 Oh, hi everybody on the live and recorded videos. It's totally normal. Why do you ask? As you can see, nothing is unusual. Right? So what if Roger's gone? Everything's fine. We're fine. He just has the day off. We're going to be OK. Everything's fine. Stop asking me. Geez. Just don't panic. I don't know why you're being so intense about this, like whether or not things are fine things. Seriously, back off, audience. See what happens? Roger goes away, and we just sort of crumble and act weird. Everything's going to be just fine. We're going to be fine. We're all fine here. How are you? Aye. I think we're going to have a really good show. There's a very long pause between aye. That was me trying to figure out what to say next. Where do I go from here? What do we do? Well, usually here's the thing. I have to have extra screens up with Roger gone. So my desktop is more polluted with stuff than usual. It's usually really polluted. And so I'm not seeing all the chats. And that's usually my go-to is to look at chat and be like, oh, what are they saying in there? And I couldn't see it right then. I think I'll Instagram this desktop for posterity. It's been a minute since I've dug up into XChat. I'm going to do an XChain. Because you did it, you did it, you did it, you did it, you did it in a minute. Football season is coming up. Scooter, you're a Niners fan, right? I am. In fact, I was actually catching up on the whole NFL on Sports Center last night because I'm like, I don't even know who anybody is anymore. I'm just out of the loop. Somebody left the Cowboys, and people were all thinking that was a crazy thing. Did Roger Saabuck finally scream? Did what? Round of that hot take. So, no, Dez Bryant, I think is probably who. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, I haven't really been following it. First, Niners haven't been good in a while. Just a heartbreaker, and I'm still mad at them for the Santa Clara thing. But also, I just, I got really into basketball the last few years, and I still like baseball, and I'm kind of tapped. I don't care about the NFL as much as I used to. You are not up on, because now people are very bullish on the Niners because of. 40% chance of getting to the playoffs is the last thing I heard. Should be 49, but yeah. Yeah, really. I don't know. I mean, that's not even really that great of a nod, It's the new bad boy quarterback of theirs, Jimmy Garoppolo. All right, you guys are about ready? Yes. We'll finish up our 49ers preseason analysis following this episode of Daily Tech News Show. Justin, would you be so kind as to read the line three opening? Oh, Tom, it would be my pleasure. All right, here we go. Three, two. Thanks to everyone who supports Daily Tech News Show directly to find out more. Head to dailytechnewshow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, July 26, 2018 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Feline, better known as Scooter. I'm Sarah Lane. And from Oakland, California. I'm Justin Rabbit. We need trading cards where it says Sarah Scooter, Lane. And then on the back, it can explain how she got her nickname. Turns out it isn't much of a story. We just decided. Producer Roger Chang is almost sitting out with us, which made it sound much more permanent. He just has the day off. But he'll be back tomorrow. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Video Land says it is blocking Huawei phones from downloading its free VLC4 Android app from the Google Play Store. And a company tweet Video Land explained that Huawei's decision to cut off all background apps except its own, which stops VLC's audio playback, was the reason for the block. Qualcomm is dropping its $44 billion deal to buy NXP semiconductors. The deal would have been the biggest semiconductor takeover globally to date. Eight national regulatory agencies have approved the merger since it was agreed on in October 2016. But China did not issue a decision in time for Qualcomm's Thursday deadline. Oh, yeah. They basically won by inaction. American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said Thursday that Amazon's facial recognition system known as Ruck Cognition with a K incorrectly identified 28 members of Congress as people who've been arrested for a crime. ACLU was conducting a test. They downloaded 25,000 mug shots from a public source, then ran the official photos of all 535 members of Congress through recognition. Recognition has already been in use by a handful of law enforcement agencies. So this was trying to show that that particular system may not be as accurate if it doesn't have proper training. All right, let's talk a little more about Amazon, not its earnings yet, but something else, Justin. Amazon announced Alexa Cast, which lets users switch from listening to music via the Amazon Music app to the smart speaker without interruption. Service is available starting today through an app update on iOS and Android. Similar to Spotify Connect or Apple AirPlay, users can tap the Alexa Cast icon and select the device that they want to send streaming music to. Amazon also moved its Echo spatial perception feature to the cloud so that all devices with Alexa, not just Echoes, can make sure that only the device closest to you will answer. I think people are pretty interested in the ability to cast music, but I don't think people are very interested in using Amazon Music for listening to their music. Well, I mean, I pay for it just because I want to play music through my Sonos One, because it does not have Apple Music integration just yet. So yeah, I can find uses for this. I don't often do this within the iOS ecosystem, though. If I'm listening to something on my phone, I'm not really going to air play it to my Apple TV where it would pick back up and use those speakers all that often, but it's certainly a nice feature. I wonder, and just a real quick stopover in the Amazon Music discussion, but I wonder whether or not they have had discussions on whether or not they move that to either a very modest add-on to Prime or a just included in Prime thing, because they could almost overnight become one of the biggest players in that space. Yeah, and that's the problem right now is nobody that I know, and I shouldn't say nobody, very few people just listen to Amazon Music, right? People listen to Spotify or Apple Music or maybe a few others out there. But Amazon Music doesn't have a big number of people who listen to Amazon Music on the go. Like Sarah said, the big reason that people usually have for subscribing to Amazon Music is they wanted it to be able to be used easily on an Echo device or in your case, the Sonos, right? And that's great, uninterrupted, you know, cast my song over here, that's great. What I know, and again, I'm not using Amazon Music at all on my iPhone, although that is the way that I set it up on my Sonos, a lot of folks had complained that not only was it sort of clunky to send over, but you were sort of losing playlists and the whole thing needed an upgrade anyway. So good stuff for you. On the spatial thing though, I think that's great. Many people are moving to either multi-mart speaker homes, if not multi-different kinds of speakers. So this is- Yeah, no, it was huge for Echo to do it for Echoes. It's extra huge for it to be across the entire ecosystem. Moving on to Microsoft now. The company announced preview bills 17723 and 18204 for Windows 10 insiders, including various features like new emoji, a mixed reality flashlight view into the real world, and a new system for rolling out Windows updates that might include machine learning tech to predict when it's best to update your PC. And a blog post, Microsoft explained that the new feature could check to make sure not only that you're not currently using your device so that a restart would mess everything up, but also trying to predict if maybe you stepped away from the device briefly and will be back soon based on previous behavior. Oh, that's, yes, please make that work. I'm not saying it will, but that is one of the biggest annoyances is stepping away from a Windows machine and having it ask you while you're gone. Hey, it doesn't seem like you're working right now. I'm just gonna reboot, okay? And it'll be an hour or so. Actually, it's usually not an hour anymore, but it's still annoying. Yeah, you know, this is, I don't know. Where are we at on just complaining about Windows being annoying? I feel like it's like less and less. Like a lot of the old battle acts kind of issues with Windows have kind of slowly faded away. It's a vestigial complaining now, but the Windows update thing has been something where yes, you can go in and say, don't update during my working hours, here are my working hours, but a lot of people didn't do that. So having a more proactive thing that just can tell, like, I know he's not working right now, but because of the machine learning, it hasn't been long enough. We'll wait a little bit. I don't know, I think it's, I know that the other things in here are probably more significant in the update, but that's the one that definitely caught my eye. Oddly enough, it's Apple now that has the reputation deservedly so for constantly asking me for an update that I constantly let it know to try. Remind me tomorrow, remind me tomorrow. Remind me tomorrow, that's all I tell OS 10 every day. I'm working, remind me tomorrow. Yes, absolutely. All right, hey, our chefs have prepared Samsung stories for you three ways today. First, may I call your attention to the newly produced second generation 10 nanometer class 16 gigabit LPDDR4X mobile DRAM. It can achieve the same data rate in current top smartphones while using 10% less power. We also have a Samsung announcement ahead of the expected Note 9 announcement on August 9th. This teaser from Samsung promises better battery life. Doesn't say anything about fires, so that's good. And finally, Samsung's just announced UI certified unbreakable OLED displays that do not need to be attached to rigid glass like previous flexible OLEDs. And most people are saying, well, okay, this explains the foldable phone, right? You can have a bendable display, but usually you have to have the glass around it solid for it to work. But this applies some plastic unified with the display so you can actually have it move. You couldn't really have the flexible displays move in a phone before. Well, anytime I hear unbreakable, it's sort of like unlimited data where I'm like, well, that's not true. But it does sound like in their testing, it wasn't just, oh, we can drop this from a, you know, a higher point without shattering. But we can do this multiple times where even if glass, you know, the strongest glass that's on the market now can withstand a fall or two over time, it starts to be less able to do that. So I, as a person with a breakable phone that is not in front of me right now, but I'm sure everyone's seen it before, I welcome this. I think obviously, I've often wondered, and this is a little bit off topic, but if you were to have a battle, and it doesn't have to be a physical, but let's just say it's a fight just between all the world with crack screens and all the world without, what would that breakdown be and who would win? Well, the breakdown would be more people without crack screen, but I think crack screen people win because they have the sharp objects. There is that, they would come in with a weapon. Yeah, it's one of those things where it's almost like, you know, when pregnant women are like, why did that stranger touch my belly? It's like, I always am having strangers come up to me and be like, look at your phone, it's so cracked. It doesn't cut your fingers? Yeah, I'm doing it on purpose. A new report from Canales on the smartwatch market found Apple shipped an estimated 3.5 million Apple watches worldwide and it's 2.2 of this year, 30% more than a year ago. The Apple Watch Series 3 with LTE was the best shipping smartwatch in Asia, making up 60% of the 250,000 units that were shipped total, but Apple's share of the smartwatch market dropped from, dropped to 34% from 43% in the first quarter of 2018. Canales on competition in the market from Fitbit, Garmin, and others. So smartwatches are selling, right? Like that's basically what this means, like Apple's selling more smartwatches than they used to, but their market shares, yeah, because so are other things. For a while it looked like, well, Apple Watch is really the only ones that sells and the market is pretty stagnant, but there were folks like Gartner and others saying, we expect it to eventually start to rise. It's gonna take a little while to ramp up, and it is. And Apple sometimes has this problem, like with the iPad, where they come in and they're like, yeah, people have been doing it but we'll do it right, but then they lose that advantage, right? They never really lost that advantage with the music player. Music players just became less of an important category, but the iPod always dominated. The iPad, on the other hand, it dominated tablets in its early days because it made tablet a viable category, but then it faded back as the category went more abundant. I wonder if that same situation might not play out here. Well, but even historically, Apple's cared less about market share than it has about the profitability of where they're gonna sell their products. So I don't think that they necessarily mind this or that it's even unexpected. I do think that the thought with the Apple Watch was always, well, if they can't make it work, then maybe there just isn't a demand for this kind of smartwatch at this kind of price. And it's been heartening to see that the one thing that everybody kind of wanted was, hey, let it be a standalone device. Let it do things that it doesn't have to be paired. It's not just a mirror of your phone. And that seemed to not only be a big selling point for Apple, but also, again, Fitbit and Garmin, these are the fitness equivalent. Yeah, and navigation apparently is also starting to play a part in this too, which is interesting. But yeah, it's fitness, health, and navigation pretty much. Well, we said we were gonna talk about Amazon earnings and now's the time. Q2 earnings are in for the company. Reported revenue rose at 39% in the quarter, due in large part to online shopping and cloud services, which Amazon does very well. Revenue of $52.9 billion just missed expectations of $53.41 billion, but earnings were $5.07 per share, which positively smashed the $2.50 expectation and way up from 40 cents per share just a year ago. Revenue from Amazon web services rose 49% to $6.11 billion, beating the expectation of $6 billion. Wow, so yeah. Yeah, I mean. I mean, my first reaction is like, okay, a little bit of a miss on revenue, but not much. And we used to talk about Amazon as being the low margin one, like, oh, 40 cents earnings per share is actually pretty good for Amazon, is what I was saying a year ago at this time, $5 and what, seven cents? I mean, it's a whole new Amazon. And it's funny, the Reuters story that I was reading said, you know, but mostly on retail and web services. I'm like, yeah, they're two businesses. I mean, yes, they might move into retail a little stronger with the Whole Foods acquisitions and Amazon Go. Yes, it looks like they might be trying to make a play for pharmaceutical, but that's still just retail, really. And that is the story of Amazon and full disclosure. This is a household for which owns Amazon stock because my wife works for an Amazon owned company. However, this company is remarkable in that everything that they wanted to do when they were making very, very thin margins has come true. They invested in there, in other elements of their company and they have continued to build it out, maintain their lead in terms of retail and really build a monster in AWS, which we are always reminded of when there is any kind of outage and you realize that a third of the internet is now unusable. The fact that Amazon has two jet engines on this plane is very, very, very important because we're gonna get into a discussion about another company that really has one. Yeah, and don't forget, we're not dismissing that Amazon does own a lot of companies. They own Comicsology and they own Twitch and they own Audible and there's a lot of parts to Amazon, but retail sales, especially online retail sales and Amazon web services are the predominance of their business and when those are both going strong, they are unstoppable. Even if one of them were to slow down, like you say, Justin, you've got another engine that you can bring in the earnings with. Yeah, I mean, if all of a sudden we were all able to 3D print everything we would ever want for free, right? Amazon would still be a profit, a very, very, a titan in the industry. If all of a sudden all data storage was free, they would still be a titan. This is very, very important when we look at some of the other companies and it's Fang Brethren. And even anybody who's like, ah, earnings are poorest, it's just a bunch of money, they're rich, whatever, it's like, this is unusual to double analysts' expectations and be so far above where the company was a year ago in revenue. You don't see that very often. Yeah, by the way, if someone doesn't understand Fang, that is Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, not using Alphabet so that you can make it Fang, basically. If you wanna get all the tech headlines folks each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com, our sister show that dispatches everything you need to know in a compressed form. It's like the pill version of the meal we serve you at Daily Tech News Show. So yes, let's talk about good ol' Facebook. Facebook announced revenue of 13.04 billion for the last quarter, falling short of analysts' expectations of 13.32 billion. And also announced 1.47 billion daily active users short of the expectation of 1.48 billion. Keep in mind, Facebook's miss on revenue is less than Amazon's. Okay, this has caused a steep slide of Facebook's stock price, probably mostly because of the stagnation of users, the fact that they didn't grow as much as people wanted them to. Facebook added 22 million users worldwide, but that's the lowest rise since 2011. You take China out of the number of people who can access the internet worldwide, because Facebook isn't allowed to operate in China yet, and you end up with around three billion people who could access Facebook, 2.23 billion do access Facebook on a monthly basis. So there is not much room for growth without increasing internet access, which Facebook is working on, or launching in China, which we've seen Facebook kind of start to take some toe steps towards doing there too. Facebook's CFO David Wenner said total revenue growth will likely continue to decelerate in 2018. They've been saying this for a couple quarters though. Facebook is offering more privacy choices now for various reasons, including the GDPR, and is promoting users to the personal stories timeline because of the quality of the engagement, rather than the more lucrative news feeds. And the idea there is to combat accusations of spreading lies and basically cleaning up their public image. Facebook has been saying this, we are going to see a slowing in user growth. We are going to see a deceleration of our revenues because of these changes we're making to combat these issues that have been in the public eye for a long time. And yet today, everybody in the investment community anyway is freaking out about this. Well, because as much as it's true that Facebook had a PR crisis that they've been actively working on in many areas, and perhaps this report is directly affected to that and we'll see an upswing again, the truth is we're closing in on the people who could be on Facebook in the world who aren't already on Facebook. We're literally closing in on the planet, which is why Facebook again, always presented as a goodwill measure to bring internet to the masses. They want to give underserved internet areas internet so that more people use Facebook because that's what else are you gonna do, especially when you have declining growth in certain areas, stagnant growth in the US, which is a key market for Facebook. And all of us sort of, we've all been sitting around wondering if this was ever going to happen because it has with every other company ever. You keyed in on what I think is probably the biggest problem for Facebook. In the parlance of King of Kong, a fistful of quarters, we have a possible kill screen when it comes to how many people you can get on Facebook compared to how many people there are in the world. There has to be either another way that you are stimulating growth and stimulating engagement or they'll get into China eventually at what cost will be a question and that will continue to raise growth a little bit, but they are at a point where there's no more people. I mean, you can try to find, again, you can launch all the balloons over Africa that you want to try and figure this out, but you are getting the thinner and thinner elements of society that have not sampled your product. Here is, I think, if I'm going to give the alarmist case, yes, they've been warning that this was going to happen, but is there not a case to say, well, what are you going to do about it to get out of it? Like, yes, they knew that this was going to hurt, but is there a way to make it better? And if there's not, then really your question is, if Facebook fades out of popularity, is this company anything? Well, okay, but we're well away from Facebook fading out of popularity. Remember, the users grew. They just didn't grow as much as people wanted them to. I think the saturation point is a bigger danger than the revenue. Let's be fair, Facebook's saying, hey, revenue's going to slow for a while while we make these changes. They didn't say revenue's going to start going down and there ain't no end in sight. Like, and that seems to be the reaction is that they said the second thing when what they're saying is, yeah, our acceleration is not going to be what it was as we make these changes and adapt, but we think we'll be fine. We think we'll, you know, we'll stabilize and get back to regular growth at some point. They haven't said what point that is. Maybe they don't know. But on the one hand, I don't think this is the end of Facebook by any stretch. No, no, no, no, no. On the other hand though, Facebook is weathering these times less well than Amazon and Alphabet. Remember we had Alphabet earnings earlier where they're killing it on advertising. Facebook's operation is based on advertising. Amazon is, you know, it's not exactly advertising, but it's sales, you know, Amazon acts as if it's the search engine for products, basically. It's killing it too. And the key here you hit on with Amazon, Justin, is they're not locked into just the one thing. And with Alphabet, it's we're a platform that succeeds based on the success of others, whereas Facebook is a silo. I mean, yes, they have Instagram, yes, they have Oculus, but the majority of the revenue comes from Facebook. And if Facebook starts to get sick, the entire company is gonna get sick. They're just sniffling right now, but that's what has people spooked, I think. Well, I think, you know, you mentioned that after Cambridge Analytica and other sort of data privacy, what's going on on Facebook scandals, people expected a lot more folks to perhaps leave the platform. And the numbers just did not show that. The gradual decline of numbers for no real reason, besides the fact that Facebook is used by lots of people and there are going to be other platforms. There have already been a lot of platforms that cropped up. Instagram, thankfully, is owned by Facebook, but people do want other options. Facebook doesn't provide a service the way Amazon does. It provides a community. It tries to provide services. It has been successful in some of them, but mostly unsuccessful in others, especially when they try to copy another apps model that's been doing well. So that's, I think, where Facebook has to really think about when people just sort of get bored of this thing that they've been using for a long time, and some people have and will, then how do you increase revenue? Although I don't know if that's the problem. You're growing users. 22 million worldwide is not nothing. You're just not growing them as fast as you used to. But you're also losing users in markets that is important. If that trend were to continue, that would be a bad thing. Although US and Canada was flat, not declining, just flat. Right, yeah. It's an advertising company. They are a walled garden advertising company. If their walled garden is declining, and you're right, Tom, there is no, we should not be saying that the sky is falling when it comes to whether or not the walled garden on Facebook is less trafficked than it would or should be. I'd be drizzling, but the sky is not falling, right? I do think, though, this could get bad fast for them in a way that it won't get bad fast. It will take a long time. If somebody came up with the killer ad platform for the rest of the web, it would take a long time for ad words to degrade. If Disney launches their own service, it will take probably a couple years for Netflix to decline. It will take a long time for Apple products to become unfashionable. And as we discussed with Amazon, they've got two horses kind of leading their cart. Facebook is Facebook. If Facebook, if they can't get people into the tent and then convince advertisers that this is the place where they need to buy advertising to get in front of those people, it gets bad fast for them in a way that it doesn't for the other companies. Yeah, and honestly, I mean, diversification is the thing you need to have to survive. Alphabet's doing it in a couple ways. One is other bets, Waymo, et cetera. Those are long-term bets, but they're planning on and it looks like they're right to plan on Google still being a cash generator for a while so they can be patient with those other bets. Facebook's diversification is Oculus, which has a bit of a long-term bet right now. Instagram, which is doing great, but is smaller than Facebook. And right now, I'm not sure Instagram would save a faltering Facebook. So most of the eggs are in Facebook's basket there in a way that they're not so much with Amazon and Alphabet. Hey, Sarah just reminded me, Carl in our Slack, or in our, I'm sorry, in our Slack, in our Discord actually alerted us to a story about Slack. Slack has bought HipChat and Stride from Atlassian and will discontinue them. Well, it's funny because I don't know if anyone here has used HipChat more than just trying it out. I have not, but I know that when Slack became kind of the darling of enterprise chatting software, there were a lot of holdouts where like, no, no, no, HipChat is actually quite a bit better. This was before Discord's days, so I don't have a lot of personal experience with it, but I know that there are some people who are gonna be really bummed that HipChat is going away. Yeah, it sounds like maybe it's one of the brains. Yeah, exactly. And they're in a defense movement against Microsoft as I think Derek Silva said in Discord as well. So smart move for Slack and sad for the HipChat fans and the Stride fans as well. The only constant is change. Thanks to everybody who alerts us to breaking news while we're doing the show. And also thanks to everybody in our subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We are also on Facebook. Hey, we have not abandoned Facebook. If you don't want to, head over there, facebook.com slash groups slash Daily Tech News Show. And we get emails. We love getting emails. What kind of emails do we get, Sarah? We get a lot of emails. But I love this one from Virhealio who actually sent me a YouTube video of a pronunciation. So I would not get this wrong. Hope I did you proud. He says regarding the watch party story, which was something that Facebook just launched yesterday and we talked about it. First thing I thought was, what about a focus group? I could see this being used for getting feedback for political ads, for example. Facebook could monetize it. So if you participate in the watch party of a video, a variety of videos, you might even earn some money. Thanks for the hard work. I'm a longtime listener. Back to the tweet days. Oh, thank you, Virhealio. Good to hear from you again. That is an interesting take. I don't think it'll be the only way that Facebook watch is used, but it certainly could be. And I would be very interested to see what would happen if they tried to pay people to join a Facebook watch. Or if companies somehow, if you belong to a group that was associated with a business, could you be allowed to pay somebody to participate in your watch party? Yeah, that'd fall afoul. Yeah, there are services like that. I know that there's one which name escapes me, but you can watch ads for bits that you can use on Twitch and stuff like that. So there are sites wherein you can give your opinion on a thing and that contributes to market research and they cut you, you know, plus you a little shekel. Yeah, would Facebook allow that? Would they like that? Because no alternative source, I'm running for them. Facebook's like, I don't know, what do you want? Well, Facebook is dying, guys. They've got to do something. It's Kramer doing movie phone. Why don't you just tell me what you would like on the platform? Thanks Virhealio from Somerville, not Maryland, Massachusetts, by the way, hashtag dirty water. I guess that makes sense to somebody besides me. Justin Robert Young, does it make sense to you? Is it the dirty water of the River Charles? I don't know, Virhealio. Let me know on Twitter at JustinRoyYoung. And while you're at it, you can head on over to freepoliticalnewsletter.com. That is a newsletter that I do. It is free and it is about politics, but it's been growing. And we're just about to pass 1,000 people on it, which I'm very, very proud of. Congrats, that's great. Yeah, like so short, such a short time ago. And also we migrated to Mailchimp. So now we have included the weird political video of the day. These are old ads, old flubs, and it has been a delight going back and finding just gems from the 90s, from recently, from even further back. Go ahead and check it out, freepoliticalnewsletter.com. Hey, in a couple of days, it'll be the first of the month. 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And it's our end of the month round table with Rob D'Amillo, Shannon Morse tomorrow. Talk to you then. Woo-hoo! This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I'm in the club. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Did I ever? Great show. What do we call it, Roger? Oh, crap. Oh, no. Roger's not here. I can open this. Showbot.tv. If you happen to be listening or watching live, you can vote on the titles. The titles are submitted through IRC at IRC.chatrealm.net. Facebook, it's made of people. Wilting of the Wald Garden. That's not terrible. What was it again? Wilting of the Wald Garden. Wilting, got it, yeah, all right. Facebook is made of people. Yeah, Wilting of the Wald Garden's pretty good. I kind of like that one. Is there anything else of note? A lot of Facebook recommendations. Maturation or saturation? Well, that's pretty clever. I like that. Facebook is dead, along with Facebook. Yep, you heard it here, guys. The king is dead. Lower the flag. I almost made a Bruce Willis joke when we talked about Unbreakable. Yeah, I wouldn't have gotten it. The other thing with Facebook that I think is kind of unfair to say, because it is so popular, is that anecdotally, it's become a less usable product for me and many people that I know. And I don't know how to quantify that. And I don't know how to say it in any kind of journalistically responsible way when the numbers continue to say that it is this obviously wildly popular, culturally important picture. But it seems like it's become ever more complicated and in the search for maximum eyeball usage, it's burnt. This is a point I wish I would have made earlier. There is this tendency as humans to think effect follows cause really quickly. And when you're talking about large numbers of people, effect follows cause at a very slow pace. I generally try to go by this principle when thinking about the economy. The economy is generally reflecting changes from, I don't know, a couple of years ago. You don't make a change and then you see it in the economy the next month. And Facebook is large enough to operate by that principle. So a slowing of growth right now could be an effect of things Facebook did two years ago. I don't know that, but that's something to think about. Like this may not be the result of Cambridge Analytica. This may be a result of a more insidious long-term trend. Well, and I think that's the point that Justin was making is hard to put my finger on why. I'm like, I should check Facebook. I haven't done that yet today. But that's what I feel more and more often. And I don't really know. Yeah, there are more things for me to do on Facebook, but that turns into more things that I don't really use on Facebook. It's kind of, it's overwhelming in an unhelpful way. But at the same time, it's very repetitive because even if you have 500 friends, which I, yeah, I have something around that, there's 30 of them who do all the talking. And even sort of waiting your own algorithm to make your newsfeed as pleasant and customized as possible, I feel like it is a chore. Kind of the way I feel about going to LinkedIn. I just, I do it. It's part of being on the internet, but I've just started to gravitate towards other things. I find more, I don't know, like that serotonin boost. And I don't think I'm alone. I don't think a lot of people who use Facebook less in markets where user growth is slowing or even stagnant have a really good reason for why it sucks or something. Everybody's still there. Good news for Facebook is it seems like everybody says, so I go to Instagram now instead, right? That's what I hear a lot. I think certainly for a certain demo, but I don't know if my mom will ever move from Facebook to Instagram, although maybe, I don't know, my brother. You know, it's funny. My sister uses Facebook and Instagram, but not Twitter. She's like, two toxic, don't want that. So I kind of feel like she's a good mainstream canary in this social networking coal mine we're discussing. I have many friends who are like, I don't even get Twitter. I don't know what you've been doing there for 10 years. They're just, it's never gonna happen, but they don't necessarily use Facebook all that much either. It's more of like a fun app, easy stuff. I'm Facebook blind because one of my, you know, I try very hard to use multiple platforms. I make myself use Windows and OS 10 or Mac OS and Linux. I make myself use Android and iOS. I don't make myself use Facebook. And so I am blind to this. In fact, I use Facebook more these days than I used to simply because we started a Daily Tech News Show group there. So I can't follow my gut on this at all because I don't use Facebook and never have the way most people do. I will say this. So there's a conversation here in the chat about, you know, Facebook versus Twitter. And certainly Twitter is a festival of nonsense and can very often be just as depressing and ridiculous as Facebook can be. So I do think that they are, they have an equal capacity at the very least to bum you out and make you question why you're friends with any of these people at any given moment. The difference is Twitter is, and I almost think to Twitter's detriment, just a timeline and maybe some lists. And then you open a thing to tweet and that's it. Follow people, you unfollow people. You can DM them. That's, they are comparatively to Facebook in and out burger. It is a simple menu that they have kind of stuck to. Whereas- Well, they tried really hard not to, they keep having to stick to it. I know what you mean. Well, I mean, remember when Twitter and Facebook were compared incessantly a few years ago where it's like Facebook is, you know, now they're trying to copy some Twitter stuff and now Twitter knows that Facebook's getting market share. It's like the two platforms are not alike at all. I wouldn't compare them at all. I would say that Twitter is, yes, more of a real crapshoot, but it's also where news breaks, at least in my community, it's also where, you know, memes arise. There's a certain like fun vibe going on that I don't have on Facebook at all. And I would never, if something were to happen, that, you know, there's an earthquake in two seconds from now. Like I'm going to Twitter, I'm not going to Facebook. And I think that that's an extreme case, but they're very different. And Facebook doesn't, you know, that whole sort of like check in with people and stay here all day and watch videos together. And that's a tough sell for me. Well, certainly so. Cause Facebook has been a different thing. There was no point in which Twitter's like, now we're a games platform. In the way that Facebook was like, now we're a games platform. They both have done live streaming stuff, but you know, Facebook put a lot of time, effort and money into it. Not to say that Twitter hasn't, but I don't think it was the same amount. There is, you know, Twitter has not done groups in the same kind of way. They have not tried to leverage themselves as a platform for people to gather communities in the same kind of way. It is fairly top down. Have a Twitter account, get tweet from it. People like it, and they retweet it. That's pretty much it. It's not that same kind of community building that Facebook is. And to be honest, that's really where I'm gonna track back when I started to find Facebook more of a nuisance. And let me also state for the record, I am a rare bird. I take every friend request and I have for the last 10 years. It is pretty unusable form. In fact, it is to a credit of Facebook's algorithm that it surfaces my family, you know, to give me the things that I actually wanna see. But it was the advent of groups and the idea that everybody has these groups now, it's constantly surfacing the same kind of stories over and over and over again in my feed. It's pinging me. I don't know. I've been added to groups by people that I don't really know. I got some friends with them. So it's given them the ability to add it in. And next thing you know, I get an alert on my phone about it. It's just- I wonder if you don't like Facebook. I mean, I don't do any of that stuff, but I still don't wanna go. Like no Facebook notifications ever. You must get so many. Oh, I deleted the app. Yeah. I mean, that's why, yeah, that was- I couldn't, it was a haunted ghost ship. And so I'll always keep it because I wanna still reach that audience. I've spent 10 years building that audience and many of it are people that actually get to do anywhere else. So it's like, cool. I'll, whenever I've got a thing, I'll post there. But otherwise, like if I'm not just updating, like I'm not gonna let everybody know that I'm going to the December's concert this Friday. Well, and you could, you could pare down everything so that your experience on Facebook is not unlike mine, even though you have way more friends because you could just unfollow everybody and not have to be part of the feed. But that's a lot of manual collaboration. And I don't know how to do it. And it's like, I don't wanna put the time and effort into learning. I don't think that the juice is going to be worth that squeeze. And so I'm kind of disconnected. I mean, I did that back in 2009, right? Cause I used to take everything like you did. I used to just, you know, accept every friend request. And then at some point I realized, well, hold on, this is a bad idea and I got out while I could and pretty much just kind of stopped using it. And so I did what you did a long time ago, which is one of the problems I have with Facebook in evaluating it from my own personal standpoint. On the other hand though, I think you hit on something really interesting about Twitter. What Twitter does is so simple, it's been not great for their short-term growth, but it may be good for their long-term survival, which is you're not locked in. You can come into Twitter, go when you want, right? Facebook, you're locked in. And that is starting to wear on people. I think that's a lot of what you were talking about, Sarah, where people are saying, you know, like, ah, I feel like Facebook is just a duty. Like I remember feeling that way about Twitter, but I never left Twitter. I just stopped checking it as much. Whereas Facebook does things to say, well, if you're not in here, then you're not part of it because it's not out on the web. You're not gonna see it embedded anywhere else. And I think it's the most successful walled garden yet, but walled gardens generally cannot stand the test of time. Well, and there's sort of, I still can't totally define it, but there's something about if there's a certain, oh, I'm gonna get a certain kind of news or comedy or music stuff or whatever I've curated on Twitter. For whatever reason, all of those people are very different than my Facebook community. And part of that is because my Facebook community is family and friends from home and people who are just like, ah, I use Twitter. So they're going to be different by nature, but I don't find there ever to be like momentum on Facebook of any kind. And part of it is because their algorithm doesn't really work for live stuff. And maybe that's just the nature of what we do for a living. And I care about that a little bit more, but you go and it's like, eh, there's some family photos and people asking for recommendations about where they should go eat in New Orleans. And it's all fine. It's great. Someone tags me in something every now and then. I definitely post what I think I should, but it's like, what, where's the there there on Facebook? You know? Yeah, no, it's just like, it's the trailer that came out three weeks ago that my high school friend is just getting around and posting because he really likes this movie. And then two people that I used to know arguing about anti-vaxxing. And it's like, all right, cool. Great. Yeah. Imagine that was a room you walked into. Would you stay in that room? The funny thing is the people doing it. It's like, and grant, this might be a little bit of a Florida situation, but like, listen, these people were animals back in the day. Like, and now they're like at each other's throats about, you know, this, like, be aware that everybody grows up and they've just become weird. It's true for all of us. And thank you, video people for not being weird and watching us all the way through. We had a nice extended discussion today and I hope you enjoyed that. Folks who are listening to audio on the Discord or good day internet feeds, please stick around. There's more to come.