Okay, well, thank you so much, both of you, for making time. I know your schedule has been very busy, but you came highly recommended to me as I'm working on an idea for peace where really I just wanna get different perspectives and insights from economists around the world and their take on how some of our global systems have been impacted by COVID-19 and which ones they feel need to be disrupted and changed and discuss how, what is a way forward to doing that? I know there's a very big kind of lofty concept, so the angle for the peace might change. The more people I talk to, but you were my first economist that I'm speaking with. I normally write about the intersection of technology and social impact and global innovation, but I've just done a little research on you and objectivism and some of your perspectives on globalization. For the everyday person who does not know what objectivism is, would you explain that? Sure, so I mean, objectivism is really a philosophy, not an economic theory, and it's a philosophy that basically advocates for a morality of kind of rational, long-term self-interest of people pursuing their happiness and figuring out what is the best life to live and how to live it in a way that they're not being sacrificed to other people and other people don't sacrifice to them. In politics, and the primary way of doing that is by using your mind and following reason and by engaging with other people primarily in relationships of trade, of win-win relationships and taking responsibility over your own life primarily through producing, making the stuff that you can, making, taking responsibility over producing enough so that you can live and that basically means working and having a career and taking that really, really seriously. And then politically that implies, politically economically that implies a system that basically leaves us free to do exactly that, to live our lives, to pursue our happiness, to choose our own values, to follow a career, to produce, to create, to build. And that's a system of capitalism in which the government is limited really in its function to the protection of our rights, the protection of our freedoms, but otherwise leaves us alone and allows us to live our lives as we see fit. And so that's kind of on a very, very quick basis kind of the idea of objectivism. Is that something you think is possible with everything that's going on in the worlds right now with the crisis or do you think it was before or could be when there's a vaccine and when things calm down, whenever that may be? No, I think it's always possible and necessary now than ever. We need more now than ever guidance. Reason, I mean, a lot of what's happening in the world right now is panic, emotion, projection, it's speculation, it's, what we lack right now is data, knowledge, and we lack leaders who actually lead from the perspective from a thoughtful perspective. We have leaders that emote, we have leaders that provide us with two alternatives, we're all gonna die or we have to shut the entire world down and that's it, there's nothing in between, there's no more thoughtful approach. We have leaders who don't view the value of testing, obviously, because we're not testing, so data's not important to them. And we also, in terms of the population, we want a population that thinks about pursuing their own self-interest but thinks about that in the context of other human beings and in the context of long-term flourishing and pursuing happiness. And that means being responsible in terms of your behavior and what that looks like rather than on the one hand people who are, yeah, let's go to the beach, let's party, doesn't matter who cares about tomorrow, but on the other hand, no, no, this is, I'm so scared I'm gonna hunker down and live in my basement for the next two years until there's a vaccine. No, we need rational people focusing on true risk assessment and figuring out how to live even when there's a lot of uncertainty and we're not exactly sure what exactly is going on, but in a way that's responsible to our lives and responsible to the people around us. Yeah, I fully agree with that point. Are there any particular infrastructures or global systems that you've been keeping a very closer eye on than others in terms of things that, you know, I mean, none of our systems are really set up for equity or there's no such thing as being equitable really in some of the systems, right? So it's, you're like, well, maybe, but some of the problems that have existed in some of them are possibly more amplified or magnified right now. Are there any systems in particular where you would like to see changes made and are hoping that they could be made in light of anything going on, whether that's the financial system, education system or food system, political system, energy systems? Because I see so much happening in the world of business in the private sector and startups in terms of people wanting to create more equality, people wanting to have, you know, whether it's doing an unconscious bias program or building the pipeline more for equity or whatever it is and they do these programs, but it's really the underlying systems that I find problematic with the way that things are going. These businesses can have all the programs, you know, they can keep turning them out and doing great things, but if the systems are stuck, then what do we do? Well, we probably disagree in what the problems are. That is, I don't believe that there's a problem of inequality. I don't believe that equality should be a goal. I don't think equality is a good thing. I believe in freedom and freedom generates inequality. It just does. It always does under all conditions it does. When you take any group of people and you leave them free, you leave them alone to do their thing, you'll get an inequality and that's a beautiful thing. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think we should celebrate inequality and not try to get rid of it. I think it's very dangerous and ultimately very violent to get rid of inequality. And I think the reason these systems don't work is because the only real way to get rid of inequality is through violence. I mean, how do you make me and LeBron James equal in basketball? You can't, but other than if you break his legs and break his arms or something like that, violence, right? How do you make me and Bill Gates equal in wealth? Well, you steal his money. Can you give it to me? But that's violence, that's stealing. There is no such thing as equality. We have to get rid of that. The only quality that means anything, the only quality that the founders of America implied when they wrote all men are created equal in declaration of independence, even though they didn't live up to that, but they implied it, is a political equality, equality of freedom, equality of rights, equality before the law when the law is focused on protecting our rights. So creating a level of playing field, not an economic sense, but in a political sense in the sense of we're all free to go out and pursue our lives, to try to build, to try to create, to try to make, and recognizing that we all start from different starting points. We all have different advantages and disadvantages. That's just reality. I can't change the genes I have. I can't change the parents I have. I can't change the wealth that my parents had and the opportunities they gave me or didn't give me. Given all that, I wanna maximize my opportunities. I actually wrote a book. It's behind me. I didn't put it. I didn't know we were gonna talk about it, but it's called Equal is Unfair and we talk about all this stuff and this is exactly what it's focused on. So when I look at the infrastructures in the world, I see what I try to maximize is not equality. I don't care about equality of outcome, equality of economic equality, or even equality of opportunity, which I think is a bogus concept. What I care about is maximizing opportunities for everybody, for the poor, for the middle class, for everybody should be maximize opportunities. And I know only one way to do that. And I think objectively in history, there's only been one way to do that. That is through freedom. I wanna liberate markets, liberate individuals. So when I look at the world, I look at where are the bottlenecks for liberty? Where are the bottlenecks for opportunity? And I see them all over the place. So it's hard for me to say what infrastructure would I like to be changed? Because I'd like to change almost all of them because I think all of them are constrained today, are limited, but given the coronavirus, given what the time we're living through, the one that is obvious that needs to be liberated is healthcare. I mean, healthcare is a mess. It's a disaster. And it's not surprising it's a mess of disaster. It's heavily, heavily, heavily controlled by government. If you look at the three areas where in the United States, you see prices go up and quality goes down. Three areas, healthcare, education, and housing. All areas completely controlled by government. All areas where government constrains the supply and regulates the demand and regulates every aspect of it. If you want to see prices drop and quality go up in healthcare, education, and housing, get the government out of the way. Liberate it just like Silicon Valley as little restraints on development of technology. And as the consequences prices go down and quality goes up. You need the same thing in healthcare. I would love to see, and I think the response to coronavirus is a great indication of that. Why couldn't we test early on? Because the FDA wouldn't allow testing. And the CDC decided that it was gonna design the best test in the world and the only test in the world. And central planning doesn't work. I mean, I always ask people, what would this look like as an iPhone, right? What would this look like if a government committee designed it? And everybody laughs. Well, why do we let a government committee design our healthcare system? Why do we let bureaucrats decide which tests are good and which tests are bad? Which drugs and which procedures are good and which bad? Don't we trust our doctors? Aren't our doctors smart? And can't they read the medical journals? And can't they figure this out? And couldn't the market have a replacement for the FDA? So I would love to see a true free market in healthcare. And imagine, why do we have so few hospital beds? Fewer than in the entire Western world. We have, why? Because in order to get a hospital, in order to expand your hospital, the number of beds in your hospital, if you own a hospital, so-called private, you have to submit to the state a statement of need. Why you need more hospital beds? And all your competitors get to write in to the state saying, well, you don't need additional hospital beds. They don't want the competition. And so you cannot expand the hospital capacity or ICU capacity or any capacity without getting the state approval. Indeed, one of the things that the state did, like in the middle of the crisis with state hospitals, okay, okay, for now you don't need to submit a certificate of need, go do whatever you need to go do. I mean, all of that is absurd. If you look at any other business, when demand goes up, what happens? First prices go up, second supply goes up and prices come down. Well, if suddenly you have a pandemic and hospitals know that they're gonna be flooded, what would they have done? They would have expanded supply. They would have figured out, they would have bought a hotel and turned it into a hospital. They would have bought away, they would have done stuff to expand the supply. Same thing with masks, the same thing with ventilators, all these things, the thing that constrains their production is that we don't let the price system work. If you take toilet paper, which is an easy one, right? If you'd allowed supermarkets to basically raise the price of toilet paper when everybody wanted it, then people wouldn't have hoarded it because they couldn't afford to. They would have bought what they needed and they would have gone home. And then people who manufacture toilet paper would have looked and said, wow, there's a huge amount of need for toilet paper and gone into production and produced toilet paper. This is economics 101, right? But when you tell supermarkets, oh, that's price gouging and you can't raise the price, then of course what you get are shortages. Again, economics 101, every freshman learns this in college, but we don't apply it because, oh my God, you can't raise prices in the middle of the crisis. So what we need generally in every infrastructure is more freedom. I'll give you one other one. And certainly this is true of education and housing. But I'll give you another one. I am very concerned about globalization. I'm very concerned about global trade. I am a huge proponent of global trade. I think it is the right pro-freedom thing you should be able to buy from anywhere in the world or whatever price people are willing to offer. And it should be your decision who to buy from, not Trump or any president or any bureaucrat. I think we're entering a period where global trade is gonna shrink, where we're gonna see much more protectionism across the board, where we're gonna bring supposedly industries back. And that will guarantee a lower standard of living for Americans and for anybody else. Higher prices, lower standard of living and fewer jobs. Actually globalization creates more jobs than it destroys.   Some examples. Yeah, well, I got to watch one of your videos. I think you were riffing a bit on China, talking about China and the situation there. I mean, I read a piece and I think it was foreign policy a couple of weeks ago about China and they were saying how China, it's been no secret that China is light years ahead of United States, anyway, than has been. And that this pandemic. What, what, what, what? What are they like years away from? What are they like years away from? I think the writer was referring to technology, AI, things like that. I don't think any of that is true. I don't think any of that is true. Yeah, I don't know.  I thought that I'd see a lot more things happening in AI and machine learning when it comes to the pandemic. I'm seeing some things being done, but I thought I'd see a lot more at this point. But the point the writer was making in the article was that now China is in a position it's like doing, being generous with other countries and the medical supplies and everything. And the US is just looking worse and worse and worse and China is looking better and better. What, I mean, do you see that? Do you, what is your take on China and globalization? I'd separate two issues here. One is the perception of a country globally and internationally. And look, Donald Trump has destroyed whatever positive, much of the positive perception of the United States globally and his attitude towards trade, his attitude to immigration and many of his other attitudes have created a lot of ill will in other countries and justifiably so. And China is trying to come in and fill the gap and pretend that they're the good guys and everybody's gonna be nice. And I think to some extent they succeed in that, but everybody knows what they're really trying to do. I don't think anybody's gonna be fooled and people are suspicious of China. So I think people have way too positive a view of China's economy and China's ability and China's strength and China's ability to flourish in the future. China has become more and more authoritarian over the last five years. This president Xi is a disaster for China. He will bring China down and he already has started to bring China down. The Chinese economy shrunk for the first time in 40 years but since 1978 I think 6.8% last quarter. China can't afford to shrink. China is a poor country. On a per capita GDP basis, China is way behind the United States, way, way, way behind the United States in terms of wealth. China's technology to a large extent is either copy or stolen from the US. Because of the lack of freedom, there is no great innovation going on in China. When you look at things like the stuff they're using for social, their social score, facial recognition, spying on people, that's Israeli technology, American technology. It's technology that they've taken and adapted but it's not homemade technology. To be successful economically and to be successful technologically, you need freedom. To the extent China allows their industries and their tech industry to be free, to that extent they succeed. And that's what happened from 1978 till about five years ago. It was massive liberalization and opening up freedom in China. About five years ago they started shutting down. I think that shutting down, shutting down the freedom, more controls, more central planning will make China less able to grow the economy. I think it'll make China more desperate and it'll make China poorer. And we will see what happens. I think a long-term there's real risk of civil war in China as people who are poor now not advancing into middle class because the economy's not growing very fast. They go out into the streets and what happens in a world of where everything is streamed when you have another Tiananmen Square? I mean, the Chinese are terrified of this. The Chinese authorities, the Communist Party is terrified of this. So I think China's in trouble. I think their troubles are internal. Their troubles are economic. Their troubles are social. Their troubles are how do they control their own population? And the way they handled this pandemic was a disaster. They penalized the people who actually were providing information. I mean, there was a courageous doctor who provided information early on and he lined it up dying from COVID-19. So, and the Chinese hid this and distorted the facts and their population knows this. So I think China's in trouble. I don't think other countries buy their benevolence. I think other countries are skeptical about it. And I think people have seen through their authoritarianism and the consequence of them in a sense repressing information. And so people are gonna be, I think they're gonna have a hard time with regard to trade. I think a lot of people are gonna hesitate to trade with them, particularly in the developed world. People are gonna hesitate to give them new technologies or to sell them new technologies. We're already seeing the backlash against 5G from the Chinese companies and even the UK shifting to different technologies so that the Chinese don't get a foothold in the UK. So I think China's in trouble. I think it would be a mistake to view China as benefiting from what's going on in the world right now. China needs a robust Europe, a robust United States and Europe and the US that want to trade with it. And so I think as globalization declines, which I think is what's gonna happen, I think global trade declines, China is a huge loser, the United States is issue. I mean, it's a lose-lose proposition. If trade is win-win, the essence of trade is win-win, the essence of tariffs and restrictions on trade is lose-lose. China loses, the US loses, the West loses. And there's no way out of this. The whole Belt and whatever Belt and Highway project that they have cannot succeed without massive trade. And there's no indication the world is heading towards massive openness and trade. Okay, we only have a couple of time or minutes so I just have two more questions. What is your take on the idea of universal basic income? There's been conversation around that, especially as of late for obvious reasons. What do you think about that? Are you for that and how would it even be possible? So I think there are proposals that are feasible in terms of UBI, so I don't think it's unfeasible. I don't think it's a crazy idea. There's a version of it that I'm sympathetic to and the only version I'm sympathetic to is a version where basically we will place all social programs with UBI. But that would mean all social programs, everything, all the welfare programs, but I would even throw in healthcare into that. I would do away with Medicare and Medicaid and so everybody gets a check and with that check they have to buy health insurance, they have to pay for their own food, do whatever they need to do. And they don't expect anything else from the government. And if we could as a consequence of UBI shut down the entire welfare state bureaucracy, get rid of all those employees and right now we have, I don't know, 500 different welfare programs, little minutiae food stamps and help for this and help for that and help for these people, help for those people. We got rid of all of that and just replaced it all with one check from the government every month. Then there's a huge increase in efficiency there, right? Because you get rid of a bureaucracy, you turn people who are not very productive into people who now go out and seek productive jobs and you actually create markets. So for example, if you gave old people a check and said you have to buy insurance with this, then you suddenly create a health insurance market for old people that replaces Medicaid, which I think is much more productive, much better for our healthcare system, much more efficient than Medicare, which is a one size fit all program that distorts the market in dramatic ways in really, really big ways. So that's the way in which I, it's the only way I think UBI can work, but philosophically I'm opposed to it even then, right? Because I'm opposed to redistribution of wealth. I'm opposed to taking from some people and giving to others. So I would propose UBI, let's say we said everybody gets 20,000 a year or 15,000 a year. And then I'd say, okay, but realize this, everywhere, every year, other than let's say for seniors, everybody else, we're gonna cut it by $1,000.  So start planning, start saving, start organizing your life so that when the government stops helping you, you're in a position that you can afford to take care of yourself. So it's a way to, in my view, it's a way to transition as far as a welfare state that tries to control every aspect of our life today to a truly free society one day down the road. But as a transition, it's far superior to what we have now with this insanity of the bureaucracy of the kind of welfare state we have. Okay, my last question is about Puerto Rico. Well, I'd love to know what brought you here, but maybe we'll save that for another conversation because I know you've only got five, six minutes. So I'm working on a separate piece right now for Forbes about Producé and Uva to delivery services here. Producé delivers all fresh organic food from farmers, local farmers, and Uva is groceries and restaurants and they've expanded to pharmaceutical and essential needs. And as you can imagine, their subscriptions have skyrocketed the last month because everybody needs these things. And so we're looking at, obviously Puerto Rico relies on imports very, very, very heavily. We're looking at is it possible? What would it take for Puerto Rico to be less reliant on imports and can we someday have a more self-sufficient island? Look, Puerto Rico is a basket case. It's an economic basket case. I gave a talk, I've been on the island for two months, two years and three months. So I came January 1st, 2018. And three months later in March, I gave a talk in Puerto Rico on how Puerto Rico could become the Hong Kong of the Caribbean. Because why not, right? It's a beautiful island. It's got friendly people. It's got talented people. They do fine when they move to the US.  It's a beautiful beaches, should be a tourist haven, but it should be a producing haven. There should be skyscrapers everywhere. I mean, there should be a financial and hub on the Caribbean and what's stopping it? Well, to do that, you have to look at why Hong Kong is Hong Kong. And basically, Hong Kong is Hong Kong because it's free. So if you take the number of people who work for the government in Puerto Rico versus Hong Kong, in Puerto Rico, a third of all people employed work for the government. In Hong Kong, 5%. So the first thing I would do is fire, you know, 90% of government employees in Puerto Rico. Because there are, one of the things that you realize as an economist is people who work for the government, most of them, they're not all of them, but 80 to 90% of them are actually destroying wealth. That's their job. It's to destroy wealth. It's getting the way of producers. It's getting the way of developers. It's getting in the way of wealth creation. So, you know, I gave an example. Why can't Puerto Rico become the first state in the US to do things like fire the DMV and make the issuance of a driver's license online?  All of that is emailed to some agency where they verify the information electronically. You could do that with blockchain. You could verify that all the information I gave is true and then they download my driver's license onto my iPhone. I mean, why do you need one person to work at the DMV if that can happen, right? You don't, everything could be electronic. So, technology today, but it could replace many government employees. And then what you need to do is free up developers to develop, free up, you know, I'm here because you're probably familiar with Act 20 and 22. So, I'm benefiting from Act 20 and 22. So, I have a very, very low tax rate. Why shouldn't Puerto Ricans have a low tax rate? Why should I pay less taxes than Puerto Ricans? Why doesn't Puerto Rico institute a flat 10% tax rate? Not just, do you know that Puerto Rico has the second highest corporate tax rate on the planet Earth? It's like almost, I think they lowered it recently a little bit, like the 30 something percent. Why doesn't Puerto Rico institute a flat 10% personal income tax rate and corporate tax rate? 10% across the board, all taxes are 10%. We've already have a high sales tax rate in Puerto Rico. And live within your means, then start cutting the bureaucracy, lay people off, get rid of, to open a business. I mean, I'm a business owner, I have two businesses in Puerto Rico. The amount of forms and little taxes I have to pay, little fees here and fees there, it's an immutability here. I hire an accountant to do all that. Another unproductive job of somebody who just works between me and the government to smooth things out. All of this should be easy and simple. You want to make it as business friendly as possible. The way Hong Kong does it is only 5% of the people employed on the island work for the government. And as a consequence, there are almost no regulations. There are almost no constraints. There is development. If you want to start a business, you can get a license in a day that business taxes are minimal and trivial and easy to pay. The forms are non-existent, so easy to fill out. That's what, and of course, you need to get rid of the corruption.  They basically hired a construction firm to go buy medical tests. And the construction firm happened to be owned by somebody who contributes a lot of money to the political party in the rules of Puerto Rico. So the corruption has to disappear, but the way you make corruption disappear is you shrink through all the government. If government can't hand out favors, people don't lobby it. So make it impossible for the Puerto Rican government to hand out favors by shrinking it, by reducing its power, by taking it out of the economy. The more government intervenes in the economy, the poorer we are. The more freedom we have, the richer we are. This is my case about China, by the way, what I argued about China. When China became really, really grew fast, it's when the government didn't intervene much in the economy. When China is now intervening heavily in its economy, the economy is gonna grow much slower, if at all. So Puerto Rican needs to adopt the same legal, the same kind of structures as every country that's ever become rich has adopted. And that is protect property rights and get out of the way. It's really, it's actually super simple. It's super shocking that nobody actually does it.  Nobody's actually practiced the mechanisms to get rich. It's easy. It's not that hard. It's politically hard, but actually, in reality, it's not that hard. All right. Wow. Well, thank you. Sure. It's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you and...


Today we're sharing our TTPs, our tactics, techniques, procedures, clearing structures, taking care of any type of active threat that your forces may come across while you know, at home or even overseas. Well, threats are everywhere. We need to mitigate them. It's a dangerous world out there. Everyone here is a first responder. We're here to protect our community and our country. You can't get ready. You have to be ready. It's super important we know how to get in safely, get out safely and clear wherever we're going as safely as possible. We have rope room set up, two groups of them going over, being in the stack and entering the room appropriately, safely to execute the mission. And in the back there's also entering and clearing staircases for the scenario. Security forces can be in action at any given moment. So we're always on our toes, always training, always ready.


What's up Mopar fam? We are live at Moparty. We have made it got both trucks here We got storm over here Hanging out at the Torque Storm Supercharger booth Obviously, we got frostbite as well frostbite chilling out Storm chilling out pretty good Places already packed two guys Got all the blowers over here Hanging out over here with the Arrington guys red line oil at the Torque Storm Guys hanging out We drove storm all the way up here guys just like we said all the way from Georgia storm is here at Holly Moparty in Kentucky Made the trip Driving under its own power and I know you guys are dying to hear that Supercharger So stay tuned. We'll have some videos here soon on that thing running frostbites over here chilling and and Here's a sneak peek y'all seen the unboxing of the intake manifold Well, there it is. It's on the truck. That's what it looks like guys. I Will have a much better video going up on the install of this thing and what it looks like everything about it But here's your sneak peek Here at Beach Band at Holly Moparty Lots of stuff over here guys Got the racetrack over here This is another Torque Storm truck Has a blower on it. This is another ram. It's an older ram. This is like an 0405 ram There's a quick little update Just want to let everybody know that we did make it to Kentucky. We are here at Moparty and Like I said, we got both trucks up here storm drove all the way up here and made the trip perfect with no issues and frostbite Obviously is up here and we're gonna be racing frostbite in two classes We are gonna be doing a true street class And we're gonna be racing with John Cope in a pro class. This will be an eighth month class That'll let us use the trans break in that class. So clearly. Yeah our storm Frostbite and that's it. So stay tuned. I'm gonna have some lots of videos about Moparty coming up Lots and lots and lots of stuff up here guys. There's gonna be so Whoo so much stuff To check out here at Moparty They are gonna be doing another general lead jump. They will also be doing a Roscoe Part trying to chase the gentleman down. Hi guys. Stay tuned. We'll have more coming


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Norm Fezikas, Chris Allen, and Chris Smith. Coming up on DTNS, why chip shortages are a good thing for the Xbox, software to ease your back pain, and the most important things to know from the avalanche of tech earnings this week. DTNS starts now! This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, April 29. My sister's birthday, 2022. Happy birthday, Meg. In Los Angeles, I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, co-host of the Snobo S podcast and the tech, John Terrence Gaines, AKA Brother Tech, welcome back. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you bringing me here and sweating a little bit in the pre-show because I was kind of neat. No one needs to know. Yeah, Terrence has always been here. I don't know what y'all are talking about. I'm the curtain. All right, let's start with a few tech things you should know. Reuters sources say that Elon Musk is said to have secured loans for his pending acquisition of Twitter, a little more than half of the offer price is made up of $25.5 billion in loans. Musk supposedly said he would reduce executive and board pay, cutting other costs internally. Twitter has relatively large gross margins, leaving potential room to cut. Musk also promised to develop new ways to monetize tweets, such as charging for third parties to embed tweets from verified individuals. The sources also said that Musk has lined up a new CEO for Twitter. Parag Agrawal took over for Jack Dorsey in November of 2021 and will remain a CEO until the acquisition closes later this year. The South China Morning Post sources say China will hold a symposium with the country's largest tech firms after Labor Day to assure executives that the government plans to ease its crackdown on big tech. Prior to the symposium, the government will reportedly hold a joint regulatory meeting to put all regulators on the same page so that they all know they're easing up on big tech. At a meeting of China's Politburo on April 29th, the government said it will normalize control over the tech sector and design measures to support it. Short version of this is, oh, this is affecting our economy. Maybe we should ease off. A report by research from the University of Washington, UC Davis, UC Irvine and Northeastern University claims that Amazon and third parties collect process transcripts from interactions with Amazon's voice assistant to send to advertising partners. This data is used for to infer user interests for ad targeting on Echo devices and also the web. Amazon confirmed that it does serve targeted ads on its smart speakers, but does not share voice recordings with developers. In December, participants in the Pone to Own competition identified several security bugs in Net Talk. That's an open source protocol that can act as Apple share file servers for macOS clients, a lot of software uses it. Net Talk patched the vulnerability in the March 22nd version, the 3.1.1 release. And Thursday, Synology warned users that some of its NAS appliances are exposed to multiple Net Talk vulnerabilities. Synology says patches are ongoing and should arrive within 90 days of the advisory at the latest. The vulnerabilities have already been fixed for Synology appliances running disk station manager 7.1 or later. So if you're on that and you're up to date, you should be all right. Earlier this week, QNAP advised its NAS users to turn off Apple file protocol on its devices until patches can be issued. Epic Games acquired Bandcamp just last month. I know it seems like a lifetime ago, but it was a month ago. Now Epic is filing a motion for preliminary injunction to stop Google from removing Bandcamp rather from the Google Play Store. Digital music sales had been exempted from using Google's billing system, but a policy change requires apps to use Play Billion as of June 1st of this year. All right, let's talk about game consoles. Protocols, Nick Statt has an article up theorizing that chip shortages are helping Xbox close the gap with the PlayStation. And yet they may not need that help. It's been a good week for Xbox, MPD Group estimates. It had its best March in 11 years. MPD Group does console sales monthly. And during Microsoft's earnings call, the company claimed it had taken market share from the PlayStation for two consecutive quarters. They didn't give any numbers to back that up, but that's what they said. And it's in an earnings call, so it's subject to some regulatory assurances. So it's probably true. Microsoft says the Series S and the Series X have sold faster than any previous Xbox generation, and hardware revenue was reported up 14% on the year. If you do some tea leaf reading, estimates are that Microsoft has sold between 10 and 12 million Xbox Series units. Sony last reported its sales in February, and at that point, the PS5 was about 17 million units. Statt points out that those numbers still have Xbox on the same sales pace as the Xbox One. It's just that the PlayStation 5 is selling a little slower than the PlayStation 4 did. However, if Sony is having a harder time getting chips, which it appears it might be, that would mean Microsoft is closing the gap on it because of the chip shortage. Anecdotally, Statt notes that friends, and I've known some friends who say the same thing, have bought an Xbox only because it was easier to find and cheaper on the secondary market. PlayStation's are still going for about twice what retail is. However, Statt points out that none of this may matter that much for Microsoft, which is less reliant on the console install base than it used to be. Things like cross saves and cross buying mean that players can move between the console and the PC using Xbox Game Pass relatively easily. And with cloud streaming, you can even just play on mobile. Game Pass subscribers increased 45% on the year, so it's booming. Microsoft's future now heavily relies on serving people who might not ever buy a console or even possibly a PC. That leaves the market looking like this. Nintendo is the king of unit sales. So if you just want to count the number of consoles Nintendo wins, but it's often because it's a secondary console. People might buy the PlayStation and the Xbox or one of the other PlayStation or the Xbox and also a Switch. Sony still brings in about half of console consumer spending because even though PS5s may not be selling as fast as they'd like, they have a huge PS4 install base, but Microsoft has the early lead position in a device agnostic world, in a world that's switching to subscriptions. Terrence, if you were a console maker, who of these three would you rather be right now, do you think? Me, if I was a greedy person, it would be Sony. You could be whoever you want. Yeah, Sony, okay, why is that? Because they're harder to get. Therefore, the demand is higher. Therefore, people are going to be scraping and scrounging to get these. So whenever the chip shortage kind of eases up or they get to produce more products, I think those are going to fly off the shelves way faster than an Xbox or a Nintendo Switch. Yeah, but I mean, but if you look at the Xbox Game Pass numbers, clearly people are like, okay, maybe hardware is a little difficult right now. Let's do something that's a little bit more platform agnostic and Microsoft is really reaping the rewards. Those camps are pretty tough in the console wars. I don't see that easing up anytime soon, even if there's more options to go cross-platform. It's something about Xbox versus PlayStation that keeps these things going. That's just my opinion though. Yeah, and I think you're right in the short term for sure. It does look bad for Sony that their unit sales can't catch up because of supplies. And that supply shortage does seem to be dragging on a little longer than people thought of because new problems keep cropping up. We're going to talk about that quite a bit when we talk about earnings later. But even so, eventually the supply shortage will work itself out. And when it does, I think a lot of people will give up their PS4 for the PS5. I don't think there's going to be as many people who are going to give up Sony now because they can get an Xbox. There are a few anecdotally, like stat said. But I think down the road, Microsoft does have the longer-term advantage. I will add that Microsoft definitely has a broader advantage because a subscription is something you can get as a Christmas present, but you don't necessarily need to go hunt through every Target, Best Buy, or eBay sale to get one. And the same thing will apply to people who are just tangentially interested. They don't necessarily want to plunk down four or 500 bucks and then all the associated peripherals, which is what hardcore gamers would do. But I mean, if you're looking at, I want to appeal to a broad base, you're going to have to look outside that core demographic. It's easier to acquire new customers, right? Exactly. Because they want the fight to get the console, yeah. For that, and then you just have Mindshare, right? It's a brand name. It's something to put your tongue. Sure, sure. I think it is going to be fun to watch. I really do. All right, let's improve our posture, Sarah. Well, let's do it. A company called Zen, you've either heard of it, maybe you even use it, uses posture mirroring software to send alerts when it detects that you're not sitting up straight. You're not giving your body a rest so you can correct your posture and avoid physical pain while doing your job as you're hunched over your computer. Likely at home. But to do so, it uses your webcam to check on your posture, which might raise some eyebrows from folks who'd like better posture but don't want to be watched all day. Zen also sells a version of its software to employers and assigned about 30 companies, some of them enterprise, so a lot of employees there, since it launched in October of 2020. That might raise even more eyebrows such as, hmm, is my employer using the tool to check on me, to see when I'm at my computer, to see when I'm not, to see when I walk around, see how often I'm doing work, et cetera. Now, Zen says it's taken a privacy-centric approach to building this webcam-based posture-correcting tech with its posture correction software being open source except for exercise and educational content, which is something that Zen says it does customily. Zen's AI also processes data locally, that's on device, meaning that it's not uploading or streaming any data to any cloud. You can test their claim by using it with your Wi-Fi or internet connection disabled if you don't believe them or feel paranoid, which many people do. Also, it doesn't record or store any visuals. So employers only receive an aggregated total number of how many employees sign up to the app, how many use it on a weekly basis, not exactly who those employees are or what time of day we're, you know, moving into this. Also, the software is designed so you don't have to keep it on all the time. You can check in just a couple times a day, which may be enough to keep you aware of your posture. Zen says that most users do like a 30 to 60 minute posture session in the morning, maybe another in the afternoon, that's enough to keep people aware of their posture all day. And some say that even think of it at home and at the dinner table and such. So in some ways, that's really great, especially those of us who've had RSI injuries or other stuff from kind of not having great posture while we're doing our work. When it is running, a stick person icon is displayed in the menu bar, mirroring the user's posture, turning blue when it's good, red when it is correcting. The algorithm uses each user as a baseline, meaning that what you demonstrate as upright will be what it tells you to work for. And that's specific to you. It's not some crowdsourced ideal because everybody's different. Right now, Zen is $3.99 per month or $23.99 per year although the company plans to switch to a freemium model when you pay for advanced features. It also plans to get into selling things like ergonomic chairs, keyboards, mice, and things like that for people who care about these things as well as integrate movement sensors from wearables like headphones and watches. Man, I was watching Nick with a C in our chat room who was like, sounds like spyware. And then Sarah said, like, it's all on device. You can turn off your internet to prove it. And then he's like, I don't know. Those alerts sound like they might be annoying.  You don't have to have it constantly alerting you. I feel like this company has tried to do everything possible to anticipate what your objection would be to using their software and make it so that it's not annoying, but just helpful. However, one of the people I know has got a keen eye for finding out whether there's loopholes and all that is Terrence Gaines. Terrence, what do you think of this? Well, not necessarily a loophole, but of course companies are going to want to use this information now. Again, Sarah said in the breakdown that it's not safe to the cloud. The only notifications employers are getting is how many people use it and maybe how often they use it. But still, that's not gonna stop people from thinking or assuming or taking something and putting it over the camera because this thing is installed. I don't see this as being a big deal outside of me being frustrated with myself because I can never get my posture straight. I could see that thing going red all the time. And then in the first couple of times, I would try to straighten up and fix myself. But then I would just get annoyed because I can never stay that way. And I know you're supposed to fight that, but it's just like, I just too much work. Yeah, it depends on the person, right? Because they had interviews with some people in this article that showed that if you just had it on for 30 minutes, constantly correcting you, you could turn it off, you could cover your camera and you just sort of get in the habit of doing it anyway. Some people were even saying they were doing it at home. Like Sarah said. However, that's not gonna work for everybody, right?  I'm just saying one may be the exception to that. But it probably works for enough people to make this worthwhile. And I have a really good chair that's helped my posture, but I do try to remind myself to also straighten up because I somehow have figured out how to slump even in a good chair. Yep. Oh, go ahead, Sarah. No, no, I was just gonna say, I kind of mentioned this earlier, but I have definite repetitive stress injury on my right hand. It kind of comes and goes. Sometimes it's really bad. Sometimes it's not as bad and it all has to do with my posture. You think like, oh, is it because I'm using my hand in a way that's not great. Now, it actually has to do with my monitor placement. It has to be up high enough. I have to be sitting up straight. I have to do all these things. And if I do all those things correctly, I'm okay. But if I don't, I'm not okay. So I understand that there's some privacy implications that people are gonna have to decide if they're comfortable or not using something like Zen, but this is actually something that I feel like is really important to many of us, especially before you get hurt. Cause once you get hurt, it's a lot harder to not be hurt anymore. Right. Yeah, yeah. Let us know if any of you are using this in your workplace or you just decide to try it out on your own, especially if it once it goes free in them, it'll be low cost to try out. I'm curious what they're gonna charge you for. I wonder how useful it is for free, but we'll see, especially cause they're not supposedly getting any data, so they can't monetize your data if that's the case. But if any of you use it, let us know, we'd love to hear from you. We also love to hear from you on our subreddit. The reason we had that Synology story in there is cause RW Nash posted it to our subreddit today and folks voted it up. You can help figure out what goes on the show by using our subreddits. Submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. It was a big week for tech earnings reports, but rather than get lost in all those numbers, we thought we'd dive a little deeper into a few of the bigger implications that came out of them. First, keep in mind the situation these companies are all in. You know all this stuff, but it's worth reminding global inflation, possible interest rate rises to combat that inflation, and thus possibly a recession on the horizon. Consumers know all this and consumers are therefore being cautious, even if they're not impacted immediately. That's a drag on sales, especially for expensive tech products. There's also the fact that as we venture out more now, we're consuming fewer things online and there's an inevitable adjustment from the sky-high numbers of 2020 and 2021 for those companies that benefited from lockdowns, Netflix and Amazon, for example. There's also a war in Ukraine, which is impacting supply lines, causing companies to cut business in Russia and be unable to serve customers in Ukraine, in some cases, and that introduces more financial uncertainty as well as just financial uncertainty in general in the populace. There are also massive lockdowns in China as COVID-19 surges there among a population that was not exposed to previous waves, and whose vaccinations are proving less effective than one might have hoped. Ad-based businesses are taking some of the biggest hits. YouTube grew 14%, which may sound like a lot, but it's quite a bit lower than they expected, quite a bit lower than usual. Facebook rose its advertising 6.1%, and that is its slowest growth in the 10 years since it went public. In fact, almost all tech companies reported some kind of revenue or profitability hit, sometimes both, even Apple, which reported record numbers didn't have a rosy forecast for the current quarter. Apple CFO Luca Maestri said supply chain issues, mostly related to lockdowns in China, would reduce sales by $4 to $8 billion in Q2. On the one hand, CEO Tim Cook said that almost all factories in China that assemble its products are back to work. Wall Street Journal bears that out with reports that several Apple suppliers, including Lux Share and Wistron, were granted COVID-free status by the government in China. That gives them priority to resume production, and Apple did not seem worried about demand for its phones, likely bolstered by the fact that while worldwide smartphone shipments fell 11% last quarter, Apple's phone shipments grew 1%. But still, despite all that, oh, the factories are coming back, we don't expect phone sales to get hit, Apple would not forecast revenue for next quarter or say when it expected its supply chain issues to ease. Intel also forecast a weak Q2 because of supply chain issues. Amazon, on the other hand, had a low forecast, but in their case, it was due to higher costs. Amazon revenue grew at its slowest rate since 2001. You know, 2001, that's when pets.com went bust. Amazon ran on thin margins for most of its history and it's back to that, but this time it's not caused by spending on expansion, but on increasing costs, particularly fuel costs. They've started to charge shippers who use their service of fuel surcharge. Insider Intelligence estimates Amazon's market share grew 0.2% in 2021. That's its slowest growth rate in years. But let's end on a bright note. Cloud, look to the clouds. Amazon is powered by AWS, its cloud services division, and cloud services is booming for everybody. Synergy Research figures the total cloud services market rose 34% on the year to reach $53 billion. Amazon has pretty much been at about a third of that market share for years now and it stayed there hovering around 33%. Microsoft inch forward from 20 to 22% of the market followed by Google at 10% and then everybody else. Cannellus had similar numbers and pretty much identical rankings. So that's the layout. Bad week for big tech, couple bright spots and nothing but cloud on the future, both good and bad. Terrence, what do you think? I don't know. Am I tripping or are all these companies, I don't know. I'm pretty sure they got forecasters, they've got people that kind of see all these things happening or coming down the pike and are they really acting on it? Cause it seems like they're just go, go, go. And then when the numbers come out, they're like, are y'all going to hit us hard for revenue and all these profitability and things to go down? It just seems like they were just go, go, go. And then now the wall is looking to come to the wall. And I don't see too many companies outside of, like you said, going to the cloud, doing other things to kind of prep for that or am I making that up? I think that quite a few companies, Amazon is an obvious example of this, but quite a few companies during the pandemic when a lot of people shifted how we do things day to day globally, enjoyed the repercussions of that, right? That all of a sudden it's like, wow, look at our numbers. But that wasn't going to last forever. And we certainly, as you mentioned, Tom, depending on where you live in the world, there's no sort of like COVID's over type thing going on here at all. But there's a little bit more of going back to life that is going on. And all of these companies are now feeling that and having to, I don't know, back up their claim that they're going to be okay in the future. I think it's probably if you're a company of a certain size and you have just like exponential growth because of something that is happening that's largely outside of your control, but it's happening in the world. You just kind of hope it's going to stay that way. It won't. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. These are battleships, right? And they're slow to turn. That's always the problem with a big company. The reason people get upset about big companies when they're doing well is they're battleships and they're hard to oppose. But as soon as those waters get choppy and they need to turn, they turn slow. So you're not wrong, Terrence. They're all trying new things, but the bigger the company is, the slower those new things are to try. And they're all still trying the new things that they started a couple of years ago before the world got as choppy as it is now and it's harder for them to innovate. This is something I've been kind of talking about for years, which is, look, these big companies are really big and successful right now, but none of them ever stay that way. The big companies that were successful in 1999 are not the same big companies that are successful now. Or if they are like Microsoft, they went way down and had to come way back with something entirely different, going from being an operating system-based company to being a cloud services-based company in Microsoft's case. So what we're seeing right now is there usually is something unexpected happens in the world that is harder for a big company to adapt to because they have so much momentum behind what made them good. And that's where that advertising number starts to look really interesting, which is the problem that a lot of people have with big tech is, well, they get all this ad money and they monetize our data and there's no way to get them off the ad money. Well, if the ad money does start to dry up, it's gonna force them to try other things, which then opens up a place in the market for smaller companies to out-innovate them, which brings us back to your point, Terrence. This is the time for the small company to jump up and go, we can move faster. Yeah, and I wish I was a battleship when I went to, if I go to my mortgage company and say, hey, I lost my job, I'm a battleship. I'll work with me. You're just a cruiser or a PT boat. Most of us are, right? Exactly, yeah. All right, let's finish up with some fun stuff. Sarah, what do you got? Let's do it. We talked recently about the subscription-based cancellation service for other subscriptions called True Bill. And a few of you wrote in to us about your experiences with that, so thank you in advance. How good is it at helping you actually cancel things you probably shouldn't be paying for? Is the big question? Well, now the company is sharing some data on where cancellations do happen the most. Subscriptions for Audible, Time Magazine, Amazon Kindle, The New York Times, and Ben Verified have cancellation rates above 50% with Audible specifically at 18%. True Bill, Chief Revenue Officer at Yaha, Mohtarzada says that subscriptions with higher cancellation rates tend to be in two categories. The first one, people signed up for an aspirational subscription. Maybe you signed up for a gym. You wanted to lose weight or get in shape. Maybe you got an audiobook membership. And the second is the sneaky subscription, which might involve, all of a sudden, you're now part of a fashion subscription monthly, maybe in-flight Wi-Fi, slipped to the cracks, didn't really know you were signing up for it. True Bill also found subscriptions that have cancellation rates between 1% and 2%, so that's quite lower, including productivity services like Wix, Squarespace, Dropbox, and Zoom, streaming and entertainment services like Twitch, Xbox Game Pass, Blizzard Entertainment, and also financial subscriptions like Stash and Wealthfront. Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me that the stuff that you use to run your website, keep your files in for work. Yeah, you tend to need to keep that active. Yeah, yeah, those would be the stealthy ones. The thing that just jumped out at me, and we've had this in the rundown for hours, and it just jumped out at me, Sarah, when you were telling us about this, Time Magazine gets enough subscriptions online that it can have a high cancellation rate. That's interesting. Yeah, apparently a lot of people want it, and then they don't. It probably has to do with Time Magazine person of the year. There's certain cyclical things that I think are probably at play here, or maybe there's some time as offered people a deal, and they end up subscribing, and then they decide that they can find all that information online somewhere else. Well, I think it's time.com that's getting the subscriptions, right? Yeah, yeah. Probably not the Print Magazine as much anymore, but still, I wouldn't have thought that would be high enough to rank with Audible and Kindle, because you may say like, well, yeah, but they're canceling, Tom, the high cancellation rates, true Bill explained this in the protocol interview, the high cancellation rates are actually a good sign for companies, in a lot of cases, because it means they're getting enough people trying the service that they have a high cancellation rate, but they still keep the rest of the people, and they prove of an audience. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I was just smiling as soon as Sarah started reading it, so I see where this is going. Ultimately, the stuff like people wanting to read, or actually exercise, or do better, the aspirational stuff, it's like high cancellations for that. Up until... I mean, that's like the gym membership on January 1st, right? Right, right. You know, where you go, my intentions are good, but come March 1st, have I really been going? No, so don't pay for it. Yeah, it's like a snapshot of real life then. The stuff we need for work, and the stuff that lets us sit on the couch, right? Those are the ones we're not canceling. That's true. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes in from Kome. Kome says, and this is in response to our Snap Pixie conversation we had yesterday. Kome says, I'm a drone enthusiast. I have seven functioning drones at the moment. Snap's Pixie reminded me of a few drone projects that I backed on Kickstarter and Indiegogo long time ago, including one called Self Fly from 2007 that's similar to Pixie. Kome says, I never received the product, and I assumed the project was dead, but I have to check. But after five years, I'm glad this type of drone finally became available from a major company. Second note, Kome says, is my smallest drone is 105 grams, about the same as Pixie. When I fly indoors for testing, all the napkins on the table fly everywhere, even a small drone can make quite a mess if people decide to fly it indoors, something to consider. The design of Pixie looks safe says Kome, but one of the disasters that can happen with a drone is long hair sucked into the propeller. It can get tangled badly. I believe Pixie can't prevent that if it only has front and bottom facing cameras. Oh, well, I don't know that that's true. It does seem that it's able to fly its flight path with those sensors. There may be more going on with those two sensors than it looks like at first. I wouldn't want to say one way or the other, to be honest, but it's no joke that if you get too close to a propeller with long hair, that's not going to be good for you. I mean, listen, I've got a Roomba, and I mean, the number one thing I do is clear my own long hair out of the Roomba. So I can see where this is. It truly is an issue if you live in a house where you're flying a drone and things are going to get caught inside of it, but it doesn't seem like a deal breaker, just seems like something you should keep in mind. I was just surprised that people are still using Kickstarter. Are people still using Kickstarter like that? People are, Terrence. Say what? Yeah, they still are. I remember that was a big deal back in the day. Now I really don't hear about Kickstarter projects, but again, maybe that's just me. Yeah, cause it's not news anymore. It used to be news that somebody did something on Kickstarter. Then it was news that somebody did something weird on Kickstarter. Now it's just like, well, everything's on Kickstarter, so yeah, I feel like that's what's going on there. And honestly, Tacoma's point about inside, don't fly your drones inside. I don't think even Snap wants you to fly the pixie inside. All their demo videos show it outside, so that's a good reminder, Kome, thanks for that. Well, it depends on how high your ceiling is, but your mileage may vary. Yeah. Ha-ha, get it? Especially your altitude mileage. Well, Terrence Gaines, such a pleasure to have you on the show today. You're friend of the show, so we all know what you're doing, but let folks know that might not know the rest of your work where they can find its. Sure, sure, sure. So me and my co-host, Nika Montford, we host a monthly Apple-centric podcast called Snob OS. Get it, snob, and then OS. I don't know, do people get that? I hope, I get it. I hope people are getting what we're trying to put out, right? So we do a weekly show where we talk all things Apple, and then we have some other things where we split off into social media and just things in general. So in addition to that, myself and Rob Dunwood and Stephanie Humphrey, who are also friends of DTNS, we also host a tech show from a different perspective called The Tech John. So we talk about technology, we talk about how it relates to diversity, things of that nature. So definitely can check us out there if you go to techjon.com. And then in general, I'm on everything social media at Brother Tech where I just talk about tech and just anything in general. So definitely reach out to me that way if you wanna get me the fastest. Well, thanks so much for being with us today. Also, we wanna extend a special thanks to Steve Roger Prigg, one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, Steve. This is also a longer version of the show. It's called Good Day Internet. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's available at patreon.com slash DTNS. And for live viewers, we roll right into it right after we finish up this show. But just a reminder, on DTNS, we're live Monday through Friday for PM Eastern, 200 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. And we hope you all have a great weekend and we'll be back doing it all again on Monday. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker, Roger Chang, producer, writer and host, Rich Stratholino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Kunz, technical producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter. Science correspondent, Dr. Nikki Ackermanns, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Gadget Virtuoso, Steve Guadarrama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Stevens and J.D. Galloway. Modern video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta. Live art performed by Len Peralta. A-Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias. Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's shows include Patrick Norton, Justin Robert Young and Terence Gaines. And our guest this week was Dr. Kiki Sanford. Thanks to all the patrons who make this show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.