Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, jonvan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Speaker 1: tech Are. Yeah, welcome to my penultimate episode of hosting
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. I mean, you know, second to last normal
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. Anyway, I might occasionally host a special episode
Speaker 1: that drops into the feed now and then I'll still
Speaker 1: be around at iHeart Podcasts. I'll just be executive producer
Speaker 1: rising for the most part. But anyway, we're going to
Speaker 1: continue what we started in our last episode and talk
Speaker 1: about some of the biggest tech stories that have unfolded
Speaker 1: since tech Stuff first launched in mid two thousand and eight.
Speaker 1: And in our last episode, I went through the second
Speaker 1: half of two thousand and eight up through twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: Today we're gonna go twenty fifteen up to present day.
Speaker 1: So that's more in years and I wrote more. So
Speaker 1: this is going to be one of those long episodes.
Speaker 1: But hey, I'm hanging up my boots, so you won't
Speaker 1: be having to put up with me for too much longer.
Speaker 1: So let's just go on this journey together, shall we.
Speaker 1: So we're up to twenty fifteen. That's when Apple first
Speaker 1: introduced the Apple Watch, and it would take a bit
Speaker 1: of time, no pun intended to get momentum on this
Speaker 1: product compared to other Apple products. But these days it
Speaker 1: is the most popular brand of smartwatch here in the
Speaker 1: United States and it holds like a thirty percent of
Speaker 1: the market share globally. Wearables and smart watches had been
Speaker 1: around for a while. It's not like Apple invented them.
Speaker 1: And though Apple created a popular smart watch, I would
Speaker 1: say that it didn't have the same sort of Cinderella
Speaker 1: energy as the original iPod, or the iPhone or even
Speaker 1: the iPad, at least not initially. So just as a reminder,
Speaker 1: Apple didn't invent the smartphone, it didn't invent the MP
Speaker 1: three player, it didn't invent the tablet computer. But it
Speaker 1: did succeed where everyone else had not in that it
Speaker 1: was able to create products that appealed to a wide
Speaker 1: audience and not just like a narrow tech geek niche.
Speaker 1: So there was every reason to expect that they would
Speaker 1: do the same with smart watches. It would just take
Speaker 1: a little bit longer for those to really become popular,
Speaker 1: And I honestly don't know how popular they are in
Speaker 1: comparison to Apple's other product lines. But another innovation that
Speaker 1: was introduced in twenty fifteen was Tesla's autopilot feature. That's
Speaker 1: the not really self driving mode that has made headlines
Speaker 1: many times, often for tragic or unfortunate reasons. This year,
Speaker 1: Miles Klee of Rolling Stone Magazine wrote a piece titled,
Speaker 1: Tesla has highest rate of deadly accidents among car brands,
Speaker 1: study fines. That's not great news. Meanwhile, President elect Trump's
Speaker 1: transition team has recently recommended that the new regime in
Speaker 1: the US repeal a rule that otherwise requires car companies
Speaker 1: that have self driving technologies incorporated into their vehicles to
Speaker 1: report on car crashes. So yeah, now the team is saying, hey,
Speaker 1: we should get rid of that rule. And you know,
Speaker 1: Elon Musk also happens to be heading up one of
Speaker 1: the government departments in the new administration. So I suspect
Speaker 1: this is just the beginning of a lot of these
Speaker 1: kinds of arguments that are are designed to remove restrictions
Speaker 1: and regulations and accountability to allow businesses to operate with
Speaker 1: little to know oversight. In other news, Google did a
Speaker 1: big old corporate restructuring by creating a company called Alphabet,
Speaker 1: which acts as a holding company for Google and its
Speaker 1: various spinoffs like YouTube and Android. In space news, Jeff
Speaker 1: Bezos's private space company, Blue Origin successfully launched and landed
Speaker 1: a reusable rocket called New Shepherd. SpaceX at that point
Speaker 1: had not yet managed to do the same thing. They
Speaker 1: had launched some spacecraft, but the landing had not really,
Speaker 1: they hadn't stuck the landing. I guess it's safe to
Speaker 1: say like sometimes their landings could be a little exclusive.
Speaker 1: But obviously SpaceX would catch up to Blue Origin and
Speaker 1: then like leave Blue Origin in the dust as far
Speaker 1: as private space industry stuff is concerned. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: going to see way more stories about SpaceX than Blue
Speaker 1: Origin typically. But the big story that I want to
Speaker 1: highlight from twenty fifteen came to be known as diesel Gate,
Speaker 1: and it involved the car company Volkswagen. So in September
Speaker 1: of twenty fifteen, the United States Environmental Protection Agency or EPA,
Speaker 1: accused Volkswagen of violating the US Clean Air Act through trickery. Essentially,
Speaker 1: the issue was that Volkswagen was using software, you know,
Speaker 1: software technology in order to fool emissions testing equipment regarding
Speaker 1: its diesel engine vehicles and the emissions that they put out.
Speaker 1: So here's kind of how it worked from a very
Speaker 1: high level. When a Volkswagen diesel vehicle detected that it
Speaker 1: was being put into testing mode, it would artificially limit
Speaker 1: the output of the engine so as not to exceed
Speaker 1: emissions standards. Now it would look like the engine was
Speaker 1: operating at normal capacity, but in fact it was purposefully
Speaker 1: holding itself back. Once it detected it was out of
Speaker 1: testing mode, the engine would switch back into normal operations,
Speaker 1: at which point the vehicle would be emitting more than
Speaker 1: restrictions would legally allow. So the investigation had actually been
Speaker 1: going on for a couple of years at this point.
Speaker 1: It started with some researchers at West Virginia's University and
Speaker 1: they were finding some pretty odd readings with a couple
Speaker 1: of Volkswagen diesel vehicles. Now they were using testing equipment
Speaker 1: that allowed for on road tests. That meant the vehicle
Speaker 1: was actually in use on roads at the time it
Speaker 1: was traveling. Most emissions tests are done with a vehicle
Speaker 1: that's stationary, it's not actually on the road, So the
Speaker 1: researchers were seeing unusually high emissions ratings on the two
Speaker 1: Volkswagen vehicles, and that merited further investigation because you know,
Speaker 1: when they were routinely tested in normal emissions testing facilities,
Speaker 1: they were under the limit, So something was going on here.
Speaker 1: Their findings found their way to regulators at both the
Speaker 1: California state level and the US federal level, and ultimately
Speaker 1: led to the EPA accusing Volkswagen of deception. Other countries
Speaker 1: subsequently investigated the matter and found similar results, and Volkswagen's
Speaker 1: stock prices plummeted. The CEO resigned, and the company apologized for,
Speaker 1: you know, essentially defrauding everybody. The gambit turned out to
Speaker 1: be a costly one for Volkswagen. Estimates put the total
Speaker 1: cost at nearly thirty five billion with a B dollars.
Speaker 1: That's a hefty amount of fines and legal expenses and
Speaker 1: replacement costs and that kind of thing. But beyond that,
Speaker 1: there were some considerable non financial costs. In fact, they
Speaker 1: were incalculable. For example, you can't really to fy the
Speaker 1: amount of damage that was just done to the environment
Speaker 1: or people's health, right like. That certainly was a factor,
Speaker 1: but we don't really have a way of putting a
Speaker 1: number on it. All in all, Diesel gait was an
Speaker 1: example of corporate subterfuge and greed. And here's a fun
Speaker 1: thing to think about. It's possible that organizations like the
Speaker 1: EPA here in the United States are going to face
Speaker 1: some pretty drastic cuts in funding or possibly even dissolution,
Speaker 1: setting the stage for companies to pull similar stunts without
Speaker 1: having to worry so much about being called to answer
Speaker 1: for transgressions, you know, the way that Volkswagen did back
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen. If there are no regulatory agencies out
Speaker 1: there to oversee it, then it's almost like you're not
Speaker 1: doing it at all. Moving swiftly onwards to twenty sixteen, Okay,
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen was a huge year for tech news. In
Speaker 1: most of these years, when I was looking back, I'd
Speaker 1: be like, oh, there's like two or three stories that
Speaker 1: are contenders. But twenty sixteen just it was like the
Speaker 1: year that just kept on giving. It was an election year,
Speaker 1: and that was part of it here in the United States.
Speaker 1: But in twenty sixteen, we got an early smart watch
Speaker 1: that had been boosted through crowdfunding and boasted an e
Speaker 1: ink display that maximized battery life. It kicked the bucket.
Speaker 1: In twenty sixteen. This was the Pebble smart Watch, which
Speaker 1: was an ambitious project, independent project. Ultimately it was not
Speaker 1: able to succeed as a business. That was a bummer
Speaker 1: for me personally. I had actually backed it after the
Speaker 1: kickstarting campaign was already over it had already successfully completed
Speaker 1: the Kickstart campaign. In fact, it was one of the
Speaker 1: most successful campaigns at that time, and I had held
Speaker 1: back on backing it. But then I went to Cees
Speaker 1: and I saw a presentation about the Pebble smart Watch,
Speaker 1: and that convinced me to put in a pre order,
Speaker 1: and even though I got in too late, I ended
Speaker 1: up getting a Kickstarter edition watch. It's one of the
Speaker 1: red ones. I'm guessing that the people who were backing
Speaker 1: it didn't order as many of the red ones, although
Speaker 1: I thought the red one was really striking, which is
Speaker 1: why I got it, so I guess that's why I
Speaker 1: got a Kickstarter version. Anyway, I thought it was nifty,
Speaker 1: but Pebble ultimately didn't have staying power and it folded
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen. Other notable tech stories from twenty sixteen
Speaker 1: included the tragic reveal that a Tesla vehicle operating in
Speaker 1: autopilot mode was involved in a fatal car accident that
Speaker 1: would sadly not be the last time we would hear
Speaker 1: something like that happening. The Hyperloop One company was plagued
Speaker 1: by a crazy power struggle and various legal battles, which
Speaker 1: meant we were not getting any closer to the science
Speaker 1: fiction vision that Elon Musk had laid out a couple
Speaker 1: of years earlier. If you don't remember what hyperloop is,
Speaker 1: the concept is it's a transportation system meant to go
Speaker 1: between like cities there may be a couple hundred or
Speaker 1: few hundred miles away from each other, and it can
Speaker 1: cysts in its original form as a tunnel that has
Speaker 1: had most or all of the air pumped out of it,
Speaker 1: so you have very very very low air pressure inside
Speaker 1: the tunnel. You've got a magnet system or air bearings,
Speaker 1: one of the two, or maybe both. It allows a
Speaker 1: train to essentially hover above the floor of the tunnel
Speaker 1: and travel with very little friction, so very little resistance,
Speaker 1: and it allows the train to reach incredible top speeds
Speaker 1: and thus make the trip in pretty short order while
Speaker 1: being more efficient and less costly than air travel, less
Speaker 1: environmentally pollutive, I guess than air travel as well, but Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: hyper Loop one, because of this big battle, ended up
Speaker 1: kind of getting again not to use a pun, but derailed.
Speaker 1: Hyper Loop one would stick around, but would severely cut
Speaker 1: back on its vision as far as what it's setting
Speaker 1: out to do. Another big story that happened in twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen is the explosive and that is intended controversy around
Speaker 1: the Samsung Galaxy seven Note smartphones. So there were multiple
Speaker 1: reports that detailed how these smartphones would spontaneously burst into
Speaker 1: fire and explode. It led to lots of restrictions on
Speaker 1: the phones. There were airlines that said, you cannot board
Speaker 1: a plane if you're carrying one of these. You have
Speaker 1: to leave it here. You can't take it on board
Speaker 1: because these things had proven to be unstable. And it
Speaker 1: turned out that the battery manufacturing process, which was actually
Speaker 1: being carried out with two different companies and had two
Speaker 1: separate issues, but they resulted in the same problem in
Speaker 1: that they created short circuits inside the battery that would
Speaker 1: lead to thermal runaway, meaning the battery would heat up
Speaker 1: and heat up and heat up until it ultimately failed
Speaker 1: and would explode. This was huge news, obviously, and it
Speaker 1: cost Samsung millions of dollars in recalls and lawsuits. It
Speaker 1: was a big story in twenty sixteen. There's so much more. Though,
Speaker 1: Yahoo admitted that it had been the victim of a
Speaker 1: massive data breach that year. That breach affected hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of people. We would find out later it essentially
Speaker 1: affected anyone who had a Yahoo account at that time, Like,
Speaker 1: even if you hadn't used it in a while, you
Speaker 1: were affected. Also another cyber warfare kind of story, hackers
Speaker 1: brought down a domain name server host in the fall
Speaker 1: of that year, which in turn affected numerous major websites
Speaker 1: and services like Netflix and Amazon, so they were unavailable
Speaker 1: on again and off again in October twenty first, twenty sixteen. Like,
Speaker 1: that was just a bad day if you were one
Speaker 1: of those companies. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Speaker 1: A ton of stuff happened in twenty sixteen and tech,
Speaker 1: but none of that is what I wanted to focus
Speaker 1: on in this episode. Instead, for me, the story that
Speaker 1: caught my attention most in twenty sixteen was kind of
Speaker 1: the official beginning of the end for the biotech company, Thearrahnose.
Speaker 1: It was literally the end of Therahnose that year. But
Speaker 1: then the beginning of the end for the freedom of
Speaker 1: the people who are leading Therahnose. So this was a
Speaker 1: company that was founded by Elizabeth Holmes, and it was
Speaker 1: a company that aimed to democratize medical testing. The idea
Speaker 1: being that you would end up with a device the
Speaker 1: size of a desktop printer that would allow the average
Speaker 1: person the chance to screen themselves for more than one
Speaker 1: hundred different diseases, all while just parting with the tiniest
Speaker 1: micro drop of blood. Because Elizabeth Holmes said she was
Speaker 1: scared of needles, and that was one of the reasons
Speaker 1: she didn't, you know, she would kind of avoid medical checkups.
Speaker 1: But she thought, said, well, if you could do it
Speaker 1: where you could only need the smallest drop of blood
Speaker 1: and you could run, you know, potentially hundreds of different
Speaker 1: or more than one hundred different medical tests on that
Speaker 1: little drop of blood, on a device that could sit
Speaker 1: on top of your desk and find out you know,
Speaker 1: what you need to look out for and what you know,
Speaker 1: what your health was, and maybe if there were any
Speaker 1: lifestyle changes you needed to make in order to live
Speaker 1: a healthier life. It would open up options for people
Speaker 1: that otherwise never would exist. That was the dream. When
Speaker 1: we come back, I'll talk about the problem that dream
Speaker 1: had when it came to meeting up with a thing
Speaker 1: I like to call reality. But first, let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break to thank our sponsors. Okay, we're back. So
Speaker 1: I left off talking about twenty sixteen and Fairhos. So
Speaker 1: here's an issue. This company's story was kind of the
Speaker 1: stuff of Silicon Valley fairy tales, Like it was the
Speaker 1: sort of thing that investors really get excited about. So
Speaker 1: Holmes had been attending Stanford University before she dropped out
Speaker 1: to create her company. She courted various investors, including really famous,
Speaker 1: high profile ones like Oracle found under Larry Ellison was
Speaker 1: one of them. The media conglomerate owner Rupert Murdoch was another.
Speaker 1: And so she had raised hundreds of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: to make her dream of becoming an iconic tech leader
Speaker 1: come true. And I want to be clear about that. Like,
Speaker 1: the technology was something that she thought would be really cool.
Speaker 1: She seemed to be pretty passionate about it. But my interpretation,
Speaker 1: which I admit is fully biased and I could be
Speaker 1: entirely wrong, was more that she was interested in being
Speaker 1: an icon than really, you know, having a belief and
Speaker 1: knowledge about this technology. She wanted to be another Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: you know, be on the cover of magazines and be
Speaker 1: talked about as like this visionary leader. The trouble was
Speaker 1: her idea proved to be much less attainable than she
Speaker 1: initially thought. In late twenty fifteen, Wall Street Journal's John
Speaker 1: Kerrieru whose name I always butcher anyway, he broke the
Speaker 1: story that Darrenos the company was actually built. On top
Speaker 1: of this, that the company's supposed demonstrations of its technology
Speaker 1: were in actuality frauds. They were relying heavily on existing
Speaker 1: blood analysis technologies from other companies, so actual machines made
Speaker 1: by other companies that did standard blood tests. They were
Speaker 1: using those, but then claiming that the results came from
Speaker 1: their own technology, and that they would take tiny blood
Speaker 1: samples larger than a micro drop but still you know,
Speaker 1: pretty small. Then they would dilute those samples and then
Speaker 1: run tests on them using these other companies, you know, machines.
Speaker 1: Then they would pass off whatever the results were as
Speaker 1: their own work, while desperately trying to get their technology
Speaker 1: to operate properly. The story didn't end there either. There
Speaker 1: got worse, Like it unfolded that there had been advisors
Speaker 1: who had told Holmes early on that her idea was
Speaker 1: unrealistic from a technological and biological perspective, that just because
Speaker 1: she wanted it to work doesn't mean it would work.
Speaker 1: So essentially it turned out to be kind of an
Speaker 1: Emperor has No Clothes situation, and the company would totally
Speaker 1: unravel throughout twenty sixteen. In the process, Holmes, who had
Speaker 1: developed a reputation for extravagance and peculiar habits, found her
Speaker 1: net worth plunge to zero. She went from being one
Speaker 1: of the wealthiest women on the planet to having no
Speaker 1: net worth at all. The SEC opened an investigation into
Speaker 1: the company. Holmes and her business partner and on again
Speaker 1: off again romantic partner, Ramesh Malwani, would ultimately stand trial
Speaker 1: for multiple criminal charges of fraud and related crimes. Holmes
Speaker 1: then would be found guilty and sentenced to eleven years
Speaker 1: in prison, although that did get reduced a couple of times. Currently,
Speaker 1: I believe she will be eligible for release in the
Speaker 1: summer of twenty thirty two. Balwani would get a similar
Speaker 1: sentence of nearly thirteen years for his part in the
Speaker 1: deception and the reason I wanted to highlight therahos in
Speaker 1: this episode is because I think it really shines a
Speaker 1: light on some real issues in tech in general. So
Speaker 1: Issue one, companies overhype the capabilities of their technologies just
Speaker 1: par for the course. Here. Some folks refer to this
Speaker 1: as marketing. I call it lying. Issue two. Their nose
Speaker 1: really strips bear the dangers of the fake it till
Speaker 1: you make it philosophy that you know, folks will assume
Speaker 1: that if they can imagine it, that it's actually possible,
Speaker 1: and they'll build a business idea or an actual business
Speaker 1: around this concept before finding out if it really is
Speaker 1: possible or not, and by then it's too late. So
Speaker 1: you sell yourself on this idea, and then you scramble
Speaker 1: to try and make the idea actually work in the
Speaker 1: real world. It is not a good approach. I mean,
Speaker 1: when it works, it's great. It just very rarely works.
Speaker 1: Issue three, and this is relating to the last one.
Speaker 1: It reminds us that while technology is incredible and it
Speaker 1: can let us do stuff that previous generations would have
Speaker 1: thought was impossible, technology is not without limitations. It's not
Speaker 1: some sort of magic get out of jail free card
Speaker 1: for all situations. Issue for the trappings of the tech
Speaker 1: icon identity are really tempting, you know, from wealth or
Speaker 1: influence to the public perception that you're someone who's just
Speaker 1: really innovative and savvy. There's a lot to envy there,
Speaker 1: so you can understand why someone would want to be
Speaker 1: in that category. Issue five. Investors can sometimes propel a
Speaker 1: bad idea into the world despite the fact it's a
Speaker 1: bad idea, and that wouldn't be an issue except that
Speaker 1: in the course of things, other people who are innocent
Speaker 1: can end up suffering as a result of this. So
Speaker 1: with the Theradouse case, that included patients who were relying
Speaker 1: on what ended up being unreliable medical results. So they
Speaker 1: are like actual people, sick people who were you know,
Speaker 1: making use of this supposed tech and there's a chance
Speaker 1: that some of the stuff they got back was not
Speaker 1: at all reliable, which that's life endangering. That's terrible. So
Speaker 1: I think Fraans is going to be a case study
Speaker 1: for many, many years. It's a lesson on what not
Speaker 1: to do and how not to do it, and I
Speaker 1: hope a lot of people take that to heart and they,
Speaker 1: you know, they learn from those mistakes. Let's move on
Speaker 1: to twenty seventeen. Holy cow, this is taking forever. It's
Speaker 1: almost as long as living through those years in real time. Anyway,
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, mega venture capital fund company soft Bank invested
Speaker 1: hundreds of millions of dollars into a company that was
Speaker 1: portrayed as if it were a tech company, but it
Speaker 1: really wasn't. In reality, all it was doing was little
Speaker 1: more than subleasing office space to clients, and that company
Speaker 1: was we Work. Now, over the following years, soft Bank
Speaker 1: would increase this investment to the point where it's spent
Speaker 1: around sixteen billion with a B dollars on work, not
Speaker 1: just in investments, but you know, overall. We Work meanwhile,
Speaker 1: would prep itself for an initial public offering or IPO
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen. Unfortunately, that public offering imploded before it
Speaker 1: could happen. It was kind of an absurd situation, like
Speaker 1: there were corporate documents that just read like new age,
Speaker 1: you know, ridiculous meaningless babble. Anyway, we Work did not
Speaker 1: go public, and it then started to go into a
Speaker 1: period of decline and actually went into bankruptcy protection in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty three. And it didn't go away, It didn't
Speaker 1: go out of business. It did go into bankruptcy, but
Speaker 1: it's still around. Some view we work as sort of
Speaker 1: a cautionary tale about the startup ecosystem, and as crazy
Speaker 1: as that story is, it's still not the one I
Speaker 1: picked to focus on this episode. Other things that happened
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen. There were a lot more data breaches
Speaker 1: that year, including equa Fax, which is a credit reporting
Speaker 1: company that was huge like bad bad news. I mean,
Speaker 1: you expect an institution like a credit reporting company to
Speaker 1: have really strong security measures because that's incredibly sensitive information
Speaker 1: that affects millions of people, Like we're all lumped into
Speaker 1: that system here in the United States. You know, everyone's
Speaker 1: got their credit rating and everything, so having that information
Speaker 1: get breached very damaging. The Yahoo breach I mentioned earlier
Speaker 1: would end up becoming more clear in twenty seventeen. That's
Speaker 1: when we learned that essentially everybody was whoever had a
Speaker 1: Yahoo account was affected by it. And it also had
Speaker 1: a huge impact on an acquisition because Verizon was buying Yahoo,
Speaker 1: and it ended up affecting that acquisition deal by knocking
Speaker 1: off around three hundred and fifty million dollars off Yahoo's
Speaker 1: sales price. So yikes. Facebook's mark Zuckerberg was called to
Speaker 1: face questioning from Congress, and not for the last time,
Speaker 1: after Facebook had served up political ads that turned out
Speaker 1: to have been paid for by Russian groups, and these
Speaker 1: were political ads for the United States, so they were
Speaker 1: intended to sway Americans who were voting in the twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen presidential elections, and this started up a conversation in
Speaker 1: America about how to protect against foreign interference in American elections,
Speaker 1: something that hadn't really taken like the headlines by storm
Speaker 1: in previous years, but this time it really was. Fortunately,
Speaker 1: we have all of that sorted out today and there's
Speaker 1: no more problem. That was me being sarcastic. Cryptocurrency boomed
Speaker 1: in twenty seventeen and Ethereum became more of a known
Speaker 1: quantity and introduced the possibility of other blockchain based cryptocurrencies
Speaker 1: based off the Ethereum blockchain. At this point, Ethereum was
Speaker 1: a proof of work cryptocurrency, just like Bitcoin is, but
Speaker 1: would later turn to be a proof of stake, but
Speaker 1: that would take a few years. Arguably this was really
Speaker 1: when proof of work currencies began, making it very hard
Speaker 1: for non crypto customers to get hold of graphics processing
Speaker 1: units or GPUs, particularly in the video game space. GPUs
Speaker 1: are important. Crypto miners were relying on these cards because
Speaker 1: they have great parallel processing capabilities and that helps when
Speaker 1: you're mining cryptocurrency and a proof of work system. So yeah,
Speaker 1: this was the beginning of a tough time. If you
Speaker 1: were a gamer and you wanted to get hold of
Speaker 1: the latest in GPUs, it was just as hard to
Speaker 1: get hold of them for a few years. But the
Speaker 1: big story I really wanted to talk about is the
Speaker 1: no good, very bad year that Uber had in twenty seventeen. Now,
Speaker 1: to be clear, a lot of the stuff that happened
Speaker 1: to Uber in twenty seventeen had actually been happening for
Speaker 1: a while. It's just that it all came to a
Speaker 1: head in twenty seventeen. So starting off, we've got some
Speaker 1: political events that landed Uber in a critical place. They
Speaker 1: got a lot of criticism for this. So in January
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, Donald Trump passed some executive actions that placed
Speaker 1: hefty restrictions on foreign nation being allowed into the United States,
Speaker 1: and largely these restrictions affected people who were traveling from
Speaker 1: countries that have a large Muslim population. So people got
Speaker 1: very upset They were enraged that Trump was apparently engaging
Speaker 1: in profiling because it's not like these other countries that
Speaker 1: don't have large Muslim populations were affected. So yeah, it
Speaker 1: was it was hard to justify. But in response to
Speaker 1: his move, taxi cab drivers in New York City refused
Speaker 1: to work in protest of these travel restrictions, and they
Speaker 1: did this the day following when Trump signed those executive actions,
Speaker 1: and Uber became news because it lifted surge pricing in
Speaker 1: New York in an apparent attempt to take advantage of
Speaker 1: a lack of competition due to that taxi driver work stoppage,
Speaker 1: and it was seen as a move to undermine a
Speaker 1: political protest, and in response, a hashtag called delete Uber
Speaker 1: began to circulate. As it would turn out, there would
Speaker 1: be lots of other reasons folks would want to delete
Speaker 1: Uber as the year went on that didn't involve travel
Speaker 1: restrictions at all. So next up. In February twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: a former Uber engineer named Susan Fowler came forward posting
Speaker 1: a blog post that made public accusations regarding gender discrimination
Speaker 1: and sexual harassment within Uber, and she detailed a devastatingly
Speaker 1: toxic work culture that was particularly harmful toward women within
Speaker 1: the company. Fowler's move would inspire other women within the
Speaker 1: tech industry to come forward with their own stories, and
Speaker 1: when paired with the blossoming Me Too movement in late
Speaker 1: twenty seventeen, this would build into a more unified call
Speaker 1: for change and accountability. And I wish I could say
Speaker 1: that we got there, that things were all better now,
Speaker 1: But over the following years we would get more stories
Speaker 1: about companies and toxic work cultures and sexual harassment that
Speaker 1: had been codified into company culture. So we got a
Speaker 1: long way to go. But also in February twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: a video went viral showing then Uber CEO Travis Kalanik,
Speaker 1: who co founded the company, getting into an argument with
Speaker 1: an Uber driver, and the driver protested to Kalanick that
Speaker 1: the company was putting drivers in a squeeze because it
Speaker 1: was raising standards for stuff like, you know, the types
Speaker 1: of cars that could be used on various Uber services,
Speaker 1: while also dropping prices for customers, and drivers were having
Speaker 1: to pay more and they were getting paid less. Kalan
Speaker 1: Nick got really argumentative, but the whole exchange was captured
Speaker 1: on a dash cam. The driver later uploaded it to YouTube.
Speaker 1: I found quite a bit of popularity. Kalanik later issued
Speaker 1: an apology in an internal email in Uber. He sensed
Speaker 1: that perhaps he didn't come off looking really sympathetic because
Speaker 1: he was sitting in the back of an Uber black
Speaker 1: vehicle between two women sitting next to him and arguing
Speaker 1: with his driver about the fact that the driver needed
Speaker 1: to take responsibility for his own financial situation. That Uber
Speaker 1: was blameless in this particular batter, You know, considering how
Speaker 1: Uber was also trying to dodge the responsibility for accusations
Speaker 1: brought against the company from Vowler. The fact that he
Speaker 1: was arguing that, hey, you need to take responsibility for
Speaker 1: your life while simultaneously the company was trying to dodge
Speaker 1: responsibility struck a lot of people as being perhaps on
Speaker 1: the touch ironic side, and we're not done with their year.
Speaker 1: That's just the beginning of the year. In March, the
Speaker 1: New York Times published an article revealing that Uber was
Speaker 1: making use of a tool called gray Ball. Now. The
Speaker 1: purpose of this tool was to fool local authorities in
Speaker 1: regions where Uber's operations were unsanctioned. In other words, gray
Speaker 1: Ball was meant to trick police so that Uber drivers
Speaker 1: could operate in places where they weren't technically allowed. The
Speaker 1: gray Ball tool would identify law enforcement that was attempting
Speaker 1: to hail a ride. So let's say that police are
Speaker 1: trying to prove that Uber is operating in a place
Speaker 1: where they're not supposed to, so they're using their phone
Speaker 1: to call a ride. Well, grey Ball was meant to
Speaker 1: identify when it was a police officer, and then the
Speaker 1: police officer would see cars on the app, but no
Speaker 1: car would ever come to actually pick them up, so
Speaker 1: you know, there was no way for them to use
Speaker 1: that as evidence that Uber was picking up or dropping
Speaker 1: off in that particular region. So Uber spokespeople claimed that
Speaker 1: the tool was actually meant to protect drivers. It was
Speaker 1: meant to prevent them from picking up a fair from
Speaker 1: somebody who was abusing Uber's systems in other words, and
Speaker 1: said that you know, the drivers are independent contractors and
Speaker 1: that they should also not be persecuted or They also
Speaker 1: suggested that law enforcement was somehow in collusion with taxi
Speaker 1: companies to muscle ride hailing services out of various regions.
Speaker 1: I think it is good to point out that even
Speaker 1: if that were true, it doesn't mean that Uber gets
Speaker 1: a free pass to break the law, Like the law
Speaker 1: is the law, and a law can be unjust, but
Speaker 1: breaking an unjust law still comes with consequences. And I
Speaker 1: know it's an easy pat answer to say that the
Speaker 1: solution is to change the law, because you know, I
Speaker 1: know our system here in the United States. I know,
Speaker 1: at best it's byzantine and complicated, and at worst it's
Speaker 1: broken and biased. But you know, it's still a law.
Speaker 1: That's the problem. Like you can't just choose which laws
Speaker 1: to obey and which ones not to obey. Now, that
Speaker 1: still just gets us into to March of twenty seventeen,
Speaker 1: and Uber's very bad, no good year still has a
Speaker 1: long way to go. In May, the company had to
Speaker 1: come clean about how it was paying drivers. So, in
Speaker 1: an example that g Nome Shiber used in the New
Speaker 1: York Times, if a fare cost twenty dollars and taxes
Speaker 1: on that fare were two dollars, Uber was only supposed
Speaker 1: to take its commission, which is twenty five percent off
Speaker 1: the eighteen dollars that were left over so after taxes. However,
Speaker 1: it was discovered that Uber appeared to instead be taking
Speaker 1: its twenty five percent share before taxes, so in the
Speaker 1: example that Schiber gave, it would take twenty five percent
Speaker 1: of twenty bucks, which is five dollars, instead of twenty
Speaker 1: five percent of eighteen bucks, which is four dollars fifty cents,
Speaker 1: and it meant that drivers were taking home less money
Speaker 1: than what they were actually owed. An advocacy group argued
Speaker 1: that what Uber was actually doing was passing the cost
Speaker 1: of state taxes onto drivers, particularly in the state of
Speaker 1: New York, and Uber was not assuming the responsibility of
Speaker 1: paying taxes as a company, and this was a tough
Speaker 1: argument against Uber, and Uber executives said that the company
Speaker 1: was dedicated to paying all drivers the money that they
Speaker 1: were owed due to this practice, that they were sorry
Speaker 1: for it, and you know, et cetera, et cetera. So
Speaker 1: this ended up costing the company as well, gave it
Speaker 1: another black eye, which was unfortunate because at this point
Speaker 1: Uber had more black eyes than eyes. At the halfway
Speaker 1: mark of the year in June, and internal investigation in
Speaker 1: Uber led to twenty people in the company, some of
Speaker 1: them in leadership positions, being fired for inappropriate behavior. And
Speaker 1: by inappropriate behavior, I'm mostly referring to sexual harassment. In addition,
Speaker 1: the board of directors pressured Travis Kalanick to resign, which
Speaker 1: he did, though he still had many close friends on
Speaker 1: the board of directors, so that was a bit of
Speaker 1: a struggle too, and we're not done so. In Singapore,
Speaker 1: it was discovered that Uber had been renting dangerous vehicles
Speaker 1: to drivers. These were vehicles that had known safety issues, namely,
Speaker 1: once in a while they would catch on fire, and
Speaker 1: Uber apparently knew this and still use those vehicles to
Speaker 1: rent to drivers in Singapore to drive for the company,
Speaker 1: which seems in my mind a tiny bit negligent. Uber
Speaker 1: also lost its license to operate within the City of
Speaker 1: London for failure to adhere to certain corporate responsibility requirements,
Speaker 1: and near the end of the year, the company had
Speaker 1: to come clean about a data breach that had happened
Speaker 1: in twenty sixteen and allowed hackers to access information about
Speaker 1: drivers and customers alike. Oh and also that Uber had
Speaker 1: paid a ransom to keep the whole thing quiet. And
Speaker 1: as I always point out, paying ransoms is bad because
Speaker 1: it reinforces to the attackers that ransoms work, and it
Speaker 1: just means we get more of them. So it's better
Speaker 1: not to do that anyway. Yeah, not a good year
Speaker 1: for Uber, especially since you know, they paid to keep
Speaker 1: that thing quiet and it came out in the open anyway.
Speaker 1: So twenty seventeen rough year. All Right, we got a
Speaker 1: whole lot to get through. So let's take another quick
Speaker 1: break and when we come back, we'll pick up with
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. We're back. So in twenty eighteen here in
Speaker 1: the United States, we were coming to grips with how
Speaker 1: to navigate city streets while all these folks on rental
Speaker 1: electric scooters were whizzing around on sidewalks and roads, and
Speaker 1: it was a mess. It was a mess because you know,
Speaker 1: you had all these people just getting in the way
Speaker 1: of pedestrians, traffic and stuff. It was a mess because
Speaker 1: you would have folks abandoning their electric scooter wherever they wanted,
Speaker 1: including like in the middle of the road sometimes or
Speaker 1: some people would get upset about the electric scooters and
Speaker 1: would round up as many as they could and like
Speaker 1: throw them in a pond or whatever. It was just
Speaker 1: a a huge mess and an example of a tech
Speaker 1: oriented business model that hit the streets before local laws
Speaker 1: and regulations could really weigh in on how this should
Speaker 1: interact with the existing infrastructure. So example here in Atlanta. Technically,
Speaker 1: the law is that if you're driving one of these things,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to be on the road. You're not supposed
Speaker 1: to be on a sidewalk. And technically I believe you're
Speaker 1: supposed to be wearing a helmet, though nobody does, and
Speaker 1: as far as I've seen, no one really enforces that either,
Speaker 1: But that's what the rule is supposed to be anyway.
Speaker 1: Twenty eighteen was also the year when five G wireless
Speaker 1: technologies first began to take headlines by storm. And it
Speaker 1: turns out five G is a little more complicated than
Speaker 1: just being one G better than four G. There are
Speaker 1: different flavors, if you will, of five G. So on
Speaker 1: one end, you've got like the ultra high frequency five
Speaker 1: G bands. These are the ones that are great for
Speaker 1: super high throughput, so you're able to make huge data
Speaker 1: transfers in very short amounts of time. But it has
Speaker 1: a limited transmission range, and also the frequencies aren't really
Speaker 1: good at penetrating solid matter, so if you happen to be,
Speaker 1: say on the other side of a wall as a transmitter,
Speaker 1: you might not actually be able to make use of
Speaker 1: that five G transmitter. Lower frequency five G bands allow
Speaker 1: for longer distance communications, and they penetrate through stuff like walls,
Speaker 1: but they also have lower data throughput values, so you
Speaker 1: don't have the quote unquote speed of the other version
Speaker 1: of five G. But communicating all of this to customers
Speaker 1: is hard, Like how do you say, Hey, under certain circumstances,
Speaker 1: you're going to get this kind of experience, but under
Speaker 1: every other circumstance it's going to be like this, that's muddy.
Speaker 1: So a lot of the marketing that I saw really
Speaker 1: focused on the ideal hypothetical situation you could find yourself
Speaker 1: in where you have this incredible throughput with these ultrai
Speaker 1: frequency five G transmitters and ignored everything else, and that
Speaker 1: just set people up for disappointment unless they just happened
Speaker 1: to be in an area where they could take advantage
Speaker 1: of those ultra high frequency transmitter stations, in which case
Speaker 1: they had a great experience as long as a wall
Speaker 1: didn't come between them and the tower. Rumors first began
Speaker 1: to circulate in this year that Apple had been working
Speaker 1: on a mixed reality headset, with the original goal of
Speaker 1: having it come to market by twenty twenty. Of course,
Speaker 1: we would realize later that the Apple Vision pro would
Speaker 1: not debut until early twenty twenty four, and the somewhat
Speaker 1: tep in response to that headset has put the future
Speaker 1: of the product line into question. I have read a
Speaker 1: lot of analysts that have said that Apple is likely
Speaker 1: going to release a lower cost, stripped down version of
Speaker 1: the Vision pro that they haven't fully abandoned the tech
Speaker 1: product line. But you know, we'll just have to see
Speaker 1: what happens, and by the time you hear this, maybe
Speaker 1: we'll already have seen it. That's also twenty eighteen was
Speaker 1: the year when Elon Musk would get into trouble with SEC,
Speaker 1: not for the last time. He tweeted out that he
Speaker 1: intended to take Tesla private for four hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: dollars a share and that some presumably some unnamed investors
Speaker 1: would front him the funds to do it. But turns
Speaker 1: out that was what we call a lie, and the
Speaker 1: SEC wasn't so big on the whole. Hey, it was
Speaker 1: just a weed joke. Defense Musk, as CEO of Tesla,
Speaker 1: has a responsibility to Tesla's shareholders, and the SEC said, hey,
Speaker 1: you can't go around defrauding everyone, even if it's a joke,
Speaker 1: because you're the CEO. You can't say that you're going
Speaker 1: to take the company private if you don't actually have
Speaker 1: plans to do that. Musk would go on to build
Speaker 1: a very contentious relationship with the SEC, and I'm very
Speaker 1: curious to see how that plays out over the next
Speaker 1: few years. Okay, here's the story I actually wanted to
Speaker 1: focus on for twenty eighteen. That was the year when Facebook,
Speaker 1: specifically Mark Zuckerberg, was called before Congress again, this time
Speaker 1: to talk about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which had been
Speaker 1: broiling around the tech world for a couple of years
Speaker 1: but really only became public knowledge and a big story
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen. So in case you don't remember what
Speaker 1: this was all about, Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting
Speaker 1: firm that worked on various political campaigns, including Trump's first
Speaker 1: candidacy for president back in twenty sixteen here in the
Speaker 1: United States. And it turned out that Cambridge Analytica worked
Speaker 1: with a researcher, a data scientist, who had designed an
Speaker 1: app essentially a personality test slash survey, and this app
Speaker 1: would scrape data off of Facebook without the knowledge or
Speaker 1: consent of most of the people who were affected by it.
Speaker 1: So here's how it kind of worked. So essentially, some
Speaker 1: users were invited to take this little personality test slash survey,
Speaker 1: and in return they would receive a small amount of money,
Speaker 1: so they were being paid to do it. The survey
Speaker 1: involved installing this app extension in Facebook that let the
Speaker 1: developer look at all the profiles connected to the users
Speaker 1: who were taking the test as if the developer were
Speaker 1: was that that user. So let me use an example
Speaker 1: to explain this. Let's say that I'm on Facebook and
Speaker 1: I'm friends with you, and I've decided to take this survey,
Speaker 1: and let's say that you had set your Facebook profiles
Speaker 1: so that only your friends could see it, like the
Speaker 1: public cannot see what you post, only your friends can
Speaker 1: see that. Well, because of the loophole that existed in
Speaker 1: Facebook's app environment at the time when this data scientist
Speaker 1: was doing this research, the data scientists could view your
Speaker 1: profile as if the data scientist were me, like it
Speaker 1: would be like if it were in my place, and
Speaker 1: they would just see everything you had posted because I'm
Speaker 1: your friend, and now the data scientist is posing against
Speaker 1: me and can see everything that you've posted. And thus
Speaker 1: they were able to get hold of tons of information
Speaker 1: that involved people who had never consented to having their
Speaker 1: information collected or used. Now, Cambridge Analytica was aiming to
Speaker 1: take that information and create various targeted campaigns in various regions,
Speaker 1: including doing stuff like discouraging people from voting. You know,
Speaker 1: if it turned out that there was a region that
Speaker 1: was not likely to support one of the candidates that
Speaker 1: had hired Cambridge Analytica, they would try to discourage people
Speaker 1: from voting at all to help boost their clients' numbers. So,
Speaker 1: in the Trump example, if it turns out like there's
Speaker 1: a county in a state that's not likely to support Trump,
Speaker 1: but maybe Trump could carry the state. If that county
Speaker 1: just didn't participate in the election, they would target that
Speaker 1: county that kind of thing. Now, their effectiveness in actually
Speaker 1: accomplishing this goal was a matter of debate. I saw
Speaker 1: a lot of people kind of dismissed, saying like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, what they did was unethical and potentially illegal,
Speaker 1: but they also were not really good at it. But still,
Speaker 1: the data collection thing was huge, Like it violated the
Speaker 1: privacy of millions of people. So Facebook also faced a
Speaker 1: ton of criticism because it facilitated this. It allowed it
Speaker 1: to happen through having this lax policy, which, to be
Speaker 1: fair to Facebook, the company had already addressed. They had
Speaker 1: already closed that loophole before anyone had come to the
Speaker 1: public with Cambridge Analytica. Like, I don't even think anyone
Speaker 1: at Facebook necessarily knew about Cambridge Analytica at that point.
Speaker 1: They just had been made aware of this loophole and
Speaker 1: they had fixed it. Also unrelated to that, but the
Speaker 1: company's chief operating officer at the time, Cheryl Sandberg, landed
Speaker 1: in the hot seat because apparently she had hired a
Speaker 1: PR firm to investigate people who are criticizing Facebook, which
Speaker 1: seems like an intimidation tactic to me, right, Like, sure
Speaker 1: would be a shame if you said something bad about
Speaker 1: Facebook and then I don't know, people found out you
Speaker 1: were having an affair on your spouse or something like that.
Speaker 1: As very skullduggery and cloak and daggery not attract. Okay,
Speaker 1: we are now up to twenty nineteen. We still have
Speaker 1: several years to go, but don't worry. Like once I
Speaker 1: hit twenty twenty, things go real fast. However, because of
Speaker 1: the length of this episode, we do need to take
Speaker 1: another quick break to thank our sponsors. We'll be back
Speaker 1: to wrap all this up. Stick with me because I'm
Speaker 1: not going to be doing this much longer. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, and we're up to twenty nineteen. So Tesla
Speaker 1: introduced the cyber truck that year. It was a sometimes
Speaker 1: a fairly embarrassing unveiling. It included a moment when windows
Speaker 1: that were supposed to be reinforced and difficult to shatter shattered.
Speaker 1: That was a whoopsie. But it would actually take several
Speaker 1: more years before any cyber trucks would be ready to
Speaker 1: ship to customers, so you could argue this was one
Speaker 1: of those events that happened way too early. I also
Speaker 1: think that's going to be the case for some other
Speaker 1: Tesla products, like their robots. Like a fully fledged robot
Speaker 1: capable of doing what their robots appeared to do at
Speaker 1: a recent Tesla event, I imagine is going to take
Speaker 1: a few more years. And also, I'm sure no one
Speaker 1: anticipated someone blowing up a cyber truck outside of Trump's
Speaker 1: Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. So as I record this episode,
Speaker 1: we still don't have all the details about the Las
Speaker 1: Vegas incident. We know that there was a fatality, the
Speaker 1: person who was in the car and seven injuries, and
Speaker 1: it appears to have been an attack. I mean, the
Speaker 1: news articles I've read have suggested that the car was
Speaker 1: laiden down with potentially a mixture of fireworks and fuel,
Speaker 1: maybe other explosive devices, and so it appears that it
Speaker 1: was purposefully exploded outside of Trump's casino in Nevada. But
Speaker 1: we don't know anything more than that at the time
Speaker 1: that I'm recording this. So if more details have come
Speaker 1: out by the time you hear this, what a tragic
Speaker 1: and baffling sort of thing. Like I never get these
Speaker 1: acts of public violence. It's absolutely alien to me. Twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen is also the year that Disney Plus launched, which
Speaker 1: I don't think merrit's a whole lot of conversation, except
Speaker 1: to say I think of it as almost like a
Speaker 1: tipping point where the number of streaming services started to
Speaker 1: get out of control. I mean, we already had Hulu
Speaker 1: and Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max and
Speaker 1: Disney Plus joining the ranks would make things more crowded,
Speaker 1: and we were just getting started. I mean, Apple TV
Speaker 1: Plus also debuted in twenty nineteen that was more of
Speaker 1: a prestige television angle. That Apple was going for but
Speaker 1: still adding even more options there. And today we live
Speaker 1: in a world where there's so many different streaming services
Speaker 1: that we're starting to see them make bundles because they
Speaker 1: recognize that they're too many and that if they all
Speaker 1: try and stand on their own, they're not going to
Speaker 1: get a big slice of the pie because customers have
Speaker 1: a limit to how much they're willing to subscribe to,
Speaker 1: or at least most do. We're getting bundles and consolidation
Speaker 1: because of that, because there's just so many of these
Speaker 1: gosh darn streaming services out there, and most of them
Speaker 1: aren't even nearly as good as dropout TV. And I
Speaker 1: don't know anyone on dropout TV. I just know that
Speaker 1: dropout TV is really good, all right, Speaking of a
Speaker 1: flood of media. It's funny because in twenty nineteen we
Speaker 1: saw what we thought was a big booming period in podcasting.
Speaker 1: And I say it's funny because the next year would
Speaker 1: put twenty nineteen to shame. But yeah, twenty nineteen was
Speaker 1: an important year, Like we saw a lot of people
Speaker 1: getting into podcasting, including high profile personalities like cod and
Speaker 1: O'Brien starting his podcast that year. Meanwhile, there were folks
Speaker 1: like yours truly, who had been going strong for more
Speaker 1: than a decade to that point. And all I'm saying
Speaker 1: is I was podcasting before it was cool now. I
Speaker 1: think the story of twenty nineteen that I want to
Speaker 1: focus on is that the various US regulatory agencies and
Speaker 1: the Department of Justice here in the United States began
Speaker 1: to consider anti trust investigations into big tech companies, primarily
Speaker 1: members of the Big Five. And those are Facebook, which
Speaker 1: is now Meta Alphabet, which is you know, Google's parent company, Apple, Amazon,
Speaker 1: and Microsoft. And those stories are still playing out today,
Speaker 1: with Google in particular looking ahead to a ruling from
Speaker 1: a judge that could determine the future of Google Chrome,
Speaker 1: among other things. Twenty nineteen was also the year that
Speaker 1: TikTok exploded in popularity, so it already launched, but before
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, it was largely just this obscure app that
Speaker 1: teens were using to lip sync to various music tracks
Speaker 1: and create, you know, fun little videos that way. But
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen it became a fully fledged short form
Speaker 1: video social network, and it also quickly became a concern
Speaker 1: among people who were worried about stuff like privacy and security,
Speaker 1: and obviously that escalated in later years and ultimately would
Speaker 1: lead to the United States government banning the app in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty before unless it separates from its Chinese parent company,
Speaker 1: Byte Dance. However, I should add that the Trump administration
Speaker 1: has asked the Supreme Court to delay the deadline for this.
Speaker 1: It was set for January nineteenth, which is the day
Speaker 1: before Trump takes office. He's now asking the Supreme Court
Speaker 1: to delay that deadline, and presumably Trump would then attempt
Speaker 1: to change the thing like it's already been signed into law.
Speaker 1: So I don't actually know what the process is at
Speaker 1: this point. I mean, he's the president of the United States,
Speaker 1: but like, I don't think he just has the power
Speaker 1: to undo something for a previous president had signed into law.
Speaker 1: But I'm no constitutional expert, so what do I know?
Speaker 1: All Right, So, now we're up to twenty twenty, and
Speaker 1: nothing happened that year, At least I'd like to pretend
Speaker 1: nothing happened in twenty twenty. The COVID nineteen pandemic obviously
Speaker 1: made an enormous impact on everything in the world, including
Speaker 1: the tech sector. It pushed some companies to the spotlight,
Speaker 1: so tools like Zoom and Slack became crucial to businesses
Speaker 1: that needed their teams to be able to work together
Speaker 1: even when they weren't allowed to like go to the office.
Speaker 1: And as I mentioned a moment ago, podcasts had another
Speaker 1: explosive moment of growth in twenty twenty. Everyone and their
Speaker 1: Dog launched a show that year. Most of those shows
Speaker 1: ended within three episodes, but some of them stuck around.
Speaker 1: Some tech companies or companies connected to tech, found themselves
Speaker 1: in deep trouble in twenty twenty. You know, like we work,
Speaker 1: we work not technically being a tech company, but treated
Speaker 1: that way. It was already having issues before the pandemic,
Speaker 1: but the pandemic meant that customers had no need for
Speaker 1: office space in the meantime, and we work with sitting
Speaker 1: on all these leases that it needed to you know,
Speaker 1: pay off, So that put we work in a really
Speaker 1: tough position, set it up for the path to bankruptcy
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty three. Now, one huge story connected to
Speaker 1: the pandemic was how the Internet facilitated the spread of
Speaker 1: misinformation that year, twenty twenty election year in the United States.
Speaker 1: We always see an uptick in misinformation on those years,
Speaker 1: and boy howdy, did we see it in twenty twenty, Like,
Speaker 1: remember stories like how five G wireless technologies were supposedly
Speaker 1: carrying the coronavirus in some inexplicable way, Like there were
Speaker 1: actual people who believe that. I don't understand how that's
Speaker 1: the case. I guess if you aren't aware of how
Speaker 1: wireless technologies work and the way or lack of way
Speaker 1: that they interact with organisms, I suppose you could be convinced.
Speaker 1: But like it just takes the smallest amount of education
Speaker 1: to learn that just isn't a viable possibility. I still
Speaker 1: can't wrap my head around that one. It's been four years, y'all.
Speaker 1: And that's just one example of one of the weird
Speaker 1: fringe theories that went around related to tech and the coronavirus.
Speaker 1: There's so many. And because it was an election year,
Speaker 1: and while twenty sixteen gave us a taste of how
Speaker 1: misinformation and propaganda campaigns could work, largely funded from foreign
Speaker 1: sources and primarily from Russia, honestly, twenty sixteen felt like
Speaker 1: an informal rehearsal compared to what happened in twenty twenty plus.
Speaker 1: We were starting to see how emerging technologies like deep
Speaker 1: fakes could potentially play a part in misinformation campaigns down
Speaker 1: the road. It was in twenty twenty when Trump as
Speaker 1: president first attempted to ban TikTok through an executive order. Interestingly,
Speaker 1: now that TikTok is actually facing a legal ban here
Speaker 1: in the United States, not just an executive order but
Speaker 1: a law that's been passed, Trump now opposes this move,
Speaker 1: perhaps because one of his big financial supporters during the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four campaign also happened to be a big
Speaker 1: investor in byte Dance, which is TikTok's parent company. But
Speaker 1: who's to say, okay. There's also a move to take
Speaker 1: the protections out of section two thirty of the nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety six Communications Decency Act in twenty twenty. That's the
Speaker 1: measure that protects platforms online platforms from being held legally
Speaker 1: liable for content that was posted by users. So if
Speaker 1: a user posts something that's illegal, the platform is not
Speaker 1: held responsible for that, particularly if the platform responds appropriately
Speaker 1: by removing the content and restricting the person from being
Speaker 1: able to do that again. I suspect that we're going
Speaker 1: to see a much harder push to strip Section two
Speaker 1: thirty protections moving forward. In twenty twenty five. I would
Speaker 1: be amazed if section two thirty remains a thing by
Speaker 1: the end of Trump's presidency. We'll see, all right. So
Speaker 1: twenty twenty is also the year that Quibi debuted. Do
Speaker 1: you remember Quibi? Quibi debuted, it sputtered, and it died,
Speaker 1: all in the span of a year. If you don't
Speaker 1: remember Quibi. It was a short form video platform that
Speaker 1: poured a whole lot of money into very highly produced,
Speaker 1: professional video projects. So this wasn't user generated. This was
Speaker 1: meant to be like Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever,
Speaker 1: except for short form video. It was made with an
Speaker 1: audience watching on mobile devices in mind. In fact, every
Speaker 1: production was made so that you could view it portrait
Speaker 1: or landscape, to the point where like directors had to
Speaker 1: frame their shots so that it would work in either orientation.
Speaker 1: But the project did not work out so well in
Speaker 1: a world where everybody was stuck at home because of
Speaker 1: the coronavirus and they would just watch stuff on larger
Speaker 1: screens instead of their phones. Most analysts that I've read
Speaker 1: up on seemed to agree that even if the pandemic
Speaker 1: hadn't been a thing, Quibi's success was a long shot
Speaker 1: at best. And that you couldn't say that the coronavirus
Speaker 1: made Quibi fail, but sure to help. I think the
Speaker 1: story to reflect on in twenty twenty is the solar
Speaker 1: Winds hack, which opened their eyes to the dangers of
Speaker 1: supply chain attacks. Now that's a complicated story, but i'll
Speaker 1: sum it up. A company called solar Winds creates software
Speaker 1: for enterprise clients, so that is other businesses. Hackers were
Speaker 1: able to hide some malware into a solar Winds update
Speaker 1: to software called Orion. So rather than focus on the
Speaker 1: end targets such as you know, specific agencies in the
Speaker 1: US government, the hackers implant the malware in a trusted
Speaker 1: partner's software package, which then got pushed out to the
Speaker 1: customers all around the world and infected those customers. So
Speaker 1: this was a huge and very effective cyber attack. While
Speaker 1: thousands of organizations were impacted, it appeared as though the
Speaker 1: attackers had a few specific targets in mind. It's just
Speaker 1: their attack was super effective across all of solar Winds
Speaker 1: customers using the Orion platforms. So the reason I included
Speaker 1: in this episode isn't because of how devastating the attack was,
Speaker 1: although it was quite devastating, but rather it illustrates how
Speaker 1: effective a supply chain attack can be. So, if you
Speaker 1: have identified that your target has really strong defenses and
Speaker 1: you're not likely to be able to penetrate their systems,
Speaker 1: maybe you target one of their trusted partners so you
Speaker 1: can find a way in. It's scary stuff. In twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, we had a few interesting things happen. Antivirus
Speaker 1: software developer and totally bunked's personality, John McAfee passed away.
Speaker 1: I know it's ghost to speak ill of the dead,
Speaker 1: but this guy really was wild. So in a normal world,
Speaker 1: McAfee would best be known as a guy who created
Speaker 1: McAfee antivirus. But we don't live in a normal world.
Speaker 1: We live in this one, and this is the world
Speaker 1: where McAfee was perhaps best known for living a kind
Speaker 1: of sex, drugs, and rock and roll lifestyle, which comes
Speaker 1: complete with him living in a different country and at
Speaker 1: one point being under suspicion for a committing murder on
Speaker 1: one of his neighbors, something that may or may not
Speaker 1: have involved him, we don't know. He was wanted in
Speaker 1: the United States for tax evasion, and he was arrested
Speaker 1: while in Barcelona Spain, and then he was found dead
Speaker 1: in his prison cell not long after. The Spanish courts
Speaker 1: that approved his extradition to the United States absolutely wild,
Speaker 1: and the implication is that he did take his own
Speaker 1: life while he was in jail rather than be extradited
Speaker 1: to the un to stand trial. Microsoft launched Windows eleven
Speaker 1: and twenty twenty one, and it has generally received a
Speaker 1: more positive reception. There are some notable exceptions that would
Speaker 1: unfold later on. Microsoft had skipped over the number nine.
Speaker 1: It went from Windows eight to Windows ten. Windows ten
Speaker 1: got a fair reception. Windows eleven seemed to be an
Speaker 1: improvement in many ways, but some recent developments have critics
Speaker 1: upset at Microsoft, namely the recall or recall feature, which
Speaker 1: takes snapshots of user activities on their computers, so like,
Speaker 1: you can search through these snapshots to find times when
Speaker 1: you've visited certain sites or use certain apps or whatever.
Speaker 1: Advocates have argued that this represents a privacy and security vulnerability,
Speaker 1: and Microsoft did tweak it quite a bit in response
Speaker 1: to those criticisms. But it's opt in, so at least
Speaker 1: you're not like using it by default. But I guess
Speaker 1: the big story that year was really a pair of
Speaker 1: news items that arguably had some connection to one another,
Speaker 1: and both of them involved Facebook. So in the first story,
Speaker 1: a whistleblower named Francis Hogan, who had previously worked as
Speaker 1: a data scientist for Facebook, came forward with the accusations
Speaker 1: and documentation showing that Facebook's policies did a lot of
Speaker 1: bad stuff, like putting children at risk, for example, and
Speaker 1: that Facebook executives further know about this, and the company
Speaker 1: had worked hard to hide it from the public while
Speaker 1: still pursuing these variously harmful or potentially harmful policies, and
Speaker 1: that really what was all about was the company was
Speaker 1: seeking profit over anything else, even in the wake of
Speaker 1: potentially hurting not just children, which is bad enough all
Speaker 1: by itself, but also hurting things like institutions like democracy.
Speaker 1: And Haugen's testimony to Congress was brutal. It is wild
Speaker 1: to me that we have largely forgotten the things she
Speaker 1: brought forward back in twenty twenty one, because it was
Speaker 1: extensive and I thought pretty damning, But you know, we've
Speaker 1: largely moved on since then. Now. Not long after her
Speaker 1: accusations became headlines, Facebook added to the chaos by announcing
Speaker 1: the company was changing its name to Meta Now. Ostensibly
Speaker 1: this was because Facebook would be investing heavily in the
Speaker 1: metaverse concept, which is a vague vision of the future
Speaker 1: of online interactivity that typically involves some form of mixed
Speaker 1: reality component. Critics argued that it was an attempt for
Speaker 1: the company to distance itself from the very real accusations
Speaker 1: flying from the testimony and documentation that had come out
Speaker 1: earlier in the year. However, here we are in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four and Meta is still very much a thing.
Speaker 1: Investors sometimes get a little miffed at Mark Zuckerberg for
Speaker 1: continuing to pour so much money and R and D
Speaker 1: into mixed reality AI and the metaverse concepts, but other
Speaker 1: than that, the Meta ship continues to sail fairly smoothly
Speaker 1: all things considered. All Right, now, we're up to twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two. Man, let's power through it saw a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff happen in twenty twenty two. Non fungible tokens
Speaker 1: aka NFTs had become mainstream headlines in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: They'd been around a little longer than that, but twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one was when the mainstream public really became aware
Speaker 1: of them, and that's when we saw a speculative market
Speaker 1: form around these blockchain based digital markers, and I think
Speaker 1: a lot of the speculation was rooted deeply in ignorance
Speaker 1: as to what NFTs actually are, or maybe more accurately,
Speaker 1: what they are not. Anyway, it was early in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two when that speculative market collapsed in on itself,
Speaker 1: and NFTs as a whole lost nearly all of their
Speaker 1: value in the process. So what had been the gold
Speaker 1: mine of twenty twenty one became kind of a punchline
Speaker 1: in twenty twenty two, and suddenly some people found themselves
Speaker 1: in possession of a digital marker that was worthless after
Speaker 1: they had spent perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of
Speaker 1: dollars on them. One big story that spanned nearly all
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty two was Elon Musk's quest to purchase Twitter.
Speaker 1: His intentions first became clear in the spring of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty two, but not long after he announced his plan
Speaker 1: to buy it, he began to backpedal, and he tried
Speaker 1: to get out of the deal, but doing so would
Speaker 1: have cost him an awful lot of money because he
Speaker 1: had already entered into the negotiations in good faith and
Speaker 1: backing out just wasn't an option, at least not without consequences.
Speaker 1: At one point, the United States court system got involved,
Speaker 1: and Musk capitulated and agreed to buy Twitter for a
Speaker 1: whopping forty four billion dollars before he was forced to
Speaker 1: do so, so he did it by choice technically. One
Speaker 1: of the investors in Twitter, a company called Fidelity, would
Speaker 1: later estimate in twenty twenty four that Twitter's value had
Speaker 1: gone all the way down to nine point four billion dollars.
Speaker 1: So he spent forty four billion and now it's worth
Speaker 1: nine point four billion. That is a heck of a
Speaker 1: decline in just two years. Russia's invasion of Ukraine would
Speaker 1: also have a huge impact on technology. For one thing,
Speaker 1: the US would start to restrict business dealings with Russian
Speaker 1: based companies that included tech companies like Kaspersky, which is
Speaker 1: a cybersecurity firm, and many a American based tech companies
Speaker 1: would pull out of operations within Russia. So you had
Speaker 1: companies just picking up stakes and moving out of Russia,
Speaker 1: sometimes even suspending customer access to platforms within Russia in
Speaker 1: the process. YouTube has been in hot water with the
Speaker 1: Russian government on and off again since this, because they
Speaker 1: have done things like block state backed misinformation channels because
Speaker 1: it's misinformation and Russia's government doesn't like that very much. Also,
Speaker 1: as the tech sector began to settle after the chaos
Speaker 1: that had followed the COVID outbreak, we started seeing the
Speaker 1: first of many rounds of layoffs. Companies that had grown
Speaker 1: very quickly to respond to changing conditions during the pandemic
Speaker 1: found themselves ready to slim down again once things were
Speaker 1: starting to settle, and we still see that happening today.
Speaker 1: There have been numerous cuts in the sector and it's
Speaker 1: really demoralizing and hard to see those headlines month after month.
Speaker 1: Also in twenty twenty two, we got open AI's chat GPT.
Speaker 1: Arguably that should be my big story, because generative AI
Speaker 1: would continue to be an enormous topic in the following years.
Speaker 1: But I think the big story I want to focus
Speaker 1: on from twenty twenty two is the implosion of FTX,
Speaker 1: the cryptocurrency exchange. So as a reminder, the face of
Speaker 1: this company, the co founder Sam Bankman Freed or SBF,
Speaker 1: would be accused of running a kind of fraud in
Speaker 1: which he was taking customer deposits in FTX and then
Speaker 1: using those to cover investments that were being made by
Speaker 1: a sister company called Alameda Research. So Alameda was kind
Speaker 1: of a hedge fund company that would invest in businesses
Speaker 1: related to the crypto space, but to cover investments that
Speaker 1: were made there. SBF and team were siphoning money away
Speaker 1: from FTX in the hopes that no one would really
Speaker 1: notice and that maybe in the long run they would
Speaker 1: be able to cover all their bases. But an expose
Speaker 1: in late twenty twenty two led to investigations, which in
Speaker 1: turn led to SBF getting the boot from the company
Speaker 1: and ultimately to his arrest. He has since been sentenced
Speaker 1: to twenty five years in prison and ordered to pay
Speaker 1: eleven billion with a B dollars in forfeiture, which is
Speaker 1: something I suspect will not ever be paid off, but heck,
Speaker 1: who knows, maybe he'll get a pardon. This administration lot
Speaker 1: to see now. The collapse of FDx added to the
Speaker 1: instability in general in the crypto market. It led to
Speaker 1: other crypto exchanges and other companies falling apart as a result,
Speaker 1: including a couple of banks that had been instrumental in
Speaker 1: the crypto world, and for a short while, it looked
Speaker 1: like crypto in general, could end up sinking as a
Speaker 1: result of the FTX failure, but ultimately the industry did
Speaker 1: weather the storm and would prove to be as volatile
Speaker 1: as ever in the long run. But yeah, the failure
Speaker 1: of FTX was a reminder that sometimes tech isn't there
Speaker 1: to enable new things, but maybe just mask attempts to
Speaker 1: commit fraud, you know, just make it confusing enough and
Speaker 1: nobody asks any questions. Okay. Twenty twenty three this was
Speaker 1: the year that Musk changed the name of Twitter to
Speaker 1: X while making sweeping changes that alienated many users and
Speaker 1: encouraged a bunch of others. The users who were alienated
Speaker 1: often left and ultimately would go to some other alternative
Speaker 1: short form messaging or social network services. The whole pay
Speaker 1: for a verified check mark strategy must introduce chased off
Speaker 1: a ton of people who had previously received a check
Speaker 1: mark from being a notable personality of some sort. I
Speaker 1: was one of those people. I had a checkmark and
Speaker 1: I was on Twitter. I would argue I am not
Speaker 1: actually notable, but I did have a check mark. But
Speaker 1: you know, twenty twenty three was really a year that
Speaker 1: was all about AI. So Chad GBT had debuted in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty two, but it was twenty twenty three that
Speaker 1: saw artificial intelligence make headlines pretty much every single day
Speaker 1: of the year. Sometimes it was because of the incredible
Speaker 1: display of AI's capabilities, some of which really are you know, amazing.
Speaker 1: There were also tons of think pieces about the technology's shortcomings,
Speaker 1: everything from hallucinations or confabulations to the possible impact on
Speaker 1: creative like you know, whether or not AI is plagiarizing
Speaker 1: the work of actual human beings or putting them out
Speaker 1: of work because folks will use AI to I don't know,
Speaker 1: generate marketing slogans as opposed to hiring marketers or create
Speaker 1: artwork instead of hiring an artist, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: We got lots of warnings from critics who were worried
Speaker 1: about deploying a technology before it was thoroughly tested to
Speaker 1: make sure it was safe. You know, we just could
Speaker 1: not get away from AI in twenty twenty three. Whether
Speaker 1: it was Open AI or Google or Meta or Microsoft
Speaker 1: or Amazon or some other company. Artificial intelligence dominated headlines
Speaker 1: throughout twenty twenty three, and we asked a lot of
Speaker 1: questions and we only got a few answers, and none
Speaker 1: of them were relevant or good. So we're still working
Speaker 1: on that related to this. In twenty twenty three, Sam Altman,
Speaker 1: who was one of the co founders and the CEO
Speaker 1: of open Ai, got the boot from the Board of directors.
Speaker 1: He was fired, but then he was a to return
Speaker 1: to the company after enormous pressure was put on the
Speaker 1: Board of directors to reverse their decision. The board was
Speaker 1: concerned that Altman was leading open Ai in a direction
Speaker 1: that was in opposition to its founding principles, which were
Speaker 1: to develop AI in a safe and accountable and transparent way.
Speaker 1: So the board directors were saying, that's not what's happening,
Speaker 1: and we need to get rid of this guy because
Speaker 1: he's pushing the company to do something that's fundamentally in
Speaker 1: opposition to what it's supposed to be about. But the
Speaker 1: board's decision was reversed. The board was then kind of
Speaker 1: given the boot and replaced, and Sam Altman to this
Speaker 1: day remains the CEO of open Ai, And considering the
Speaker 1: stories involving open Ai since then, I think the Board
Speaker 1: of Directors' concerns were merited. I'll say that. And then finally,
Speaker 1: after all this time, we get to twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: and a lot happened in twenty twenty four, but let's
Speaker 1: be honest, there's only one story that we really need
Speaker 1: to talk about. The big story in tech is that
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, co founder and host of the popular podcast
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, announced he would be stepping down from the
Speaker 1: show in early twenty twenty five. In fact, next episode
Speaker 1: will be my last as host of the show officially,
Speaker 1: though again who knows. I may occasionally pop in with
Speaker 1: a special episode here or there, depending upon circumstances, but
Speaker 1: I should add I don't have any plans to do
Speaker 1: that just yet. I'm just saying it's a possibility. I'm
Speaker 1: not leaving it off the table. It could happen. We
Speaker 1: just don't have plans for it. But yeah, the curtain
Speaker 1: is closing in on me and I've got one episode
Speaker 1: left before I shuffle off backstage. And in our next episode,
Speaker 1: you will meet the new hosts of Tech Stuff, the
Speaker 1: people who will bring the show to new heights that
Speaker 1: I can only dream about. I'm genuinely excited to see
Speaker 1: where they take it and how they share their own
Speaker 1: view of technology. And yeah, the show will be different,
Speaker 1: but I have no doubts it will be even better
Speaker 1: than before, and now so I can say it one
Speaker 1: last time to y'all, I'll talk to you again really soon.
Speaker 1: Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
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