Leo [00:00:22]:
And we're back for another episode. Hey, Gary. How are you doing?

Gary [00:00:25]:
Good. How are you?

Leo [00:00:26]:
Hanging in there Yeah. Is you know, it seems like, January has already been a month long even though we're not even halfway through. I'm not sure why. Yeah. One of those one of those months where everything is happening and yet everything is kind of waiting for something to happen.

Gary [00:00:45]:
Sure. Yes. Which pretty much is what the stuff we're gonna talk about. A lot of that is

Leo [00:00:50]:
that

Gary [00:00:50]:
falls under that.

Leo [00:00:51]:
Yeah. Let's dive right into that. So what Gary's talking about, of course, is the impending TikTok ban that is scheduled to take effect on 19th. As we talked about before, nobody has really clarified exactly what that's going to look like. Everybody's assuming that TikTok will just stop working. And in fact, I think that there is a little bit of precedent in that. I believe it's India. TikTok is not allowed.

Leo [00:01:23]:
And indeed, that's exactly what happens. Right? You get a note that says, oops, sorry. You know, we can't we can't do TikTok here, because so it's interesting. With the 19th coming up, I did notice I ran into this yesterday. I I had a little hard time finding it before the episode, but, there is at least a move to try and further delay the, the ban. And, it's unclear if that'll happen. If I if I remember correctly, the bill that's being introduced would delay it for another 270 days. In other words, you know, punt punt it further down the field.

Gary [00:02:03]:
Much further down. Yeah.

Leo [00:02:04]:
And, but it's unclear how that happens. If that happens, you know, what just exactly what the steps are.

Gary [00:02:11]:
Yeah. I've heard well, yeah. The it's very weird because all of the different plans like, you know, punt it for, you know, the the 90 days or the 270 days or whatever, there's just it's just rumors. It's just little Yeah. Somebody saying something. There's not not really anything official. Right? The current presidential administration isn't saying anything by doing any of that. So

Leo [00:02:37]:
I've been watching TikTok creators over the last couple of days, I guess. Mhmm. And a lot of them are basically saying goodbye. Mhmm. They're just assuming that when TikTok goes away, that they're gonna lose their audience. I don't know if if they are necessarily planning on continuing to post on TikTok to everybody else, or if they're just going to assume that, you know, the majority of their audience is American and all their revenue is gonna go away, which actually leads into an interesting concept of the there are a number of people on TikTok who are who have made this their career.

Gary [00:03:22]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:03:23]:
I think they didn't plan on it. They more or less stumbled into it Mhmm. Where, you know, they were doing some TikToks for fun, and they got a lot of engagement. And then TikTok offered their creator plan, and all of a sudden, they were getting, you know, like, job level money. So it actually became a career. This is clearly going to impact them dramatically because none of the alternatives really have that same level of revenue potential is what it sounds like, because you engage differently on those other platforms. The revenue models may not even be there in some cases. And it's just you know, these are folks who are actually going to be dramatically impacted, if this actually goes into, into plan.

Leo [00:04:13]:
The other thing that they're doing, of course, is making sure to let everybody know which other platforms they're on. Up until just a couple of days ago, the platforms that I heard the most often were Instagram and YouTube, the ones that are YouTube shorts typically, because those are at least in format. They support kind of sort of being able to do the same kinds of things you do on TikTok. They're established. There's large audiences out there. Honestly, a lot of the people on TikTok probably already have Instagram accounts and YouTube accounts. So, it's more a matter of changing behavior than it is trying to get them to, to establish accounts.

Gary [00:04:53]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:04:54]:
But there have been a couple of alternative apps that have been getting mentioned that I hadn't heard of before. One of them is Lemon 8, which, I've heard conflicting stories on because apparently, it's owned by ByteDance, the people that own TikTok.

Gary [00:05:11]:
Same company. Yep.

Leo [00:05:12]:
So is it affected by the ban? Are they supposed to turn off Lemonade as well? Mhmm. I know that a lot of creators are suggesting Lemonade. Set up an account on Lemonade and go find me there, which could be risky if, you know, on 19th or after 19th. Whoops. That one doesn't work either. The one that I just heard about yesterday, honestly, for the very first time, and it's gotten a lot of traction in the last 24 hours, is something called RedNote. RedNote is a completely different Chinese owned company Yeah. Which I find just wonderfully ironic.

Leo [00:05:56]:
I've got a link to at least a Reuters article that's talking about, you know, over half a 1000000 TikTok refugees have flocked to China's RedNote. If you actually go visit Rednote, I have not installed the app yet. I'm kind of undecided. But you can at least, you know, visit the the website, which is not Rednote. It's zhaohongshu.com, as always, links in the show notes. And, yes, it's, you know, lots of Chinese. I mean, by that, I mean, not just I mean, not Chinese people. I mean, lots of Chinese text flying by.

Leo [00:06:26]:
The captions are in Chinese. The the you know, everything is there. And I'm not sure exactly how that's going to change over time. I read, this morning that they're actually having some interesting growth payments. The growth was unexpected for, for RedNote. So I was expecting to hear server related issues, capacity related issues, but in fact, what I'm hearing about are translation related issues.

Gary [00:06:54]:
Oh, sure. Yeah.

Leo [00:06:54]:
They're trying to figure out a way to, handle the influx of English speakers and not and basically have it be something that English and Chinese speakers can both enjoy together, with some kind of translation or automatic stuff, automatic stuff or whatever. Anyway, given the government's attempt to prevent, you know, their nominal risk here was, you know, some kind of security risk posed by Chinese ownership. It is very ironic that so many people are simply just fleeing to another company that is not affected by the ban that just also happens to be owned by, you know, a Chinese company. I have played a little bit with a VPN. Mhmm. And, you know, all it really takes, like, for me is I did VPN out of Canada, and everything seems to work just fine. I'm using ProtonVPN. I'm a paid subscriber, so I'm actually getting, you know, performance.

Leo [00:07:52]:
I suspect that free VPNs, besides having the random security and privacy issues, They're just not gonna have the performance, especially if a lot of people try to fire up VPNs to make this happen. However, I also don't expect a lot of VPN usage. I don't expect given the the massive audience that TikTok has, I really don't expect them to, you know, that large a number of people to actually start firing up VPNs in order to get around this to really have a significant impact on on what's going on. Yep. The the the most wonderful rumor.

Gary [00:08:28]:
Why? I heard it's like, oh, wonderful. But yeah.

Leo [00:08:30]:
Oh, it's it well, yes. There's a rumor, of course, that, the folks at ByteDance would be willing to, sell, which is actually it's not a ban as much as it is a deadline to be sold. Right? You're supposed to sell the company to an American holder, and then everything would be fine. Not happening. So the risk the the rumor, of course, is that they're gonna sell to Elon Musk, which, again, TikTok, ByteDance says that's pure fiction, but, of course, because of the, the enormity of what that could potentially turn out to be, it's got a lot of traction, a lot of press. My only thinking is that if that happens, I'm not sure that's actually going to satisfy or make the TikTok audience all that happy. Yeah. Because if Musk does to TikTok, what he did to x, rather than leaving because it ain't working anymore, people are gonna leave because it ain't what it used to be.

Leo [00:09:31]:
It'll have been changed dramatically into something that they probably don't enjoy. Anyway, I just I found that an interesting rumor. I don't give it much credibility at all, especially since supposedly, ByteDance has emphatically said that it's fiction. But, I just thought it was funny, if nothing.

Gary [00:09:49]:
There is that other rumor about, like, what, one of the Shark Tank people or whatever.

Leo [00:09:53]:
Oh, I haven't heard

Gary [00:09:54]:
that one. With a with a group of investors, so not like a real just like, you know, a whole group of American investors buying it that seem to be a little bit more legitimate as in that, you know, they may think that they're interested. But I haven't heard anything about you know, ByteDance has always been like, we're not selling. That's been their line straight through. They have never so I doubt they're talking to anybody, for real about this. They wanna see how it plays out, you know, if they get if they get banned or not.

Leo [00:10:27]:
It'll be interesting to see what happens. It really will. Because if they do get banned, like I said, it affects a lot of people. It's gotta be a a not insignificant chunk of ByteDance's traffic and revenue and and all that kind of stuff. So I just I just honestly, I don't see how anybody wins. You know, the the, you know, ByteDance doesn't win because they lose their audience. TikTok users don't win because they lose their ability to pass fun for those people that are just using it and make revenue, have a job, have a career for those people that are actually doing that. And, honestly, I don't think the government is gonna end up getting what it is they think they're getting.

Gary [00:11:08]:
I don't think they know what they want out of this. You know?

Leo [00:11:12]:
Well, it's you know, the my take, of course, is that it's not so much about security as it is about political maneuvering and posturing, yada yada. But nominally, it's about security. And when everybody flocks to a different Chinese app, you gain 0. Right? You got nothing. So, yeah, we'll see.

Gary [00:11:29]:
Maybe even worse. I think, well, one of the reasons I say I don't think the government really knows is, of course, people outside of government, when talking about the ban, especially if they're in favor of it, people outside of government, when talking about the ban, especially if they're in favor of it, usually say they're in favor of it for reasons that have nothing to do with the legislation. Right? So, oh, it's polluted the minds of our youth or whatever. And it's like the legislation doesn't really talk about that. That's not why it's being banned. But what I've also seen people, like, in congress, like, been being asked for a sound bite on the news. Mhmm. And they also state kind of the same things where it's like, well, that's not what the legislation is about.

Gary [00:12:06]:
Like, if you want it banned for that, fine. But that's not why it would be banned if this ban goes through. So sometimes I think that there are a lot of people in in government that are in favor of the ban for reasons that have nothing to do with what's on the actual piece of paper, the paper, the the bill that they passed, which is fine, but that just means that people are, you know, at odds with, you know, what one congressperson might say they wanna ban for this, another congressperson for that. It's,

Leo [00:12:39]:
the problem to me too is that if they really are interested in banning it because it's corrupting our youth or whatever Yeah. Whatever the bucket of phrase is, then banning TikTok does not solve that problem.

Gary [00:12:51]:
There's plenty of other American companies that are doing worse.

Leo [00:12:55]:
Any other American companies

Gary [00:12:56]:
that are

Leo [00:12:56]:
doing worse. And, of course, one of the pieces of feedback I get from, some of my my readers is that, you know, okay. Supposedly, we're banning it because China is collecting data. But it's okay if Facebook and Meta and Google and Microsoft all collected that same data and more. It's just yeah. It's it's an interesting mess.

Gary [00:13:20]:
Yeah. And what data exactly? I mean, because it's unlike a social network I feel like a social network like Facebook is very personal. You're posting about what you're doing, what's going on in your life, things that identify you and, you know, your interests, all of that stuff. Whereas TikTok is much more of a performance platform. It's like they're I I just don't see people that often going and saying, let me update you what's going on with my life kinda thing. Maybe celebrities do that, but celebrities, we already know. We can read, you know, tabloids and watch TMZ and see what celebrities are doing. What, normal people do is they find a niche usually.

Gary [00:13:59]:
You know, I like to talk about new music. I like to talk about, you know, TV shows. I I talk about astronomy. I, you know, I all this stuff, and they find

Leo [00:14:09]:
about Winder.

Gary [00:14:10]:
Winder. Yeah. And they talk and they talk about their niche. It's a performance thing. It's like my channel. You know, it's going to have my name on it, but I'm going to be about this, which is makes it very different than Facebook and also very hard to see, like, what sort of data, like, people get, especially considering that most of the data on TikTok, it doesn't really have a very deep profile kind of situation going on where, you know, like a Facebook kind of social media thing does. TikTok, it's all like it's out there. The information that they could be looking at is stuff that's I we could be looking at.

Gary [00:14:43]:
Like, you could go on to TikTok, follow somebody, go through all their videos, and see all the stuff that they say.

Leo [00:14:49]:
There is a piece of data that, TikTok collects Yeah. That, you and I can't get access to

Gary [00:14:57]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:14:58]:
That, honestly, I don't think most of our politicians are, I don't wanna say smart enough, but in tune enough to understand. Remember that TikTok is all about the algorithm. Right? What do they do? They feed you more videos like the videos you like.

Gary [00:15:18]:
Right.

Leo [00:15:18]:
And with occasionally interjecting something else as kind of a I think of it as a probe. Is this something is this something that he likes? It's completely out of left field. But is this something that he likes? And if he does, then, okay, we can add that to the mix as well. So one of the things we don't have access to that TikTok does is understanding their viewers'

Gary [00:15:41]:
True.

Leo [00:15:41]:
References. What it is they, what it is they follow, which a lot of people tend to take as, affinity. Like, for example, if I were to watch a lot of, I don't know, Mac videos, for example, then TikTok might think I'm a huge Mac fan, whether or not I really am. But that's the kind of inference that they might make. The government doesn't necessarily like that. But what they also don't like is the ability of TikTok to insert random things in their algorithm to get your attention, or those random things could potentially be directed by, an enemy government, a government that we don't trust.

Gary [00:16:24]:
Right. Influencing

Leo [00:16:25]:
us. Yes. Yes. The the yeah. There's there's influencers, and then there's influencers. Right? There's the influencers who are watching, and then there's the platform itself who might subtly be trying to influence us by some of the random things they show.

Gary [00:16:39]:
And it's, and I think this is the real danger except, of course, it still has a thing where, like, other apps can certainly do this as well. But the idea that, not only could they insert stuff to try to influence us, propaganda, that's what it would be. Right? But they don't have to make the propaganda, which is what's interesting about, when you have enough content being made, whether it's TikTok or YouTube or whatever, they could just basically say, we don't need to make any propaganda at all. We just need to make sure that the people saying the things that we like have a slight that we'll turn the dial up just a notch on those people, and we can kind of, like, over years push, you know, things in this direction or that direction. I don't know if how well it works, really. I mean, because historically, you've got the problem where very overt propaganda has not worked. Right? I mean, there's been I mean, we could point, you know, I I went to journalism school and we certainly talked about, you know, his history, and propaganda was one of the things we talked about. And the interesting thing about a lot of the examples of propaganda is, like, yeah.

Gary [00:17:48]:
So, like, Germany didn't win the war. The Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore. Like, you know, looking at things like that, it's like, so how good was the propaganda? So you have you have that. I I think part of it is because you have backlash. Whenever you push propaganda enough, people recognize it and then start to counter the propaganda because that's kind of interesting. So I don't I I don't know. And they I certainly have heard politicians talking about this, and I don't know if that's part of the bill, if that's actually in there saying that this is one of the reasons Yeah. Or it's all about privacy.

Gary [00:18:25]:
I did years years years years ago, maybe way before they even, you know, during, you know, 8 years ago whenever it was when they first mentioned banning TikTok or something. I remember this one privacy thing where they said that troops stationed in Afghanistan Mhmm. Were using TikTok because they had a lot of downtime. Right? You know, you're that's military. Right? You spent a lot of time at the base, months months, and then all of a sudden, one morning, you're said, we're we're going here. We're doing this.

Leo [00:18:58]:
Right.

Gary [00:18:58]:
And so what was interesting is they they found that they were using TikTok, watching it a lot to pass the time, making TikToks a lot pass the time. And then they'd be told, tomorrow, we're doing something. Everybody off your phones. So all of a sudden, you'd have, you know, a group of several hundred people that were on either TikTok or Snapchat or Facebook or whatever, who were posting and watching stuff every day go quiet. And it would be like, oh, they're moving out tomorrow.

Leo [00:19:31]:
They all go dark at the same time. Something must

Gary [00:19:33]:
be happening. Exactly. So that's kind of interesting. But, of course, you don't need a ban for that. You need a ban in the military for that or you need a ban, you know, in, that kind of thing. Of course, you can also use it for counterintelligence, you know, just, tell everybody, yeah, keep keep post get a lot of stuff ready to post and keep posting even while you're on the road and make it seem like we're, we're we're that. But, yeah, the influence stuff is interesting, and it's the best argument for actually banning it.

Leo [00:20:02]:
To be fair, I'm not sure I agree only because now Yeah. I can't say I've seen a single thing that I would consider to be, influence in one direction or another.

Gary [00:20:14]:
That's because you and I aren't on the edge. Right? Because when you wanna do propaganda, you're not going to there's gonna be people on one side or the other that you're not gonna affect. You wanna get the people that are in the middle or who are, you know, you you can kinda slowly, you know, they're they're more malleable. Right?

Leo [00:20:32]:
I was gonna say they're they're I must not be malleable enough that it Yeah.

Gary [00:20:35]:
Yeah. And you don't care about the people that you like. You don't even matter of fact, you'd rather the people that really in the know and really feel strongly not see any of the propaganda. But the the people that are kind of open to influence, only they see it. But, you know, I I again, I'm not convinced that that a band is actually targeted for that. Plus, of course, there's nothing to prevent people from using American companies from doing that. Matter of fact, that's exactly what's happened with Facebook. You know? And

Leo [00:21:04]:
Supposedly, the Russian influence campaign during the for previous election was all part of that. It was an external country using the United States hosted or centered Yeah. Social media.

Gary [00:21:16]:
Yeah. Exactly. And there was that it's what the British ad company that used Facebook for for political influence. It was a whole thing, like, 8 years ago.

Leo [00:21:26]:
That. Yeah. I don't remember that. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gary [00:21:28]:
Yeah. So so yeah. So so there's a lot of that. Yeah. So yeah. Well, what I'm interested in, I know you wanna talk about it, is, like so, okay, so it goes dead in the United States. Like, I'm super curious as to, like, what TikTok is gonna be like.

Leo [00:21:46]:
Yes. Yeah. You you ever have those situations where you're with a group of people Yeah. And you're having a conversation and then that one person leaves, that one annoying person leaves, And then everybody that's left finally gets to say, okay, finally, he's gone. We can be ourselves. Right? Is that what's going to happen? Right?

Gary [00:22:07]:
Are all

Leo [00:22:07]:
these TikTokers from other countries gonna say, boy, I'm sure glad that that that ugly American is gone. Right? We

Gary [00:22:15]:
can we

Leo [00:22:16]:
can finally finally be ourselves. I don't know.

Gary [00:22:17]:
I I'm curious. I I no. This is something this is probably what's going to get me to use a VPN. Like, a few like, I'll probably be able to make it a few days, but I'm gonna be so curious. And I do follow tons of people on TikTok that are, like, particularly from, you know, Scotland, Ireland, England, and and also people that are, like, travelers that travel around the world, and they do travel kind of things. And it's funny because when I see some of them talking, they're the ones not mentioning this as much because, of course, it's not affecting that. They're gonna keep I mean, it will their audience. But

Leo [00:22:57]:
And and I suspect that some of them don't care. Right? Some of them say, you know, the the folks that aren't making money or the folks that that are literally just doing it because it's a passion project, they're gonna do it no matter who's watching. Yeah. And if everybody in the United States goes away, it's like, oh, well, I'm not gonna do anything about I'm not gonna go go take the extra effort to get on another platform. I'm just gonna keep doing my thing here on TikTok. I expect there's more than a few of those.

Gary [00:23:22]:
I know. I'm I'm gonna be so tempted, like, just to take one device, you know, an old iPad

Leo [00:23:27]:
Right.

Gary [00:23:28]:
And just lock that in with a VPN, said to look like it's from Canada, and go on and just see what the vibe is, what the feeling is. I my my feeling my guess is that I would see a lot of, UK and Ireland, content Sure. That would continue on, and then that would probably be kind of interest. It would become like, when you when you remember that you could tune into Internet, like, streams for radio stations around the world, like, every once I remember that and say, let me go let me go and pick, like, some random country in the world and, like, see what the rock station is playing right now.

Leo [00:24:06]:
To. Yes.

Gary [00:24:07]:
And then you listen to it for, like, an hour or 2. I I suspect that they'll be even better than that. I'm also interested. It it's weird watching those goodbye videos like you were talking about before. Well, first of all, there's the goodbye videos, and then there's the what people are calling the last TikTok meme, which is saying goodbye to your Chinese, you know, listeners. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Gary [00:24:32]:
So people, you know, saying goodbye, oh, to whoever's been watching my TikToks in the in the Chinese government, it's like, you know, sorry. You won't be able to see my stuff anymore. But, also, like, there are a lot of people saying, yeah, like you said, go to Lemonade, go to Red Note, go to Instagram or whatever. I I'm hearing things all over the place. There's certainly one thing, about Instagram that I find interesting is several people have said is, like, forget Instagram reels because Instagram reels content is mostly people from TikTok also posting Instagram reels. So the question is is will people then adopt Instagram reels as their primary place or because they stop posting a TikTok, the Instagram reel stuff is just gonna dry up, which which will be interesting. And it might be true of YouTube shorts as well. We'll have to see.

Gary [00:25:21]:
There might actually not be more stuff posted at those two places, but less stuff.

Leo [00:25:26]:
Right.

Gary [00:25:27]:
So that's gonna be really curious. I've seen some companies that are on the verge of this year of launching something that could be a little TikTok like, and they're desperately telling people, look for us later on. Like, we're gonna have a beta. Sign up for our beta list. And that's interesting. I just I can't believe that since we've had so much warning, it's really been 8 years since the original call for a ban of TikTok, came out and more than a year since this legislation really started pushing it forward, that some company, you know, like how, Meta did threads after people were wanted to leave the the artist formerly known as Twitter as Twitter. They, they came up with threads really fast. Like, I'm so surprised that some company didn't say, hey.

Gary [00:26:14]:
We've got something that could be a TikTok competitor, but we were gonna go in a different direction because, you know, we don't think we could compete with TikTok. But now we have the servers. We have the app. We could push it back in the TikTok direction. Let's get it launched before TikTok ends, and that hasn't happened. It's all like the I've read a lot of articles like you have, and it's all been like, here's another one, but it's more text based or but the videos are shorter or but the you know, it's not exactly that. And it's like, well, TikTok's a pretty simple concept. If you forget about the fact that they've got an algorithm that's supposedly is really good.

Gary [00:26:52]:
Right? If you forget the algorithm and say you the algorithm can catch up later, like, they could you could work the next year to fix the algorithm to get it to be better and better. The basics of just being able to post video and being able to watch, you know, the streams of video should be pretty basic. And I'm surprised nobody really jumped on it, to try to, like, really just go head to head with, like, the absence of TikTok, I guess.

Leo [00:27:17]:
It's interesting because one of the things that I think the the whole Twitter migration is actually a relatively good example. Now, obviously, Twitter didn't go away, although some would claim that original Twitter went away. But, there have been so many different places for people to go. And as bad as so many people feel that Twitter is or what it became, there's a lot of people still there. I don't know what it takes for people to actually migrate somewhere else. It usually takes something big. Right? A big event of some sort, and then you get a surge. But it's not the whole platform.

Leo [00:28:01]:
It's not the majority of users mostly, and they tend to go to a bunch of different places. When you think about it, there's a lot of things that are pretty much Twitter. Blue Sky is probably the closest thing to what Twitter used to be. Right. And while that's seen an uptick, it's certainly not seen it's certainly not seen as a Twitter replacement yet.

Gary [00:28:25]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:28:26]:
And I just don't know that that's gonna happen. But my concern here is that even if somebody did come up with a a TikTok clone, which is essentially what you're talking about, Would people move?

Gary [00:28:38]:
This is new territory.

Leo [00:28:41]:
Yeah.

Gary [00:28:42]:
Like like the like the Twitter thing was this, okay, it's still there.

Leo [00:28:46]:
Right. You

Gary [00:28:47]:
don't have to leave. Right? And you have this big silent majority. Right? You have people that that are very vocal, people that do podcasts like us and start talking about it. And we're like there's, like, a 10%, like, of us, and 10% are gonna leave Twitter and 10 whatever. And then there's gonna be these people that just quietly just continue doing what they were doing. Right? And they're slow to move. It's you know, the the the mass of peoples are gonna be slow to change their habits. This is different because, you know, as far as US users anyway, TikTok goes away.

Leo [00:29:19]:
But but for the last 8 years Yeah. Nobody really believed it would happen.

Gary [00:29:26]:
I know. So what happens when it does?

Leo [00:29:28]:
I know. I get that. I mean, yes. I don't know where people are gonna go. It'd be really interesting to see which services have the uptick come next week if it happens. But I think to address your original statement is, you know, why isn't there an alternative? Why didn't somebody do something? Yeah. Because they probably didn't think the opportunity was real. They probably didn't believe Yeah.

Gary [00:29:45]:
It's a risk.

Leo [00:29:46]:
We would actually come to this point. And you're right. They would be risking investing, and creating a TikTok clone only to find out then that TikTok wasn't going away, and they don't have a way to differentiate themselves.

Gary [00:29:58]:
Yeah. That is that's true. So Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of migrations

Leo [00:30:05]:
Let's

Gary [00:30:06]:
the you know, TikTok's not the only thing where there's, like, this big migration happening. It seems to be that's, like, the big, like, big story going on over the last couple of months, maybe even going back a year, but certainly in the last couple of months. This migration, throughout either social media or regular media, between places. And it really got a push in the last week or 2 with Facebook's announcements and things about how they're changing, how moderation works. A lot of people very upset about that, including myself, taking away fact checking. Meta, of course, owns a whole suite of things. It's not just Facebook. It's Instagram.

Gary [00:30:47]:
It's threads, and other things as well. But those are the 2 big ones where fact checking really comes in to play there. I'm really only using threads now, but I don't know if I'll be continue continuing to use threads. Very upset about what they're what they're doing. So there's been a lot of talk separate from the TikTok stuff of migration away from Instagram, away from threads and Facebook. Of course, there's been talk about getting away from Facebook for a decade now. But to other things, like, for instance, you know, Blue Sky and Mastodon for the microblogging, you know, going from threads to those, There's been a lot seems to be a lot of talk over the last couple days about, PixelFed as an alternative to Instagram. It's kind of like the mastodon, I guess.

Leo [00:31:35]:
It's the mastodon of of image based. Yeah.

Gary [00:31:37]:
Of image based stuff. You know, you could continue with your Instagram ways of posting photos if that's what you'd use it for. But it's federated and, you know, you create your own instance if you want. You can join a bunch of others. So it's really interesting to see that. Then also in, like, regular media, right, the big story there being the Washington Post starting with, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post going in and and stopping the endorsement for the for the presidential election at the last minute, right, when they already had the endorsement set ready to go to print, he stopped it, and that made a lot of people mad inside the post and outside the post. So outside the post, you got people saying, forget it. I'm done with my subscription.

Gary [00:32:22]:
Inside the post, you had people resigning and leaving, right, and going to various other places, starting various other places. Mhmm. So there's, like, this migration away from traditional media sources that are all now online, really, but they're still traditional, you know, they have writers that write stuff and they publish it. It's not like, you know, a social media or microblogging platform. In other places too, people getting away from this or that or, you know, figure out who owns what and trying to stay away from that platform. So, yeah, it's it's been really interesting. Even messaging apps, I've heard people talking about, like, getting away from either traditional messaging, like, you know, usually their mobile carrier or things like WhatsApp going with things like Telegram for more privacy and all of that. There's that kind of migration?

Leo [00:33:17]:
WhatsApp is another one that goes under the meta umbrella, right, which is, you know, another another big thing. Telegram tends to be a little bit controversial. There are some folks that don't believe it's everything it's cracked up to be. Everybody says you should be using Signal if you really want privacy. Yeah. But

Gary [00:33:33]:
yeah. Yeah. There's it's interesting. There just seem to be migration all over the place and diversification because a lot of this migration is going away from bigger things to smaller things, like going away from Instagram to PixelFed, which by itself would be a whole bunch of smaller servers and services. But also, I've heard people recommending others or even going back to, Flickr. Like, I've heard people say, I'm just going back to Flickr away from Instagram.

Leo [00:34:01]:
I never left Flickr. I've been there forever. Come on.

Gary [00:34:04]:
So, you know, and there are a bunch of other photo sharing ones as well, and I've heard so, boy, people are migrating all over the place. Even some of those a lot of journalists have basically moved away from working for publication to working for themselves.

Leo [00:34:20]:
Right.

Gary [00:34:20]:
And they move to things like going to Substack, for instance, where they could continue to write about what they wanna write about

Leo [00:34:27]:
Mhmm.

Gary [00:34:28]:
And then just get paid directly by the people that read them.

Leo [00:34:32]:
Right.

Gary [00:34:33]:
And some of them set up their own things. Some of them are setting up Substack. Some of them, I suspect, are using Substack as their launching platform, but the plan is to get off of it eventually.

Leo [00:34:44]:
Right.

Gary [00:34:44]:
Sure. Have their own have their own thing. But it is interesting where I've even noticed too that, as far as monetization, some of the publications I'm used to going to, like The Verge and Wired, like, I mean, they've had ways to pay them for things for a long time, but now I'm hitting, like, the limits all the time. Right. Like, I never I don't remember ever going to The Verge and getting told that, oh, you hit your limit to scribe, and the same thing with Wired online. Fortunately, I can get both through Apple News Plus.

Leo [00:35:19]:
Oh, okay. So you But so In a sense, you are paying for it.

Gary [00:35:22]:
I am paying, which is which makes it tough because I have to remember that because I have to be like, well, I find this valuable. Maybe I'll pay. Oh, wait a minute. I think I already am. But now every time I see an article, I have to go to Apple News Plus and find the article there.

Leo [00:35:35]:
Oh, so you actually have to you can't just use some credentials on the website. You have to actually do it

Gary [00:35:39]:
through as soon as possible. I mean, there might be an easier way to do it, but, yeah, it's a pain. I what I need to do is remember at this point, which is exactly, you know, what Apple wants with the with the app is I remember, oh, if I'm going to read news, stop searching the web. Right. Go to Apple News Plus in the 1st place. And maybe that's part of the problem. Maybe I'm doing that, and I'm not realizing I'm seeing some things that I'm paying for. And then when I go to the web, then I'm reminded that it's like, oh, yeah.

Gary [00:36:06]:
You just can't read this.

Leo [00:36:07]:
As an aside, I would love to subscribe to Apple News Plus. It I think it covers enough of the publications that I care about that I would actually end up saving money in the long run. We'll talk about my shift here in a minute. But, the the issue is, of course, that it's Apple only. Yeah. There's no web interface. If there was a web interface, I I swear, especially in the current climate, you know, they could double their revenue, double their subscribers in an instant, by making it available to non Apple users. Yes.

Leo [00:36:41]:
I have an iPad, but I don't have it with me all the time. And it's not the kind of a thing that I just generally go to to do things. So, yeah, Apple News Plus would be wonderful if

Gary [00:36:51]:
Maybe they maybe this shift in things will get them going there. We'll we'll have to see. I mean, they certainly did it with Apple TV Plus. Right? They started off with, you need an Apple device to do it. Right. And now you get the Apple TV Plus, for instance, on Roku. And And

Leo [00:37:07]:
so you you don't have

Gary [00:37:08]:
to buy Apple hardware anymore. You could just get a Roku box.

Leo [00:37:11]:
As I do. Yes. Yeah. That's exactly I I want that same experience for Apple News.

Gary [00:37:17]:
So so maybe though maybe they will now. Maybe it's they'll become more viable. Certainly, it's become more valuable to me. I really only had Apple News Plus, for a while there because it just came with my Apple One subscription

Leo [00:37:30]:
Sure.

Gary [00:37:31]:
Which included Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus, the things I used. But now it's to the point where I use it enough that I think, I would pay for like, if it was separate, I'd I had to pay $5 a month or whatever. I probably would. Right.

Leo [00:37:45]:
Right. Yeah. Yeah. So Washington Post is interesting. There's the most recent thing, of course, that happened is that that editorial cartoon caught

Gary [00:37:56]:
Yes. That's right.

Leo [00:37:57]:
At the last minute. And that person, the the art the artist behind that one whose name escapes me right now. But she actually already had a Substack. And I'm absolutely convinced that her Substack subscribers just went through the roof as everybody heard more about this. This was a wonderful classic case of the star sand effect. Right? I suspect that had they just allowed that thing to get published normally, it would have gotten some eyeballs and it would have raised a few eyebrows, but it would not have gotten nearly the coverage.

Gary [00:38:29]:
It it wasn't a yeah. It wasn't a very controversial editorial cartoon in my opinion.

Leo [00:38:35]:
Right. Yeah. It was just just another one. We simply send plenty of them. But, you know, she's obviously gone off and done a substack of her own, and, I don't know if she's making revenue enough there or not. But one of the things that is happening a couple of different things on Washington Post. You mentioned, of course, in your notes here that people are going to other publications, other publications that, some of which I have already subscribed to, like The Atlantic. I love The Atlantic.

Leo [00:39:06]:
It's one of them.

Gary [00:39:07]:
Yep.

Leo [00:39:08]:
It's like top tier for me. If if if I could subscribe to only one thing, it would probably be The Atlantic. The Economist, I think, would be a close second. But what I've been doing is I have been migrating my subscriptions. Indeed, I did cancel my Washington Post subscription, which really only means that come October, as it turns out, it's not going to auto renew. And I've done the same thing actually with the New York Times because the New York Times is falling into some other issues that people aren't trusting them as a reputable, proper news source. What I've been doing is I've been shifting some of my subscription dollars to other publications. I just, like yesterday, ended up subscribing to The New Yorker because they had a wonderful article about something that, okay, yeah, if they're going to do more stuff like this, I will support them.

Leo [00:40:00]:
But I'm also doing the individual thing. I've got probably about half a dozen individuals that I've subscribed through usually through Substack. Although, there are alternatives that kind of operate like Substack, to varying degrees. And, it's it's as you say, it's it's kind of a migration from, corporate journalism. Which we would think of as Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and so forth, to individual journalism. Because now individual journalism is a thing. It didn't used to be. Right? You needed the machine of a big corporation to get your words distributed.

Leo [00:40:42]:
But now all you really need to do is set up something on the Internet. And as long as you can attract the appropriate attention and get subscribers, you're done. You're ready. You're you're you're making your your mark in the world. So I've been doing a lot of that as well and really, really rethinking where I'm spending, spending my my subscription dollars. The one thing I found kind of interesting is that, I don't know if you know who Kara Swisher is.

Gary [00:41:08]:
Oh, she's got well, I recommended her book.

Leo [00:41:11]:
That's right.

Gary [00:41:11]:
So this very show not too long ago.

Leo [00:41:13]:
Well, apparently, she is spearheading a movement to try and purchase the Washington Post.

Gary [00:41:21]:
Yep.

Leo [00:41:21]:
She's trying to gather investors to come up with, you know, whatever the appropriate amount of of money would be to do that. Personally, I think it's doomed, no matter how much money they raise because it's clear that, Bezos isn't interested in selling. And even if he were, the fact that he has apparently, you know, basically gone all in on the next administration, the next administration won't want him to sell because they want to be able to control what goes out in that publication, albeit through him.

Gary [00:42:03]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:42:04]:
So I just don't see that as happening, which is unfortunate. I don't I do but I just I just don't see the other way around it.

Gary [00:42:11]:
Yeah. I think, I mean, it is interesting, you know, the the billionaire is controlling the media stuff. The funny thing is, of course, that the Atlantic is owned by a company who is led by Lorraine Powell Jobs, another billionaire. Right? Right. So interesting how, like, yeah, there there there are publications like that. So there's, you know, the individuals trying to do things. And then there's the individual, like, just doing a sub stack

Leo [00:42:41]:
Right.

Gary [00:42:41]:
Which which is it's amazing. I mean, I I got my journalism degree in 1994. And if I would have suggested to somebody then that it's like, yeah. I wanna write about this, this, and this, and I'm just gonna do it on my own. Like, I'm not gonna get a job somewhere doing it. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna they'd be like, oh, you're gonna start a newspaper or magazine? No. I'm not gonna start a newspaper or magazine.

Gary [00:42:59]:
I'm just going to write articles, and that's it. That would have been crazy and how that's changed. But, also, if you look at the history of journalism, you know, you went from a period in the 20th century where you had so many newspapers. Like, small cities would have, like, 4 newspapers competing with each other, like daily newspapers. You know, big all big cities had multiple big newspapers, and then slowly those went away. And you got to an era, you know, in the nineties, you started to have this thing where big cities could only support 1 newspaper. And you had these newspapers merging like crazy until every city has its own newspaper. And then you have today where those newspapers, for the most part, still exist, but they struggle.

Gary [00:43:43]:
Like, they went from having, like, multiple buildings with, like, printing staff and machines and, like, huge staff of, like, advertising executives and stuff to, like, having, like, a floor of an office building where they have a few journalists and editors and everything else is outsourced and all that.

Leo [00:44:01]:
The other thing is that a lot of those daily newspapers, city newspapers, they're not independent anymore. No. Yeah. They're owned by huge corporations. They own newspapers. 3 or

Gary [00:44:12]:
4 of them.

Leo [00:44:13]:
Yeah. 3 or

Gary [00:44:13]:
4 of them own, like, 80% of all the newspapers, something like that.

Leo [00:44:16]:
We're very fortunate in Seattle and that the Seattle Times is not owned by one of the big corporations. But you don't have to go very far, either north or south in the state. In the very next paper, the very next city that comes up that has a big enough newspaper. Yep. It's owned by a national corporation. Yeah. It's frustrating, but it's the change in the business model. It's a

Gary [00:44:37]:
change but but now things are changing in a weird way, in an unpredictable way where you you went from everything consolidating and getting smaller to now if journalists can just go off and start their own blog it really is a blog, but that's an old fashioned term already. But they start their own thing, and then people will pay them because it doesn't take a lot of people to support one part. You and I should know. Right? Because with basically what we're doing, we're both tech journalists. We both have our niche. We have our our small set of supporters that wouldn't be even on the radar of any, you know, newspaper size kind of organization, but we're able to do that. And it it's interesting. So you went from lots of organize news organizations to a few news news organizations to but back to a lot, but they're just individuals.

Leo [00:45:33]:
Right.

Gary [00:45:33]:
And Right. And so it's, yeah, the continuing evolution of of media, really. And and media is really ties it all together with everything we've been talking about because you've got the people that are writing. You got the people that are making producing videos, and you but you also have the people just live streaming, you know, TikToks as as it is because every individual on TikTok was basically their own little one person media company

Leo [00:45:58]:
Right.

Gary [00:45:58]:
That was replacing what we would see on TV, like, produced by a big corporation owned by, like, a even bigger corporation and then broadcast at 6 PM on, you know, in your on your local station or whatever, your affiliate. Now it's like, no. I'm just gonna watch TikTok or whatever comes next and just see the individuals that made it with their just their phone.

Leo [00:46:21]:
Couple of things you said that that I wanted to react to. 1 is, you called me a journalist. And while I appreciate the compliment

Gary [00:46:29]:
Yeah.

Leo [00:46:29]:
I have been very I I try really hard to never think that I am because I don't have the background. I don't have I don't have the degree. I don't have the the and that but that's actually representative of what I think a lot of people are struggling with right now. Yeah. Is a lot of people who are out there generating news, right, writing up articles, blogs, whatever. They're also not journalists. Right? They don't have that same background. So they don't bring to it the tools that you, for example, would because of the journalistic journalism background.

Gary [00:47:03]:
Yeah. I disagree though. I I I think because if you go back 30 years and you look at a newspaper and a newspaper says, we wanna have somebody write a tech column. Right? They they may have done the wrong thing and found a journalist that knew a little bit about technology, but could write.

Leo [00:47:20]:
Which I I know some will.

Gary [00:47:21]:
But they may have done the right thing and said, let's find somebody in tech who knows what they're talking about, but they do have the ability to communicate. Right?

Leo [00:47:30]:
Right. But they're doing that within a framework of an organization Yeah. That can, for lack of a better term, apply the journalism to what they could do. Right? Whereas I'm sitting here at my desk writing stuff, and it's about tech. It's the stuff that I know. It's the stuff that I love. And while I understand journalistic principles, it's not something that I can honestly say I consider myself to be. And like I said, that's just me.

Leo [00:47:58]:
The point here really is that a lot of people are just out there spewing. Right? Some of it's good. Some of it's really good. Some of it isn't. And, it's not they may think of themselves as journalists, because they've got a blog. Right? But but they're not. The other thing I was gonna mention is that one of the journalists that I follow, a true journalist, has the pedigree, is, Joan Westenberg, and I believe she's down in Australia. She's had a blog for a long time with a lot of really good thought pieces.

Leo [00:48:36]:
She she's one of those that shows up fairly regularly for me in 7 takeaways every week. But, she's actually starting a news publication, an actual news thing, I guess, you'd call. I'm not really even sure what the right term for it anymore. It's it's called the index. It's the index dot media. And, it is intended to be, a new a source of news, not just her writing in her blog, writing her her opinions and her thought pieces, but actual news. I I find it interesting that, an individual is attempting to do something like that. I'm hoping, I guess, that, it's a long game that eventually, maybe there'll be other revenue, other players that this thing will grow.

Leo [00:49:30]:
But, I just find it interesting that an individual is now thinking in that way.

Gary [00:49:36]:
Yep. Yep. I I think, well, I think that kind of sums up all this stuff. Yeah. Going from, you know, going from big companies to individuals and, as for the media makers and also the consumers, everything's in flux now. It's a really it's gonna be a really interesting year. I really have no idea at the end of 2025 where we're going to be in this landscape. It could go in a lot of different directions.

Gary [00:50:00]:
I don't think it'll go too far. Right? I I don't think it's gonna move super fast, but I think, it's going to be something definitely worth watching, which is not something I could have said for every year. Go back, like, 10 years ago. It's like, woah. Is the media landscape gonna change this year? Probably not. Maybe a little. Maybe it'll move.

Leo [00:50:17]:
Another factor that we have not mentioned that is also at play here that we've been mentioning every other week on our podcast and that is AI AI is probably going to be another spoon that's stirring the pot of what media turns out to be in the next 12 months.

Gary [00:50:37]:
Yep. Indeed. Well, we could, we could talk more about that next week maybe. So what, what did you find was cool this week?

Leo [00:50:48]:
As it turns out, I had something selected, and then somebody else beat me to it. So last night, we ended up, just I don't know if it's on a lark or what, but, we ended up watching American Primeval. It's on Netflix, and it is a western during the time of the migration of a lot of people into Utah. I'm finding it fascinating. I will say that it's very violent, presumably, I guess, as those days were. But, it's just it's an interesting story. In theory, it's about, a woman and her son who are traveling westward to meet up with her husband, but there's clearly a backstory that we haven't been told yet. And, a lot of the individuals and organizations that they meet along the way.

Leo [00:51:42]:
So anyway. And what the other thing that's interesting is, they're going for reality in the sense that, if there's a big Indian presence or native American presence, and they are speaking in

Gary [00:51:59]:
Oh, and Yeah. You don't really hear that very often in westerns.

Leo [00:52:02]:
With with, of course, captions. I just find that fascinating to listen to. I I you know, it's it's very interesting to me that, that, you know, when they

Gary [00:52:10]:
I might have to give that a look. Yep. Mine is a a a cure for all that ails us. Yeah. It's going on in the world today. It's right in the middle of all of this. Everything going on is one big bright spot, and that is there's a new Wallace and Gromit movie. Hey.

Gary [00:52:27]:
It's on Netflix. I love Wallace and Gromit, and this does did not disappoint. I we put it on. I started smiling, and I smiled, like, and laughed through the entire movie. It was, yeah, great stuff.

Leo [00:52:45]:
We did the same thing. We ended up watching it last week. I think it was. And and same thing. It was it

Gary [00:52:50]:
was like, oh, yes. Something something to be happy about.

Leo [00:52:53]:
It's funny because between the 2 of us right now, I think we've both defined the two extremes of what can happen on Netflix.

Gary [00:53:01]:
Yeah. Yeah. Really? Wallace the Grommet versus American Primeval. Yep. Okay.

Leo [00:53:06]:
In terms of promoting our own stuff, I want to point people at an article called yet another way to install Windows 11 without a TPM. TPM, the trusted platform module, is this new hardware requirement that Windows 11 has that is intended to increase security or improve security by handling some in hardware, some of the things that were traditionally handled in software. Like, it's supposedly it's a it's a more secure place to store your encryption keys if you're doing, like, BitLocker whole disk encryption. However, it's also extremely controversial. It's certainly gotten the conspiracy theory crowd out saying that, well, Microsoft is doing this to force us all to purchase new machines, which, of course, I don't buy into. As it turns out, there have been a series of ways to install Windows 11 bypassing that requirement. They've gotten progressively more I don't wanna say more complicated, but at least different. And this is, as the title implies, yet another way since the other ways that I've been using in the past, have been getting whack a mold by Microsoft.

Leo [00:54:16]:
So that's yet another way to install Windows 11 without a TPM. It's askleo.com/177-093.

Gary [00:54:24]:
Cool. And I'll, link to my, latest video. App you know, when Apple came out with iOS 18, they had a redesign of how the Photos app works. Basically, instead of having all these pages of things to look through, it's just one long screen. You can scroll up and down and find everything. When I first saw it, I was like, oh, this is neat. Not a really a big change, but it certainly makes things a lot easier and simpler to describe. And I was shocked when a lot of people said, oh, this is horrible.

Gary [00:54:50]:
I was like, why? It's all nothing's changed. There are a lot of people saying, my this is gone or that is gone. It's like nothing is gone. Everything is still there. They've just organized it in a big list. I think people coming to the app fresh will have no problem using it. I think if you use it every day and are used to all this, then it's a change.

Leo [00:55:12]:
Right.

Gary [00:55:12]:
And so I eventually got around to doing a video that basically explains, look, it's just one long list. Everything's still there. Everything's easy to get to. Take 5 minutes to get yourself used to it, and you won't think about it ever again.

Leo [00:55:24]:
You'll be fine.

Gary [00:55:25]:
You'll be fine.

Leo [00:55:26]:
Yep. Yep. It's funny because that reminds me. I just, I've had an article on Ask Leo, should I upgrade to Windows 11 from Windows 10 to Windows 11, which suffers from a lot of the same misconceptions. Right? I just updated it the other day because the the deadline's looming closer. But what you what you said about photos just resonated a lot. It's like, okay. Yes.

Leo [00:55:48]:
Things are rearranged a little bit. It's all still there. You'll be fine.

Gary [00:55:52]:
You'll be fine. That may we should change the name of our shows to you'll be fine.

Leo [00:55:56]:
You'll be fine. Anyway, you'll be fine for another week. I think that pretty much wraps us up for this one. Yep. As always, thank you for listening and for being here, and we will see you again real soon. Take care, everyone. Bye bye.

Gary [00:56:11]:
Bye.