody wants, by the way. Yes, exactly.

Isn't that funny that people don't want the algorithmic feed? No. No, exactly. I mean, except they say that, except that what gets the stickiest is the algorithmic feed, right? And otherwise companies would do a real preference. And everybody's revealed preferences to be in an algorithmic feed. Right. And by the way, it's proper.

There's a couple of feet on this guy. Sorry, I was just going to say, there's a discover feed, which is algorithm. Yeah, pretty good. As a journalist, I get what you're saying, Alex, about Twitter as a good news feed, but it used to be when it was just a firestorm of data came out in real time. At the moment, it's so algorithmically twisted that

Yeah, you know, if I'm writing a new story, I'll check out what people are saying on Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily, you know, believe it entirely because the whole thing is so full of bots. Exactly. Exactly. But I don't know, blue sky could become that. It all depends whether or not they catch the ball or they fumble it.

Yeah, and I'll just say, I'm not saying this as somebody making the case for X or a fan of X. I'm just saying there's real utility there. And as a sort of psycho power user, a lot of what I do is on lists. So I have lists of different reporters for different topics. And then finally, the thing that really keeps me back there and Leo, I think you pointed to it.

is sports. Like every sports reporter, every sports publication is on Twitter. I'm kind of a nut following sports. And so if I want to get up to the information analysis of how my teams are doing, that's where I'm going to find it. So it sounds like the consensus is, yeah, we do kind of need something like Twitter. Yes. And your contention, Alex, and I think you're right. I think we forget this kind of

You know, the sudden burst of interest isn't going to last, that people, you know, get tired of it. It's kind of like the Gartner hype cycle where you get real excited. Oh, God, I get one more press release about the bloody Gartner magic quadrant. I swear. Which quadrant are you in? I'm the one that says, if I don't care how much money you can Gartner, you know, stop emailing me about it. Yes.

I think they go in my spam bucket. I don't think I ever see that. All right. Well, it's not a huge story. The truth is most of the world couldn't care less. Isn't spending the amount of time we are spending thinking about blue sky versus threads versus Twitter. But in our little circle of tech journalists, there was a lot of conversation this week about blue sky exploding.

You know, you know, they only have 17 million now or 18 million. Yeah, and Twitter is like 300 million, right? Yeah, I was gonna say the growth is impressive because of, you know, the percentage change, but obviously it dwarfs, you know, everything else out there. It's so far behind. Critical mass is important for a site like this, right? The network effect is huge. It's the whole... To a certain extent, but I'll say that like, listen, communities are where people talk and don't enjoy themselves, right? Right. And so there doesn't,

I always bring us up to the problem with capitalism, this idea of whatever network or product you create has to have infinite growth to be successful, where technically that's not possible for a lot of things. And because of that, we get into this idea that there needs to be like one dominant social network.

where clearly I think we're going to this world where it's very broken up and divided. And that might be an okay thing, because back in the days, that's how the internet was, and a lot of people enjoyed it. I mean, we're all old enough to remember the internet when it first came out. There weren't a lot of people on it, but it was still cool. And blue sky has that feeling, which is why I think a lot of people are positive about it. But, you know,

It has a lot of custom ability that Twitter doesn't have. Like I said, with the custom feeds, it has this starter packs, which are really kind of cool, where we have one for Windows Central. If you click the link, it shows you all the authors on Windows Central. I do like that feature. Yeah, we've done the same for the register as well. I mean, this is the way the internet goes. I mean, Reddit only got started because dig drop the ball. Right, exactly.

It's just same with facebook my space got dull. I don't know it's it's going to be interesting but i think you're right the federated future is the way to go and instead we're going to have a third party portal which will allow you to cover all of these things rather than just going to twitter or just going to facebook.

And it's ironic that you would think Elon Musk would have actually been for that model, which is like argues against centralized power. You can't buy it though. Control, right, right. It's like, that's the way it should be. Instead, he's arguing for the centralized system where one person controls the algorithm. And like, remember, the whole idea was like, oh, Twitter's left wing, it's biased, it needs to be equal balance. And now the guy is like on stage supporting the president and like, it's just like all over the place, right? So it is a weird.

situation, but I don't know. We'll see what happens. But I don't think Blue Sky needs to be, you know, it doesn't need to pass Twitter to be successful. It could still be its own thing where people on the left, nerds, media people hang out and talk. And that might be just enough for a lot of people. Yeah, it could be a Discord server, right? And that's the real question is, is Blue Sky going to be a Discord server or a social network with the size to replace X because everybody has complaints about X?

And I think you're right, Daniel's probably gonna end up as a Discord server, which actually will be better than Clubhouse, which I compared it to earlier. So if it does that, then I guess that's some sort of win, but just not what the founders of Blue Sky intended, aka Jack Dorsey.

Well, I will always be thankful. Jax, he gave us one of the smartest headlines in Russia's history, but still will drop it down. You can't stop there. What was the headline? Well, it was when Dick left Twitter. OK, that's fine. I get it. Yeah. So it was big Dick pulls out Jax in the hot seat, but no.

Oh, God, you guys. Well, did you watch the so you watch the fight, Alex? Because you're a sports fan. Daniel, because I watch spectacle. It is. I mean, that's not sport. Is it when you get a what is it? 20 something fighting a 60 something or late 50 27 and 58. Yeah, that doesn't seem quite fair. Don't you think that everybody, including Netflix, we're really hoping that Mike Tyson, which is

Wham Jake Paul and knock him out the first round. Absolutely. That's what everybody wanted. Everybody's hoping for. I want to say I wanted to say beaten like a Reddit and stepchild. I mean, it was just kind of like and then I logged on to the Netflix Netflix feed and all I got was Mike Tyson's ass and it was just like, right? Okay. I missed that. What was that? Was it frozen there or? Well, no, he was sort of chapless at one point, which

Oh, no. He's walking away from an interview and it was just his bare ass. I caught that. I barely watched it. So just like a lot of us were just like barely watched this thing. And that's like, we all saw that. And it was just like, all right. Well, apparently Netflix had a lot of technical issues, but that's probably because what did they say? 65 million people at one point.

which makes it the biggest event outside of the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and maybe some cricket. So it was massive. Hashtag Netflix crash and hashtag unwatchable were two of the trending topics.

It did remind me that episode of Silicon Valley where they're trying to stream the ultimate fighting championship and it just the stream falls over. It was just, that's right. I forgot about that. There was an image in my head of Gavin Belson showing this is, you know, I can't say that word. By the way, no spoilers. If you haven't seen it, we aren't going to tell you who won.

I guess you've learned now that it wasn't a KO in the first round, that's all you know. I did not watch it. We saw one of the undercard fights and it was so brutal. Did you see the female? Apparently that was even worse. No, I saw the first card.

That was, I mean, I also agree, boxing is brutal, but it is, I'm trying to find the words to talk about how unbelievable that women's fight was because they landed and threw so many punches. And the fact that they were able to get through the match was just incredible. I'd never seen any boxing like that. Male or female, it was an amazing fight.

This is why women's sports are really something to watch. I mean, when it comes to football, for example, they play harder than the blokes. And I've played women's hockey teams. I still have a floating broken bone on my left arm from that. But it's an interesting area of where sport is going. It's becoming much more diverse.

Uh, it does feel like it was it was a money grab on Netflix's part. It was like pure spectacle, right? Oh, of course. Yeah. That's what that was. Was that sport?

Really? The first three matches were sport, but the Tyson Paul match was spectacle. It was not sport. But you know what? It is a win for Netflix. They created musty TV. This was their first big scale live production. And even though the streaming didn't work,

It's all anybody can talk about. And it's like it takes a certain amount of brilliance to put Jake Paul and Mike Tyson in a ring together, put them at Jerry World in Dallas, and put some really good fights in the undercard and stream it live. And they did it. And I think this is, Netflix has to make this pivot.

to live. They're doing this. They're doing some F1, I believe, and they're also doing two NFL games on Christmas Day. Good NFL games. And this is the way they're going to grow. Why is this necessary for them to grow?

I think they kind of used to. Did you read Hoffman? Did you talk to him? Oh, I'm sorry. That's Reed Hastings. Hoffman's coming on in January. But I think they have to grow because they're saturating. They had a moment where they had negative subscribers or they had a subscriber contraction. And then they started growing again because they cracked down on passwords and created this ad tier.

But ultimately, what's basically all the engagement data shows, they're not really growing the pie, they're just making money off the pie. So they're effectively doing de facto rate increases by password sharing and all this stuff and not allowing you to churn. So they're maxing out. And the only way to create new audiences is to have must-see TV live events. And no matter what you say about it, and I watched it and I was disappointed with the Paul Tyson fight, it was a spectacle. And this is the type of thing that only, I don't know if only Netflix can do,

But Netflix is certainly the only streamer that can do it, and it's huge.

I mean, you mentioned something. You mentioned with Formula One, Alex. Now, Netflix has grown Formula One in the US. Yeah. Yeah, with Drive Fly. Enormously, when I came over here in 2008, San Francisco Formula One Club was a couple of dozen of geeky people sitting in a pub Sunday at 9 a.m. watching a race. Last time I tried to go to actual live race in the city,

And it was rammed. Two entire pubs rammed out. Netflix has enormous power on this. And sports are one of the few areas on streaming which are actively growing. So I think it's a wise move. Yes. And they did in a run up to the Tyson poll fight. They did like a documentary, a three-part documentary following the two fighters, also following the women fighters. And I caught like

one and a half episodes before the actual fact and they were really well done they brought Mike Tyson back to Brownsville in Brooklyn and you see him like taking his shirt off on the street and challenging old guys to fights and it was it was real I don't know it was compelling television absolutely

Yeah, I mean, drive to survival is compelling television. I mean, it makes a lot of stuff up. But at the same time, it's brought a lot of new fans into the sport and it's made Netflix awful lot of money. Presumably, Netflix is doing these also to learn. I mean, they started, they had a live with Chris Rock Comedy, Spencer was live, and then they did the Tom Brady roast. They've been slowly, incrementally, trying live streaming to see where the flaws are. But this was obviously the biggest test of their physical plant. And they had tests, they failed, but presumably,

They'll learn from that and solve it. Yes. Yeah. A lot of engineers are going to be going over the data and saying, right, where do we fall over here? Where do we fall over there? What can we do? You know, there is a risk, of course, if it really looks terrible, it's unwatchable. People may not come back, right? And what's what you said a couple of weeks? What's the next thing they're going to do Christmas? Christmas with the NFL. And by the way, we are an incredibly forgiving species.

And if there's something that everybody's watching, we're going to want to watch it. And I do think they bought the Monday Night Raw from WWE. So that's going to be live every Monday night. Yeah, they'll solve this. They'll figure it out. And I think you're right. The point that Ian made is spot on, which is that this was a test. I don't think they realized how big it was going to be. It just.

It just sort of snowballed. But they will learn from this and they will have to get the NFL right in December. And if they don't get, like it's one thing to buffer on the undercard of a Jake, all Mike Tyson fight. It's another thing to buffer in the fourth quarter when the Steelers are driving down. Yeah. Take the lead. You cannot buffer them. Yeah. Because remember, you're the only show in town. Nobody else is going to have those games.

You know, I was really think, I thought the NFL might have stumbled when they let Amazon have the exclusive rights to Thursday night football. That has proven to be a huge success. It's now beating Monday night football on the networks. The production value on Amazon's Thursday night broadcast is amazing. Well, they got Al Michaels, which doesn't hurt. Yes. They have great announcers, great career game post game, but it also, it feels to me like they're using better cameras. I don't know what they are. I actually visited a truck.

When we were in Green Bay for our game, Alex Lindsey got me into the Amazon truck. They spent an phenomenal amount of money to have the best technology capable of 4k. They don't stream in 4k yet, but the capability is there. And they're doing graphics packages that are far ahead of what the networks have done. Amazon clearly saw this as an important

And they were right. I thought, man, you guys are crazy throwing all that money into this. Are NFL fans going to subscribe to Amazon Prime just so they can watch Thursday night football? Yeah, turns out they are.

YouTube is really heavily pushing the sport's angle as well. I think this is something that they've recognised. This is something that people will pay for. They want it on sport, and that's something the Netflix has got to get sold out if it wants to cash in on this market.

Yeah. By the way, the dirty secret about those denied footballs, you don't really need to be an Amazon prime subscriber to watch. I'm not a prime member and I just watched amazon.com in a place. Oh, interesting. Although I'm still not sold on American football, it's armored rugby. Nothing more, nothing less. Thank God for the armor. That's all I can say.

Yeah, it's interesting because it also shows what it tells me is that over the top broadcasting is here. This is it for cable television, for broadcast television. If people are completely willing to watch a streaming version of an NFL football game, or what was it, 65 million watching that fight the other night? That shows you, it's made it, it's in, it's done.

If I were a cable company, I would start to, I'd be worried right now, they've been worried for a while, I imagine. I mean, hasn't this just been like a terrible two weeks for broadcast news where you look at the election and the primacy of podcasts and now you see Netflix pull, you know, out of thin air, a spectacle that rivals the Super Bowl? Right. The writing is on the wall, that's for sure.

I've got a quick question. This is Benito, by the way. Benito Gonzalez, our technical producer, editor, booker, the guy does it all. Hello, Benito. So my question is like, I think the one issue I see with streaming services doing sports is that not everybody is synchronized watching it, which is not true with a teller. Well, they are live, aren't they? They're alive, but you know, everybody's a little... I know, because when I'm downstairs in the gym and Lisa's watching upstairs, this sounds insane. So is that a problem? I kind of feel like that's a little bit of a problem.

That's interesting. You got to put this one on Do Not Disturb. I mean, I was watching football today and texting with a friend and I was like, I was watching on with my bunny year antenna and he was watching on streaming and I was like 20 seconds ahead and I really made it mad because I was. Exactly. So that's what I'm talking about. Is that a problem? I mean, it's the same with F1. I mean, I watch. Well, that's always delayed because it's in the middle of the night for us in America, right?

Well, okay, we've got Las Vegas coming up and we've just had some races in our time zone. But I will watch that and be on the forums talking to people.

And they're like, they're like, you know, that corner was passed 10 seconds ago, why are you commenting on this? So yeah, the differences in speed. I don't think that's important. Well, I think where it's really going to be an issue, Benito is betting, sports betting, because the line is going to come in. And if not, everybody's on the same. And the new push in sports betting.

And thanks to that British bookie company is to do real-time betting, props in the middle of games. Is he going to make that field goal? But we've seen this with flash trading and the stock exchange. And I think we're going to see the same thing in terms of sports betting. If you can get that millisecond advantage, you could clean up. That was the premise of Michael Lewis's Flash Boys. It was actually fascinating.

because they were trying to build a fiber optic network from the Chicago Board of Trade to the New York Stock Exchange. And it was extremely important that it be straight, that it be the shortest possible line, because nanoseconds could make the difference between getting that trade ahead of time or not. Which is why you've got shipping containers parked next to the nearest exchanges with a whole bunch of data servers in there. And it made an enormous amount of money. But yeah, the Michael Lewis book is really worth a read.

Yeah. Flash boys. Yeah. Is that what it is? Flash boys? I think it is. I think so, yeah. Yeah. Let's take a little break. We got some flashy boys here right now. We got...

The A Team is here, Ian Thompson, from TheRegister.com. Always a pleasure to have you in your bookshelf, which looks at any moment. It's going to totter and fall into your head. And I live in the earthquake zone, so yeah. I know. I'm just nervous for you. That's all I can say. I'm nervous for you. Also, with us, Daniel Rabino from Massachusetts, Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. Great to have you, Daniel.

And where are you, Alex? I forgot. New York in New York. We got the cut the continent. The left and the right coast covered Alex Cantrowitz hosted the big technology podcast and newsletter at bigtechnology.com. Great to have all three of you. I am in Northern California. And Burke would not let me build this attic studio.

He said, that bookshelf is going to kill you until we had it, like it's bolted onto the wall. It's more solid than the wall itself. So, but on the other hand, the lights could kill me. So I don't know. But you saw in Petaluma. I mean, you said, sorry, Petaluma is the butter and chicken. The chicken and egg capital of the world. Thank you very much. But it is the, it is the beginning of the wine country of Sonoma. Sonoma County. So I count the wine as well.

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Let's talk a little bit about cyber security. Actually, this is an interesting Microsoft story for you, Daniel, from ProPublica. Did you see this story?

Apparently, President Biden in the summer of 2021, you may actually remember this, brought CEOs of the big tech companies of the White House. This was after a series of cyber attacks linked to Russia, China, and Iran.

had left the government reeling, says ProPublica. The administration asked Microsoft CEO Sacha Nadella, Amazon CEO's, Apple, Google, and others to make concrete commitments to bolster US defense. Microsoft said, oh, well, yeah, we got something for you. Sacha Nadella pledged to give the government $150 million in technical services to help upgrade its digital security.

Good idea, right? Big win for the Biden administration and a win for Microsoft.

a major win for microsoft well it turns out maybe yes because it was a limited time deal uh... the white house offer this is pro public writing as it was known inside microsoft will dispatch microsoft consultants across the federal government to install the company's cyber security security products which were free for a limited time once the consultants installed the upgrades

Federal customers would be effectively locked in because shifting to a competitor after the free trial would be cumbersome and costly. At that point, the customer would have little choice but to pay the higher subscription fees. ProPublica quotes a couple of former Microsoft employee sales leaders involved in the effort. They said it's like a drug dealer hooking users with free samples. And he thoughts about that, Daniel? This is your beat.

I mean, business is going to business, right? Yeah. Yeah. I think we all go to go back to today's a trial where or, you know, anytime you're going to try a, you know, a new service for 30 days, but it auto renews after 30 days, right? Hey, we do that. Right. We have two weeks free for Club Twitch after what you pay.

I mean, it's only $7 a month. I mean, I'm not. Microsoft said, quote, the company's sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies, or continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors. This is from Steve Fail, who's a security leader for Microsoft's federal business. There was no guarantee the agencies would purchase these licenses, and they were free to engage with other vendors to support their security needs.

Yeah, rip out and replace. So it's an easy thing to do. The White House disputed that characterization, including Tim Wu, who was a former presidential advisor. He told ProPublica he discussed the offer with a company in a short and formal chat prior to the summer, but did not sign off. He said, if they're saying that they're signed off, they're misrepresenting what happened on the phone call.

Your business is going to business, but on the other hand, it's a little unseemly for the business to say, see, we're helping America, we're helping the federal government with this lovely free trial offer. It's a little disingenuous.

Oh yeah, no, I mean, I guess I should tell the government for once to redefine print. Yeah. You know, like, and this is one of those things where it's, I'm not going to justify, you know, like what Microsoft did, but this is just common practice across anything. And if you're a business,

Securing government contracts is the goldmine, right? That's what I know. Once you get to that defense industry and everything, it's a lot of money. And Azure makes a ton of cash for Microsoft. It continuously grows. It's one of their best business divisions. So it doesn't surprise me. It's unfortunate that this happens, but it's also interesting that we're actually getting kind of transparency on this, whereas a lot of other contracts, I would say, that probably happen to me.

Yeah, with the defense department, especially. We don't get any kind of reporting of this or that same kind of coverage because this is Microsoft. But, you know, when you look at how like jets are made and stuff like that, it's, you know, it's way more severe. I mean, we're building the dollars, you know? So it's like, this is a thing. And hey, maybe Doge will solve this, but, you know, talking about the Department of governmental efficiency. Yes.

I don't think really, Elon is asking for high IQ individuals to come and work 80 hour weeks on doge for no pay. It's like, if you do that, you're low IQ. Exactly. Exactly. You have to have a blue check. You have to pay to use his service. The best and the brightest, my friend. Yeah, but I mean, come back to what Daniel was saying. This is Oracle's entire business model when it comes to go contracts.

It's like get them locked in. I mean, Palantir was doing the same thing as well. I don't blame Microsoft for this, but they really managed to turn a tragedy, which was their accounts had leaked government data to all kinds of foreign actors. They were like, okay, well, we'll invest $150 million and we're going to get billions in return. I don't know who the business manager was that came up with that, but I should imagine they're getting a fairly healthy rise.

I also think that this ProPublica article is pretty irresponsible, at least the framing of it. And they say Biden asked Microsoft to raise the bar on cybersecurity. He may have helped create an illegal monopoly. And so I was like, all right, let's read the story and see how many times it mentions monopoly. It mentions it only once where the issue here is procurement. And I'm not defending Microsoft. I do think this is like typical sketchy tech sales.

But they cite this professor who says that what Microsoft did is exclusionary conduct opening the door for an illegal monopoly. There's no way that this is a monopolistic behavior. It'll never hold up on court. And a professor who's calling it an illegal monopoly should have known better than to do it.

I guess the real question is how hard it would be to, once the one year free trial wore off, to switch to something else. You can switch, I mean, it's up to the competitors here, right? Like the way that governments go through this is they do an RFP process, a request for proposals, and then every company that wants the government money, and there's a lot of them, they bid. And so if you're, let's say you're Amazon, right?

Are you going to tell me that you cannot outbid Microsoft? Like it's the company that wants it most is the one that gets it. And that's why Microsoft got it, is because it wanted it the most. And so, I mean, would it be cumbersome? Yes, I mean switching from Gmail to hey is cumbersome. Switching from Twitter to blue sky is cumbersome. But I just think that we can't have such low expectations of our government that when something is difficult and cumbersome for them, that they'll never do it.

And that, therefore, the company that sold them the software in the first place is a monopoly. It just doesn't stand up to me, just on the basis of facts. I mean, we've seen this before with a Jedi contract, for example, where, you know, the government was saying, basically, when it comes to the military, you want a single source provider and the rest of it, which was a dumb idea from a start. But, you know, and Microsoft wanted, you know, governments like easy

Get it in place. Who cares if we have to pay a lot more for it later on because the taxpayers are paying. So I don't know. The cost of shifting your system is such that I don't know. I think Microsoft played a blinder on this one.

Microsoft, according to the ProPublica, was very aware having been through a little fight with the Department of Justice a few years earlier of the antitrust issues. Tim Woost and Microsoft's lawyers were overly paranoid about antitrust concerns. Sounds like Microsoft.

I made it clear, says, there was no ability in the White House to sign off on antitrust. We can't say that you're indemnified for any antitrust actions on basis of this. He was said, I'm not smart enough to say, oh, yeah, that's fine with me. I'm not crazy.

So there was an awareness anyway on the part of Microsoft that this offer could be seen as kind of a little bit skeasy. They didn't want to be accused of antitrust. And they wanted Tim Wu to say, no, no, you're OK.

Microsoft has been playing this game for evidence invested in Apple just to keep an alternative operating system going. They're very, very aware of this, and they should be particularly after the IE case. The sales teams, according to ProPublica, said they knew customers who accepted the White House offer were unlikely to undo the intensive work of installing the upgrades. Maybe, Daniel, you can explain this better. There are different tiers of security from Microsoft products. Most of the federal government was G3 at this point.

Microsoft said, we'll upgrade you to G5 free for the first year. But moving back to G3 seemed unlikely. They knew that once they were into G5, that they would continue to pay for it. Is that what I just said, make any sense at all, Daniel?

Yeah, no, I think it's anyone who's dealt with IT before even has a small scale knows how difficult it can be to roll out something. Well, also, if you've moved to G5, this isn't the, by the way, in the wake of the SolarWinds Orion attack, if you move to G5, you're protected for a year. And then you say, okay, good job done. And you go back to G3 and suddenly you're attacked again. That doesn't reflect badly on Microsoft. That reflects badly on the organization.

So there's also some pressure not to downgrade your security, even though it's now going to cost you money. Salespeople pitched the White House offer. Again, ProPublica had sources in the Microsoft sales organization for this. Salespeople pitched the White House offer as the easy button.

Our argument was we have this whole suite of goodness set of former Microsoft employee who worked with the Department of Defense. You should upgrade because it will take care of everything. Rather than have a bunch of vendors that will do one of the 20 things that the G5 can do.

Yeah, I mean, this is probably not a non-story. It's more about government procurement. Microsoft did what any company would do, say, hey, first year's free. Go ahead and give it a shot. That's really the question, right? Like if any other company got in this position and had the same thing, would they have behaved any differently? Right. No. And nor should government procurement assume that companies are somehow no longer in it for the money.

Well, that's the, that's the funny part. They say, yeah, some lawmakers like Rep. Jim Langevin of Rhode Island accused the company of unfairly upcharging customers for what they considered to be basic security. Quote, is this a profit center for Microsoft? Unquote. He asked Smith, Brad Smith during the hearing. Smith replied, um, I'm putting the um in there. We are a for profit company. Everything that we do is designed to generate a return other than our philanthropic work. It's like,

Is there, are we paying for this? Yes, Congressman. It's called buying things. Yeah. Yeah. So if anything, maybe we should, Congress should look at the procurement process more than, I mean, Microsoft's just doing, as you say, what Microsoft does.

Well, I mean, we have seen claims, particularly with Jedi, where, you know, government procurement officers will offer jobs at tech firms after they retire. And this revolving door is just a recipe for disaster. That should be illegal. That's the stuff we should be mad about. Absolutely. Not about companies that make government a good offer and government taking the offer that they, you know, deemed to be the best.

Microsoft, by the way, three years later, offered the nation's hospitals a G5 level upgrade at no cost for the first year. Yeah, the first one's free. Sorry, but like, do the procurement people in these government offices and in these hospitals not look at the pricing for year two? Can they not do like in the analysis of what the pricing is? Because if you're not, if you're legitimately not looking at year two prices,

Then what are you doing in your job? Yeah, you suck at your job. I mean, it's just that. You've got to look at long-term costs. And also, you have to ask your people, your IT people, okay, we're going to be G5 for a year. How hard is it to go back to G3? Or are we stuck? Are we going to have to be G5 forever after?

And previously, when you sign up for this, you're agreeing that you're going in with the assumption it's going to work for the first year. Yeah. You're going to like, all right, we're going to probably hopefully lock this in for a couple of years because it's doing the thing we're told it's supposed to do. So it's weird not to plan this out with the assumption that you're going to get charged. But I don't know how that stuff works.

I'll say the hospital thing, though, is really important. I used to work at a hospital. My partner, she works at a hospital, and everybody should be scared and nervous about the security systems and the computer systems that are running. Oh, they're awful. There are so many years behind. They started the IT departments. Everything is just... We see how hospitals run, especially because the for-profit ones.

It's a horrible, horrible thing that's going on right now with hospital. And that's why when you're ever feeling sick, you should just type your symptoms into jet GPT. It's the safest way for care. Yeah, okay, so you just know that you've got cancer then, but it's like... It's the same problem with the British National Health Service. Some of their computers are still running XP. And they're paying Microsoft through the nose for a little extra support and paying micro patches as well.

But yeah, you're right. The basic infrastructure of government is running on software that should not be running. And this needs to get upgraded. And yeah, they're going to pay for it. But yeah, look at the year two, year three, year five costs. Isn't there a petition going around in the EU to force the EU to use Linux?

Um, yeah, there's there's been a movement around that. Um, in particular, the German government was very big on open source. Um, they've now shifted slightly back to commercial software, but there's still a large open source. Um, it's going to push that way, but okay, I'm from Britain. I'm Breck's Island. So you know, you don't get affected by that, huh?

unfortunately not know but i mean this is a petition leaving apple and google support the future of our freedoms sign the petition for an EU Linux operating system in public administrations this could be the year of limits in government how hard would that be i mean you are you may wonder is it shouldn't the government foster support open-source software not

I don't know how much, I know open source is just that buzz phrase that people like to say and that automatically sounds good. It's like cancer free, like how could that be bad, right? And I feel like that's how open source is. But from what I was working in the hospital, I was working in a sleep center. And one of the reasons we didn't upgrade our operating systems was not because Microsoft was closed source or because Linux wasn't available, it was because the programs we ran

to do to sleep diagnostics is custom made software by a tiny little firm. And if we want to upgrade the operating system, they were going to have to do a lot of testing and a lot more validation for the software that would have gone through a whole process and caused

sort of commotion. So they would rather just keep the operating system with their custom software running and just be as is instead of investing to guide it all up to date. And that's what you see with a lot of hospitals. It's just this custom software that is just difficult. Sometimes the companies may not even be around anymore or it could take a very long time. It's not just the public sector. Every company has this. We have this problem. We had a young guy in here who wrote us a sales system

And he left, you know, he was, he was, you know, just kind of almost an intern left after a year. And we said, well, are you going to support the system you wrote? He said, no. Exactly. And so we, you know, we're running, we've been running on it ever since.

It has a few little glitches. He wasn't a professional developer. Two people can't use it at the same time or the whole thing crashes. We've had to hire a developer to come in and try to figure out how to make it work. But companies do that. We did that. It was a sensible thing at the time. Yeah.

Well, you've seen the billboards around San Francisco in the Bay Area about paying for open source over the last couple of weeks. Oh, really? Yeah, there's a movement going. A whole bunch of startups are basically trying to get companies to commit to paying a couple of grand a year to fund an open source project. And this is actually really crucial because they use it for free and they don't. Yeah.

Yeah. But I mean, we did a story. Do you remember the great XKCD cartoon about how the entire operating system was run by one guy from Omaha? Yeah. We found him. The GPRSS protocol is run by one guy in Omaha, and he supports it entirely on his own. And these people need funding. Otherwise, you go to a commercial vendor because you're actually going to get support. And that's the central thing that the chasm that open source has to cross.

This is the cartoon, a modern digital infrastructure, which is a very complicated structure of bricks, all supported by one little teeny block at the bottom, a project, some random person in Nebraska. It's been thanklessly maintaining since 2003. It's funny, but it's also

actually really true in many, many cases. Yes. I mean, this is the kind of thing. If you're going to build a proper, if you're going to rely on open source, you've got to fund the open source developers that keep it running. And the industry hasn't found out a way to do that yet. Yeah.

Let's take a little break so we can fund this operation. I'm in it for the money. I admit it. I'm like Brad Smith. Yeah, it's a profit deal here. But we are very happy to have a great panel in working with us here for no cost at all, right? I think Alex, yes. Daniel's nodding. Never did get paid for this. Daniel Rabino, Editor in Chief, Windows Central. Alex Cantrowitz.

From the big technology podcast and of course the wonderful Ian Thompson who is a reporter at the register dot com happily Happily returning to his roots as a reporter getting the right again. It's the fun part Yeah

I believe that. Do you end up doing a lot of investigative stuff like you dig for stories? Oh, yeah. No, I've got some major stuff coming down the line. It's one of the things that when you move away from interesting, you've got a lot more time to dig around. Yeah. And it's weird how these things come off. I'm speaking to some people at NASA. Well, NASA is still alive about some really interesting technology they're developing. Do you want to give out like your signal handle or anything for

I haven't gone the handle route, but my phone number is on Twitter and blue sky. Okay. So people, Paris Martyno from the information does this every Wednesday in her twig show. She gives out her signal handle and she also says, and don't use your work phone to send me the tip.

So that's another tip. And also set self deleting messages. This is something that's come up in the lawsuits over FBI investigations time and time again. People think, oh, it signals end to end encrypted. And it is. It's the best messaging system out there. But if you don't set messages to delete and someone gets access to your phone, game over.

Unlock it. Yeah. Good point. I am LaPorte.24. I've, you know what, Ian, if you just go to your signal, it'll show your phone number. Then below it, it will show you the game. Yeah, I know, I know, but I don't like spreading it around, to be honest. If people will find me, they can find me. Okay. There you go. I like that. Make them work. Make them work for it. It stops spammers. I tried it. I got a hell of a lot of spam. Oh, yeah. Am I going to regret just saying what I just said?

Well, maybe. People are going to signal me and say, would you pass this on to Ian? The fundamentally signal is the one to trust. I don't trust WhatsApp entirely. I don't trust a lot of other messaging services at all. So, yeah. Don't use email. That is notoriously problematic for privacy. Email, you might as well leave a trail of crumbs all the way through the forest.

All right, we're going to take a little break. Mack with more. You're watching this week in tech. Brought to you this week. Actually, this is a really interesting sponsor by Fundrise. Now, you're probably familiar with venture capital as one of the most lucrative asset classes in the world. I mean, if you look at the S&P 500,

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It's interesting. I think the consensus is although it's not completely clear that the incoming Trump administration will be a little less likely to go after any trust actions, FTC actions, Lena Khan will be gone and so forth. But then there's also the issue of there are some big tech companies that the president-elect is not like.

It's not a clear, it's not a clear sale for anybody. Right now, for instance, the CFPB, the, what is it, a bureau? I guess it's the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken places, steps to place Google under Federal supervision, which is an extraordinary move. This is from the Washington Post that could subject the technology giant to the regular inspections and rigorous monitoring the government imposes on major banks.

CFPB, of course, is government's banking. It wants direct oversight. This is a major move Google has resisted. The final months of the Biden administration, I think some companies are hoping that maybe they can hold out until January 20th. On the other hand, if you're Google, I don't think President Trump is a big fan. What should Google do at this point?

I think it should probably be a little bit worried. Just because, I mean, Trump, the thing with Trump is like, he says a lot of stuff. And I get people, you know, are like, believe it when he says, yeah, but he also lies a lot. And he says a lot of things that he never does. And so I don't like, for instance, even though that the TikTok thing, right, which was he was so... Yeah, we're... I mean, if I were TikTok,

According to the law passed by Congress, it has until January 19th to divest the American subsidiary and get the Chinese government's hands out of TikTok. January 19th is not an accidental date. It's the day before inauguration.

Yep. Congress knew that things might change on January 20th. And he led that. I remember being on this podcast talking about Trump and like the whole TikTok thing. He hated TikTok. Because Microsoft was one of the companies trying to get into it. Microsoft and Oracle both tried to buy it. Yeah.

Yep, and now it's like the reverse right now. It's like oh tiktok's great It's just like but how he's gonna reconcile that with China and his rhetoric on China I don't know, you know, so like he said publicly like Remember with Google the search results and he said it was favoring Kamala and all this they need to be investigated But I don't know how much it's actually going to matter don't get a lot of these companies have also

kind of rolled over lately. You know, Bezos did this, of course, with the Washington Post. All of them. Tim Cook and Andy Jassy. And of course, Senator Pichai, all congratulated the president-elect. Let's get going on innovation. And I have to think that the future for the CFPB is not bright under Trump.

No, everyone hates it. It's kind of like, I mean, Leena Khan is out. That seems to be... Leena Khan's out. Although... He's an advanced likeser. J.D. Vance likes it, exactly. Yes, he does. He does. And Matt Gates, sorry, Matt's... Who's the sex offender? Oh, you mean Matt Gates, yeah. Yes, that's the one. Oh, that one. I mean, he's apparently also a fan. Absolutely. That's what's so interesting about this.

is how unpredictable it is. Now, if I'm Google, I'm thinking, well, at the very least, let's push, you know, let's appeal, let's push this stuff up till January 20th. And let's do everything we can to get on the good side of the new administration.

Right? It's not just Google. It's also... Everybody. Everybody. The CFPB has also worked to finalize a broader set of rules that could allow it to impose supervision on others, including Amazon, Apple, PayPal, own Venmo. All of these companies are kind of in quasi-banking. Apple Pay, Google Pay.

a Republican administration is going to want that much government involvement in private business. That's just my guess. It also feels like I don't know how much power Elon Musk is going to have or Doge is going to have a lot.

You think? Well, it has no constitutional power. He's going to be authorized by Trump. Well, he's the first one who's going to defend these companies. Is he not? It depends which ones he likes and which ones he doesn't like. He doesn't like meta, for instance. I think he doesn't like meta. Trump doesn't like meta. Meta has a lot of business that can be seen by the government.

talking about Trump. So, you know. Well, they're all kissing up to him. Yeah. Right. I mean, that's just a given. There's a great piece, and then I think in the New York Times about how successfully Tim Cook has managed his relationship with the president-elect, and will probably continue to. Actually, it's Bloomberg. The story is probably from Mark Gurman. Yeah.

I mean, let's not forget that Trump was talking about Jayling, Mark Zuckerberg's, you know, not a few months ago. It's all about who sucks up the most. And at the moment, we're into crony capitalism territory, where if you have the ear of the president, you're going to do very well. If you have the ear of Musk, you're going to do very well. But I've got the feeling that Musk and Trump are going to fall out at some point. And that's going to be really interesting to watch. Was the Zuckerberg offense making the get a little remix with T-Pain?

Yes, I'm sorry when when you hear Mark Zuckerberg talking about the sweats on my board. Oh, don't say any He said it. We couldn't stop him. It was just kind of like really I'm actually going there. I played the clip not knowing what it said. I just heard it and then oh no Paris Marto had a translate and I went oh, I'm so sorry

I still haven't heard, so I feel good. But yeah, my show, we're not fans of the get-low remix by Z-Pain, the second T-Pain are called together. Z-Pain, I love it. We played it, and I did get a text message from a listener being like, listen, you hated it so much, and you played at the end, and it sounded kind of good. It's quite melodic. So I don't want to end up getting the counter effect here, but I don't know. I would not have made that song, I'll put it that way.

He made it for his wife, right? As a gift for Priscilla. And then I think he filmed her and put it on Instagram. And all of this combined is certainly it must violate some federal statutes. Something weird is going on. You saw the statue, right? That he had commissioned to his wife. Yeah, that was creepy. And then he designed dual vehicles. Custom. There's something weird going on there. How long before we as a nation tire of billionaires

And they're foibles. We will. I think we will. We as a great vote for just voted for one of them. And with a massive endorsement by another one. And I think Peter Thiel made this point. They're not just billionaires that you don't know. These are like the ideal of billionaires. You think of billionaires, you think of Elon, and you think of Trump and the nation just pretty clear. It was like,

We're still on the billionaire train. So I think as a genre are still in, although Zuckerberg might be out, if he keeps releasing songs with TV. What would you do right now if you were such an Adela Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook?

The final money to causes that maga wants absolutely It's not too late. It's not too late to donate to that. I don't know this up. I mean, sorry. Go ahead. Oh, we did it. We did it. We've been to I'm being too polite. Please carry on. All right. I have to arbitrate now. Unfortunately, Daniel, go ahead.

No, I was going to say, I mean, I just think this is how it's going to work that like these companies can offer support. They can not be, you know, the Trump 1.0 thing was you had a lot of companies kind of resisting fighting back. I think when they start donating money or they start supporting openly or even just not attacking, I think. Is it enough to tweet? Is it enough to say, Hey, congratulations. Good job. Let's get to work.

It certainly wouldn't hurt. I think they all did it. I think everyone wants to be on their good side. Beyond donating, I don't know if donating will happen, but the companies were seeing a sort of like a bastion of the resistance during the 2016 era and have been a lot less political since. And I think that like,

I don't know. I'm not just going to be prescriptive here. This is a tough leadership choice that's above my pay grade. But I think that what you're going to see from these leaders is to be descriptive, they're going to crack down on internal chatter. And you saw that happen a lot in the first term. And one of the interesting things that German points out in this story about Tim Cook and Apple is that Apple didn't have slack

in 2016, and they have Slack now. And people put the company on blast, on Slack, for decisions that they don't agree with. By the way, it's sort of wild thinking that Apple has Slack, like the most secretive company has this chat group. But anyway, maybe that's why German gets all these scoops.

But I would say that I would not be surprised to see Apple shut down slack. I would not be surprised to see more employees fired for speaking out. And it's going to be a very interesting balance within these companies to sort of try to figure out how to manage the fact that they have an employee base that very much does not agree with Trump and Trump who is quite important to their future fortunes.

Yeah, I mean, we saw this with Project Maven and Google. That's right. And that, you know, employees rebelled against it. And what? Okay. Well, okay. They rebelled as in they took an hour off during the lunch hour to protest outside the site. You know, and at the same time, they won. They did win. Google capitulated. They dropped out of Project Maven. Yeah. And a bunch of other companies moved in and took over that business. And with the current

You know, when you've got Trump and the Republicans controlling the presidency, Congress, and really the judicial system, then it's in company's best interest to play ball. And they're going to, as you say, donate. They're going to, what's a polite way to put this, kiss the imperial ring. And yeah, they're going to make money from it. That's the end goal.

In fact, Gurman points out that Apple probably wanted Trump to win because they've had problems with Biden. They were hoping that Joe Biden would save the Apple Watch from the Massimo suit. He had the power to do so, did not. Apple was sued by the Justice Department. They're currently fighting an antitrust case.

It's interesting that there isn't necessarily a lot of love for the Biden administration in Apple. And now there is also a very complicated road here because Apple obviously makes a vast majority of its products in China.

spot on. I mean, US-China relations are the most important thing for Apple. Remember, Apple's 20% of Apple's business comes from China. Large part of its supply chain comes from China. And if Apple thinks, OK, let's, you know, we can have a similar run as we had with Trump in 2016, where he listens to what we need and gives us the exemptions from tariffs. So we can make the iPhone, the iMac, the Apple Watch, and AirPods without tariffs as they did in the first term.

That's great. But the risk is, and there's always outlier risk with Trump, is that we do end up in some sort of trade war with China or worse, and that impacts Apple's ability to operate. Well, in fact, President Trump ran on raising tariffs to China and has the legal authority to do so with executive order because China is an adversary. He says 60% tariff on goods imported from China, which would be 60% increase in expenses.

Yeah, I mean, if you're an IT buyer at the moment, or if you're just looking to upgrade your laptop, get it done now. Because if those tariffs kick in, we're already hearing from major IT buyers, we're just like, we're stocking up our inventory now, because if it does go to trade war, we're looking at a massive increasing cost.

Of course, Apple has increased production. Foxconn's got a plant in India and in Brazil and they're working there. Part of the recent, they have such a presence in Brazil is because the Brazil has huge tariffs on phones manufactured outside Brazil. I just got my new Apple Mac mini and it was made in Vietnam. I was surprised to see.

And let's not forget the Mac Pro, which has always been made in Austin, Texas. And remember the photo op of President Trump and Tim Cook in the Austin, Texas factory showing off the Mac Pro being made in America from parts almost exclusively from China. Yeah, I mean, tariffs on them. Yeah. Unless there's going to be carve outs.

Yeah, exactly. I think this is going to be it. It's like, if you're a friend of the administration, you get a carve out. If you're not, then you're down with the dogs. It's been really interesting, though, how Vietnam has really tried to take on some of the manufacturing load from China. They don't have the ability to scale as yet, but I was speaking to some White House folks and they're like, yeah, Vietnam is the new China when it comes to manufacturing. Interesting.

The reason China is so important to Apple and many other companies right now, and this is Tim Cook's great creation is the way the supply chain works within China. All these smaller manufacturers who feed Foxconn and the assembly, they're all nearby

there is a natural synergy there that would disappear if you moved to assembly somewhere else. And it might not just be assembly, you might have to also get all those manufacturing, little manufacturing entities to make their devices somewhere else as well. So, uh, mistakes. I also that like one of the ways that Apple and a lot of these companies can get on the good side of the administration is simply by giving them those PR wins, right? We know that they love something. Yeah. Tim Cook's been very good at, right?

Yeah, so if they can get Apple and the Trump administration to, you know, announce something publicly, we're opening a new factory in America, we're going to be doing this, you know, that makes Trump look good. That's how you get on his good side. And next thing, you know, carve outs could maybe happen. You know, so I think a lot of these companies will be smart in that way. Another analysis will be, of course, if, you know, this administration is like what the left says, which is going to be like a fascist one. This is going to be a very bad thing.

Well, it's also complicated because, well, I think Trump likes Tim Apple and likes Apple a lot. Elon Musk does not. No. He has a working relationship with them. He does, but according to German, he chafed at Apple's unwillingness to buy Tesla 10 years ago, has complained about App Store commissions, and he has called Apple's business model unfair.

Elon is like anybody else. It's going to be a transactional relationship, not a... Yeah. That's pretty benign when it comes to Elon. Yeah. And you'll remember that he did complain about the stop Apple stopping to advertise on Twitter. That's right. And then it went to Cupertino and met with Tim Cook and got them back. It's all okay. Yeah. So I don't think they're back in the same way that they were, but he's definitely able to do business with them. Yeah.

Well, and that's another thing that's probably very good for ex. We haven't seen it yet, but I imagine advertisers are going to suddenly discover that ex is really a great place to put their heads. Oh, yes. It's looking like the boycott is folding faster than a wet tissue. They're coming back in because they recognize that he has the presence there, and this will be very useful to them.

Quite how long that last we'll see. But yeah, there's an awful lot of caving going on. Yeah. We're not talking about the one with the submarine and the pedo guy. It's going to be very... Look, one thing is obviously going to be a very interesting time. And every one of these CEOs at this point must have a war room where they're trying to figure out what the heck to do to make sure that they do well in the coming four years.

But Silicon Valley is also way more plugged in with the Trump administration than they were the first time around. Well, because of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and JD Vance and the all-in podcast guys like David Sachs is doing his thing. It's been pretty interesting this election seeing how the tech industry has basically

Steve, they're all kind of like, oh, we'll spend millions on lobbying, but we're publicly non-political. And that has changed significantly in this election. Yeah. I have a question. I have a quick question about it, yes. So if the companies, like CEOs and upper management, start cutting people off, start firing people for political views or just saying things like that. Or just shut down the slack. Like, do you think that leaves the door open for finally unionizing?

We've seen it. I mean, we've seen that certainly in the journalism industry and there've been attempts in the tech industry, but to be honest, go ahead. Yeah. The reason the Google Project Maven Boycott worked is because engineers, although small in number, are vital to these companies. And I think engineers after that said, you know, we've got a lot of power here. Not we don't need the unionize. We've got a lot of power as long as we exert it.

And so it'll be very interesting to see. I don't think engineering talent is so politically motivated that they will do something that's bad for the company, for political, for their own political interests. And also, let's not forget.

that when they protested in 2016, those were in the years of plenty. And yes, I admit that all these companies have the highest market caps in the world and are much more valuable now than they were before. But there is a different philosophy that has hit them since 2022.

in the year of efficiency era. Now, that year is over, but I do think there's been such wholesale cuts within the tech giants that there's a lot more paranoia than there ever was. Hence, folks are much less willing to speak up. These engineers, most of their compensation comes in the form of stocks options. It is in there very much in their interest to make sure the company continues to perform well.

I was going to say, I mean, I'm guessing, but I'm probably the only person on the panel that's been a union member. Oh, for heaven, for finned, I've been saying after for 30 or 40 years. You'll sack after. Wow. OK. Yeah, I just killed also. I was in the writer's guild, so. Yeah. I was almost in the project. I was killed by BuzzFeed news. Yeah.

I mean, the fact of the matter is, if you've got to set up a union, that is assigned a fantastically bad management, because I've been in those discussions. And if you have to go through all the pain in the backside, you know, stuff to actually get a union going, that's the sign that management has really. I think that's good things up. Yeah. I'm a union guy and a union supporter, but I think you're exactly right.

So, I mean, I don't think it's going to work in the tech industry. I really don't. I think they're going to end up voting their pocketbook. Yeah. Which is traditionally the way human civilizations have gone throughout the years. But, yeah, we'll see.

Even in an industry with a pretty substantial immigration. That's going to be the big thing. If he starts supporting Google and Apple engineers, then all bets are off. I don't know what's going to happen at that point.

Well, I mean, I'm illegal immigrant and I have thought about, you know, becoming a US citizen just to cover my back. It does mean that the IRS is going to audit my tax returns for the rest of my bloody life. And I'm not keen on that. But, you know, it's

And also it broke my mum's heart. But you know, I mean, it's one of those things to take into tree relies on immigrants and in a good way and in a bad way. One of the things I agreed with Trump on was cracking down on H1B because a lot of companies are hiring very low skill tech workers on H1B visas and using those to replace US workers. And that needs to be cracked down on. But in terms of mass deportations, that's going to be a disaster for this country.

All we can say is, let's wait and see. I mean, I don't think anybody knows what's going to happen. That's why we honestly don't. Well, I don't think anybody has any idea what's what's coming. Speaking of not what did you see the breaking news with the US, UK and France have allowed long-range strikes into Russia? Yeah.

Yeah, that's really gonna work with that happen. Yeah, Biden really held the line on that for a long time because that's kind of a war-like move. It sounds like these countries are hoping to win the war before January 20th. Yeah, this is the last sort of

go at it before they have to decide that trump is in and they have to negotiate mike i mean once trumps in the new cranes gone you know they're going to have to basically give up large amounts of territory uh... to the east uh... because america is by far the largest supplier of weapons to the ukraine i mean i guess though that the american people would not support this move that this is this is a move from a lame duck administration

that uh... would not have done this if before the election they didn't well i mean uh... americans want to support of you know however uh...

just an honorable to Ukraine people. No, Ukraine was a massively corrupt institution from the start, but at the same time, it allowed you to bleed out the Russian army. You don't want Russian invading sovereign nations. You kind of have to draw a line at some point. At the same time, I don't think Americans feel that strongly about it. Many Americans might, but not.

There's a very sort of 1938 feel about this. I was talking to my mum. I do the weekly phone call back to the UK folks Europe gets it when you've got it. Does she remember those days? My mum was born on the set before the Second World War. She grew up in rationing. She didn't see a banana until she was 17. But no, I mean,

The message is clear. Putin in Georgia and in Ukraine, he's on the rise. And next up is the Baltic states. And if he gets Ukraine, we've got

You know, Russian forces right up against NATO territory. It's not looking good. And so they're fighting back against it. But if the US abandons the fight, yeah, Ukraine's gone. Taiwan is the really, really worrying one. Yeah, I'm sure people are watching closely to see what our commitment to Taiwan would probably be a lot.

more aggressive, I think. I wonder, under the new regime, if China didn't invade, I want to just blockade it. What would the US do? That's a good question. Also, you have North Korea involved now in Russia and Ukraine. You end up having this very clear division within the world of

Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. Against the world, maybe. It's kind of unnerving. It is. It really is. If I were your mom, I would have a little sense of deja-fu. I'm sad to say. Let's take a break. I don't want to get too great. On that optimistic note. On that high end, not exactly.

We're all doomed. My attitude basically is waiting, so we just have to wait and see. Increasingly, I'm not doing stories that are what might happen because we just don't know. We just need the right move, Leo.

Everything's up in the air until January and even then even then it's up here for the next four years. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it is fun and worthwhile to specus to speculate I just you know, we have a little pool going I invite you to join on how long before Elon gets thrown out of the administration Honestly, the best idea I heard was Time magazine making Elon guy of the year and that would irritate Trump be all of it would cause me all over the divorce Trump's always want to be the man of the year he

That would really be all over. I think June 1st is the date I'm putting in there. But who knows, you know? These guys seem to really like each other. I'll take the over on that. Do you know that? I will. You think he's gonna last four years? No.

But Elon's not in the administration. It's almost like he's going to be the sort of leader in his business. He's uncle Elon now. Yeah. Well, they call uncle Elon. I mean, the first buddy. I mean, we have our district, the Rivian CEO on Wednesday on big technology podcast. And I was like, how do you feel that your number one competitor is now the first buddy in the White House? So it's kind of weird.

It is. It is because I remember when Elon bought Twitter that Jason Calicanis and David Sachs became Elon's first buddies.

And in that same exact sycophantic kind of court jester role. And so I wonder what happens to them. Jason didn't cover himself with glory at that moment. But you know, it's one of those things. No, but we did get his text message to Elon that he would jump on a grand day for him. And that I think is worth everything.

I am watching with great interest. I wish I had some popcorn right now. Thanks to having, it's so great to have all three of you here. Thank you. We'll continue on in a moment, but first a word from our sponsor, OnePassword. And OnePassword has a, I think a rhetorical question because I think you know the answer. I certainly know the answer to this. Do your end users?

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this is really this is extended access management the number one p a s s w o r d one password dot com slash to it we think one password so much for supporting this week in tech.

Apple, by the way, just I don't know if this is an example of how you can expect Apple to operate in the new world, but they just removed the radio free Europe app at the request of Ross calm nods or the Russian media regulator

And let's see, the newly removed RFE RL app is that of the Russian service for Radio Free Europe, which hosts the websites of its regional products, Siberia realities and North dot realities. Apple had removed other RFE apps prior to this, including their Kyrgyz service, and current time, which is the Russian language TV and digital network run by Radio Free Europe.

Raskam Nonsor says, the Russian service app contains materials from an organization whose activities in Russia have been declared undesirable. You can still download it here. In fact, everywhere but Russia.

Well, Russia's done this, sorry, Apple has been caving to Russia on this for quite some time. I did a story about this last month. They've pulled over 60 VPN apps from Russian users simply on the request of the Russian government, which makes me always slightly

A slight right chuckle whenever you see Apple advertising themselves in the US as we're privacy focused and it's all about your privacy. Offer may not apply in China and Russia. They also removed or hid several Russian language podcasts produced by independent journalists. Apple will say, well, we have to obey the laws of the countries we operate in, and this is the law of Russia.

Indeed, they do. And that is, I think, what he is saying is spot on, which is that these companies may put this like we are a benevolent entity face on in front of US audiences and European audiences. But at the end of the day, they'll just do whatever a company tells them to do. And like we've said multiple times in this episode,

Their job is to make money. Absolutely. They will do what it takes. It's clear. Anybody who thinks otherwise is not paying attention. That's really all. That's what a company is designed to do. Can't get over that congressman being like, so are we being charged for this? Yeah. I love it that Brad Smith feels like, I'm going to tell you the truth. We're a profit-making entity here.

Good on Brad for not kind of trying to weasel word his way out of that one. Well, I mean, they still publicly try and weasel word out of it. But when it comes to congressional hearings and I go through a lot of those, they're perfectly honest about it. We're here to make money. Yeah. And I have to say, and I don't know if you agree with this, Daniel, because you covered the company, but I feel like Brad Smith has always been pretty much a straight shooter.

maybe to the extreme. Do you agree? Yeah, he's a very good communicator. And he knows how PR works and how to get ahead of the story. They've done this pretty well with AI, putting aside the co-pilot. Some of the fiasco is there. Yeah, I feel like that was one where somebody was asleep at the switch.

Yeah, I don't think that was his call. But yeah, I mean, he knows how Washington works. So he knows how to negotiate. I mentioned this before that they have a, they had a permanent presence in Washington a long, long time ago because their strategy is to try to self-regulate and publicly mention that and broadcast it to prevent government from coming in to regulate them because

They feel like in that case, one's going to be obviously bad for business, but also they'll probably get a lot wrong because we know how tech is and how government doesn't necessarily understand things like the earlier story. And so he's been very good with trying to look like the good steward for technology and to set standards. So I don't know. He is definitely good at his job and good communicator.

Yeah. He has one of the best, I think, leaked speeches or memos I've ever seen, where people are asking him, like, why are you donating to politicians? And he goes, well, we donate to politicians to get invited to parties and dinners, and so we can influence them to make policies that benefit us.

It's like saying, you gotta love somebody who's just, we know that. Everybody knows that. It's just admits it, right? Well, America is legalized bribery and called it campaign contributions. Exactly. But I mean, it's, but I have to say, he's also godsend the headline writers because Mr. Smith goes to Washington as just gold. But I mean, yeah, America has basically decided, you know,

Okay, we're against bribery, but we will fund political ads, you know, in other areas in order to get influence. And that's the way it works. And can I? Yeah. And what about allowing papa? I mean, speaking of our legalized corruption, we allow our politicians to trade stocks on inside the nation. Absolutely outrageous. It's rising nuts.

I mean, I was listening to Nancy Pelosi's interview on the interview show with The Times the day after the election, and she was like slamming the table as the Democrats, you know, being the party for the working class. And it's like, well, Nancy, your family's trades are so hilariously on point that people will, you know, basically mirror all of your trading activity as the second they see it. And they're quite successful at it. So that's a good idea. I didn't think of that. We should create a new Nancy Pelosi index.

They have, I think they have Pelosi ETFs at this point. And also, what the hell is she doing in Congress at this point? She's 84. You know, I find Stein served until the day she died. I mean, she was still sharp. I don't mind like that. If she's sharp or you're not, but that's fine. But you got to be kidding me with the stock trading. It's really disgusting.

No, it's the ultimate insider trading. I mean, it's absolutely outrageous. And, you know, they made Jimmy Carter give up his peanut farm, for goodness sake. And yet, Congress for Congress, critters are allowed to trade on inside information. It's ridiculous. Whatever Jimmy Carter did is working for him. That dude has been in hospice for a decade now. He's still kicking. I think he likes it. God bless him. God bless him.

The Onion. Oh, marvelous news, marvelous news. The Onion decides to buy Infowars. As you know, Alex Jones was sued by the Sandy Hook families and they won a massive, I think was more than a billion dollar settlement, which required Alex Jones to divest his Infowars property in bankruptcy.

It took the Sandy Hook family's agreement to take a lesser amount of money for Infowars, for the onion to buy it. But it's pretty awesome.

The Onion, of course, is a satirical news site and says, we're going to take info wars and turn it into a satire of itself. They've already started by publishing from global tetrahedron, why I decided to buy info wars. This is the phony CEO of global tetrahedron, Bryce Tetrader. And so they've already begun.

There might be a fly in the ointment because Elon Musk's ex-corp has weighed in and is asking for a hearing with the bankruptcy court. And while we don't know what the plan is, they're claiming the bidding process was unfair. It's my guess Elon wants to buy and for worse himself.

I mean, that's what everybody was encouraging him to do once they found out the onion went in their body. But there's apparently discretion here that the lawyer for the Sandy Hooks family has, which is that they can accept

less money so long as it's more in their interest. And that's why they're kind of did with the onion was because it's because the onions also agreed to run like anti gun stuff and do stories around that. And they're going to have like a kind of a partnership with that program that with the Sandy Hook family.

So there's sort of that reasoning there. But yeah, it looks like that, you know, Elon wants to get in there elbows way in and be again, the savior for people on the right. I'll say, I didn't realize that the Ben Collins, who was a reporter at NBC, he runs the onion now. Yeah. Yeah. And like, I followed him on Twitter and at some point it turned to Tim Onion.

Yeah, which is like his handle and but yeah, he got together with a bunch of people and they bought it when there was it That other company spun it off and now they would kind of like a a private route and they've been rebooting it They do the subscription now with the the prop up the paper. They've been doing a really good job with it. So absolutely goes through

Yeah. Yeah. Thanks to Collins for saving the onion. Even print a paper now. You can actually get it. It's newspaper again. No, no, I'm subscribing to the newspaper now. It's just to support them. Yeah. It used to be when I first moved to San Francisco, you get it in new stands for free. Right. Great. Yeah. Exactly. And some of those, some of those papers were absolute gold.

A friend of mine still has, I think it's the 2000, the September 11th edition, which was just what the nation needed at that time. It was holy for that, I can't say it. But also, the little sidebar at the bottom, Clean Road World Trade Center says, best sick day I took ever. Yeah, that's the kind of humor that we needed from the onion.

So I do hope, now the judge seems like he's a little bit in Elon's court here. It's a Texas judge and he said, Judge Christopher Lopez said, no one should feel comfortable with the results of the auction.

This is the results of the auction being that the onion had purchased it So the X Corp filing date of November 14th does not disclose the purposes of X's appearance Other than the state the rights reserved to it as an interested party and request all relevant documents in the case I think the argument will be but your honor we want to pay more and That's better for the bankruptcy Despite what the Sandy Hook families say

So it's a weird position to take. Yeah, I mean, they should have a play in this because they were directly affected by the whole thing. You know, families have to go into hiding over these lies. So I say fair play to them. And there's a lot of, I don't think it would be out of the realm to suspect if Elon bought it, he would just give it back to... Oh, Alex Jones. Well, he, you know, remembers that when the N4s was banned from every platform,

They put him up on X. He streamed on X. But if he gives it back to Alex Jones, I think Alex Jones will have to sell it back again. Sell it again. Yeah, Alex Jones. Ben Collins, I was watching an interview with Ben Collins, and he said, not only did we get the Infowars intellectual property, we got the vitamin warehouse. Yes, all the supplements. They got all the supplements.

And so he says, we're going to melt it down and make a giant health candy bar. Actually, that was what the fake CEO said he was going to do now that he owns it. So we'll see what happens. But yeah, they own not just the right and the name to be in for words in the website. They actually own the supplements that Alex Jones was selling.

The made him a billionaire, billion and a half dollar judgment. In that parody, you know, why we're acquiring the onion, there was a hilarious line where it's like, we want to make you as scared as you could possibly be and then sell you supplements so you can live as long as you can to get, you know, scared for the longest amount of time possible. Yeah. It was brilliant writers.

No, they really are good. They really are. I don't know. It just encapsulates an awful lot of American culture. I wish them the best if X wants to take it over. That's fine. But I don't think they're going to. I think the only more fight on this one. I hope so. This is Bruce Tetrater, the global Tetrahydan CDO.

As for the vitamins and supplements we're halting their sale immediately, utilitarian logic dictates if we can extend even one CEO's life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the info wars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar-sized omnivitamin that one executive, I will not name names, may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

That's good. Yes, that tires should be in the hands of the sort of should not be in the hands of the establishment. No. And so, I mean, obviously, like we're talking about musk acquiring in four wars, but it just would say be much better if it was in the hands of the satirists. The hell of a lot of funny hook in the eye. Yeah. We all know what you want is not very funny. Yeah. It's the worst. And I don't think that's funny. That's what's really bad.

Yeah, the Babylon B is not funny. And I'm not saying that just because I love the center, but it's just not funny. It's not funny. Right. But I mean, on a serious point, we've got to remember that satire really doesn't change that much. Well, well, I mean, the lovely Alan Corinne, British satirist, love said that some, you know, yes, satire has this role, but you know, Germany in

You know, 1932 had some marvelous cabaret clubs, which we still remember didn't do anything to stop it. But, you know, there's only so far that humor can do. You know, it's we need to actually, yeah, it's a bad, sorry, bad ending point. But we are living. No, I disagree. We're living in a society where, you know, I do think that there needs to be some sort of counterweight. Honestly, I think. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Humor is the only defense at this point. And I think Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator did a lot to puncture Hitler's appeal. That is a great film, but at the same time, organizing rather than making fun of it might be more. Yeah, we can do both. We have to do both. But you need to make sure the pumposity by mocking it. Go ahead, Benita.

The satirists are there for an entry point. People need an entry point. That's true. That's what they're there for. Benito lived in the Philippines. Marco Sarah Philippines. Oh, good Lord. Sorry. He knows a little bit about this. Yeah. His family are Aquinos. So he knows a lot about this.

It's like what Emma Goldman said, if I can't dance to it, it's not my revolution. That's all. Absolutely. Yeah. She a commie. I think she was a commie. Okay. Even better. No, no. Her biography was one of the best things I've ever read. Really? All right. I'll put it on my list. Absolutely.

the craziest life I've ever read. And the thing she was advocating for, like in the 20s, it was just, I don't know, she was so ahead of her time. What a wild thing. And bear in mind that when the Communists took over, anarchists were straight down to the goo like so, yeah.

Yeah, she was the first one to her and Alex and a Berkman. They came back. They visited right after the revolution. And they came back to the US and went on a tour. And they were the first ones to say it's horrible. It's everything that's wrong. And it's where, you know, it's like one of the worst dictatorships we ever seen. No one believed them, you know, but they wrote all about it. And they were the first ones. But yeah. All right. Which, what's the name of the book? My Further Disillusionment in Russia? No.

Oh, that's the one that I was just talking about. That's what she wrote. But I think it's just called Living My Life. Living My Life. It's a two-parter. It's two-parter. I think where is the... Yeah. Yeah, here we are. Behind you? No, no. You can't win by Jack Black. I would highly recommend reading that. Oh, there's another one. Callee. I get my reading recommendations from Twit. That's awesome.

Let's take a little break. I have some other recommendations for you. We will continue in a moment with our wonderful panel from the big technology podcast, bigtechnology.com, Alex.

Thanks. Yeah, we were having, you know, fun, fun moment right now, launching video on, on Spotify. Oh, good. Oh, nice. Yeah. So we're trying to do that with the bang. We have the Spotify co-president who's just been on. We have Rivian CEO, RJ Scourins. We have AWS CEO Matt Garman coming up and, of course, Nolan Arbo, like we talked about at the beginning of the show. So always great speaking with you and thanks for having me on.

Look at your set. Is that your set or Spotify set? This right here is mine. Although we are going to be taping some shows at Spotify's studio for World Trade Center. I like it. It's pretty nice. I like your Webby. And it was very nice Webby spotify logo on the wall up there just for.

Is that a webbie over your shoulder? That's their webbie. That's their webbie. It's a nice studio, though. I mean, it's the real deal. Yeah, it looks pretty good. Also with us.

Do you have a studio at the register in Thompson? We do have a studio but unfortunately the lighting is really bad because we get great views over the San Francisco Bay but unfortunately the office we're in the lights come on automatically so it just throws things off. So I'm working from home today and I have a

large cat with much better. Stumpy is sitting up. It has been sitting on my lap for the last hour. So if you see my ears, one of those things, but always a pleasure to be on. Nice to have you, of course. And from the wonderful windows central editor in chief, the big man, Daniel Ribino. Always a pleasure to have you as well. Great panel. Thank you for being here.

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So you've already talked to the Spotify guy. It looks like you say he's going to be doing AI music and podcasts. Yes. So we had a great conversation. Oh, you asked me. Okay. So I should say he's not doing those things. We talked a little bit about how he feels about those formats. But creators are doing it.

Creators are doing them. Spotify and the AI front is doing some really interesting things, like they're allowing you to write a prompt about the type of playlist you want, and it will fill a playlist based off of natural language. And when Gustav, who came on the show, it's a CTO, CPO, and co-president of Spotify,

told me was that he wants you to be in dialogue with your recommendations. So many people every week are like, I'll discover weekly really got me this week or discover weekly didn't. And there's no real feedback mechanism that Spotify has other than you listen or you don't. And what they want to do is put users in dialogue with the app where they could actually guide the recommendations based off of their

natural language. That was interesting. But I think what you led with Leo was really the most interesting part of the conversation where I basically pressed the case. Like, do you want your platform to fill with the equivalent of shrimp Jesus the way that we have on Facebook, which is like, we can have AI-generated songs, we can have AI-generated podcasts. They're okay.

do you want those on Spotify? And I think that... Like from Suno and stuff like that. Oh yeah, we led off talking with Suno and it's getting good. And so his belief is that you should, people are gonna wanna connect with the human behind the music and therefore AI music will have a limited appeal. And I don't agree with that. I think that we're gonna get to the point where you might be feeling a certain mood or a certain emotion and you're gonna want music to sort of

Connect with that mood or emotion and you're going to type in a prompt and you're going to get AI generated music. Isn't there a huge risk though? I mean, already creators are kind of not a huge fans of Spotify. This is just going to piss creators off like crazy, artists off like crazy. I mean, they see AI as competition.

So this is the argument that he made to me, which is that we already have AI baked into songs that human creators are making. So the question is going to be sort of not, should AI be there? Because AI is already there. It's going to be to what degree of AI, you know, are we going to be comfortable with?

I think AI is already there, to be honest. I mean, we've had it with AutoTune for 10 years. Yeah, but there's a difference between that and a fully AI generated. Absolutely. I mean, look, as a podcaster, I'm not, I already think Spotify has damaged the industry hugely. I think I blame Spotify for what's happened to advertising and podcasting.

It's honestly Spotify has led to a lot more gigs, though, from people who no longer have royalties. But that's the only way you can make music as a musician now. Absolutely. But if you look at the way that AI is shifting this market,

Um you know it's much easier to get an ai to do this stuff and the the rights involved are still under court uh you know well i understand that's why i that's why i spotify loves it. Spotify lives and dies by the music industry and i understand they don't like that one cotton pick a bit they would love.

for there to be some other source of content that they could sell, so that they don't have to pay royalties to the music industry, and B, be it the mercy of music industry raising those royalties. So what this guy goes to sort of from the person that he has a lot of titles, that's Spotify, let's call him the co-president, that's one of the titles, he said they will not create AI music on their own.

And my point to him was like, you might be leaving yourself open to competition if we end up moving to a place where people are going to want to listen to this. Well, I think that's kind of missing the point though. I'm not worried about Spotify doing this. But I'm worried about everybody else doing it and putting it on Spotify. Well, we had we had already happening, guys, like this isn't a future. Yes. Like this is already happening. There's a lot of time. There's a ton of AI music in Spotify already.

I know it's why I don't use Spotify anymore because you very frequently when you do a Spotify search will get something that you didn't want, which is created by some AI or some jerk trying to make money off of search terms. But I mean, this is hitting us already. I mean, we had a case last week where we did a Jessica Lance of security edited a great interview with a Red Team Pentaster.

We published the story and within a week, an AI had basically stolen the story, put in hallucinations or mistakes, as we used to call them, put in the wrong photo and published it. And she came back to us and it's just like, yeah, we have to crack down this absolutely because it's just

It's a new world out there, but at the same time, it's a deeply unpleasant one. And I, you know, I'm a big AI booster. I think AI has a lot of promise. But the one thing I don't want AI doing is being a creator. I think humans should get to write the poetry, make the art, and do the music, and let AI do the other stuff, you know? Yeah. I will never. AI will never break a story. You know, they, they will steal it. Yeah, it's classic power territory.

I'm with you all. I just don't think that that's going to be the world that we're living in. I don't know how long it's going to take, but I think that we need to be ready for it because AI is going to create music. There's going to be AI artists or people that are prompting with AI that become stars. Guys, we're already there. That's our future date. That's where we are today.

But it bothers you, Benito, because you're a musician, right? It bothers me the most, because also I have a personal crusade against Spotify, but we won't go there.

And I'm sure you've talked about it on the show before, but notebook L.M. is just every time I use it to generate a podcast, I'm blown away. And like one of the points. Well, it's amazing what it can do. I don't think it's great quality, but it is amazing what it can do. Exactly. I mean, as a journalist, author is, you know, it's a great product, but I don't trust it. I'll go through and check the, you know, the quote, the autor.ai. Yeah. That's right. That's the transcription tool. Yeah.

Which, for journalists is great, but at the same time, you have to check it because it makes mistakes, sorry, hallucinations, whatever the PR term is. But, you know, I mean, it genuinely screws up at times. So, yeah, there are tools out there. We should use them, but we shouldn't be dominated by them.