And now, tonight's presentation of Radio's outstanding Theatre of Thrill's Suspense. The story of a mountain road in the pursuit of a runaway car. We call it Speed Track. So now, starring Eddie Firestone, here is tonight's suspense play, Speed Track. Sometimes it takes you years to get to know a guy. Sometimes on Highway Patrol you learn all about a man in ten minutes. Like the night Craig Hollister checked me out on my new beat. Soft shoulder here. I didn't answer him. I was too busy sweating the grade. The wheel was easy in my hands. Too easy like it always is on a slick highway. My headlights caught the rain and sleet slanting down from the pass. It was steamy inside the patrol car. Hollister wiped the mist off the windshield. I thought of loosening my collar, but I didn't want to make a bad impression on Hollister. He didn't look like a police academy officer, but he didn't talk much, so I couldn't tell. I knew he was a good patrolman. They told me at headquarters, good patrolmen go by the book. I decided I'd leave my collar button. I wiped my hands one at a time and changed my grip on the wheel. Curve coming up. I don't see why they need us on this road. The driver would be nuts to go over 30. People speed anywhere. This turns called Millie's hairpin. It's slick in the rain. Found four kids here in a station wagon after the last storm. What was left of them? Who was Millie? She went over the cliff in a Model T five years ago. She was 60 years old. Killer? Not a scratch. Devil's Curve coming up. We've had three fatalities here this winter. I don't know if I'm gonna like this beat. It isn't bad. Once you get used to the blood. You actually catch speeders on this highway? So I met my wife. She was speeding here. Pardon me. Spetcher? This is 3-1-2-2. Joe, will you call Debbie and tell her to pick me up at headquarters? Okay. She's gonna get down here before she does. Without like her, this is safer on me. Take your old relics. You can break your arm. Joe. Yeah? It's awful slick up here. Tell her to take it easy on the grade. Roger. Well, this was pretty good.  You gave the dispatcher a call on the radio. That was something they hadn't taught me at the academy. I had a hunch it wasn't exactly standard either. Maybe working out here in the sticks had habits points. If you didn't end up at the bottom of a canyon some night chewing on a piston ring or if your wife didn't go nuts feeding the chipmunks. Well, I sure hope she doesn't try to break the record getting to headquarters. Not tonight. Did you say you caught her speeding here? That's how I met her. See that stretch at the bottom of the grade? I remember it.  I try to get them before they hit the real grade and clobber them themselves. That's where you met your wife, huh? Yeah. She was roaring down the hill with a car full of phonies coming back from a party Schweitzer was giving on his estate. All of them tried to the eyeballs. Including your wife? I thought so. I wrote it up that way. Then what happened? Well, the county judge thought otherwise. Debbie cried and her old man said he wanted to treat it just like anybody else even if he had just given the county a new library.  It wasn't a dry eye in the courthouse. You married her, huh? Best thing I ever did. I think. You think? You're married, aren't you? Your wife doesn't like the mountains? Whoever I am, she likes it. Why? It's kind of lonely for a woman, Debbie says. Well, here's the place I was telling you about. Pull over. Pull over? Yeah. We'll wait here and follow her down. Why? Well, she still drives this great too fast. With me back of her, she'll take it easy. Oh, I pulled over, of course. Even if it was quitting time. He was the boss, and if he wanted to baby his wife down the grade, it was okay with me. I was tired, and I could have used a cup of coffee back at headquarters, and I was trying to get my wife moved into her cabin, but the man said pull over and wait. So I pulled over and waited. He even offered him a cigarette to show there were no hard feelings. He shook his head, and the flare of my match I could see was squinting up the road. He was tired. Some of the roughness was gone, and this joker was worried. He caught me looking and seemed kind of ashamed. She'll be along in a minute. Sure, no hurry. She can't follow her everywhere, you know. You in a hurry or something? No, no, it just seems... Debbie and I'll be out of these mountains next week. She's a good driver, but it's slick tonight. So if it's okay with you, we'll just... Sure, sure. I'm sorry. What's the matter? Look at those headlights up there. I twisted around in my seat. Half a mile up the grade, a pair of headlights stabbed over the cliff seemed to hang there, and they whipped back to the road jerky, like when somebody's really floor boarding the accelerator. Then there was a straight stretch where the light swayed like the guy was skidding. Hollister gripped my shoulder and then the light straightened out and got brighter and brighter and further apart. The guy was practically flying. Holy smoke! That's not your wife, is it? No, no, she's still a little while, but she's not crazy. Hollister was big and a little older than me. He didn't look like he could move very fast, but he was nothing but a blur jumping out of that car. He was around the hood and swinging a flashlight in circles before I could even turn on my red light. That crazy headlight seemed to reach out at him. Let's take him. Holy cow, I thought you'd had him. Close, but no cigar. He must be plastered of the years. Get his tag, the light's blinking. I just see there was a convertible. That's all. A convertible? Yeah. Aren't you going to call a dispatcher? No. You've got to be parked near a halfway house. Two, four, two, nine. This is three, one, two, two. Two, four. It was a convertible. All right. And I caught a flash of the driver and my heart had flipped.  I felt sick. I took the pieces after a few wrecks down in the valley. It's bad enough when it's a man, but a young girl. Two, four, two, nine. This is three, one, two, two, pappy. We're in pursuit of a possible 502 three miles north of Halfway House. Just about ran me down. He's weaving all over the road. Be careful. Roger. I'll try to take him. Her, not him. Take this curve tight, buddy. What did you say? A driver. It's a woman. A woman? I think so. Okay. After this curve, you can cut loose for about 800 yards. Try to get me close enough to your spot later license. You get the number. No. Maybe on the next stretch. We don't need the number. What do you mean? I know the number. You know it. How come? It's Debbie's car. Well, your wife, you must be not. It's Debbie. Why would she try to run you down? She doesn't know what she's doing. What do you mean? She's fried, plastered. She's going to roll that thing, and that'll be all. That'll be all. This guy was shook. Sliding through a turn, I caught a glimpse of his face in the light from the dash. He was staring ahead. And he had that thousand-yard stare I'd seen in Korea before an attack. I shivered. Well, where do we go from here? I could see it coming. I could see it. Alone in that house all day. It's why we were going to move to the city. But now it'll be too late. Step it up, Art. Step it up. If we had time to change... I can't do any better than you stick with it and try. Try to get her before a killer curve. That's a heavy car she's got. Craig, it's like it was glued to the road. It isn't glued to the road. It'll roll just like the rest of the middle road. Happy, I'll flag her down. How's he going to do it? She didn't stop for us. Maybe she didn't even see us. You want me to try to take her here? Not here, Art. Not here. If she speeds up anymore, she hasn't got a prayer on killer curve. Hang back. Don't press her. Then he did something that wasn't in the books. He reached over and cut our growler. And he flicked off the red light. I started to turn it back on and fell his hand on my wrist.  Maybe we're panicking her. Art, if she doesn't slow down now, she'll never make it. Then she started her turn on killer's curve. It was easy to see she wouldn't make it. It's the roughest turn on the grade. Washboard, no bank to it at all. 100 foot drop to the riverbed below.  Murder. The taillights hesitated for a second like they would make up their minds whether to run into the hill or over the side. The car slid sideways, rear toward the river. She was going over backwards. Oh, no. No, babe. No, no. I took my foot off the gas. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw Hollister cover his face. And then I was fighting to stay on the road myself. Suddenly the miracle happened. She'd made it. Now we had to do it. This is 3122. We're a mile north. Still unable to catch the 502. She's doing 75. So just just start up and try to box her, but be careful of it. This is 2429. Do you say her? Yes. Roger. Okay. I see her lights. Starting up now. Stay on the tail. We can just stay. Just ease her between us. Just ease her between us. Watch out. It's like glass out there. I'll try to take her again. What's your speed now, Gray? 73. We're a half a mile behind you. She's weaving. I'm up to 65. Is she slowing down? No. No, she's swinging left. That's a heavy car, Papi. Be careful. Roger. She's swinging right, Papi. Let her by. Let her by. Let her by. How are you going to make an old time patrolman let a drunk pass him on the road? No, Papi tried to fight it. He tried to ease her onto the shoulder. A block long convertible against the patrol car was like a good pro featherweight against an amateur heavy. All skill and no punch. For a second I thought he had a run off the road but the convertible lurched back. The two sets of tail lights got closer. And then Papi was off the road over the shoulder bouncing and rolling down the embankment. I eased my foot off the accelerator praying that it wasn't as bad as it looked. I wanted to use the brake but on that highway it would have been suicide. What are you doing? Going back for Papi. What about her? Call a dispatcher. They'll stop her. She doesn't go off the road first. We gotta get back.   They'll stop her. It's my wife and I don't want her killed.  What about Papi? I said stay with her. I'm still running this beat. But Papi's needs? Joe, this is 3122. The mile south of Halfway House. That 502 just ran Papi off the road. Send an ambulance. We're staying on her tail. This isn't Joe. It's Sergeant Tapeye. Setting up a roadblock outside headquarters. She won't get through it. Go back and help Papi. What kind of roadblock? You aren't shooting at a woman. If she tries to run this block we'll shoot at her. Now get back to Papi. Sergeant. Sergeant, that girl is... Don't worry about the girl. I'll take care of her. You get back to Papi. It's Debbie. I'm sorry, Hollister. She's just run my best man off the road. I said she almost hit you. There's trucks and cars coming up the lower grade. She'll hit one of them if we don't stop her. So we'll stop her. If we have to blast her off the road. You are listening to Speedtrap. Tonight's presentation in Radio's Outstanding Theatre of Thrills. Suspense. Hardly a driver is now alive who passed on a curve at 65. Slow down, driver. If you're pushing even a little bit too hard for the road conditions ahead tonight. Play it safe behind the wheel. Your life depends on it. The lives of others on or near the highways depend on it too. Safety first behind the wheel. Don't make a death trap of your automobile. And now we bring back to our Hollywood soundstage Eddie Firestone with Larry Thor starring in tonight's production, Speedtrap. A tale well calculated to keep you in. Suspense. I felt sorry for the man beside me. I knew what was happening outside headquarters. A couple of patrol cars rolling into position. Spotlights pointed up the grade. The guys drawing automatic rifles, maybe shotguns. Flares set out further down the hill. A reception committee for Craig Hollister's wife. Not what he'd planned when he'd asked her to meet him at headquarters. But there was nothing I could do. I slowed carefully. Keep going. Now look, guy. Keep going. You heard the sergeant. Pappy might be bleeding to death. He's only a quarter mile from halfway house. They can do as much for him as we can.  I can't. I'm running this and I said stay with her.  Craig, I can't. They'll suspend me.  Watch this next curve. What can we do? We can't stop them. If she tries to run the barricade, they'll blow her apart. If she... Hang on. If she doesn't slow down, she won't even get to the barricade.  Turn off my lights. That's right.  When she doesn't see it, she slows down a little. How am I going to see? Use her lights. Her lights. Fine. Great. But what if there was something coming up the grade? I wondered if Hollister had gone nuts. I shot a look at him. He was appearing ahead and he seemed to have got a hold of himself. I didn't really think he'd pull a gun on me, but suddenly I knew I'd go along with whatever he was trying to do, even if it cost me my badge. I flicked off the lights. It seemed to help. The car ahead lost some of its crazy fear. You're gaining. Slow. Slow and easy. Watch it. Okay. Usually stretch here. Gaining all right, but what good is it? If she makes this turn, she's still only got a mile to the barricade. Is that a car coming? Looks like a truck. Get over. Get over. Watch it. Get your lights on. Now, catch her. Every time I put on another mile an hour, we start to slide. I have to get closer. I'll never do it from here. Closer, the man said. I was already pushing 80. My arms and eyes ached from the strain, and the range was still too far unless he was aiming for a lucky hit or an unlucky. You've got to catch her by that stretch in front of headquarters. Well, that made sense. It was the only level shoulder in the grade. If he was going to shoot out a tire, it would have to be there. But that was where the barricade was. Now, we just have to get at the side of it. Hollister rolled down the window and I felt a spray of rain on my face. Suddenly I spotted the barricade's spotlights. She's slowing, honey. Putting on speed. I can't wait any longer. The range was just too great. It had to be her left rear tire. If she went off the other way, she'd be killed. And if the ricochet got her, she'd be killed anyway. But she was just too far away. Suddenly, not really wanting to, I jammed down the accelerator. At least I could give him a last chance. The rear end swayed and lurched. My hands were sweaty with fear. And that did it. The heavy car began to turn, hesitated and headed for the shoulder. It leaped when it hit the dirt, half turned and went over. I skidded all the way through the roadblock. It took me so long to get stopped and turn around that the guys from the barricade beat us back to the crash. But it was just as well because without help, I'd never been able to keep Hollister from the ruin convertible. Hollister, where do we get her out? Doc will be here in a minute. I killed her. I killed her. We don't know yet. She's down there, Doc. Hey, how's Papi? You're broken leg. Not the car that ran him off the road? Yeah, that's it. It seemed like an hour, but it was only a couple of minutes before the Doc scrambled out of the ditch. A patrolman and an ambulance driver set a litter by the ambulance. Two other guys had Craig in their patrol car trying to calm him down. I walked over to the ambulance. The girl was hurt. Hurt bad, but she was alive. Sergeant walked up. Is she alive? Yeah. Tell Hollister. Okay to let him see her, Sergeant? Yeah, I guess so. I started back to the patrol car and stepped back to let a convertible onto the shoulder. A girl got out. A pretty girl. And I thought of the kid by the ambulance who would never be pretty again. Then I felt the sergeant's hand in my arm. He was staring at her. This is Hollister. Yes, Sergeant, what happened? What's the matter with you? Well, we thought... he thought... Oh, look, poor thing. She's just a kid. Hey, Pete, bring Hollister over here. I guess she figured she was old enough to get fried to the gills and try to make that grade on a rainy night.  How? He and Art here almost broke their necks catching her, and a blast hit her to pieces. Where is Craig? Is he all right? Craig, darling, what is it? It wasn't you. Better skip it, Craig. No, no. Now, you ought to know, Debbie, I want you to know I thought the girl was you. Me? Well, why me? Oh, I see. And it could have been. Good night. A long time ago, maybe. A long time ago. His arm was around her when they walked away, Debbie Hollister had a kind of thoughtful look in her eye. You kind of wonder at a time like that what two people are thinking. I turned back to the sergeant. You okay? Oh, sure. Yeah, I... I would say, uh... Sergeant... Uh, about us not going back for Pappy. I was driving, you know. Yeah, I know. Well... Forget it. Learn anything tonight? Yeah. I learned something. Suspense. In which Eddie Firestone with Larry Thor starred in tonight's presentation of Speed Drap. Next week, suspense will bring you the story of a man who knows that he will be caught for a crime that he has not yet committed. We call it sight unseen. That's next week on Suspense. Suspense is produced and directed by Anthony Ellis. Tonight's script was written by Mr. Hank Searls. The music was composed by Lucian Morrowick and conducted by Wilbur Hatch. Featured in the cast were Lillian Byef, Tom McKee, Ted Bliss, and Jack Prussian. Listen while you work. Enjoy Perry Mason every Monday through Friday in the daytime on the CBS Radio Network.


August 19th marks 70 years since the U.S. backed coup against the then Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Masaddik. But this is not just any anniversary and the coup has relevance to this day. How is that? In a dramatic development, the Pewtai Party and the party of former Prime Minister Prayudh Chanuja have reached an agreement which might pave the way for a new government. The loser in this scenario is the move forward party, which was the single largest force in the recent elections. What exactly is happening in Thailand? These are our stories for the day. This is daily debrief. And before you watch any further, don't forget to hit that subscribe button on YouTube. On August 19th, 1953, the popular nationalist Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Masaddik, was overthrown in a CIA-supported coup. This was one of the first post-World War II coups that showed the spread of U.S. tentacles and decided to establish its hegemony in West Asia. The U.S. managed to get the Shah of Iran restored, but he himself was overthrown 26 years later. The implications of this coup continue to this day, and the wars and conflicts and tensions in West Asia are a sign of this. Curiously, days before this anniversary, Iran's foreign minister was in Saudi Arabia, which is a key prong of U.S. strategy in the region. How does it relate to today's realities? We go to News Clicks, Praveer Prakash. Praveer, thank you so much for joining us now. Some might even call it a bit quaint that we are discussing about a coup that took place in 1953. So much has happened since then in Iran, in the U.S. and the rest of the world. But I think it's very important to register that in some ways that marked the beginning of a trend as far as U.S. was concerned, but also had impact in that region which continues to this day. So could you maybe take us through why talking about this anniversary of this 1953 coup is so significant? That's an interesting issue because it started, I think, two things which are very important. One is that it started making it very clear that oil is the crux of the West Asia issues. That means oil was going to increasingly play a much more important geopolitical role than it had done before that. So in that sense, Iran, who was really about oil because Mosaddegh, who was the prime minister at the time, he had nationalized, he had threatened to nationalize, he had nationalized, he just wanted to check the Anglo-Iranian oil companies records. So the second part of it is the entry into West Asia, at that time, don't forget it is to be called Middle East, that of actually the United States, who at that point of time Mosaddegh thought would be sympathetic to Iran because they were not a part of the colonial powers and he thought that he could appeal to the United States for support against what the British were trying to do. But what he didn't know, that already the die had been cast and the US had decided to support the coup and actually get rid of Mosaddegh. So this was the rising nationalism in West Asia, coming with in conflict with the desire of the Western powers to control the resources of West Asia, primarily of oil. And this is what already the United States had negotiated with Saudi Arabia, if you remember, after the Second World War, this is what the United States had already done. So what was going to be for next 50, 60, 70 years, the politics of West Asia was set at this point in, I would not say set in stone, but was set, course was set at this point. But both the United States becoming essentially the leader of the West, taking over from Great Britain, France, other European countries, primarily from Great Britain, and of course the oil becoming the crux of the politics in the region. And I think that is why this is important. And that's why when Shah Viran, I think 19 or 20 years old, was brought into power by essentially the US, British joining in. And the whole we know now from the CIA records, which are in public domain, most of it is in public domain now, that the role the CIA and the British intelligence agencies had played in bringing the Shah Viran into power. And that that was what led finally the surge against the Shah Viran and his getting his being thrown out. And of course, the clerical regime coming into power in Iran also is important at that time, the clerical the clerical forces were not against the United States. They were, in fact, sympathetic to the West, because they're very much anti Mosaddegh. So in that sense, they were not a player at that point of time, but getting rid of Mosaddegh, the left the only political force, because you know the Tude party was again smashed all the things that the U.S. and the United Kingdom did at that point of time, but the only political forces that were left, finally, were the one which were in the mosques, the basically the clergy, that they were left as opposing Shah Viran. And sure enough, that's what led finally to what will be seen as the Shah of Iran being thrown out, where his unpopularity became very high by the clerical forces, and we then got what we have today. That's an interesting starting point of history, which, of course, turns out to be very bloody. Like you said, there was the clerics taking over in Iran, followed by that very brutal war between Iran and Iraq, of course, in which the U.S. fully backed Saddam Hussein, who was their ally at that time. And you know, I think ever since that moment, ever for decades now, relations have been pretty bad. There was a brief interim period during the Obama years, and now under Trump, it went back again. But interesting to note that around the time of the same anniversary, the Iranian Foreign Minister was actually visiting Saudi Arabia. You mentioned Saudi Arabia, which was a key pole in the U.S. strategy of retaining control over oil and containing Iran was maybe another key pole for many, many years. But now we see that these two countries are, you know, although it's not perfect, establishing some kind of relationship. So is that order also under threat that 70 year old order almost? You know, that's a very interesting point to which I think Jass Freeman, one of the doils of U.S. foreign policy makes recently, that finally, the region is moving from Middle East to West Asia. And this is symbolic because what they are seeing is not how the West looks at them, because that's how it is Middle East. If you look from European Union or you look from the United States, it is somewhere towards the East. But if you're looking for where you actually belong, then you're a part of Asia and a part of West Asia. So here it was that the Saudis were at the point of time, the linchpin of the American policies, as we know, in West Asia. But Iran was also with Shah of Iran, completely aligning with the United States. Shah of Iran was also a big player. Now, this whole issue then becomes that who controls West Asia's oil. And the Carter policy was very frank about it, that essentially our strategic interests are in West Asia. And therefore, anybody who interferes with our control of West Asia's oil, they're interfering in our strategic resources. So what is the famous cartoon we used to see when we were kids? That our oil is under their sand. So that used to be the American cartoon that we used to see about progressive forces, I guess, and put out over there. So this whole issue about oil became much more important after 71. As we know, the US went off the gold standard and therefore who sets the price of oil and if it is set in dollars or other currencies become an important issue. And there you see now the Saudis slowly breaking away from setting up, doing all their business in dollars and starting to buy what shall we say, choose a basket of currencies depending on which country they're trading with for selling their oil. So this is also, and as you rightly said, the Saudis have had also the other issue that they are more bent upon now what we call Saudi national interests rather being just a religious identity based political entity and siding with the United States. So there is that relative autonomy that they want to have vis-à-vis the United States and the West. And in this, Iran normalizing relationships, Iran is very important for them. Otherwise, they between the two, if there is such a conflict that was always threatening to spill over into arms armed conflict, then of course, it helps Israel, it helps the West. So this was something which they needed to do in order to be able to carve out a path for West Asia, which is different from what would be dictated by outside forces. So I think this realization that they have to create space for themselves and not depend on somebody else to give them what direction they should work at. I think very important. You also talked about Iran-Iraq war. Saddam Hussein was at that point of time essentially aligned to the United States. He, both the United Kingdom and the United States, gave him the poison gas, which was used to chemical weapons and poison gas, which are used widely against Iranian troops. So at that point of time, they didn't talk about how it was evil, how it was bad and so on. It only this kind of narrative only rises when they talk about Syria. Again, essentially cooking up the story, most likelihood. So this whole region, the direction it took from the 50s onwards, particularly the monarchies siding with the US and the European powers, they are slowly breaking off into trying to work out for themselves. What should their equation be with the world, whether it is Iran, of course, which was a clerical force, but it's a sheer force as well. And this is what we know, as well as when you talk about Saudi Arabia, you talked about that, but also United Arab Emirates, also Qatar. They all seem to be working out an independent path for themselves. They are not progressive forces in any sense. So not that they are making revolutionary changes either in the region or in their countries, but they just don't want to be now hanging on to the court till the United States and other imperialist powers. And I think that is something which is changing this region in a way that we haven't anticipated. We didn't think two years back that this would happen. So these are some of the fallouts, unexpected fallouts in the way things are shaping up in the world. And part of it is the weakness of the European Union. It's no longer a major economic or political force. United Kingdom is a has power, which is days are gone. The glory days are long over. It's just that they haven't reconciled themselves to it. And the United States is no longer as dominant as it was, for instance, after the Second World War or even more after 1990. So I think a realignment is happening. And the Asia and Africa are is really where the action is. And here there are separate regions which are trying to work out their own way. Southeast Asia is one. They wanted to be a training block with the United States, with China and Japan. The US pulled out of it the famous TPP Trans-Pacific Agreement, which they wanted. At the end of it, it was our set. So now, of course, Southeast Asia does see an Asian integration of the economy and their growth is linked to that. So you see in different parts of Asia forces coming out, which want to work out for themselves what the direction should be. And also Africa, Africa finally is getting out of France, France's colonial grip over parts of the particularly Francophone Africa. Large parts of Africa is also in play today. So Africa and Asia, and don't forget, this was Nehru Sokarno imagination, including Nkrumah, that this should be the Afro-Asian unity. And this, I will not say there's an Afro-Asian unity, but it's definitely true that Africa and Asia would like to work out for themselves what their future should be. And therefore they are acting as a different set of poles in the world order today. And the weakening of the European Union and the United States in in the way they dominated the globe after 1950 and after the fall of Soviet 1990, that period seems to be now coming to a close. Right. Thank you, Praveer. It's interesting how we started the coup in 1953, but in some ways, its implications, the waves from that coup and, say, countercurrents continue to prevail in many parts of the world, especially in that region today. Thank you so much for talking to us. We next go to Thailand, which has been facing a political crisis since the elections in a few months ago. The latest reports say that the Pew Thai Party associated with the Shinawatra family has struck an agreement with the United Thai Nation Party of former Prime Minister Praveer Chanochak. Praveer's party is one of the forces being backed by the military. Now, this marks a realignment in the political spectrum as Pew Thai has moved away from the move forward party, which emerged as a single largest force in the elections to make sense of what might appear as a convoluted situation. We go to Anish. Anish, thank you so much for joining us. A bit of a confusing situation in Thailand. The last time we talked, I believe, a move forward party had been stuck. But the idea was that they and Pew Thai might continue to work together. Now it does seem like the Pew Thai Party has sort of shifted positions. Yeah, so this has been going on for a couple of days now. Actually, the speculation that, in fact, even during the previous vote that we talked about, there were already speculations that the military has been or the militaristic bloc has been making overtures to Pew Thai to actually get them to back a government that will not include move forward. So what we're looking at is a very, very interesting situation where former rivals, in many ways, ideological and historical rivals are coming together in an alliance that they say is for the stability of the country. But clearly is also part of preserving the former elites' control over the situation at the moment. What we're looking at is what is going to likely happen on the 22nd would be a government where move forward will not be part of it. It will be kept completely out of it. And that also kind of creates a situation because it's just the United Thai Nation Party that has now declared support for the Pew Thai-led alliance. Other of the more conservative and royalist parties have not given any statement so far. So it is quite and it will be quite interesting to see how they're going to get the vote through because with our move forward, which is the largest party with over 115 members, it is next to impossible to form a government of their own and it will be because obviously then you obviously have to gain support from the Senate. So and that will be a more interesting situation because that would mean that you will make significant compromises on a whole host of issues and it will be interesting how the actually plans to move forward from there and also hold on to its own base because that is also going to be very difficult at the moment. Many of them did believe that the way I would stand in an anti-military state and anti-conservative block. And right now they are put in a situation where they have to back a party that will be in alliance with some of the most hard-core conservatives and pro-military groups in the parliament right now. Right Anish. So what does this mean in some ways for move forward also? It was a new party. It came to power on an agenda of like you said, which is kind of difficult, different from most of the other conventional parties. And it actually won quite a bit of support going beyond some of the traditional opposition bases and it of course made a lot of emphasis a lot that it wanted to actually repeal the less Majesty law as well. So what is the situation of the party now? The party right now is existing on a second chance for Theta and that is primarily because it does not believe there is any established intervention or rule that pretty much prevents anybody from standing again if they failed in a prime ministerial vote in the parliament. And so they are trying to fight a case in the constitutional court. They're also trying to push for the parliament to give to accept Theta's second chance. But it's a very tricky situation right now because they have not made any statements so far, they've not made any statement of either support or opposition to this new alliance. And obviously with that there will also be no route map or blueprint for what their strategy will be in the next coming years under what might be a new government by next week. And so we need to really wait and see how they are actually going to react. The response has been quite slow at the moment, primarily because they are also believed by a lot of possible litigations against them, which might include the solution of the entire party, which is not new in Thailand politics. But and so they are probably at a moment where they want to focus more on these litigations to save them up and also probably push for a certain ideological ground within the parliament where established norms can be respected. That's pretty much their standard performance. But that is not what other members of their former alliance actually believe in right now. So it is quite like also we need to look at the base. It is one thing to talk about the parties, but the voters who voted for these parties and we need to look at how they're going to be, you know, vote or be organizing in the next couple of years, how many of them will be alienated by the situation or how many of them will actually look for maybe other alternatives in the current political scenario. It is something that we need to wait and see. Obviously, things are going at a very glacial point right now. It's almost three months since the general election results were declared and there is no government, a proper stable government yet. And so everything is going at a very glacial moment. Everything is uncertain at the moment. So the political situation, how it is going to evolve is something that we need to wait a little while. But the uncertainty is something that is not going to have a good result at the end of it, because obviously if you're going to disregard the anti militaristic vote, that is, that was the overwhelming mandate of the recent elections, that is definitely going to mean that there will be a different kind of movement in the horizon that probably with eyes not planning to deal with at the moment. Well, Anish, thank you so much for that analysis. We'll come back to you after the vote in parliament in case, especially if there is any move towards government formation. And that's all we have time for in today's episode. We'll be back tomorrow with another episode. And until then, do visit our website, People's Dispatch.org. Watch our videos from across the world. And don't forget to hit that subscribe button on YouTube.


Wondering how you're doing at work? Looking for a little feedback? Have you tried asking? Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Last time we talked about getting the right mindset for giving feedback and because working on a team is a two-way street we also need to think about the feedback we receive from others and how we react to it. Just as with giving feedback it helps to be in a healthy mindset to receive feedback and we can develop this mindset by consciously considering why we want feedback, who we ask for feedback, and what we do with the feedback we receive. Feedback is how we know if we're effective at meeting our goals and building relationships with others both on and off our team and we can't just tell how we're doing in these areas with objective metrics. We need to ask other people for a personal perspective to help us get out of our own heads. Most people receive periodic performance reviews and formal feedback about once a year but we really need to solicit regular feedback much more often from others. The reality is is that everyone's really busy these days and unless we go out and ask for it most people don't have the time to provide thorough thoughtful feedback unless we ask for it. There are a number of sources you can go to to ask for feedback. The first is your own team and they're a great source on how well your team is accomplishing your mission and if things are going smoothly or if they're struggling. If you formally supervise the members of your team this could result in a communication barrier where your team members tell you what they think you want to hear so remember to keep asking open-ended questions that can't be answered with a yes or no and continue to drill down to get to their genuine perspective. Your superiors are often the best source of feedback on how well you're meeting the expectations they have for you but bosses can be very busy people and unless you're able to pin them down for a session of a half an hour or more you may only get surface-level feedback. Now peers might be your best source of feedback in general. There's no communication barrier of a boss-employee relationship and here you can often get the most direct and candid feedback. Finally, mentors are also a great source of feedback from someone who's more seasoned and experienced than you are. There's usually no boss-employee relationship to be a communication barrier but they also tend to be very busy people so take that into consideration. Don't worry about the quality of feedback you get at first, initially it's just important to ask. If things don't make sense or you're having trouble understanding the feedback follow up and get clarification from the person who gave it to you. We can ask for feedback both formally and informally and both have their merits. Formal feedback is when we ask someone to come sit down with us and have a meeting to give us feedback. The advantage here is we both get time to prepare but it can also result in some filters being put on the conversation. Also, everyone's really busy these days so it can be hard to find the time for a long session of feedback but if it's important we'll make the time. Informal feedback is when we're just kind of out and about and kind of ask people for some feedback. The advantage to this is that they're often in their own environment where they feel comfortable and confident but if you try to do this in front of a big group people may not be willing to speak up. The other disadvantage is that people are just going through whatever's going on in their lives that day and so if someone's having a bad day you might get some biased feedback. It's important that we use both a combination of formal and informal feedback to determine how well we're accomplishing our mission and how well we're performing as leaders. So here are some final tips for you as you're getting ready to go receive that feedback. First, it's important to be in the right mindset to receive feedback as a mentor of mine used to say don't ask the question if you can't handle the answer. It's also important to be open-minded, listen to the feedback and accept it as it comes. Don't be reactive or defensive except in very urgent situations there's no need to act right away. If someone's being offensive or abusive that does need to be addressed but address that behavior and not the feedback itself. Also take all of the feedback you get from everybody into the big picture and act from that perspective. If you take nothing else away from all of this remember that feedback is important to evaluating ourselves and how well our team is doing and that if we don't ask we're never going to get appropriate feedback. If you found this helpful don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook and join us every Friday at 10 a.m Pacific time for an interactive leadership discussion on Blab. Also don't forget to click that globe off to the right that'll get you subscribed to our email list and bring all of our content direct to your inbox. I want to thank you for watching I appreciate it and remember the future is out there. Lead the way.


This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by you the listener thanks to all of you including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power and Rodrigo Smith Zapata. Coming up on DTNS, Microsoft's building an AI chip. Amazon wants to make it easier to hear dialogue in TV shows and Annalie Newitz explains why Mastodon feels like home. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 18th, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Shane. And joining us, Annalie Newitz, author of the novel The Terraformers and host of Our Opinions, our correct podcast. Welcome back, Annalie. Yeah, it's always great to be here. Thanks for having me. Thank you for being with us. Apple opened its first retail store in India today. Here are the rest of the quick hits. Adobe Lightroom now offers new AI masking categories for its select people tool with three additional adaptive presets for portraits. One is darkened beard, which darkens someone's existing beard. Polished portrait will smooth skin and improve lighting. And enhanced clothing helps an outfit pop with contrast, saturation and texture. Lightroom already offers options to automatically whiten teeth, darken eyebrows, adjust hair texture. So this is just more of the same but kind of fun stuff. The AI mask categories are rolling out across Mac, Windows Lightroom Classic and Adobe Camera Raw. And the adaptive presets are available on iOS, Android and Lightroom on the web. We got good news and bad news for China's tech sector. Let's start with the bad news. China's National Bureau of Statistics reported that in Q1, seven conductor output fell almost 15% on the air. Smartphone production fell 13.8%. People are moving production out of China. Now some good news for China. The government shows more signs of easing its crackdown on tech companies. Reuters reports regulators are expected to reduce the fine against Ant Group from the equivalent of more than a billion dollars to somewhere more in the $700 million range. Back to bad news, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission published a report identifying Chinese fast fashion companies Xi'en and Temu as risks to trade, product safety and intellectual property rights, among other concerns, kind of making them the next target after TikTok for U.S. scrutiny. And we finished with some good news for China. With the auto show beginning in Shanghai, Reuters notes that sales of electric vehicles from China's BYD are up 69% on the air. They are now past Volkswagen and Toyota in the Chinese market. Netflix continues to show science it is serious about gaming. Joseph Staten, co-creator of Halo and Destiny, is now creative director for a AAA multi-platform original game at Netflix. The company previously said it had 16 titles in development in-house and around 70 in development with third parties. That may be Netflix's future, but if part of its past is ending, Netflix announced its DVD by mail service, which, yes, still existed, will end September 29th of this year. I want to be the person who gets the last DVD from them. And what would it be? And then never return it. Yeah, just steal it. Yeah, what are they going to do?  Find me. Cancel my subscription. Reddit says it plans to start charging companies for access to its API, though it hasn't announced any pricing yet. It will be a premium price point for, according to Reddit's post, third parties who require additional capabilities, higher usage limits, and broader usage rights. This is pretty much targeted at folks using Reddit to train their AIs. Smaller developers will still have open access for reasonable and appropriate use cases. Founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times that the company doesn't need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free. Reddit conversations are helpful for training large language models, but also this data could be used to create some competitors to Reddit. Reddit was founded in 2005 and is said to be mulling an IPO later this year. Might bring in some revenue. Sonos announced a new service aimed at businesses called Sonos Pro. This supports all S2 compatible hardware, including its Ikea symphonisk line, and provides a web portal to remotely control what content is playing at different locations, as well as basic troubleshooting like rebooting. It also includes Sonos backgrounds, which features royalty-free music that's cleared for playing in commercial settings. Sonos Pro costs $35 per business location. Yeah, great for all locations of a Panera. Thank you. You know, it's one mind sometimes. Exactly what I was going to say. All right, that's a look at the quick heads. The increase in use of the many flavors of AI from machine learning to large language models is great news for NVIDIA. They sell a ton of cards that are used for this business. Trend Force suggests that open AI needs more than 30,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs for chat GPT. And the Verge notes that an NVIDIA H100 is selling for $40,000 on eBay. So there's demand. Google, Meta and Apple have all taken to designing their own AI chips for their own use. Amazon even makes some of theirs available in AWS right alongside NVIDIA chips. So it shouldn't be a huge surprise that the information sources say Microsoft is speeding up its plans to build its own AI chips itself. Called Project Athena, the idea is to make its chips available to folks inside Microsoft and to its partner OpenAI as early as next year. At the very least, it will save Microsoft some money and it's possible, though not assured, that it could offer access to the chips in Microsoft Azure. Its cloud service would make sense. To be clear, Azure does offer access to AI models. Right now, they just all run on NVIDIA chips. So I'm curious, Annalie, do you think Microsoft or any of these other companies should start going head to head with NVIDIA and sell these chips out to the rest of the business community or just keep them to themselves? I mean, it doesn't seem like that makes sense as a business model for them because all of these companies, they're basically selling cloud services. And so what customers really want is to come in and to have access to those chips along with all of the models that are maybe going to be available, all the other bells and whistles that they get with their cloud provider. So it seems like it's kind of an apples and oranges thing. Like, why would you go into selling chips when you can sell the chips as part of your service? So I don't see this becoming like a separate business revenue stream for them. And where is Intel in this is another question that I have as all of these companies are designing their own chips. A lot of times they're using ARM designs. There's talk of Microsoft using an ARM design to make a consumer chip. So it feels like somebody like Intel who wants to be a fab and also wants to get back into the race, they should be going and designing their own thing. Maybe they are and we just haven't heard about it. But yeah, that makes sense to me, Annalie, that you would see these companies just use these for their cloud services and not want to give their designs to anyone else, which is probably good news for NVIDIA because for the customers that are building their own data centers, the NVIDIA will continue to not have a lot of competition there. Although, I guess that means they sell fewer cards to the cloud service providers. Well, and that's why an H100 is selling for $40,000 on eBay. You don't have a lot of competition. The NVIDIA is like, this is a great place to be. Cool. We can just make sure that you buy the GPUs that you need to run these models. It seems like, let's say Microsoft, for example, if Microsoft says, listen, we're going to figure out our own solution here and let's say the company has a way to do that, well, it brings down prices for everybody eventually, maybe not tomorrow. But I can see where that would make a lot of sense for not just Microsoft, but a variety of companies that work with both NVIDIA and Microsoft, Intel, anybody. Yeah, there was also this interesting development the other day where Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, said, actually, large language models are dead because they're so expensive and he's kind of referring to the cost of this kind of hardware. And so it may be that this is going to be moot in a few years because these chips are no longer going to be as much a part of AI offerings. So take it with a grain of salt. This is a guy who's often made a lot of wild claims for OpenAI's business. But still, so that might be another wrinkle. Yeah. That's a really interesting point because he was like, yeah, we're not even started working on GPT-5 because we haven't explored all the possibilities of GPT-4. I guess it could also, it could mean though that it's not like GPT-4 couldn't run more efficiently on better chips. So maybe the chips would be, maybe new chips would be necessary. Certainly power efficient chips would be nice to have, right? Yeah. Because we're using a lot of energy. I know. That's actually one of the huge drawbacks of a lot of these AI models is that they just have incredible overhead in terms of using energy and using equipment. It reminds me of the heady days of Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies where it was like, how many machines have you chewed through that shows how strong your company is? Right. Well, it can be hard to understand voices and dialogue in TV shows and movies. For a lot of people, I am one of them. You can turn on captions, you crank up the volume, but depending on what you're watching, cranking up the volume, you might have to ride that volume level. And sometimes people don't like captions or it's just not appropriate for what they're watching. Some folks have settings in their speakers that can help, but Amazon wants to help in a way that gives its Prime Video Service a competitive advantage. You can now turn on dialogue boost in select English language versions of Prime Originals. So, you know, it's kind of a test for now. It's not the whole library, but it's some of them. Amazon has used some algorithms, probably some machine learning, they just say AI, to identify parts of shows where the dialogue might be hard to hear, and then adapts the playback to make talking easier to hear. This is more precise than applying the same filter to a whole show or a movie like a speaker would have to do. So, let's talk about this. Is this the best way to make audio more accessible? Kind of bringing it out of the hardware and giving you more options in software. Yeah. Have you guys heard this? Like, how does it sound? Is it just sound really natural? Yeah. I haven't got a chance to try it yet. I've tried similar things with my speakers, where it will do dialogue enhancement. Those are very subtle. They don't sound weird. They just kind of make the audio a little or the dialogue a little clearer. The idea with this because it's more precise is that it would work better. But yeah, I haven't had a chance to hear if it does any weird processing to it or anything like that. I love the idea of it, where you can leave the parts that don't have dialogue untouched, so you're not making a compromise in the overall sound like a speaker would have to, because a speaker doesn't know what it's playing, so it just has to do it to the whole thing. Well, unless you have some 5.1 where you've got a nice center speaker.  Let's only apply the filter to those parts, because it's using the machine learning to identify that. Something that sounds very similar. I haven't tried Amazon's version of this yet either, but it's within Plex. Plex is a media server. Lots of people use it, and for certain, me too. We use Plex every day of my life. For certain shows and movies, not all of them, some of them don't bother me, but especially when there's a lot of heavy action, so you're getting explosions or car chases or things that are designed to be loud, the dialogue ends up getting muffled to me, to my ears, and Plex can boost stuff for dialogue. How well it does, I don't know how to compare that to anything else, because it's the only place I've ever tried it, but it does help. I've had people over who go, whoa, that really is better. The more options we have for stuff like this, it's good to be able to customize your listening experience. Absolutely. I feel like the classic TV show that was a problem in this way was the Witcher. We were all at home watching the Witcher, and it's like the dialogue is just like and then like, oh, I'm slaying bunch of monsters, and it's a great show. Love it. I wanted to hear the dialogue. There's a lot of great zingers, and I just, I am all about subtitles and closed captions, and I feel like now that's the norm for me. So like you said, it would be great to have an option to not have to have closed captions and just try to hear it the way sort of intended to be heard. I don't know. Maybe the Witcher is intended to be mumbly. I have human-ing experience. I make that argument of like, no, no, I didn't want you to hear what they're saying there. It's supposed to be like, oh, it's so loud, you can't hear what anyone's saying kind of effect. I whispered the secret. Yeah, but we're all like, but I still want to know, and then when you turn on subtitles or captions, you find out what they said, right? I know, and I love that. Like I find like in the Mandalorian, there's always like some people like talking in the corner or something, and they're just saying something completely in name, which you absolutely were not intended to hear.   I'm going to have to charge you extra for that. Yeah, I like that this is also just an option in the drop down menu. So it's right next to subtitles and captions. And you can choose medium or high. So it's not a lot of customization, but you can sort of say, oh, maybe that was too much boosted. I want the background to be a little more forward. You could you've got a couple of options there. I hope this works well. And then I hope that other services like Disney plus Apple TV, Netflix, etc, can come up with something similar because I would like it to be standard. Because like you say, the ones on Plex, the ones that are built in the speakers, they work okay. If it could work even better and give you some control over it, then that would that would be the best.  Emily, you're not the only person I know who says, I just have them turned on often.  Maybe you're tired. At first, I was, you know, the first time a friend of mine was like, oh, yeah, I just I turned it on for everything. I was like, you do? Doesn't that take you out of the scene? And she's like, no, it makes me understand it better. Like my brain has to work less in one capacity, because I'm better at reading. Yeah. And you know, so it's like, I can, I can kind of, I can kind of have, you know, one foot over in some other activity, and it's a better listening experience. Yeah, I find that I miss it. Like I went to see John Wick in the theaters, which admittedly has not very much dialogue at all. I guess somebody decided that they would count how many words that John Wick said, and it was only like 50 words in the whole movie. And they kind of, yeah, a lot of them are just like, yeah. But I missed it. I was like, I actually, I would love subtitles because I need to understand more about the bizarre lore behind the John Wick universe. And you can get those in the theaters. There are accessibility options in theaters where you get this little device that you carry with you, whether whether that, you know, it's worth going to that trouble. And there's a limited number of them. So if you really don't need it, maybe you don't want to take it.  It's like more like a dialogue impairment. If you are somebody who did who needs that and you didn't realize that that is an option that you can get. Yeah, that's good. Good to know. And I like I look at this Amazon thing as another accessibility option. Our producer Amos is in our chat room saying like the audio engineers could just make it so you don't have to do this. Sometimes I think he's right. I sometimes I think that's true. But there are situations where the audio is just fine. It's my ears that are the problem. So being able to adjust to that is good too. Yeah. Hey, folks, if you are feeling social, you can get in touch with the DTNs folks on social networks where DTNs show on Twitter and mastodon that's DTNs S H O W. We're on the MSTDN dot social mastodon server. We're also a daily tech news show on TikTok and DTNs picks on Instagram P I X. A lot of folks are looking for new homes for their social media these days. We've talked recently about be real and sub stack notes and more. The Verge has a great article up right now from Ellis Hamburger who worked at Snapchat until last year. I'm going to oversimplify what is an excellent read that you should pick up. But one of the things Hamburger points out is that when a social network adds digital advertising priorities change and a lot of the problems in social media stem from that one company hoping to avoid that pitfall is Blue Sky. We've talked about them before. It's a decentralized social protocol company that was begun in Twitter, but is now fully independent of it. The Verge is Alex Heath sat down with Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber and he said they're not even thinking about business models at this point. They've only led in around 20,000 users so far. So that's something that's still in development. One of the most prominent alternatives of course is mastodon, which recently passed an average of a billion posts a month and growing. Annalie wrote a column for new scientists called how I found a new home online at Mastodon after giving up on Twitter. Annalie White, what makes Mastodon feel like home? You know, it's a lot of things. One is that it's a very familiar format for me. It's microblogging, which is just to say posting short pieces of information, posting pictures, sharing, talking to people. But the other thing was that it reminded me of what I liked about Twitter when I first joined, which was getting a chance to just chat with people and have conversations with folks who I really admired but hadn't ever met before. And there wasn't that sort of mob mentality or that kind of that sense that we needed immediately to go right to an argument. So there was a sense of kind of coming home psychologically like, oh, this is actually a community. It's not a place where people yell at each other or try to have a hot take. We're really just chatting. But the other thing that I really like about Mastodon is that it's part of a larger project, which is often called the Fediverse, which is to say it's part of a group of different websites and applications that run on top of a protocol, which is called Activity Pub. And the idea behind it is that it would allow you to turn a social post into something like email that can be sent anywhere. So theoretically, if say Facebook joined the Fediverse, which it absolutely will not, I would be able to make a post in Mastodon and have it show up on Facebook because it just travels seamlessly between websites. And this is becoming a reality for some well-known social networks like Tumblr, which is planning to take up residence in the Fediverse and run Activity Pub as a protocol. And that means that if I post on Mastodon, it's going to show up over on Tumblr, which is fantastic. Medium has also set up an instance on Mastodon, I'm sorry, on the Fediverse using Activity Pub. And so that means that Medium and Mastodon can be interoperable with each other in terms of posts. And I'm just really excited about this new venture where we're going to take social posts away from being inside of a walled garden and make them into something that travels between lots of different social networks. So I just like that sense of freedom. Yeah. Go ahead, Tom. No, no, go ahead, sir. Well, when you were explaining how Activity Pub could allow me, let's say I post something where I'm like, I'd like to reach as many people as possible at their place of choice. Tumblr could be an option, as would others. I know it wasn't that long ago that if you were trying to build a presence, you wanted to maximize your presence at that place.  And that's where you're going to get the most eyeballs. You're going to get the most engagement. I wonder if we're now kind of going back to the, you know, we don't care so much about where somebody's coming from. We just want to reach them where they are. Yeah. I interviewed Evan Prodromu, who is the creator of Activity Pub along with a number of other developers. And he was saying that he compares this to kind of the moment when email became widely adopted. And it's not like you join Gmail, right? You don't sort of join Gmail and then only email with other people on Gmail. You join Gmail and then your email goes to wherever you want. And he imagines a future where social media is like that, where it's, you have socials, you have social posts, but it doesn't matter if you're on Mastodon, if you're on Facebook, if you're on Tumblr, if you're on, you know, Wibbidi-Bibbidi or Wampy Wamp or whatever the next. It could be forwarded to, you know, kind of wherever. Wibbidi-Bibbidi is like the next big thing. Somebody got that URL. Yeah. So the idea is like, yeah, you would just post something and then you would say like, yeah, I want this to go to all these other places too. So that, like you said, people can see them wherever they live. And I think we're starting to realize that social networks, in order for us to feel free on them, in order for us to feel like we have some control over what we're saying, we'd actually like to not be stuck in just one. You know, we don't want that walled garden anymore after what's happened with Twitter and all the transformations it's gone through. I think people are feeling kind of like, actually I want my socials to be mine and then they can show up in lots of places, but I don't want to be like a denizen of Twitter or a denizen of another place. I just want to be me posting on a bunch of places.  Imagine if you had, and messaging is just as bad, right?  Can you create a g-mail account, right? Instead of like, what's your email? Messaging and short messaging, blogging services should be that easy. What I'm curious on your take, Annaly, is how you feel about Blue Sky doing AT protocol where they're sort of playing Adam to activity pubs RSS, where they're like, we think we can improve on it. They looked at activity pub and said, well, we want to create our own. There's also a couple others out there, I think Nostar uses its own protocol. How do you feel about that? Do you think that the Fediverse has the momentum and we should all get behind that? Or is it good to kind of try these different ones and eventually we'll all aggregate to the standard? I mean, I think we're at a point right now where people are trying a lot of stuff. You know, it remains to be seen which thing is going to be the Betamax and which is going to be the VHS of this universe. I'm putting my eggs in the Fediverse basket partly because I just like the fact that it's all open. It's open source. It's designed to be used by anyone to be interoperable with any kind of site that you want to create. So I like that idea. I like the openness of it, but I can imagine that any number of things might happen between now and five years from now. The AT protocol is open too. It's just you can't put your eggs in their basket because they've got a lid on their basket. Yeah. I mean, it's still closed. You know, it's not intent behind it is not we want to invite lots of friends over to join us in this space. I feel like they're trying to dominate the space. They're being kind of cagey about, well, we don't have a business model and, you know, we'll see. Whereas like activity pup definitely has no business model. Their business model is make your own business model, use our protocol, feel free. And I really, I like that. And as I said, I mean, just as a purely anecdotal personal experience on mastodon, I have found it to be much more friendly and less hostile. It's easier to pick and choose what you see. And it's just a it's a nice experience. It's a lot like discord in that you join a server and that's your local community. But then unlike discord, you can follow people on all the other servers that are part of mastodon. So you can have an expansive follow list. You can have an expansive list of people you are being followed by. But you kind of live in one local server. And my local server is very nice. It's full of science fiction writers and open source developers.  Very important part of a social network. No, it's like it's like friends in real life. The protocol that has the cats is going to win. But you know this about the internet. I think yeah. Folks, if you're not already subscribed to the know a little more podcast, you might want to go follow that because we have an episode coming this Thursday about mastodon. So if you'd like to know a little more about mastodon, head to know a little more dot com. Well, and if Annalie and I and other cat lovers want to get together, some of us might have to get on a flight to do that as part of a three year project to modernize airport check ins. Alaska Airlines is removing something the check in kiosk. The airline wants you to check in at home or on your smartphone. And in fact, it says, according to data, most of our customers are already doing this. So we don't think that many people are going to be affected. So in place of the kiosk is a single function iPad based bag tag station. So if you got to check a bag, that's all it really does. Everything else should already have been done before you get to the airport or on your smartphone when you're there as a flyer.  Alaska Air started this test in Palm Springs. Company says it's not ready for a wider rollout. And for those of you saying that's crazy, what if I left my phone in the cab on the way to the airport or what if I don't have a smartphone or what if my parents don't have a smartphone? Alaska Airlines says agents will still be available on site for assistance. Yeah, they're just trying to make everything a little bit smoother. They're just replacing those kiosks that run on Windows 98 with an iPad. That's probably a good thing. You know, a spokesperson for the company said most of the folks who fly Alaska will not be affected by this at all because you're already using modern ways of checking in before you get to the airport. So we want your airport experience to be as seamless as possible. We know not everybody wants this, so you're not left out in the cold. We still want you to fly our airline.  Now, if you don't use your phone to get your boarding pass, nothing is going to change for you.  But that's so few people. Most people are not even going to notice. They're just going to think, oh, these kiosks are nicer looking because it's a big iPad embedded in a pedestal. And they're going to get their bag tag and move on. So it's probably cheaper to maintain. They'll probably break down less. At least that would be the hope. So yeah, I think it's a good thing. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Thor. Thor writes, if it's of interest, I'd like to share why I am enjoying Be Real. You might recall a couple days ago we talked about whether or not Be Real was long for this world. Thor says, I moved away from my hometown several years ago and I haven't kept in contact with my childhood friends, although I suddenly found that they were posting on Be Real. It's been lovely seeing how the respective farms are going. It's such a contrast to my daily work as a software dev in Oslo. I love this perspective and I hope Be Real can figure out how to stick around simply so Thor could keep a touch with his hometown. It's great. Yeah. I love how Thor is like, I don't want anything fancy and fun. I just want to know what's up because I have been away from the farm for a while. Well, thanks to you, Annalie Newitz, for being with us today. We know you have a lot of stuff cooking, so let folks know where they can keep up with your work. So I have a new novel out called The Terraformers, which I hope you'll check out. It just came out a couple months ago. Also on my podcast, our opinions are correct. My co-host and I are doing a mini series called Silicon Valley versus Science Fiction, where we talk about the ways that Silicon Valley companies appropriate science fiction tropes really badly. So join us there. That's catnip for our audience. I think they're going to want to check that out. It's been really fun. Yeah. Well, we want to extend a special thanks to Colin. Colin, you know who you are, but now we want to shout you out to everybody else. You're one of our top lifetime supporters from DTNS. We see you. We hear you. We thank you for all the years of support. Yes. Thank you, Colin. And Colin and all the other patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet. We're going to talk a little bit about the Apple leak that maybe some iPad apps are going to come to that mixed reality headset. But more to the point, there's Google Pixel leaks. There's Samsung leaks. Should we pay all this attention to leaks? Why do you all want to hear leaks? Some of you say you don't. We're going to talk about all that and more on Good Day Internet. Stick around. You can also catch our show live Monday through Friday. DTNS is live at 4 p.m. Eastern 20 hundred UTC. You can find out more at daily technewshow.com slash live. We're going to do it again tomorrow because it's every weekday. Tomorrow, Scott Johnson is joining us. Don't miss it. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.