Okay, I'm gonna hit the live button now. It's going down. Yeah. Okay, I think we're live. I should probably not have the microphone that close to me. Welcome to the live stream, everyone, if you can hear me. And in a moment, if you can hear Tyler, we'd appreciate some yeas or nays on the audio. And of course, I forgot to silence my watch, so there'll be silence to everything but the watch. Yeah. Anyway, so yeas or nays, if the audios are good, I'd appreciate it.  Tyler, probably some talk in there from your end. Make sure we're good there. Yes. Oh, my gosh. Well, this is me talking, but my mom apparently needs help. She's at Verizon. Give me one second. All right, man. I'm so sorry, y'all, but my mom, of course. Got some audios. Panic attack. I think everything is good. Welcome, Dennis, to the screen, to the stream. Iris, Sean, Sean, two different Sean's.  That's apparently a really common name. Welcome. You can hear my voice rambling up your two 12 and subwoofers. I don't have the deep voice to make that really work. If you guys had Epos Fox on the podcast, he has a really deep voice. All right. So I'm going to test the scenes here. Make sure we're ready to go when Tyler's got his stuff going. Yeah, even though none of these Yes, yes. these large single camera versions, neither of them are centered where the dam. One day, I will fix those. Right now, only nerds and neckbeards use Linux. I don't know if that's true.  Anyways, welcome to the stream. For those of you who are catching this post live stream, welcome to also timestamps will be in the video description probably around eight o'clock Eastern time. That's usually when I get around back to it. So if you want to skip around, those should show up around then. So you don't have to listen to the nonsense if you don't want to. So let's go ahead and get started ready to go. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Excellent. All right, so I'm going to go to the proper workspace here. I'm going to hit record in audacity. I'm going to hit record in OBS and you can do the claps whenever you like. All right. Three, two, one. I think that was excellent. I don't know if I don't know that we've ever done better. Honestly, I'm probably when I look in the when I go to edit it, I realize we're like, well, it just looked good because of the latency, but we'll see how it goes. All right, let's see here. Let's let's go ahead and get started. Hey, everybody, welcome to the next cast. I'm your host, Matt. And I'm Tyler. Yes, he is. For those of you who are watching the video version of this, Tyler is not as stoned as he looked. I just figured I'd jump right in and say that before somebody said in the chat. We just might as well get it over with. He's just feeling under the weather. Don't worry about it. Anyways, so this is the Linux cast. We talk about Linux, the things usually the news. And that's what we're going to do today. We have six wonderful news topics for you today. But first, as always, we always talk about what we've been doing this week. And this this front end section is a little bit in flux. So prepare for something new to come here in the future. But as of right now, Tyler, what have you been doing this week? Well, just diving deeper into the Apple ecosystem. My sister wants to get a smaller iPad. So I've got her bigger one and I've been using that. And it's been. Oh, no, it's just been really nice. Like the whole Apple ecosystem is very, it's very nice. Although I I will say. It's made my life a lot more hectic because I like I've just. Oh, no, I've never really been able to carry around so much computing all at once. So like I'm just even more never away from my computer, which is impressive. I didn't know that was possible. I thought I already spent way too much time on my computer. But like now it's like in my bed with me, which is a problem. But yeah, I mean, that's pretty much all I've been doing. I I also did get to go down and try out a new Mexican joint, which was fantastic. So, yeah, I had some like massive, massive enchiladas. It's great. Well, pretty much it. Thank you for now. Making me making me hungry. I appreciate you're welcome. I'm glad I can. I made chili this morning. So I have that on the slow cooker simmering.  We're not doing a podcast.  So I have I have some things to talk about. So if you follow me on Mastodon, link in the video description, a hashtag YouTuber do that every time. I had some interesting computer problems. And I've never I've never actually talked about the origin of those computer problems. So. The end result was that I ended up having to reinstall Fedora. But the thing that caused all my issues. So I use Ranger as my terminal file manager. And recently I had and so I've talked about my external hard drive before that make made horrendous noises like really, really bad. Well, they got way worse about a week ago. I mean, like. The not healthy noises whatsoever. So I hurried up and backed all my stuff up on there. Like and I'm talking like three terabytes worth of stuff. I got all that onto my other external hard drive, which is brand new. And I backed it all up into a folder named the same thing as that old external hard drive. And, you know, I just plan to kind of leave all that stuff in there. But somewhere along the lines that what was it? Probably like Sunday evening or some sometime this weekend. I decided I was just going to move all the stuff out of the directory that I put it in and just have it in the root directory of that external hard drive so that it was all in just like a norm was like in normal places. And I use Ranger to do it. And the first directory that I was going to move was the backup directory, which is like two terabytes in size. It's like the biggest directory on there. I knew it was going to take a while. So I started it in the morning. The problem is I forgot about it. And so that evening I come back to my computer. It was a day off. I hadn't done anything that come back. I had completely forgotten that I had Ranger in the background moving stuff from one directory to another on that hard drive. So I noticed up in my poly bar, it said I had 168 updates. So I did an update. And as I always do when I do an update, I rebooted my computer. Completely forgetting that Ranger was in a scratch pad, moving stuff around because scratch pads are hidden, right? You don't see it. And yeah, it turns out that your computer just not like it when you shut down in the middle of moving two terabytes worth of data from one place to another. So that hard drive is always in F.S. Tab, it gets mounted every time the system comes up. And because of all of my shenanigans, not remembering that it was moving stuff, it could no longer see that hard drive. So when it booted in to Fedora, I got some really weird air saying it was an emergency mode and to try to diagnose it that way. It would not let me log in because by default, Fedora doesn't have root password. You only have a user password with pseudo privileges. So you need a root password. So I ended up having to go into my void install, which I'm testing now for a video later on and see its root into my Fedora install, set a root password, go back, try to get in, but it wouldn't let me log in as a root password because it said the password was wrong.  So I went back and devoid, CH rooted in again, changed the password again, went back into the Fedora install. It still wouldn't take it. So I did it a third time this time, ignoring my normal password and just setting the most simple password ever. And so I know I didn't mistype it at that time. It still wouldn't take it. So I got a mastodon started bitching. I'm like, why does anybody put up with this?  That was horrible, even though I still love Fedora. And it turns out you have to unlock the root password as well as create one. So I tried that and that allowed me to get in and remove the line in the FS tab to, you know, remove that hard drive so it wasn't trying to mount. And that got me into SDDM. The problem is it still wouldn't let me log in. Even to my personal account, won't let me log in. And so I get into, I rebooted and went into Grubb and booted directly into bash, which you can do basically, you can set bash as your net system. And so I went into the bash, you know, there and reset my password knowing with a very simple password. So I knew I wasn't, you know, uncommenting or typing in wrong. Still won't let me log in. And at that point I've been working on it for like four or five hours. And like, I still had work. This sounds like a headache for sure.  I'm reinstalling Fedora. I thought for, I thought for maybe 30 seconds or so just, you know, try a different distro. I thought maybe go back to Arch or something like that. But no, Fedora has been really good to me. So I stayed on Fedora. And yeah, I've been basically since that time for the last four or five days, trying to get everything back the way it was. Luckily, I had backups. Well, thank God. Yeah. I didn't even think about that, but I was just assuming you did.  No matter what, these Fedora is a really good distro. Like really good. The lesson that I learned was that not to use Ranger as a file transfer tool because Ranger has a progress bar for small files, but anything larger than a certain point, it doesn't show a progress bar. And even then the progress bar when it does show is just a spinning slash mark. It's rotate slash, it's all you see. So plus I just completely forgot about it and it was a scratch pad. Usually I'd use Crusader. I don't know why I chose to use Ranger this time. And yeah, that really messed me over.  And I was like in really foul mood, but it was not Linux as well at all. The same thing would have happened. I mean, maybe not. It may not have ended in the same way, but I still would have had hard drive problems if I tried the same thing on Windows or Mac. It does, shutting down midway through a file transfer just does not, it's not okay. It's not good. So luckily I did manage to get the external hard drive back up and running. It doesn't look like there's anything corrupt on it, which is honestly completely shocking. Like I figured at least that the folder that I was transferring would be full of files that were corrupted or missing or whatever. No, everything seems to be fine, but still, it was not a good time. And yeah, that's basically what I've been spending my time doing on Linux this last week. Oh, also, I switched to a new window manager for a little while. I switched to awesome.  And I do not like Lua at all. And Josh is in the, Josh, you know, Lua is the easiest programming language. And several people have told me Lua is amazing and really simple. And compared to like something like Haskell or, you know, Assembly, it probably is. But yeah, I just don't care for it all that much. And honestly... I like how you loop Haskell and Assembly in the same group. Yeah, I know. I talked about this in a video that I made about awesome. There's actually nothing wrong with Lua. That's, it's a me problem. It's just, I just don't enjoy it. I don't know why. I mean, I'm the same there. I agree with you. I just don't care for it. There's nothing wrong with it. I'm sure it's perfectly simple. When I put the effort into it and, you know, actually tried to learn it enough to actually do awesome, you know, it would be fine. But I have such a mental block in my head when it comes to Lua and awesome. Especially awesome. I'm like, it's just not... There's something in there that just doesn't make me want to use it. Anyways, I switched back to I3. I have put awesome on my laptop so that I can actually make a long term review of it later on. But I'm not using it as a daily driver. I couldn't do it. Lua's the easiest if you don't know anything else. Okay.  Okay. Excuse me. All right. So that is that section. Moving on to the contact information, which is the thing that I always manage just, you know, screw up every week. So we'll try to get through it. So if you want to find all of the information about the podcast, you can do so at thelinuxcast.org. There you'll find past episodes. I have not done a very good job of keeping that up to date in the last couple of weeks for personal reasons, but I'll get back to that here very soon. I do have a blog post and a new episode to post on there. So that stuff will go up there today. Anyways, thelinuxcast.org is where you'll find all that stuff. You can support me on patreon.patreon.com slash thelinuxcast. You can email me at email at thelinuxcast.org. You can, I should say you can email us if you want to do so. The traditional way email is probably the best way to contact us. I do read the emails. I'm just atrocious at answering them. So if you email me and I haven't answered you back, don't take it personally. I don't answer Tyler back if you email me. I mean, but can I know him? So like, it's just, I'm really bad at responding to email. So I apologize for that. You can subscribe to Tyler on YouTube. He does have a YouTube channel. It's just dusty, you know? One day he'll dust that thing off there and come back to it. We hope anyways. But anyways, you can subscribe to him on YouTube at youtube.com slash danielg. He's also on Odyssey Discord and I think that's it. Finally, you can subscribe to thelinuxcast on youtube.youtube.com slash linuxcast. I appreciate everybody who does do that. So thank you so very, very much. And also if you want to find any of this stuff, if you don't want to type in the links or whatever and you just want to go to the website, you can do so. Thelinuxcast.org slash contact is where you find all of this stuff. So head on over there. It's awesome. So that is the contact information, the best one I've ever done. I'm just going to put that out there. So now moving on to the main topics of the show. So as is usual, we each pick three favorite links of news that we can share with you for the week. And we've done so this week as well. And we've done way better this week making things that are more current. These are not three weeks old like the last ones. So as is usual, Tyler goes first. So Tyler, your first one. Mine is going to be Linux on Apple Silicon.  So I'm kind of waiting just to right now, like this kind of update is that the Apple Silicon chips, you can now run obviously Linux on them, but they've added in like very much alpha quality open GL to support.  And I think they talk about GNOME, Plasma. I don't know if they mentioned anything else, but I know those two are mentioned. So you can run those with, you know, hardware acceleration of Vulkan expansion is like on the way they're working on it. But I'm just waiting a little bit longer for this to mature. And I will definitely be giving it a shot on my MacBook. But apparently you can get Quake 3 running at 4K, 60 FPS. I find that more impressive if Quake 3 didn't run on everything. Exactly. But I mean, it's still, it still is neat, just knowing how difficult this kind of stuff is. The only thing that would be less impressive is if they said Doom ran on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, it still is wild, just, I mean, they're not, this is not something that's getting any kind of help from Apple. It's all just a very passionate project. Yeah. Very cool. If you guys watch the, so there's a guy, I think his name is Hector, somebody, I can't remember his last name, I apologize for that. But he livestreams sometimes when he's fixing bugs and coding for this. And he's my hero because he uses so many tabs. It's wonderful. That guy uses tabs like I use workspaces, only it's way, way, I mean, he uses Kate for his IDE. And he has sometimes like four year 50 tabs open in split pane, like each one has tabs. He uses tabs in the terminal. It's just, it's so, like I have no clue what he's doing, but I watch his live streams just because I'm so impressed with his workflow. So yeah, it'd be interesting to see if you do, when you do put this on your MacBook, how that works out for you. Cause I thought, cause you, okay, so this is all your fault, by the way. I don't know if I talked about this before, but I'm in the process of looking for a new laptop. And I've been, I'm always going to buy used. I never buy anything new. And so I decided I was going to just browse eBay.  And I was like, you know, that sounds like a good idea. I did not do it, but I thought about it for longer than I care to admit. But cause I was thinking, I was like, you know what? DaVinci Resolve will work on it. Premiere will work on it. So I could actually edit my videos on a system that actually has good video editors. Like my biggest complaint about Linux has always been the video editors and using a different platform would solve that problem. But I like Linux too much. I just do. So yeah, I'm going to end up getting it XPS probably someday. I haven't really decided yet. I keep waffling. That's all guys. Yeah. Wait, waffling? Waffling, changing my mind. It's a Michigan saying. I can't help it. Anyway, yeah, so I'm, I can close. But if I had pulled the trigger, I probably would have immediately put this on there. I don't think I'd like, I don't think I'd care for macOS. I don't like iOS anymore. Like I tried to go back to iOS for a little while. It did not work out. All right, so my first one. So I'd actually never heard of this company before because I'm not big into security cameras. I don't really, you know, need a security camera. I live in the middle of nowhere. We'll see you coming. Okay. I'm just saying. But anyways, the Ufi is apparently a very big, like brand when it comes to security cameras and their big claim was that they were very secure. And it turns out, not so much. Apparently if you just managed to basically spam a whole bunch of different URLs, you could actually log directly into their cameras. They would bypass the cloud servers, everything. Even if you ran it through HomeKit, which is encrypted, you could still manage to do a drive-by on their cameras and other equipment and basically log into the camera without any credentials or encryption bypass at all. It just was there streaming to everybody, no matter what. And the thing about this is it's like, first of all, not surprising that a internet of things thing has a security vulnerability. They all do, okay? Like they all do. That's not a surprise. What was a surprise was how horrible this company's response was. Basically what they said from what I've read is it's not a bug, it's a feature, apparently. And it's just not has been, and even worse on top of that, it was like the security firm that found this out did the thing that the security firm is supposed to do.  Just like you're supposed to do if you find a bug, you go to the company and say, hey, you guys should fix this before it gets announced so that it can't be exploited. And Eufy was like, no, man, we don't need to do that. It's just not. Well, they also had some pretty crappy marketing because they were heavily implying in their marketing that their security cameras were local, not online in the first place. So like Eufy is kind of, it just seems like a very untrustworthy company. So hopefully nobody around here watching the podcast actually has one because Eufy had do. There's a URL that somebody can just slap into a browser and just see your camera. Yeah, and apparently it's not that hard to guess because they're all similar URLs. So it'd just be a matter of, basically you could make a bash script or whatever to just get it to try a whole bunch of URLs and when it succeeds it would pop up a browser. It would not take that long. You probably could do it on your Mac book, you know. So creepy, man. So like I said, the beginning, it's not surprising that an internet of things thing has a security vulnerability because they all do. None of them are secure in the way you hoped they would be. They all have something goes wrong with them. And even if you manage something locally where you're 100% sure that it's only ever on your enclosed firewall system, there's probably still a way in. And that's the danger of having cameras in your house, okay? Once you take that step, you're inviting, at least in my opinion, you know, problems simply because you add an extra attack vector to your system that isn't going to be as secure as a computer can be. You know, at least with a computer, you have the option to install a simple firewall or you can install a hardware firewall or whatever. And cameras and stuff like that don't necessarily from things that I've read always mesh well with that stuff because they a lot of time, I mean, especially if you buy a camera from a very large company, most of them have like upload to cloud. It's going to be amazing. You can view your camera from anywhere. It doesn't sound like a really good idea to me because if you can access it, probably somebody else can too. So yeah, I would never put cameras in my house. Maybe outside of it, if I was like, Well, I mean, outside makes sense, like totally.  Like I get that. And also like, it's also not just like having video footage of you walking around outside is just different than inside of your own home. Cause like the odds that you forget pants in the outdoors versus indoors are two totally different things. And like, I just don't get why you would really want to have cameras on the inside of your house.  That's something that's been popular for a very long time.  But, you know, that's a very unique situation. I know a lot of people who put cameras all over their house and in weird places, like the kitchen, you know, like, what do you need a camera in the kitchen for? You know, it doesn't make any sense. How else are you supposed to do your cooking show, Matt? Yeah, because that's exactly what I'm I'm I'm the next Gordon Ramsay. I'm just in there just cursing up a storm.   Raw. Damn it. Raw. So bad cameras in the bedroom and bathroom. Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. I'm sure some people will do that. I don't know, like people do that. Like they get those Amazon show things, right? They were supposed to be like for video chats and they put them they use them as alarm clocks next to their bed. And they have cameras on them, you know, like.  I mean, just like it doesn't make it. I don't understand that. I mean, they make they have like a hardware switch that you can close the camera, but you got to remember to do that. You know what I mean?  It's the same thing. It's like the so like the the Brio comes with that little, you know, that little like it's a plastic that you're supposed to be able to put over it so it blocks the Brio. Yeah. Have you ever used that? No, me neither. That's that's right there. That's the point. Well, as far as I know, most most Logitech webcams have lights on them. As far as I know, the Brio does, too, in a way that they're wired that so like the like when they're being used, when the electricity is being ran through them, it runs through the light before it goes to the camera. So no matter what, if the camera is being accessed, that light will be on. So like most Logitech cameras, I don't think it's really that big of a deal.  But they also still come with a plastic clips to put over them, which is like I still like I like that, like even if. Oh, I'm glad it happens, but I'm pretty sure that the weird thing about the Brio is it comes with that that plastic clip, but it almost immediately gets lost. Like, yeah, because it's not connected whatsoever. With the the Avermedia one that I had before this, it had a it had one that was attached that you could rotate into place. That was a nice design still never used it.  You know, if it was pointed somewhere else, then I would worry about it more. But still, I don't know, cameras in your house just unless it's a webcam.  There's bad actors out there.  Easier or harder, I guess, I don't know, to stay secure. Anyways, that's it for that one. Let's move on to the next one, Tyler, your next one. So like XFCE got an update. So, like, no, the year is not 2076. It's it's still 2022 and we're getting new XFCE. I like it's as far as I know, it's not technically released, which is convenient, but it's actually coming. So we actually have some worthwhile updates. They've updated some of the look of things.  It'll pop up a little square with the image preview of what you've got selected, which I think that's really nice. And really, it's just got a whole bunch of updates, which XFCE is definitely deserving of. And I also love how this article starts off like it's opening. It's opening line is pretty good. XFCE is a slow moving, sensible Linux desktop option. Like I just I like how they worded that. Like it very much is a very sensible desktop. Like if you like it day one, odds are five years from whenever you start, it's probably going to be the same, if not slightly better. Like not not a ton, but maybe slightly. Pretty good. All right. So I have a couple things to say. So first, XFCE is one of my favorite desktop environments, maybe even the favorite, but it's never going to be very popular on a lot of distros, especially if you install it yourself. So if you install it like Arch or Fedora or like that on a distro that you already have installed and you just install it from the repost, you get the ugliest default set up in the history of the world. I mean, it is so bad. But it looks like it was it looks like that thing hasn't changed since 1997 when it first came out. It is that bad.  If that's your first impression of it, if they had, if they did a, I mean, the thing is, my XFC is you can make it look however you like. It's like KDE light. You know, it doesn't have quite as many settings, but you can do so much with it. If they just put a little effort into making that default look of XFC better.  Well, I mean, I don't know about that, but it's still more people, less people would turn away from it immediately because of that initial first impression. So that's honestly, that's my biggest problem with XFC, is that initial thing, even though I know how to customize it. Is that that there? I mean, no, your argument still stands. There's there's no real reason that they can't just whip together a real nice thing for it. Like when you can go to Unix for to find like pictures of people using XFC and you're like, and if you put it right side by side, they're like default desktop. You're like, what the hell happened when y'all are like, this is the one that we want to represent the like XFC at its finest. Like, yeah, because some 12 like some 12 year old on Unix porn will do like two hours worth of work and make XFC look fantastic. And that's the thing is like XFC is actually one of the desktop environments that it's easy to transfer from computer to computer because you can just transfer the files. Right. You can transfer the it has configuration files and they could just steal someone's off Unix porn. You won't even take them any time. All they'd have to do is say, hey, we're going to use this as the default XFC thing. I'm sure whoever's rice they were using will be like, that's awesome.  You know, I'll even maintain it for you. You know, but no. Anyways, yeah, that's the XFC. I'm glad that it's still slowly getting run because there was there was some rumors that I think maybe I'm making this up in my head, but I'm pretty sure that I read that the the main guy there decided he was going to go start working at elementary OS. Maybe he was just considering it. I don't know. I just have a vague memory of that happening. Maybe last year or something.  You're never going to get a lot of, you know, like grand huge features in XFC, and that's why a lot of people like it. So the person in the chat who's asking for my bark and fig, all my files are in the my Git lab. The link is in the video description. You can find those there. It's I three. It's good. Anyways, and it is new. I made a video about it yesterday. Anyways, that's that. So I'm moving on to the next one. This is the actually the topic that I was looking forward to most this week, because I love bitching about Mozilla. So OK, hold on. I want to have to stop here for a second, because you about you. You worried me there for a second, because I genuinely was scared that you were about to say, because I love talking about the metaverse. No, not at all. Even a little bit.  And I think I think everyone outside of the developers who develop the metaverse think that it's stupid. I was talking to someone who said the other day that disagreed with me that said that the metaverse has potential. And I was just like, I just looked at them funny. Like, no, it doesn't. I mean, well, hold on. Just to like, like just to be the devil's advocate here. I mean, like he kind of does have a point because like. But that doesn't mean the point is very good, because that's equivalent to saying, well, there's plenty of games that have a good shot of making money. Like, I mean, that's effectively what he's saying. Yeah, all right. Yeah. So we'll. I'll get to the news. Let's go to the article. Yeah, this is good. So Mozilla has been doing stuff in the metaverse for a little while. It's metaverse space, Mozilla spaces or something like that. But recently, they decided that they're going to buy a company called Active Replica, which is a Vancouver based startup that is developing a web based metaverse. And they it doesn't say how much they spent on this company. But I would expect it to be some large amount of money. Yeah, I hope not. I hope they got it for cents on the dollar. It doesn't say in this article how much as far as I can tell how much they spent on it. But I would guess that it was, you know, in the millions of dollars. I mean, you're not going to buy something like this for 10 grand. You know, so it's going to be a lot of money. All right. So. Honestly, I mean, I'd only give them two for it. I wouldn't. I. I say this knowing that that company probably employs some people and, you know, I'm all for giving developers jobs and stuff like that.  I don't even know what it was. As I know, all I know is that it has to do with developing a web based metaverse. And you just stopped me right there. But that's not even the bad part. The bad part is that Mozilla continues to do everything in its power to do everything that it shouldn't. We've talked about this before. Really, what they need to do always, they need to focus on making a good browser. That's what they need to focus on doing. They don't need to focus on making a metaverse or making a VPN or. Well, wait, Matt, wait, Matt, let's give them credit. This acquisition makes 100 percent sense.  Like that's that's my biggest issue that that was exactly my argument to the guy who said that the metaverse makes sense is like the metaverse is a thing that forgets that the real world exists.  It's called gaming. Tyler, you like to use VR. It's really good for gaming, right? And if a big company that's not Facebook ever gets into it, like Apple or basically just Apple, I would say gets into it and is competitive at a lower price points. Well, I have like Facebook headsets and most people have them just because they're so cheap. The thing is that you want someone else to come in. If Apple were to get into VR, just VR, and I'm talking about AR, I'll talk about that in a second. If they were to get into VR, their stuff would not be cheap. But what they would do is they'd spawn a whole bunch of people to start working on it. You know, other small companies and, you know, probably mostly, you know, Asian companies that we started getting into VR and stuff like that, because they'd see a market for it. Because once Apple gets into a market, there is a market for it. Right now, as of right now, it's just meta. And while there is a market for it, it's very small. Once Apple gets into it, it would be very big. But the thing that the argument is, is that it's good for gaming. It's not good. Reality exists like people in like when you want. All right. So the whole the whole idea from the meta versus from what I from what I can tell is to allow people to meet in a virtual space. We have that. It's called Zoom. OK, and basically what they're doing from what I've seen so far is they're taking Zoom and basically replacing actual images of and videos of people with cartoon avatars with no legs. Although, you know, you want to write the avatars. A few years ago, Apple introduced something on the iPhone called what the hell is their little animated emojis called? Memojis, they called them Memojis, right? And they were cool for like five seconds. Everybody made one when they had an iPhone. You know, you got on there and maybe you sent somebody a text message because you could record yourself as a Memoji and it would talk and stuff. And there like to be a voice there. It was it was cool. The first time nobody ever did it again.  You wouldn't do it in a meeting. Like if you if you work a job where you take meetings and you work from home, you don't want to be a Memoji, you know, you don't want. You don't want to be a cartoon avatar and look at a cartoon avatar of your boss as someone who takes these meetings all the time for my job. One of the things that I rely on, even though I work remotely, is body language of people on camera. They're facial expressions and you don't I mean, maybe someday VR will get to the point where it can map facial expressions and put them top. But then you even if it gets that good, the question then becomes why we had that? It was a webcam. Yeah, we've had it since the nineties. You know, I think kind of like the biggest issue with the whole like idea of the metaverse and like us connecting in this way is. None of it's none of it adds anything useful, like at all. And you don't even really have to go down into like. You know, will it work? Or I mean, like justifying how how like we're going to use it and everything. Just think about it like this. Are we ever going to get a point get to a point where if you're doing like a serious business meeting and like there's the potential for like layoffs on the table, like it's just a very serious business meeting.  Right. And it's a good point. Like these meetings are usually serious business meetings. And even like the part where you're even in like brainstorming meetings where you treat like maybe it's more of a frivolous, you know, happy atmosphere or something like that. I don't know. You still don't want to look at a cartoon while talking to your colleagues. It's just not like if webcams didn't exist, then this would maybe be OK because it would provide you with being able to see something. But webcams exists, you know, and or it adds a 3D aspect to it. But the thing about VR and this is the argument that I made with the guy on Mastodon, I think was on Mastodon. Was that the thing that makes the thing that is interesting about this technology really isn't VR itself.  It doesn't figure it that the physical world exists. And AR is not here yet. Like we sure we can hold up an iPad and it will measure things. And it'll do simple stuff.  You really like AR, we need the glasses or contacts for it to like really be a thing.   Look, it's simple, minor brain surgery. Like we got this, man. I put rockets. He's like, I put rockets in space. I can definitely do this, you know, definitely put like thousands of wires on your brain. It's cool. Don't worry about it. I was reading about that. And like the there it seems like their biggest hurdle outside of actually making it work is figuring out how they're going to charge it. And right now, their idea is that it's wirelessly charged so that once a day you have to go stand on a wireless wire charge, wireless charger to charge your chip. Like it's the best thing ever.   And like, oh, it's time to go wirelessly charged. You have to go stand on it for a little while or either that or put it up against your head. I'm sorry, but that's just like the dumbest thing ever. Like just just imagine, like. Like I I love in science fiction movies, like the idea of us having to like like becoming more technological and like having to charge always means we don't sleep. But in our dumb ass reality, we're going to we're going to need eight hours of sleep and at some point we're going to need like four hours of charging throughout the day. You just imagine this because one thing we all know about batteries is that eventually they won't take a charge anymore. So when you need a new battery, oh, brain surgery again. Again, just some minor brain surgery, nothing to be worried about. All right, either either that or there's going to be a cord permanently attached to your ear that goes on to a battery and a fanny pack. Dude, it's not a fanny pack. It's a nurse. OK. Oh, that's so good. So I just imagine somebody putting a like a triple a battery in their ear. Well, I do want to go ahead and say when it comes to like VR and stuff, I think we will have like we will definitely push towards AR. And like, I think VR is not something that's like just a fad and it's going to go away. But I think kind of the thing that a lot of people don't realize when it comes to metaverses and that kind of shit is I think a lot of the people investing in those kind of ideas don't have VR headsets or at the very least haven't had them for very long at all, because one of the things that's really good about VR is being able to go into the virtual like game worlds that you've really liked for a long time and being able to be like completely immersed in that world. Gaming makes 100 percent sense when it comes to VR. It it's the it's the hyper realism and the like the being there. Being the character that you're playing. Right. Exactly. Movies make a good. A good. Yeah. A lot of sense for VR because you could take. You could be like even if you're just, you know, watching it from the world that, you know, it's set and it makes sense because you can maybe you can't interact with stuff, but you can see it in a more immersive experience. And it opens up the opportunity for interactive storytelling. If it's not a video game, it's just more like you can interact with the characters or maybe it's like a choose your own adventure kind of thing. You know, it makes sense for that kind of it does not make sense when it comes to the metaverse because what they're talking about is basically allowing you to have meetings with South Park characters. You know, yeah. Well, I mean, even more than that, it's it they even the more like fun ones, all they focus on is social interaction. And it's like we have plenty of options. We have like, OK, so if the metaverse was ready two years ago when we were all stuck inside and nobody could meet in person, it would have made sense. OK, like nobody could go to bars. Nobody could go to meetings like this could be fun. And maybe you could game of fire or something like that. You could make it something entertaining. But yes, covid's still around, but the world is basically mostly open now. And you can go to meetings, you can go to the bar again. And there is no implementation of VR that in the metaverse that will ever take the awesomeness that is actually smelling grass and touching people. Maybe some with permission because that is very, very, you know, important.    Oh, anyways, zero Linux. Thanks for the super chat. Awesome. When a manager is not awesome. There's my one line there. It's it's it's OK. I don't know. I talked about a little bit earlier. I'm not a big fan of Lua. Anyways, that's it. That's it for the metaverse. Well, you know, actually, before we move on, we talked we bitched about the metaverse for a while. And the thing we kind of missed out on and the point that I actually wanted to get to was that Mozilla is paying money and investing money in the metaverse. And I did some someone will make Firefox so much better, so much better. But the thing is, like somebody on on Macedon told me like, well, if the metaverse is going to exist, isn't it better that there is at least a company that's interested in open source having a role in it? You know, and I suppose you could argue that it's good for a company that is interested in open source to create their own metaverse so that Facebook's not the only one if it does take off. But I don't think it's going to take off. I mean, I've been wrong before. But I don't think I'm wrong this time. I don't think that there I've talked to many, many people about the metaverse on social media and my family, you know, in real life, you know. And most of them don't know what it is. And the people who do know what it is think it's the stupidest idea ever. Now, obviously, there are exceptions. There are people who say, oh, yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, it sounds good. But for the most part. Yeah, but you don't know those people. Like that's the problem.  Like, I definitely hear people who are like, I mean, there's a chance. Like, I mean, I'm not really sure. The people who thinks that it's going to be really cool are the people who would use it exactly one time like an emoji and then realize, yeah, it turns out not being in the physical world and interacting with people not as good as being in the physical world, interacting with people. You know, the see the thing, the idea, I think they have behind and I'm still ignoring Mozilla here for a second. But the idea I think that they had behind them, the metaverse is that by cartoonizing everything, basically making everything an avatar removes the honoris, you know, horribleness that is meetings. But that's being in person or even being on a webcam with someone isn't what makes a meeting bad. What makes a meeting bad is that it's a meeting, you know what I mean? Yeah, you have to remember, it's just that simple fact.  So it doesn't like you said earlier, it doesn't solve any problems. But the thing is like Mozilla, all right, open letter time to Mozilla.   Sincerely, everyone, like we know that you have this giant spigot of money that comes from Google every few years. Eventually, that's going to dry up. Eventually, Google like, maybe we don't want to send them four hundred million dollars every year or whatever it is. Also, you know, maybe a smart business tactic might be to like reinvest in the one thing that makes like keeps your company afloat and like makes you competitive.  Yeah, like Firefox and, you know, they're doing some wonderful things with with Thunderbird and they're going to do a like a redesign of it. You know, no one really uses it, man. Come on. Like the next needs a good. Yes, there's a lot of people that use it, but compared to like those things. But at least it makes sense because it exists and people do use it and there's a market for it and and, you know, people use email clients.  OK, I'm just going to stop this. But I also don't think that most people are complaining about Thunderbird. However, I'm pretty sure everyone can think of a couple, you know, things that Firefox could do to improve its current stand. Like so. They could take all the money and that they're spending on the metaverse and put into advertising. You know, it would have like, look, if you're just going to burn money like burn it on something good, not. Some of the some of I mean, all actually there's there's technological problems with Firefox. But one of the biggest issues that they have is that most people don't even know that exists anymore. Well, I was talking to somebody like, oh, Firefox, is that still a thing? Like is that still around? It'd be like if Netscape Navigator was still around and nobody knew it. You know, technically, that's Firefox. It still exists. A lot of people use it. Millions of people use it.   When you open up a browser, you assume that it's Chrome, you know. Edge is kind of nudged its way in there because you can't uninstall it from Windows, you know, unless you like blow up your computer or something, I guess, I don't know. But, you know, people use Chrome. I mean, that's the thing that they use. And and because it's default, they assume that that's the only option. So if they wanted to spend some money on something that may or may not work, so advertising may, you know, be a good idea. OK. Moving on to the next one, we got this.   Like I use Firefox as my daily driver, but sometimes I wish it didn't. This just makes me mad. All right, Tyler, your next one. So Proton Experimental has been upgraded to fix EA.  And particularly just on Linux in general. I mean, it's the articles framed like with it, mentioning the Steam Deck and stuff. But I mean, it's a Linux issue. That's not a Linux issue. It's EA causing Linux to have an issue, which is no surprise. Because if you're unfamiliar with gaming and kind of out of the loop, let me go ahead and let you know.  And also, by the way, I also hate you and will make your life a living hill. Please come again next year to buy our next overpriced game. See you then. Man, in 2023, man. EA is just there. I genuinely don't understand how there's so many game publishers that everyone hates like very openly has no respect for and and also like genuinely wishes that they would just stop existing.  But anyway, that's completely off the topic. So I'm like, you know, Valve's done a good job. They've they fixed EA causing issues where they I guess they had a new desktop like launcher or something. But some of their games and stuff was just failing to launch and just not working. So because they they moved to they moved to something called EA desktop because they abandoned origin. Yeah. And I don't know if that like I'm going to assume that's like supposed to be their new launcher. Or I don't know if it's like just supposed to like fill the holes that were like left by origin and it's not actually like a launcher. But I think it's a launch, but I'm not actually sure.  Like, can we not do that anymore?  OK.  And I think they did it because they wanted to have their own store or they wanted to control DRM or something like that. But it's just it's a horrible consumer experience and nobody likes the launcher. Except like that's why I don't get why like so many publishers keep doing it. It's like there's there's like no one, no one in the community that is happy with your launcher ever.  Like, that's it. So last year, the theme was having a sale on the EAPASS. And some of my favorite games of all time are games like I like the Sims 4. I like back in the day before Cities Skylines was the thing I like the Sim City, the early Sim City games. Anyways, they totally have that whole thing up. And, you know, the battlefront games are really, really good, even though I'm horrible at them. And the EAPASS has all those games. And I was like, hey, you want to it was like ten dollars for a whole year. And I was like, cool, I have ten dollars. Even if half the games don't work on Linux, there's still half that do, you know. And this was a year ago. So Proton, the Steam Deck wasn't out quite yet. Maybe it was even two years ago. And so Proton wasn't quite where it is right now. And so I, you know, I paid the ten dollars. And the first thing it popped up was like, hey, you got to install origin on Linux. I was like, you know what, shoot me now. So bad. All right. Moving on to the last one of the day. This is mine. And yeah, this is the normally I avoid political topics on the podcast, but we're going to talk about this for a little while, especially considering your recent switch into the Apple ecosystem. So Apple, in their usual fashion, has kowtowed to China. For those of you guys who don't know and don't pay attention to the news, China has, for basically since the beginning of the pandemic, continue to lock down periodically because of covid. When they discover covid somewhere, they lock down an entire neighborhoods, entire buildings, stuff like that. So it's been a pain in the rear end for, like, all their people.  And they were using their Apple iPhones because the iPhone is still really big in China, even though Android is bigger. They were using the AirDrop functionality, which is device to device and doesn't ever interact with the server to send important details about meetups and protests and stuff like that. And Apple decided that they were going to or China is, I guess, contacted Apple and said, hey, we don't like this, make it harder. So that's what they did. They made it harder. They made it so that you had to basically it says AirDrop, which allows users to share content between Apple devices has become important. The feature relies on wireless connections. That's just the key points there. What they turned they made it so that they had to reconnect every like five, 10 minutes or something like that. Anyways, they made it more onerous than or actually do. And the thing is like, oh, here's what it is. Under the update, iPhones can now only set their air drop to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes before switching off. The other settings allow for file sharing between contacts only are receiving off. And the thing is like Apple says they claim that this is going to be a feature that is rolling out to everyone next year. But they just did it in China during the protests. So they know everybody knows that they did it because China asked them to do it. And obviously, this isn't the first time that China has. Or not the first time Apple has. Made concessions to China to basically they made it. So all iCloud storage for citizens in China is stored in China and is susceptible to all their laws there. So they've done several things like that. So this is not a surprise to anybody, but it's still kind of a shitty move. Yeah. No, go, Apple. Good job, guys. I'm just I'm just not surprised by this kind of stuff. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why, but people seem to get very surprised when companies who operate in China do bow down to China. It's like, I don't agree with it. I think, like, look, if you have to just do whatever China tells you to, and it's normally not in the best interest of the people who operate in China, it's normally not in the best interest of like the people you sell your products to. You probably shouldn't be doing like business there. But I don't want people like this is surprising. But there's two billion people there and they all want to buy your products and they have money and money is good. Really, whether you agree with it or disagree with it, like, I don't think that's like really my point. Like my point is just there's so many people who act like this kind of stuff is surprising. It's like, no, like they've been operating in China and I think we all know just how questionable Apple products like in their treatment of the people who make them, how questionable that is. Well, I mean, the real problem here isn't that they do it in China because all the companies have to do it in China. If you wanted to do business in China, you follow the rules. That's just kind of the way things go. Otherwise, they won't let you do business in China. But the thing is is that if Apple's willing to do this for China, they're obviously going to be willing to do it for other countries as well. And they have the capabilities of doing it. And the bigger point here is that it undermines their whole claim of privacy first. Like everything done on the device. There's, you know, end in encryption. Nobody has access to your stuff. We're way better than Android on this stuff. You know, it's, you can watch a Apple Kino and the thing that they say the most through the whole thing is safe and secure over and over and over and over again. This doesn't necessarily make it look like everything safe and secure when you do this kind of stuff. And it just, they always have had this reputation of being more secure than Google and stuff like that. And less interested in selling your data. And while maybe they are less interested in selling your data because they're not an, well, I mean, they are an advertising company, but not as big as Google. You know, it's still, it tarnishes that reputation when they do stuff like this over and over and over again. So, yeah. But- And for my own sake, since I'm using Apple now, I hope they'll actually try and keep up that reputation and not just tarnish it, like it'd be nice. Well, we'll see. Once you're in, man, you don't leave. Well, yeah, I mean, I've left before, but trust me when I say, like I know just how long it takes to get out of the ecosystem. Like once you're in it, man, it's hard. It's hard to leave. Like them walls, man, they're just so high around the garden. And they're slippery and they've got barbed wire at the top. Yeah, yeah. And then there's like machine gunners at the top. Like it's wild, you know, so it takes a lot of time. Oh, whoops, dropping stuff. But yeah, takes a lot of time. I don't want to drop your Apple stuff. OK, all right, moving on to the last section of the show. We're done with the news. That is the news. We're moving on to the last section. The last section is creatively named thingies of the week. Now, we could have called this section anything, of course. We could have been very creative and stole something from other shows that do similar things at the end of their show, like tips of the week or tricks of the week or apps of the week. But no, we did not do that. Instead, we called them thingies of the week because, well, we're 14-year-old boys. And it sounded cool. Anyways, Tyler, you're thingie of the week. Mine is kind of going to be an interesting one to talk about. So it's called Angel Studios. And it's kind of like a TV network app, but it's very interesting. The reason I wanted to talk about it and kind of show it off is it's not really necessarily about the content that you would use it for. They have apps for Android, iOS. And I'm pretty sure all of the Fire TV sticks and all that stuff. But it's essentially a Christian network, but it's all crowdfunded. And they do very, very high production value, like TV shows and movies. And it's all crowd-sourced, crowdfunded. And they have just a very interesting way of doing the streaming. Like it's all hosted and streamed through them. And it's all supported by people who watch. So you can buy different packages. And you'll pay for the streaming costs for so many different people. And when you do that, every time you watch an episode, if you haven't paid or whatever for it, you get a little message telling you what username paid for you to be able to watch that episode. And you can send them a thank you note. And it's such a cool concept for funding something like just a crowdfunded entertainment program network. It's very interesting. So I just wanted to talk about that because I haven't seen anything else really quite like it. So it's very interesting. Yeah, it's really cool. I'll have to give that a look because it does sound very interesting. All right, so mine is also entertainment-based. Mine is called Calibre. And it's been around for a very long time. The UI is horrible. I'm just going to put that right up front. It's not very, the UI is not very good at all. But are we talking worse than Audacity? Probably on a similar level. The icons are really big. They don't look very modern. There's buttons in weird places and hidden kind of. So if you want to get to the jobs, it's in the lower right-hand corner. But you don't see it very good. So whatever. Anyway, it's basically what Calibre is, is a ebook library manager. And it will do other things other than ebooks as well. If you get it into fan fiction or any kind of stuff like that. It basically manages your library. It's not a reader, although I think it probably does that. But basically what it does is it manages your ebooks. And at least in theory, it allows you to send your ebooks to ebook devices if they have that capability. And I recently got a Kindle because they basically give them away on Black Friday. So I was like, might as well. If you're going to just give me one, I'll take it. And I got it. And I'm a big reader. I read a lot. Even outside of my job, I read books and fan fiction and stuff like that all the time.  So I did. And the thing is, I don't want to give Amazon all my money to buy books. So I get my books from other places that are cheaper. And to this day and age, there's no easy way to transfer books to the Kindle outside of emailing them. Like literally that's how they do it. Like they give you an email address and you can send your books to the device through email. It's like, what is this? The 1990s? It's so silly. But Calibre has this functionality built in where you can just hit send. You enter your email of your device and the email that you want to send from. And as long as it works, it doesn't work very well with Gmail. But that's another story. But you can hit this button after you set it up and it will just send the book you want to your device to your account on thing. And it's really good. Also, if you are a fastidiously organized person, it's a great way to organize your e-books and add metadata and stuff like that from the internet. It's really good. I really, really wish that it worked with movies and TV shows as well, because that'd be so cool. I don't want to send movies or TV shows to my Kindle. That's not what I'm talking about. More, if Calibre allowed me to organize, because my movie and TV show collection is just, it's not pretty. Like they're in folders all over the place. Like it downloaded all six seasons of Lucifer recently. And while they are separated by seasons, they have the traditional naming scheme of 80 means of, getting things. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know what you're talking about. Like, I don't know anything about that, but. So the naming scheme. I mean, it sounds familiar. The naming scheme is not very good. So, yeah, I wish you'd do that, but it doesn't. It's just eBooks as far as I know, but it's still, it's really, really good. And obviously, free and open source and available. I believe it's even on Windows and Mac if you wanted to give it a try. So yeah, Calibre, that's it for the podcast. If you watch, or if you want to watch this live, we record live every Friday between 3 p.m. Eastern time or so and around 4.30, 4.45 or so, depending on how long we go. Today, we're a little bit over an hour. So we usually record for about an hour. You can find, you can obviously come watch us live at youtube.com slash linuxcast. So hit the subscribe button and the bell notification to make sure you don't miss an episode and all the other videos that I do because I do other videos as well. Not nearly as many as I used to. I've been taking way more days off lately because of stuff. So hopefully in the new year that will get back to normal, but anyways, youtube.com slash linuxcast before I go, I should take one thing. Why is it that at the end of the show, every week I forget how to talk? Like, it's really bad. Anyways, before I go, I should take a moment to thank my current patrons. That was better. Just go slower and enunciate your words, Matt. You know how to do this. Anyways, thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube.  I just would not be where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much. I truly do appreciate it. If you'd like to support me, you can do so at patreon.com slash linuxcast. Links for the YouTube and the liberapay are in the video description. Thanks everybody for watching. We'll see you next week.


It's like awesome. It's quite a production. Yeah, yeah. So you and I met about four years ago for the first time at a cafe in New York.  You've been involved in Khan Academy in education. And had just written this piece for Hardware Business Review about the economies of unscale. And we had this whole conversation about unscaling and what that meant. And I thought it was fascinating enough to go and write pieces in Newsweek and then my column that I, and we kept talking about that over time. And I remember you said at some point, we should write a book about that. And I actually, I didn't think you were serious. But then again, I didn't know you well enough to know you don't say anything like that or you're serious. And this turned into a book that's coming out in March, called Unscaled. And the book takes you on a bit of a journey of describing how over the 20th century, we invented a bunch of technologies at the beginning of the 20th century that set up 100 years of scaling up, that economies of scale were the way to make a great business. So we built bigger hospitals. We built bigger companies. We built bigger governments. And your argument was that we're creating now this new burst of technologies that are taking that apart. So I think a great place to start is to have you explain a little bit more about what unscaling is and why that's been an important thing for you to use in your investing life. So I've been investing for about 15 years. When I first got into the venture business at the beginning of the century, a lot of software that we would fund was essentially in service of helping big companies become more efficient. The last century has been all about mass production, as Kevin was saying, as you're saying. And software was all about how do you make them more efficient? How do you get basic education, health care, finance, mobile phones into everybody's hands? It was all about building an egalitarian society. And no one dared to think about, well, how do you rethink education or how do you rethink health care or how do you rethink finance back then? Because these large companies had been around for decades and often centuries. And they had this thing called the economies of scale. 2011, I ended up moving to Silicon Valley to build our firm's business in the valley. And the big observation I made was entrepreneurs had just all of a sudden become a lot more audacious. It really was about how do you rethink education to teach social-emotional learning? And how do you really think about democratizing payments so everybody's got access to that? So all of a sudden, we were just sort of, how do you build an insurance company? Elon was building a car company. So I think that shift is what got us thinking about what led to this book. And the observation was not only are these entrepreneurs becoming audacious, they're actually succeeding pretty aggressively in taking share from these large companies. And that core advantage at level that playing field is what I call economies of unscale. And I think there's three specific things that go into this leveling of the playing field that has happened. One is, scale has gone from being a mode for large companies to essentially becoming a rentable utility. So every layer of, when you think about when you start a business, whether you need manufacturing, you need computing, you need distribution, you need access to consumers, for every one of those layers, every one of those capabilities, there's a platform you can use. And so all of a sudden, the founders could just focus on building the best products. And they could just rent all these other capabilities and be hyper-focused product teams essentially that were building the next generation companies. And I think the last thing that has led to this economies of unscale has been machine learning and AI. It really has been happening over the last 10 years. And it gives this constant feedback and iteration capability to customers, for founders to serve their customers that just leaves the incumbents in the dust. So as a result, what you have now is the entire economy is turning upside down on its head, and by industry, everything is being rewritten from the old incumbency. Yeah, and well, so let's talk about AI as a factor here for a second, because as someone who's written about technology history over the years, written books about that, this was an aspect of it that I thought was particularly interesting. We went back and we were saying that in the early 20th century, there was this sort of magic technology called electricity, which ended up flowing into everything that ended up getting created. And that was part of what made scale possible and all these technologies have followed. Your argument is that AI is today's electricity. Yeah, and I'm not the only one that has said that. But I think when you think about what has happened in the last decade, all the data that's being generated through our mobile phones and all the sensors that are getting connected in the physical world and so on, it has activated our ability to do AI. I mean, the core algorithms and the core ideas around AI have been around for decades. We just didn't have the data. And today, the large platform companies are all investing heavily in AI. And there's this whole dream about creating generalized AI that all of a sudden is going to be all things for all people and solve all kinds of problems. I think we're probably three, four, five decades away from that actually becoming a reality. But around small data sets, whether it's data sets around health care, specifically in a disease category, or whether it's data sets around how people learn on the web, AI and machine learning algorithms can help build expert systems that can build differentiated products. That is happening, and that is hyper-accelerating. I think that's been a core advantage that will continue to happen. I think in terms of generalized AI, there's been a lot that's been written about how scary that is. I'm actually glad that it's as far away as it is, because I think as an industry, we need to mature in how we think about using it as well. And over the next couple of decades, if we can do a good job of augmenting our professionals, whether it's our physicians, or our teachers, or our lawyers, who are all resource constrained and helping them do their job better, that's a great function for AI. And that's really where I think it's going to lead to meaningful value creation. So in the book, we not only are talking about this general idea, this general theory of on-scaling and all that, but actually go into sector by sector, how that's going to play out, how do you rethink health care, how do you rethink the finance industry, all those things. You're clearly using this as a lens as an investor, as a venture capitalist. Can you talk about that and how that informs your thinking? I think over the last six or seven years, most of my focus has been on doing two things. One is fine entrepreneurs that are trying to level the playing field for startups, for small businesses. And that's an example of that would be Stripe, which is in payments. I'm sure some of you are building on top of that as a payments platform. We've got this fantastic company called Gusto that is allowing small businesses have the same HR capabilities and sort of a people platform that large companies can invest in through large HR departments, on and on and on. We've really gone and said, how do we level the playing field around all these capabilities that small companies don't have the resources, both capital and mind share to be able to do. And the second has been entrepreneurs that are taking advantage of these kinds of platforms and reimagining fundamentally what the new product should be in these industries. So for example, we have this incredible founder we teamed up with to start this company called Livongo, which is focused on chronic care management. We've got 30 million people in the United States that have diabetes. There's 150 million in India. There's overall hundreds of millions of people with diabetes, about half a billion, around the globe. And diabetes is a problem that's really easy to manage if you actually think about it. It's just our health care system has been set up to handle it. And this founder came, took advantage of what we call unscaling. And he's all of a sudden got tens of thousands of people that manage their disease this way within a couple of years. And we think that can have a real impact. So it has been in hindsight, it has been the sort of the foundational lens that I've used to invest. Yeah, well, you know, I'm sure probably a lot of people in the audience know or have touched Khan Academy, right? And that's not a company, but yet again, it's a, I mean, it was a really cool example of unscaling education using and using AI. So can you describe that a little bit? From your eyes. Yeah, I'm sure a lot of you have heard Sal's story. It was, Sal was actually a college friend of mine, a longtime friend, and he was making these YouTube videos to teach his needs in math.  And all of a sudden, this is a site that took off and to that there's over 100 million people that come to Khan Academy to learn different pieces of the curricula, whether it's mathematics or history and science and what have you. And I think that kind of example has sort of happened in pretty much every industry imaginable. And that's been, you know, all driven by taking advantage of these platforms. And, you know, we think it's only the beginning. I think it's gonna continue on for the next two decades. Yeah. Maybe one thing to talk about a little bit before we go into the next thing, that is in terms of this idea about renting platforms. Yeah. And that was such a turning point in the conversation about how to describe what we're describing. Just talk a little bit about that, what that really means and why that's so important. Look, the hallmark of great companies is their ability to focus. And if you take great founders and you say, not only are you already great at focusing and building fantastic products, you don't have to worry about anything else. You don't have to worry about how to clear the payroll department, you don't have to worry about how to figure out manufacturing. You don't have to worry about whether this is a product that's going to apply to 10 customers or 10 million customers. Just you want to solve a problem, you know, go rent the core platforms and start. And I think that has been liberating for founders because they get to do what they're great at, which is work on the problem that captivated them as opposed to necessarily dealing with the complexities of building a company. And I think that has been a core differentiator for entrepreneurs in this generation. You know, if you look at Airbnb and look at some of these companies and how fast they've scaled, it's mind boggling. But I think this is the reason. Yeah. Well, sir, you're working on something new, just basically taking that idea and applying it yourself. Can you describe that? Yeah, one of the areas that hasn't taken advantage of economies of unscale has largely been healthcare. In fact, as I've walked around Slush, I've talked to a lot of people here and it looks like even here in Finland, there's a talk of privatization of healthcare. So I do think this is a phenomenon that'll happen. In the US especially, where 20% of the GDP is healthcare cost, and we've spent billions of dollars over the last 15 years trying to digitize the healthcare system, there's massive amounts of technical debt. It hasn't been built with the same kind of open platforms as other industries have been made. And to the point where it's on the verge of bankruptcy. And I think one of the things that's captivating us is how do we use technology to actually make it a leverage point in changing the cost structure of the healthcare delivery system in the US. And so that's where we have started a new company and we're working with a few health systems. I mean, another area that I'm quite interested in right now is around blockchain.  And I think that's an important area too because in the world of level playing field, while these platforms that have been created, Facebook and Apple and Google and others for the last 15 years, while they've leveled the playing field, I think we're sort of going in the other direction almost, where there's so much concentration of power with these companies. And we think that decentralization of the internet is an important theme. So we are meeting with lots of founders that are starting to think about, how do you build core internet infrastructure that's decentralized so that there's true level playing field for businesses that start in the next generation. So those are the two areas I've spent all my time thinking about this year. Well, so you brought that up.  So what's the danger there? What's the problem you see and what's the solution? Yeah, we're sort of in an interesting spot. I think everybody here has seen what's happened with Facebook and the elections and the open internet. And the fact that our society really isn't designed for an open internet system given the biases and discrimination that we actively try to subside. And I think you've also seen today as companies come in and talk to us, one of the questions you're always worried about is is Amazon working on this? So all of a sudden you've got these platforms that are with tremendous power in terms of A, how and what kinds of companies can proliferate on top of them and then B, if those companies have interesting markets, will these classrooms get into themselves? So there's monopolistic implications. And sort of having a framework for how to think about that and how to manage that is going to be really important. Because all the talk in DC right now is about, especially with this whole populist movement that we've been going through, has been all about these technology platforms and their role going forward. And so what you don't want is government coming in and regulating, because that never helps. If you go back 100 years and when the government regulated all the electric utilities, look what happened. We created climate change. I mean, that completely destroyed that sector's ability to innovate. And I think if the same happens here, it will cause another set of problems. I am very concerned about how do we self-regulate, how do we implement algorithmic accountability and how AI is being used by these platforms and also by emerging companies so that we're not going down this path of regulation. And we're not creating monopolies that are making the level playing field go away. Something that we worked so hard to create. So you brought up climate change. Let's go there for a second. Because one of the sectors we address in the book is energy, which is, generally speaking, immune to the powers of technology to really change the way we're dealing with that. But you're making the argument that unscaling actually will be able to have an impact on the energy industry. And we can see a very different energy future because of it. Can you describe that? Yeah, I think a lot of technology has been created over the last decade in the what was called the clean tech sector, with solar power and smart grid technologies and a bunch of other solutions. And I think the idea that you can now put a power plant on top of your roof and you can use it to also charge your vehicle. So all of a sudden, transportation is actually an app on top of your power plant. I think that's an interesting way to sort of unscale from building these large power plants and the sort of mass transportation. Just since I do think this sector is poised for unscaling, regulation gets in the way. Utilities aren't set up to be able to do this. They're not set up to embrace these kinds of new technologies that create issues around reliability and resiliency in the grid. So there's problems to solve. But I do think over the next decade, that is a sector that will tremendously change. It has to. It has to for our planet's sake. Now, what's happening also is part of an explanation for there's disruption around the world, right? There's political disruption. There's there's a lot of unease in a sense. And you think it's in part because of because unscaling is driving so much change. And is there is there an aspect of that that can actually derail or stop this? Yeah, I mean, again, to me, the more we make decisions in software, you know, the role of governing isn't just by being. I'm just going to give the US example for a second. It isn't just being done in DC. It's being done in these technology platforms, right?  So and how do we know the right thing is being done or not? Now, these companies are starting to address this. It's not that they were ill intentioned. So, you know, the idea of an open Internet is a very seductive one. And I think we're just seeing that, you know, it's got a set of issues that you have to then solve by leveraging AI and sort of sort of these principles of transparency. But I think that we just have to see that maturation through and how we use these platforms, how we actually exist online as a society.  And I do think these companies are well intentioned to solve, but it's going to take some time. I think it's, we're definitely in the middle of that maturation process. Now, the, this previous couple of generations of technology when those things have, you know, have blossomed, Silicon Valley, where you're based, has captured a great deal of the value of all of that. Do you think as this next generation and AI and everything's mature, is it going to be Silicon Valley again that takes all of that? Yeah, and one of the reasons I'm tears is to just understand what's happening here in Europe. And, you know, when I think about the fact that all the tools are available to everybody across the world, the type of entrepreneur that goes and disrupts and becomes successful at the next problem is the entrepreneur that has empathy for that problem. I call it the empathetic entrepreneur. And when you think about it, you know, for Sal sitting in Silicon Valley and creating videos for his niece, which was, happened to be a global problem, made sense. For Mark sitting in Silicon Valley and sharing photos and that becoming Facebook made sense. But I don't think somebody there is going to figure out how to finish healthcare system should evolve. I think it's going to be somebody here who figures that and it's going to be the same in every country as through these industries on scale in different parts of the world. So I'm a big believer that while the low-hanging fruit, you know, has been picked off by Silicon Valley over the first decade of this cycle, which to me is another couple of decades, I think this is only going to progress and this is going to be a much more of a global opportunity. And we think about that for our own business thing, but we can only be investing in Silicon Valley either. And as I mentioned, that's why I'm here to understand how and when do we prepare ourselves to take advantage of that opportunity for our investors as well. Well, so we only have maybe like a minute or so left, but we wanted to get to the topic of responsible innovation, which is something that has been really high on your mind. You've talked about that. Yeah, I mean, there was this, for the last decade, it's all about move fast and break things, right? And I think that works when you're iterating games and that works when you're building, you know, things for entertainment and music and so on. When you start, but when you start thinking about actually taking care of that diabetic or teaching somebody how to learn and be successful in the 21st century or manage their personal finance, I think this whole mindset of move fast and break things isn't the right mindset. And I think as you use more and more machine learning and AI, having that transparency and how you're helping make those decisions for those products is also an important piece. So one of the things I would encourage all of you is learn from the mistakes that have been made over the last decade, a lot of them in Silicon Valley. And, you know, as these companies are, you know, learning to fix those, I think we don't have to repeat those in other parts of the world. I think we should build these next generation businesses with great transparency and care for the customers given the importance of the products we're now starting to build as a technology industry. Well, awesome, I think we're out of time and it's been awesome to be here at Slush. Yeah, great to do this, yeah. Thanks everyone, thank you very much.


For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Pharma companies are now racing to develop a new vaccine which can specifically target the Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus. This gives rise to the question, can scientists develop a single vaccine which can deal with multiple virus variants, including new variants that may arise in the future? What stands in the way of creating this universal vaccine? Immunologist Dr. Satyajit Rath talks about the future of vaccines. One of the issues that has come up with the current phase of the COVID-19 pandemic is what is the future of vaccines? This has been brought into a general public notice in part because there are reports that companies are now racing to develop an Omicron strain specific vaccine for future COVID usage. The question that arises is, how do vaccine makers, how does vaccinology as a science and technology deal with the emergence of new virus strains, new bacterial strains against which next generation vaccines are to be generated? What are the strategies involved and how are they designed? So, we already have examples of vaccines that cover multiple strains. The straightforward example is the example of the oral polio vaccine which covers three different strains of polio virus. In bacterial infections, pneumococcal vaccines that work against a bacterium that causes pneumonia started out as a vaccine against four strains, then seven, 10, 12. So, now the current vaccines are some 12 or 14 strain covering. The methodological approach, how this is done, is relatively straightforward. To take the COVID example, what ends up happening is a COVID virus protein allows the virus to stick to cells and to enter cells and set up infection. If that part of the COVID spike protein can be covered with antibodies, then infection will not happen. So, what vaccines have is primarily that part of the COVID virus spike protein as a vaccine formulation so that the body makes antibodies that block this interaction. The catch is, in the case of the COVID virus, that because we have maintained physical distancing, there is a steady emergence of virus variants, new strains of virus that have changes that allow the virus to stick to cells better and better. And in order to stick to cells better and better, the changes are most likely going to be in the same part against which antibodies will provide protection, which means that last year's version of the spike protein will generate antibodies that may not provide good protection against this year's version. So, the straightforward argument that has been used for multivalent proteins is to take as many different versions of the protein as possible, representing as many strains as possible, put all of them into a vaccine, make a multivalent vaccine and use that. This is what the polio vaccine does. This is what the pneumococcal vaccine does. The limitation is that this is a strategy that will work for the strains that we know about. What about strains that will emerge in the future that we don't know about? And that is the second pathway that scientists and technologists are attempting in order to develop a more universal or conserved vaccine for COVID-19. And there, the argument is as follows. If the COVID-19 virus spike protein binds and if various versions of the spike protein from different strains bind simply to the same target on ourselves but better and better, then there must be some shape in all these versions that is common that is important for binding to, after all, the same target. Can we identify, can scientists, can structural biologists identify this common structural motif as it were, this common basic pattern as it were? Can they extract it from the other loops and bells and whistles of the variations? And can we use just that conserved pattern in a vaccine so that the antibodies generated against it will essentially block any version of the virus spike protein from binding to the center? This is not easy or straightforward. This is a major scientific problem. It's not simply a technological problem. Structural biologists and immunologists are struggling with this problem and they are optimistic because they think that they can see pathways ahead. But this is still early days for that kind of discovery. And therefore, while multivalent vaccines will be a reality, this conserved universal vaccine is a much more uncertain outcome in the generations of COVID-19 vaccines to come. The final point in this universal vaccine scenario is that it's not as if every time you inject a protein, the body responds afresh to that protein. After all, all of us have been immunized by now with one version of the protein. So our responses are already shaped by our prior experience. Do those shaped responses make a difference to how we will respond to a universal vaccine that the scientific technological communities of the Global North tend to treat as an original antigenic sin as a problem in immunology? Whether prior experience redirects antibody responses to later exposures. And that, as all of us can imagine, is going to be an additional difficulty and uncertainty about making a universal vaccine. These are the difficulties of universal vaccines. So what we have currently to look forward to is, number one, multivalent vaccines. And number two, a public health, public good global inclusive effort to monitor virus outbreaks and the emergence of new strains to evaluate new strains for their properties of characteristics of concern and to connect all of this to a public good approach to vaccine development so that new generation vaccines can be developed and deployed in the public interest as a social good. This is the scenario for today for all of us to think about so much for this week.


Well, having been trained in medical physics, one of the surgeons had just got a grant from the Medical Research Council to develop an ultrasonic surgical technique, and they needed a research assistant to do the work, and so they gave me the job. I actually developed one of the first electronic focusing techniques for an ultrasonic probe. This is actually a scan of an artery in the neck, and I was one of the first people who made it possible to see how the blood flow is related to the anatomy. Ultrasound is used for surgery, and it's used for physiotherapy, it's used for drug delivery, so combining diagnosis and imaging with the actual therapy itself, so it has a whole wide spectrum of application.