 look like the video all people can see the rest of you yeah so i was telling tom earlier um yesterday it was raining quite hard in l.a and i was like it's just crazy that like no part of my apartment is leaking the lake started today oh no it's not it's horrible it's like well away from all my electronics i mean yeah yeah but it's you know there's like sponges and various is it just coming in through the where the window meets the the wall or the sill or whatever the window yeah um yeah it's i mean it was raining so hard earlier i just i don't know who even knows oh my god almost like not even worth telling my landlord about it because like it never rains as hard as it did this morning yeah i know you know well that's why i don't i have this leak in the in the skylight that only happens if it rains like it did today enough that a little bit of water builds up on the roof and then it comes in exactly and then it stops so it's like do i really right yeah like i mean you could probably you know call kits but i'm like it's all someone's got to ban the apartment yeah i'll just as a homeowner i'm one of those guys that like god something else i have to fork out 24 yeah well i'm also a homeowner i just don't own the home i'm in well that in your home is in the middle so the people who would be leaked on would be the floor above you what right no there's no problem in oakland is there a unit above you i think oh oh oh yes yes no uh that's true i uh never had any leaks in oakland knock on wood sorry bread well you're knocking you don't have to say sorry yeah right it worked is this wood here that's what there we go it's like knock on for make a darn it i'm so sorry uh this was a kind of plastic composite made to look like wood crap there was actually you know speaking of just you know weird things that happened to us the other day well not the other day sometime in the last several months i said something i was like knock on wood there's no wood and the person was like what are you doing what what do you mean i was like you know knock on wood but there's no wood around us so like i'm jinxing us he was like well okay like never heard of this before never been on wood spirits never been a druid or just just never heard never heard that i thought it was like so weird that i she was like are you superstitious no no it's just a thing is this some zodiac thing yeah all right you guys ready i'm ready i'm ready let's do it then here we go hello all you beautiful people the daily tech news show is brought to you by you you can find out more at that daily tech news show dot com and we thank you for your support this is the daily tech news for thursday march 22nd 2018 from dts headquarters in los angeles i'm tom merit and from studio feline i'm sarah lane joining us today very happy to have tech reporter annie gauss back in the house hello i'm good how are you guys good to have you back annie good to be here thanks to our producer roger chang for making this all possible uh no thank you for having well yeah uh we are going to talk about whether we should just break up everybody google facebook the whole the whole shebang let's start however with a few tech things you should know instagram announced a new algorithm update to ensure that newer posts will be more likely to appear first in your feed and make the experience fresher overall instagram first switched to an algorithmically sordid feed back in 2016 some people are upset about it most of us have gotten used to it which got updated though to include recommended posts late last year instagram is also testing something called new posts it's a new button that will let users choose when they'd like to refresh the feed instead of it happening automatically which some users complained buried content they would have liked to see apple's service is on track to be the company's primary revenue generator in the future according to morgan stanley analyst cap huberty she believes in five years services which include itunes app store apple music i cloud apple pay and apple care will be 50 percent of total company revenue growth with the iphone making just 22 percent of revenue growth over the same period oh remember when it was a hardware company it's getting less anyway all the time uh let's talk a little bit about mark zuckerberg's apology to mark zuckerberg did some interviews with several news outlets uh wednesday yesterday apologizing for the situation with cambridge analytica zuckerberg also said people value privacy over sharing data and that the company has been slow to realize that he apologizes profusely for that as well he also said he's uncomfortable being the one making decisions around content although i'm not exactly sure who else it would be he said if congress calls him he guesses he'd go like uh he's real sorry we've talked quite a bit about this on this show annie what's your take on this whole fiasco oh god i mean there's so much to unpack here but um i guess of all of the interviews he went on on this apology tour i found the cnn won the least interesting um it felt to me like just more of the same vague vagueness that we that we normally get from mark zuckerberg when anything seems to go wrong he seems to default to um talking points very well honed talking points but um some of the same talking points about community and i also found his the way that he broke down what he sees as users preferences to be a little bit of an oversimplification um i thought the wired interview i guess i'm sorry it was the recode interview was a little more telling when he basically admitted that he doesn't want to be the person to arbitrate content um across the web and seems a little bit too surprised that that the fact by the fact that he's ended up in this position given that he's run this company for 14 years you know besides the fact that it's mark zuckerberg you know arguably the most powerful tech company in the world um the tremendous personal power if i were in his position um and some of these things were coming to light there is a part of me that's like yeah you didn't really know you were going to deal with this now you have to you are very sorry and kind of confused as well but you know it's not like i still don't think that the people running facebook are a bunch of monsters i feel like it has become something that has run away with itself yeah yeah i mean what i'm about to say i'm going to assume that mark zuckerberg is being genuine in everything he said in these interviews of course what it showed me is that facebook doesn't realize that they can't and this i go into this a little more detail in my patreon column today they can't take the benefits of the open web they wanted and then shut off everything else and expect it to work the way things did in 1999 right there's a consequence to saying well we're going to actually control your data we're not going to let you take your data outside of facebook it only goes out of sight of facebook if we want it to he talks a lot about like we were all for sharing but i guess people don't like sharing they were all about sharing for you not letting you take your data you can't take your data easily out of facebook and take it somewhere else you don't have all the control over data he gave users a little bit of control over data and the upshot is when you take responsibility and prevent people from doing what they want with their data then they're going to expect you to be responsible for the effects of what happens when people use that data right i thought the most um of the kind of the entirety of everything that he said i thought the most annoying part for me was him setting up that false binary like well i guess you don't you guys don't want to share data that's not you know that's not really the case um it's as exactly as you said tom it's about the fact that we we have little visibility or not enough visibility into how facebook is sharing our data on our behalf you want to fix this problem be more like wordpress say your data is yours you can take it whenever you want wherever you want we're not stopping you you can use your own domain names do whatever you want you don't see wordpress.com have these kind of problems because they are truly letting you be in charge and they charge you for a service they provide whereas facebook they're more than that i'm not saying that's wrong for them to be more than that but there's a responsibility that goes with that. I mean wordpress and facebook are also not easily compared. Not anymore no but i'm just saying if he wants to he wants the benefits of being wordpress without being wordpress i guess is what i'm trying to say. Right exactly. Tempe Arizona police released dashcam footage from the uber autonomous car that struck and killed a pedestrian one view shows the safety driver appearing to look down prior to the crash the other view shows a dark road with a pedestrian walking a bicycle appearing suddenly in the roadway this footage again as we have said with all this stuff it is very difficult to say any of this proves anything without doing a lot of work which a lot of people are doing uber's doing it national transportation safety board is doing it tempe police are doing it a lot of people are working on what this actually says and it involves a lot of calculations and really understanding however casual appearance makes this look like it was avoidable to me i don't know if that's true but it certainly looks that way avoidable by the driver that was supposed to the drivers looking up it seems like you would have had time to slam on the brakes and slow the car down it's very apparent that the car does not slow down at all well and that's you know part of the you know the the whole issue with having a driver as a backup right autonomous vehicles if they work correctly you're kind of just sitting there like hopefully never having to do anything so you might get even more used to being like might look down on my phone or not saying that he was looking at his phone he or she or you know look outside or i don't know look you know look down at whatever look away from where you're supposed to look so again very gray area yeah and i think it'll be interesting you know hopefully at some point we'll learn more about what exactly happened within the car's system at that moment i mean it frankly kind of surprised me that they were running them at night i don't know why i was surprised by that but i just assumed it would be you know it's obviously harder to see bicyclists and and it happens all the time with human drivers unfortunately but i think it'll be interesting as we learn more and hopefully we will about what happened within the system you know was it was it partly a system failure or was it completely you know the negligence of the driver it'll it'll be interesting to see you know what happened in this instance and from a technical perspective what you know where the failure yeah was because tempi police still say this is probably uh unavoidable so there may be the the video may be deceptive in the way it looks it looks avoidable to me it looks like if the safety driver would have been paying attention the brakes could have applied faster it and and as you rightly point out the sensors apparently failed because it doesn't seem like the car slowed down maybe the car was slowing down and it just isn't apparent from the video there are so many questions bloomberg reports youtube intends to ban videos that promote or link to websites selling firearms and accessories this is starting in april the company will also prohibit instructional videos on how to build firearms in related news reddit has also updated its policies to ban the trade of firearms or explosives or drugs that includes alcohol and tobacco services with physical sexual contact stolen goods personal info and counterfeit reddits subsequently shut down several subreddits engaged in those activities you know i was listening to a report on this on npr this morning the youtube portion of it and uh you know there there's the whole argument of like well you know if you shut down stuff that's technically instructional um you know and not meant to hurt anybody um that you know that's a real problem as well how is youtube going to you know deal with with that side of things i'm not sure youtube cares about that right now i think that you know in general these companies have to they got a lid on the law um and appeal to what is uh considered to be the bigger problem you know somebody on twitter asked me if this might be a response to the uh change in the law in the united states regarding safe harbor to say you can't claim safe harbor if you are encouraging illegal activity and there may be something to that where youtube and reddit are saying we want to make sure that we're on the safe side of this issue i think it mostly has to do with public sentiment that they they want that there is a pressure on them to do something and so they've taken these actions right cnet sources say best buy will stop selling huawei products in the next few weeks neither company would comment on whether uh that is true and if so why huawei said best buy is still a strong partner that's that's all anybody would say it may have to do with the fact that the us has announced plans to place billions of dollars of tariffs on chinese goods the majority likely to be focused on the tech industry uh just because china makes a lot of tech white house says it'll announce a final list of good subject to the tariffs in the next few weeks a lot of details to be worked out on this it likely from what i have read would not apply to things like iphones which are assembled uh and then shipped to the united states but sold by a u.s company but it would likely apply to huawei which makes its phones and ships them from china it's a chinese company yeah i mean that was my main question about this is that given how complex supply chains can be what exactly is considered a chinese company um and i guess that's you know that it's hard to imagine putting huge tariffs on apple products for example yeah i don't think that that would go down well with several large entities in the united states probably not a lot of people either yeah well there are a lot of companies that you know would conceivably maybe move their operation to the us you know because of increased tariffs on where they had been you know working with manufacturers up until now um that's a simplified version of you know what this would do but it seems to me that if there are certain companies that could bring their operations in house so to speak speaking about the u.s that that's where this is originating from uh maybe yeah i i i feel like it's more about punishing chinese companies that are on chinese soil uh but i'm certain that the administration would not mind if it had that side effect that you're describing uh for sure okay moving on to slack which just updated its privacy policies and tools to let premium customers at a certain tier not all premium customers but those who pay for a certain amount features download all the data from their workspace that's both public and private so if you have a dm with somebody that would be included apparently without informing members of the community slack says this is in order to comply with the general data protection regulation or the gdpr that's new slack previously offered something called a compliance report which required a workspace to enable dysfunction beforehand but then also notify members beforehand for non-paying slack accounts they can use this new tool as well if they either show valid legal process uh consent uh show consent of members or show requirement or write under applicable laws so in other words if you're not paying this is going to be a huge hassle for you so you are easier than ever i understand what's going on here the gdpr says that you as a company have to make the data easy to remove for for the client uh so if the client the the citizen of the EU gets gets control over the data to slack a paying customer is the client right and the way slack is set up those paying customers are largely companies when you're a company the people in your slack are your employees there's lots of settled law that employees don't have rights over their company communications the company does so in that light all of this makes sense slack is saying hey companies who pay for our product you now under the gdpr have the right to pull your data out and no we can't make it hard for you to do it by requiring you to tell your employees they're your employees that's between you and them right we're we're out of it now uh it is weird though because i could start paying for the dtns slack the slack patrons are not my employees and then suddenly i could see their dm's i didn't have access to without even asking me if it was okay exactly well not not the the dtss ones where you're an employee that's different i'm talking about the patrons right that's like they're not employees uh so it does seem like there's uh there's something weird here that's a side effect of applying this it also seems to suffer from bad timing um you know just because we're all we're all talking about privacy and you know people being aware even if it's okay that you download you know everything and the dtn has bosses slack the fact that you don't necessarily have to disclose to anybody that you're doing it whereas before you did even as i wonder though under the gdpr if i went and paid slack and then took the data out of slack would i be violating the gdpr because they are not my employees and slack may be that may be their rationale is like hey that's between you and the members of your slack community if you violate the gdpr doing this that's your own lookout but we but the gdpr requires them to make it frictionless and so i think that's why they made this move well we will definitely revisit this as the feedback comes in feedback daily tech news show dot com if you want to get all the daily tech headlines each day in about five minutes or less subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com well somewhat on this note uh let's let's let's let's segue into our discussion story and that is corporate responsibility in fact something called corporate social responsibility often abbreviated as csr which is a corporation's initiatives to identify and then take responsibility for their effects on environmental and social well-being obviously this is more and more an issue every day the term generally applies to both efforts that go above and beyond what may be required by regulators or environmental protection groups now in it's certainly in the u.s. and and in and many other markets as well four companies dominate currently um when you talk about social responsibility you hear about amazon you hear about apple you hear about facebook and you hear about google this leads some people to say well this is the big tech this is what we should be afraid of these are the companies that are uh you know that have too much power and are potentially ruining things for the rest of us social media companies you know you know in their essence we're born out of a better way to connect right but issues plague them all and we hear them over and over facebook's cambridge analytical scandal for example other tech companies are now parting ways with these big four and others on privacy fights social platforms like facebook and twitter and google's youtube and other mainstays older companies ibm oracle sales force cisco they all want to be seen as responsible players who can be trusted who care about our data who have enough wherewithal to to make effective change annie i i want to kick this over to you um when you think about corporate responsibility and companies saying you know we're learning things along the way as we make up the rules where do you fall on on and how everybody's doing yeah i mean i think that of the big four um they grapple with different problems but um there are there are some that kind of are are applied to all of them and i think one of them is that um you know this is one of the big topics that we're discussing discussing because of the facebook news that it's hard for people to understand how their data is being used and how you know how their data and their transactions are resonating across the web and that's something that facebook is obviously dealing with right now but to a lesser extent apple does and as well as amazon i think because of the current zeitgeist facebook and google are are are struggling with similar problems around content moderation around um issues that arise from being seen as um you know soul sources of information on the web um but i don't think it's exactly clear yet what what a responsible what a fully responsible and and um and social good focused version of facebook and google would look like i think um they're not doing great i mean it's i think they you know facebook is probably um it's a younger company and it's and it's slower to figuring these things out but i think that um they probably have the worst the biggest problems to untangle at this point yeah sky galloway who's the professor of marketing at nyu he was a co-founder of red envelope uh has an ask wire article up it's one of the the articles that is the basis for our conversation here and he points out the combined market cap of google apple facebook and amazon is the gdp of france those four companies make up 24 percent of the share of the s and p top 500 these are ridiculously large companies i think some of us who've been following this for as long as the three of us have really forget that you know it's not serguei and larry and their small startup anymore it's it's not jeff jeff bezos selling books up there in seattle anymore like these are not only big companies they're not only more successful wow they're more successful than microsoft and ibm these are the four biggest companies in the world apple is the biggest company by market cap in the world and yet they still all suffer from that same problem we have which is they think of themselves as small nimble disruptors and when you're the largest you're not disrupting anything anymore you're just causing problems yeah and i think that i mean um you know i was around for example the issue of content moderation both facebook and google are you know making a big deal out of the fact that they're hiring thousands of more people to help keep the community safe and to police um you know objectionable content on their sites but you know one of the issues is that is how scalable is that and and secondly it's all very reactive you know it's like they don't seem to make the changes until it gets reported about in the press at the end of the day only they have a full visibility into what's going on on their platform um you know the rest of us don't so it takes either reporters or it takes you know other watchdogs to dig up those stories and then they seem to react to it um i don't know what the solution is i don't know what the you know the possibilities are for for having them be publicly regulated in some way i think we'll be having that conversation in the next few months but only they know you know how their data is being used yeah galloway's got a really interesting take on this he because he is a silicon valley insider he he has started several companies uh and and he talks about the fact that he you know his students actually leave his program at nyu and go get jobs at amazon but he makes a long impassioned defense which i think needs a little more evidence that maybe we should break up these companies amazon aws uh prime video apple itunes two separate companies uh you know facebook and whatsapp and instagram three separate companies google and youtube two separate companies etc etc etc i i don't know if that's actually the solution he uses microsoft as an example although microsoft never got broken up so maybe what you need is to hold their feet to the fire the way they did with microsoft to force the better behavior although i he's he said tries to make the argument that microsoft being brought before the courts and almost broken up by the courts caused them to behave better i think it was just the fact that you had google and apple and facebook resurgent that caused microsoft to act better because suddenly they were facing more competition well and i mean you know anti competitive laws are very different than what people are accusing something of facebook doing at this point you know it's it's you can't say like well microsoft did it right in the past so maybe facebook should take a page out of their book it's this is unprecedented issues that we're dealing with and i don't think that uh you know if company if a company is um is is strong enough to you know i'm not trying to give anybody a pass is what i'm saying but at the same time i'm not sure that uh you know we can all say well and i should have done it differently but i don't know in hindsight if if that's realistic for a lot of these companies no matter how big they are as big as they are annie how much animosity do you think is inside silicon valley and washington dc and how much has actually felt outside you know um i think it's probably less than what those of us in silicon valley think um you know i would guess that there's a very large chunk of the facebook user base that doesn't know know what's happening or care um we're also in the united states and this conversation is happening you know in the us and they have users you know they have a billion users across the world so um do most people care probably not but um yeah well there's a difference between knowing and caring i i you know yes the people who just use this stuff and don't follow the issue are less likely to care but i think i think there's even people out there they're like yeah i know they're the big four companies yeah i know they have some practices that are a little shaky but whatever like that's always been true you know and maybe they just expect someone to eventually do something about it i don't know yeah i mean i think if it doesn't affect their customer experience in any way it's they're less likely to care um if amazon keeps on you know providing the best customer service is anyone at any point going to care about what what they're doing under the hood um that day will probably come for amazon in some way shape or form but um you know it's happening right now with facebook um and uh you know i do think that there's some there's some ill will towards facebook at least here in our country because of the conversation that's happening about you know around politics um the rest of the world i don't i asked on our facebook group on our daily tech news show facebook group uh hey you all have obviously not deleted facebook why is that and and there's about three classes of responses one is yeah i always know they're up to something and i'm careful uh another is i'd like to go somewhere else i don't know where to go and and then there's the people like yeah i don't love what they do but i get so much out of it that you know it's still worth it to me and i i i think the fact that you've got two-thirds of those responses like that is you know is why facebook is is able to continue on the way they're they're going and i don't know what kind of intervention would change that hey uh thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com and of course facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show what's in the mailbag sarah well we were talking to dr kiki dr kiki sanford yesterday and we thought we we were uh unsure about what the plural of octopus was top and i were like it's octopi of course ben uh who says he's from rainy and eight armed seattle says you were struggling a little bit with a plural of this and one of the things that was included in my training for volunteering at the seattle aquarium where multiple giant pacific octopus are often found in display was this very topic the official plural of octopus is octopuses however what alternative is not octopi as the root of octopus is greek and not latin the proper alternative is octopodes which rhymes with electrodes so not octopodes no no as one might consider would be the greek way to do it now i mean mind blown guys i was really sure that it was octopi at least better admits that octopi is fun to say which is really the only reason i brought it up sure yeah did you know that the uh singular firm of data is datum yeah okay well you did i didn't okay i knew that datum roger probably knew that as well well screw you guys well you should have you should have that has asked us to like what's the singular of data and make us prove it because it's easy for us to say oh yeah hey do you know this thing yep i did yep sure did i remember uh so yeah octopi octopodes octopodes got it thank you ben thank you we have the smartest audience in the world exactly the worlds of octopus they know everything the high of mind makes us all smarter thanks also to annie gauss for joining us uh annie so fun to have you it's been great till folks where they can get in touch with uh all the other stuff you're doing online yeah uh the best place to get in touch would be on twitter.com twitter.com slash annie gauss that's a n n i e g a u s hey folks we're getting near the end of the month and uh our goal every month among many goals uh we have we have a goal if we can get to 22 000 on patreon we'd like to add another round table and i think after next week's round table you might want to get more of these uh but our first goal is to get more patrons than last month right now we're about 22 patrons less than last month so we need 23 new people to join us uh if you've been thinking about it if you've got an extra dollar a month uh and you think the show is at least worth five cents an episode all you got to do is go to patreon.com slash d t n s you can get access to an exclusive rss feed with bonus content uh there's all kinds of cool posts you get early access to the d t n s labs episodes and more mostly though you get to make the show happen and you get to say hey i did that i'm a producer of daily tech news show that's patreon.com slash d t n s our email address is feed back at daily tech news show dot com if you have questions comments want to weigh in on anything bring it to us please we are live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m eastern 20 30 utc you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with shannon morse and len peralta talk to you then woohoo this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com diamond club hopes you have enjoyed this program well i have diamond club thank you for asking i enjoyed this program too i enjoyed it too andy you were great yeah thank you for thank you for having me guys of course so many issues to talk about this man it's been a week hasn't it i know yeah as somebody pointed out on twitter that like you know it's a crazy week when uber killed someone and it's like the the third most important tech story i know uh i was actually i was having dinner the other night with a couple of friends and you know it they were going on and on about you know facebook stuff and whatever and i you know in order to break the ice but you know also i was like well another news uber killed somebody i like you know it was like what in the heck is going on yeah really weird news week you knew this was coming right you knew that there were only so many millions of miles uh that autonomous cars could could happen before this happens because it happens it you know cars run into people and kill them that it's you know and and i'm not trying to make the mathematical argument about which one is safer but you knew this was coming uh in the tech world there aren't always huge scandalous stories about facebook every day uh it is odd that these things coincided like that yeah you guys know my story about almost getting hit by an self-driving uber right do tell oh man i'm i have a very you know personal relationship to this topic but this was um so do you remember when they rolled out they made this big deal out of rolling out driverless cars in san francisco and this was in right and there was the whole controversy whether they had the permits and all that right right this was in i think december 2016 um and that morning like i was opened up my phone i was like oh twitter's rolling out driverless cars you can handle a driverless car in san francisco today how exciting i get i go to work um i'm in a lift and i'm crossing van s in san francisco with this big intersection and um my car crossing in the intersection a car runs a red light and comes within like five feet of smashing into us i look up and lo and behold it's one of the uber driverless cars so i turned around like took a picture put it on twitter that tweet went viral and i ended up getting like quoted in all of these like stories about it and uber then had to backtrack and like in this really interesting way and say like well it's not really that driverless so people shouldn't be scared it's actually kind of mostly human drivers you know operating them um it's mostly pr bluster and that's kind of where they had to land on that um yeah i'd forgotten all about that yeah um but yes we knew this was coming yeah yeah it was just a matter of time and miles kilometers uh title wise there were two that i liked one was too big to be startups and the other one was um too big to succeed i like too big to be startups i i'm wondering if a lot of it has to do with the fact that for a lot of these companies they they take a lot of the personality from their founders right whoever they whom or whoever they may be and so i think you know a reflection of the company culture might just very well be a reflection of uh the the founder or the the leadership at top and maybe it's time for for for rethink on the people at the top i that's an easy thing to say i'm not sure how true it is um it certainly was true of uber right like they definitely took their company culture cue from calonic and changing him was the right move i don't know that that really changes all these problems though like if you remove jeff bezos does amazon stop be i mean maybe it just stops being so successful right because maybe the next person isn't as good at it as him but i don't know if that really changes the problem isn't the company culture with amazon the problem is just how ridiculously large they are and amazon is the new big threat because they're now number two to apple they are they are threatening to become the largest company in the world and they're reaching their tentacles into logistics and health care and you know all of these things i don't know the changing bezos changes that yeah and also you know who out there can run amazon you know i mean i don't know who kind of the the other people at the top are their specific you know abilities but it's hard to imagine you know someone's them just shoehorning someone into run facebook you know i guess what i would say roger is you're right that you know the company cultures are certainly dictated by these founders especially in these charismatic founders right um but i don't know that removing them is is maybe not so much not so much removed but you know it's for example what you gave about be bezos like if you replace bezos maybe the person or persons that would would replace him or supplant him have different objectives right now you could broadly say they all want the company to be successful well but they're ready they're they're there's more than one path to being we we have a test case which is the replacement of steve jobs yes but i mean like wait i'm silent we're like well the thing is that he shoot tom strikes again and he died yeah yeah i mean it's right i know but but we we had you know this incredibly large successful disruptive tech company have their leader replaced well and i would actually go back to apple then because i would say if you look at apple when they pushed him out and they replaced him was you know with a with a handful of other people you're talking about in the 90s right back in the 90s that company was close to fault uh was faltering it was close to to to you know being bankrupted when they brought him back and he again with because of his personality he pushed the company in a new direction they started cutting off a bunch of avenues that they were exploring uh mac clones they were looking at the newton they were doing all these other things wasn't really paying off and steve joseph one we're going to cut off the clones that they're they're basically cannibalizing our sales they're not expanding it cut that off we're doing we're going to this direction with desktops we're gonna do i max we're gonna we're gonna go with these kind of more colorful candy colored kind of designs and stuff and where the company started kind of rebounding and i'm wondering if it's just you know we just haven't had steve jobs off long enough to kind of see his his uh influence kind of wane uh as his ideas that he he mapped out you know are are over and they have to start coming up with new ones post like post steve ideas maybe he was just so awesome that his echo will live for another decade so you're arguing for for jobs exceptionalism that he's he he doesn't but but isn't isn't your thing like these these company founders are so charismatic and so exceptional that they set this culture and i mean that's i'm wondering like you know it's and well i'm not saying that cutting off the head i hate to hate to use that term but to replace the head would somehow alter the companies i argue roger is not arguing for the decapitations no no no decapitation strikes no but i'm saying is like you know it's you know if they truly want to you know if they truly want to change i mean you know it's it's it's all good and say to say i'm sorry and you're looking at your feet as you as you kind of like ah you caught me and you're talking about zuckerberg now right right yeah specifically but i mean he's the my point was his rhetoric is not i mean he's sorry right but his rhetoric shows like he doesn't get the problem yeah exactly no he he doesn't understand the problem it's not that he's being disingenuous i i i don't think i know i'm not saying yes yeah yeah i know but i'm saying is that you can't have the captain lead the ship and solve the problem when he's you know what they used to say about gm the people that got gm into the state of affairs that they were in the late 90s early 2000 near bankruptcy aren't the same group of people that are going to pull it out of that crisis in the same respect some of these uh crisis of faith and trust in these companies are not going to be rectified with the same group of leadership that we have currently running yeah but i you're that implies that the problem is concentrated in the leadership and i don't know that it that's it's con i don't think i think that's kind of a cop out though i think it's not a cop out i'm saying that the problem is endemic throughout the entire system and if you just concentrate on trying to solve the leadership you won't solve the problem you can you can take zuckerberg out and put somebody else in and you will still have the facebook problem uh because the other thing that happens and i've seen this firsthand as you has have you at cnet is a company develops a culture that is independent of the people in charge of it uh and persists no matter who is running it it just it you know it's large enough and has enough people that it just has a momentum of its own i mean i i agree with that and i'm not saying that again that a simple replacement of people at the top will solve everything but you need i mean it's at the same time it's not saying that if you just leave them in there you know it's because well you know that won't change anything and so well we'll have to find another solution it's part of a i think it's part of a i think it's part of the top the bottom examination of the entire industry right so it's not yes i just wouldn't go there first like that that could help solve the problem along with other things i think you could do other things that would probably solve the problem without having to change the people in charge so to me that's lower down on the priority list i don't know i think i don't think it's i don't think it's lower i think it's like one of those things you have to do in 10 i mean there has to be i don't know i mean it's just it just seems that you know you it's it's it's hard to say because not all companies run the same and then they don't all have the same personality and some take to changes and brass better than others do some have a very independent streak seen it that you that you meant it uh didn't matter right shelby whoever else was running the show it just was the same company khakis and button downs hey leave kathy alone it was the weirdest coming to work for i thought i thought i fell into the step of the set of the stepford wise but i think you know it's i think part of me is i i think they are culpable or at least responsible in some respect and they should understand that and not so much be like you know how do we how do we how do we unchain ourselves you know from this particular crises move beyond it's more like how do we solve this so we don't have to look at it down you know in another well but you're assuming they're not yeah that's right well i don't know we'll see we'll see if i'm right or wrong because you say because these i mean these things aren't an overnight thing right they don't turn on a dime and then yeah particularly cultural cultural you know things applied in in corporations take time to change and sometimes they never change in the company just needs to go bust everyone spreads to the floor it doesn't need to go bust maybe there needs to be some kind of outside pressure maybe there needs to be a change in the landscape maybe it just needs time for people to realize what's going on and sort of understand the tools at their disposal and allow someone to come along and provide an alternative i mean the idea that microsoft wouldn't be part of this conversation except as an example from the past is pretty crazy to 1999 me right microsoft felt unassailable no one will ever get rid of internet explorer no one will ever think windows is irrelevant and internet explorer is gone and windows is not really essential to the conversation anymore um but that's true but that's what i'm saying and and it's true and you did have to have microsoft come to account for themselves in court for that to happen but they didn't actually at least in the united states europe is a different matter they didn't really have to make them do anything about it in the in in europe what they did make them do was fairly superficial well yeah but i mean like i mean you could argue also that bill gate stepping down and then what was his name young france balmer balmer uh that came in and then satchin nidella i mean that you there was a noticeable shift right but what caused the shift is the question well you know it's it might be a chicken or egg thing i think it it's both i think it's you can't just say one always precedes the other as you're you're correct you can't always replace leadership and expect a change in the company we've seen that not just in tech but also in other corporations but at the same time you know you just can't leave it there to fester and then expect everything underneath it but microsoft almost had that they almost had exactly that like in 2000 people thought microsoft got off easy they're fine they're going to be able to keep doing this forever you know what people thought that the 2008 uh with the near bankruptcy of gm would you know kick him in the kick him in the seat to do things and then a couple of years later we find out about the ignition scandal so i mean there's just a lot of things that happen in corporations that isn't i mean that is an anecdote yeah that's an anecdote it's not my personal anecdote i mean that i mean that that is an anecdote that's not a that are i mean there are things that happen to companies that cause them to change you're correct it could be it could either come from an outside source could be pressure groups could be whatever i think they're giving their own shareholders i but what i could say this book has already gotten pressure from their shareholders around the fake news stuff and harassment with uber too right yeah um and the stock has been you know in a spiral ever since this i'm actually checking right now spox stocks um so it could that could be one area of pressure too but i 164 what i'm saying is that that does not preclude them from maybe shaking up the top as well how's that i mean it's i have a question what so mark sockerberg is really hard to read like i find him really and he's got this he's listening to him talk is kind of like you know it's hard to get a sense of where he's really at at least for me do you think that he personally was unaware that these this type of abuse that happened with caberage analytical was possible or probable or do you think that he was aware that this was something that was a possibility this type of breach was something that was a possibility and just was like eh i don't think it's a problem i think and i don't know if it's zuckerberg in particular but i think the facebook culture was uh you know what put that stuff out there most people want to abuse it we'll keep an eye out if we hear of abuse we'll we'll we'll follow up uh and when and that's exactly what they did when they heard about the fact that uh kogan had handed over his data to um scr whatever caberage analytical parent company was they went and said hey you guys that's not cool we're all friends here you know we got facebook people working on kogan's papers with them just delete it all right are we cool just delete it and they're like great great yeah check box deleted it we deleted it right you told bob to delete it right yeah no i totally told bob okay facebook it's all deleted it's all good and they didn't delete it right so this is the air this is think about it right this is the air of the startup where you have like 20 employees and everybody's like ah we can't keep an eye on everything but it's all good we just keep you know uh it's a fail and faster and it's all going to be fine at at this point in 2015 they're too big to act like that and they're realizing it because they're changing their rules right but it comes to blow back on them in 2018 when they're even bigger uh and they have but i think you know a lot of this is like again you know and you know i don't work at any of these companies but again it's easy to say like you have so many thousands of people working there what is your problem but until a situation arises where you have to fix the problem you have a lot of people working on all sorts of stuff yeah so never a problem before right it's a new problem like show me a company that's had to deal with us before and weather the storm appropriately which facebook is not adhering to it's it's new territory doesn't mean that the company isn't you know making mistakes and suckerberg had said exactly that yesterday but um it's it's hard for me to say like well you shouldn't know because none of us i mean we weren't talking about this six months ago yeah i you know uh they're also paying for past sins uh this is this is a thing that people got mad about two years ago three years ago four years ago i guess uh and made facebook change and now they're paying the consequences for having not changed it before that because this is only a problem because it's 50 million because some of your friends data got shared because facebook used to let you share your friends data i still don't think this data is as nearly as useful as a lot of people think there's a lot of mechanical turk stuff it's not a representative sample of any kind yeah and if somebody takes a you know a quiz about like what zoo animal they would be i'm not trying to let facebook off the hook for it because it's no but i i think a lot of it is like you know vague behavioral things that you can pin on people but not necessarily really valuable data in most cases because there's they're they're talking about the fact that the same professor got some anonymized data from facebook that sounds like it was it was actually the basis of his papers like that was the useful stuff this other stuff was maybe useful for creating a model or two or at least helping create a model but that data was not valuable what was valuable was that anonymized data which was anonymized and and disclosed and and released in the in the proper manner i think that's part of it too is facebook's like oh well that that's garbage data anyway and you know that doesn't take into account like we don't care if it's garbage data you you don't let it happen you don't let the precedent happen and on that note any last words before i sign off sign us off only that you're all the best group hug group hug you know what i'm gonna start up a social networking uh uh yeah let's start our own social network guys you know it can't be that hard right yeah talk to me in 10 years says marg's record fast forward to 2032 when we're all in jail all right see you tomorrow