Gadgetory

and welcome and good Wednesday morning to all it's episode 240 of the 359 podcast on BV Jean in the house today I've got Ben Fox Ruben and Roger Chang the dream team whoa room T Grimm team I don't know that well good morning it's up guys oh it's gonna be gonna be the easiest sugar heavy show to have me showed it yeah yeah yeah we're gonna be talking about obviously the big news of the day uber CEO Travis conduct taking a leave of absence it sort of the culture behind that and then to lighten things up we're going to be talking about gamergate as you know III is going on right now our only insurer enterin Carson row nice feature sort of tying gamergate to the so that the actions taken by some of the more extreme parts of gamergate how that influenced so the discourse that we had 38 election there's the elections yeah so gamergate trump can't wait can't wait my god can only imagine what your comments are going to be like leaving this leave in the comment section though troll word on Bryant Brian's gonna be picking out the ones that are at least coherent and not crazy if anything's fine we'll probably focus mostly on uber or a good portion on uber because that's the big news of the day yeah yeah I mean yeah I look happy to discuss roles online we'll discuss either one and we'll get to it three minutes in 59 seconds Brian all right here we go for the recording of the podcast thanks for joining us on YouTube live stream and periscope we'll be right back to answer your questions in three two welcome to the 359 I'm Roger Chang I'm Ben Fox ribbon so there's a big shake-up at uber with CEO Travis kalanick taking a leave of absence after an independent investigation recommend big changes following a slew of scandals there pummeled the company so a couple questions we still need answered is this leave of absence just code for kalmyk leaving the company or will he be back and more importantly does this make you want to use lift more hmm I don't know are you asking me this yes I am asking you this I deleted my uber app amid all the different scandals I you know joined the delete uber Tagg movement because i didn't really use uber all that much to begin with and was very bothered by them potentially violating the Apple AppStore privacy rules yes this was one of the many controversies that people may have missed because there were so many yes it was Caltech you know yelling at one of his drivers at one point tonight talking about compensation with Google lawsuit Google it was a slew of sexual harassment allegation there was the the blog post by a former uber boy that talked about her time there right just how safely it was as a woman working in the environment right and that blog post kind of got the ball rolling and it started a lot of digging I would think by a lot of reporters that found just unbelievably toxic work a culture and environment there there have been an enormous amount of like there's been a huge exodus of executives somehow traffice is surviving yes and he's taking a quote-unquote leave of absence if this was a public company he would have been out on a rail yep so long ago so do you think that he's going to survive this like is he gonna stay a CEO you know it's it's it's tough to say I mean if you look at those initial comments but he talks about uber 2.0 this is I guess a company without Travis he also talks about Travis 2.0 grown more mature grown-up Travis so I feel like even there he's kind of setting up the foundation for him to eventually return I think it's I don't see how that's even possible for the company to actually be able to move on I think that um he just he needs to resign but what are you gonna do that's the other big question though is this enough like are these scandals and controversies enough for people to actually stop using uber yeah maybe so Farhad Manjoo at the New York Times brought up a very good point about this in a column yesterday he said that it's up to all of us to fix Ober that if we don't like what we've been reading about it start using lyft take a taxi prom as I'm sure some commenters will test is lyft isn't everywhere lift is it in multiple countries where ruber is bets that's part of the issue the ubiquity of uber and even sometimes the perception of the ubiquity of uber gives it an advantage over some of this competitors I agree so alright we've got to move on to gamergate our own insured Aaron Carson wrote about the controversial movement which supporters say that they're fighting for the ride fighting against the rise of needless political correctness games and ethics of journalism while some of the more extreme aspects of the moving folks a movement of resort to extreme actions like death threats doxxing da swatting generally trollers behavior you know Ian and Erin serve linked the rise of gamergate that culture is for the breeding ground for the kind of increasingly volatile discourse we had going to the presidential election so in some ways it's all tied back to trump yeah um what I think is at least somewhat heartening but it's still way too early to tell is that Facebook and Twitter and I believe also Reddit are at least making some effort to do something about you know the toxicity that happens online yes you know I'm I'm all for the First Amendment obviously I'm a reporter I'm a journalist but at the same time that doesn't mean that you can shout down or harass or you know death threat people yes everybody deserves to have a say on publicly listing you know addresses and telling people to direct people to kill them that's just that's cool doesn't sound very cool to me all right so that's all the time we have I know it's a huge issue a lot of nuance that's tough to sum down in four minutes check out the story check out the story and more on CNET I'm Roger Cheng I'm Ben Fox Ruben thanks for listening so let's keep the good times rolling oh my god so when appointing those like solid referential just as me being not as indoctrinated into the reporting aspect of this yeah I'm just the button pusher here that really did help bring a good blanket understanding to a lot of things that are very very confusing it's very easy there's a little note there's a lot of nuance with gamergate there are folks in who believe in gamergate who also I don't think they mean any harm they actually believe in some of the the kind of the more I guess the cleaner aspects of the movement right in terms of that it wasn't it was earlier less it was a leaderless right man but I guess later there was definitely a large element some element to gamergate that was just toxic I was volatile that was just frankly dangerous right mm-hmm so yeah and the same thing you saw during the election you saw directed mostly toward Hillary Clinton towards a lot of reporters yeah but at the same time I don't think that it's unjustified to point the finger at the platforms that were allowing a lot of this to happen it really got to the point for Twitter I would think especially where it was too toxic of an asset for it to be an acquisition target you know like at one point Disney was considering purchasing it and then they backed off saying like you know the House of Mickey Mouse does not want to be involved in this right so I think Twitter at least realized that it needed to do something to yeah clean up its act and make itself a platform for everybody as opposed to making itself a platform for just just such that we're unfiltered culture that yes yep yeah that was basically you know steamrolling everybody else's conversations oh yeah it is for the element like we start points like the death of a polite discourse right we're we no longer are really allowed to disagree with each other like if you disagree with me like I need to stamp out your opinion cuz I don't want to hear it yeah kind of what I mean actually Facebook is probably better example that right cuz like you don't even know that people disagree with you exactly your news feeds basically reinforcing your opinions all the time it's stuff that you agree with because their algorithms know that you believe a certain thing and they're gonna push that that rhetoric push that opinion yeah so yeah exactly you don't even know that there is a disagreement or what do you think is the norm right so man this podcast is get do today get pretty deep in a secretive deep don't do it okay so first and foremost we want to give a quick shout out to Raj who says hey from Australia keep up the great work thank you right thank you very very much uh Matthew doctor says is there any difference between uber and lyft from the passengers perspective I suppose there are you people who have not latched on to the questions yeah I'd sharing trend that is out there so maybe let's spell it out about how it works at least from the major markets we've experienced yet um and how there really isn't terrible amount of difference now there is no effect for the consumers pretty much same experience I would sense are actually shockingly similar I know uh I would say like again especially depend on the market you're in like lyft isn't as releve l'ile I know some drivers definitely uber and lyft uh to make policy most drivers seems to miss most drivers in general what I see is watching you both yeah sure an SF in LA that stuff with the case but uh they're not in as many market yeah as you said there's at least a perception that uber is much more ubiquitous yeah and therefore it gets the default position for a lot of people yes I think that's exactly what it is it's sort of laziness that wins now right like uber happens to be there it's like it's all your either your front page or your whatever your your it's closer to the front of your home screen that lifts usually is right is why you usually pick it yeah but at the same time people don't like this they may want to inconvenience themselves ever-so-slightly right they don't agree with these types of business practices no totally like voting with your feet that's really ultimately the end with your wallet and the other wall that's really the the only real power that we have ultimately with these types of companies so yeah yeah I mean well it this was another point that I also wanted to make that we didn't get to because it's a four-minute podcast was that despite all the controversies I still continue to believe that uber will survive like as a company yes absolute value a ssin like 70 billion is no what's the most valuable startup in the world right so despite the train wreck that's going on over there I mean like the thing that really bugs me on a personal level is that the CEO no matter what happens is gonna walk away a very very rich person but you know there's nothing I can do about that and that's okay but whether he comes back as CEO or not so you've deleted uber I have not deleted over but I also don't use it a whole lot yes saying I'm like especially in New York I feel like I use cash like 95% of time that's why I never really used uber yeah and I deleted it like I said during the podcast mostly for privacy reasons was that I was thinking if this is a company apparently they're violation of the privacy protocols in the App Store yeah just like we're just to clarify I mean what what happened was you know they were basically flagged for letting the app secretly identifying tagged iPhone users even after the app was ready for the right after you've deleted it they're still tracking you it's really is covered which is totally very very roblem at it yeah that's it so is only personally I didn't want to deal with that tracked app it's one thing when you opt in yes and another thing when you've actively said if you if you need to leave it locally the app but be that is the ultimate opt out there to not respect that's pretty low yeah that was after I heard about that I deleted it right after reading that story I was like I don't want to deal with a company like this so how do we I mean how they've since put a kibosh to that but I mean how would you even stop that would you have to have rebooted your entire phone I don't even know Tim Cook Tim Cook the CEO of Apple apparently looked Travis in the eye and was just like I think I know what you're doing and you better stop or I'm gonna boot you from the App Store and that's when they stopped but that's the type of company this is where they're literally going to get away with every single inch that they can yeah until they're called out into the carpet it's happened over and over and over again yeah forced municipalities to drag them out because you know it's completely against ordinances and laws unlike those particular municipalities and they're like you know customers love us so you make us leave like make us so and that's that's a hard thing from from a user's perspective I mean myself I just like the aspect of how uber works as a functioning device Shammi ride-sharing so let's just go ahead a brand out of it I mean so from my perspective I work in production here at Cena and CBS Interactive so believe it or not we don't have a CNET van yet and we're a 355 in just cruise around town so when you got to do field productions and I have to haul around a ton of a good it's nice to know that I can call an SUV as much as I absolutely 100% in favor of just utilizing yellow cabs I can't sit there and wait for five Priuses to go by right and depth at something large I'd like to be a little easily call uh you need predictability a appropriately sized vehicle for my needs and that's why I like uber and nine times out of ten I've had great experiences with the drivers with the actual ride itself with the amenities experiences yeah I almost feel really bad that now I kind of don't want to use it anymore for like I think that's why a lot of folks have been be telling people to switch to lift because ultimately allow them with the same Drive right it's a shame you like experience they probably see one live but you bring up a good point that there's this very obvious disconnect for people where they don't like the business practices of company X but they don't want to stop using the services I've heard it a lot covering Amazon a lot of people seem to disagree with certain business practices of Amazon they seem to think that it's it's a deal with the devil where if you shop a lot at Amazon you're essentially you know killing small discs yelling killing off your own Main Street it did to help this gigantic retailer however I mean I've bought from Main streets on Amazon that is a very good point but the thing is is that even if people really really don't like certain things about Amazon they feel like you know a choice right yeah or they just they do it anyway because of the convenience factor I mean like these are technology companies when is technology if not to help you be lazier I mean like what's the whole point of technology there's why we invented the wheel I should be our tagline really right it's to help help you be lazy yep so we will audition we will all be like those fat people in wall-e very very yeah and I look for iPhone wise everyone look forward to it all right so before we wind things down calling out to the chat if anybody is thinking like I have deleted over I will delete lubbers for these guys I want to defend them whatever you're like I want to keep uber like yeah I just enjoy the experience enough that I don't care about what's going on back file your comments away we'd love to hear from you in the meantime I be in the chat says in India we have Ola past month uber is blamed Ola for harassment case done under Oba cab driver was done by Ola to spoil the image of uber in the country is insane to blame them without any proof yeah that was well the controversies because I mean one calyx lieutenants obtained the medical report of the victim the rape victim there I they looked it over because they had this conspiracy theory that Ola was was doing this how masterminded this to smear ubers reputation in India we very house of cards in yeah I didn't like is that really like that sounds far-fetched it's pretty extreme and it does kind of highlights of the mentality mentality there that yeah new birth at like obviously yeah that that they can't even change right now well that exactly overhaul needs to be done that exact is now out yeah I well that exact his boss and now epic Alan occurs pick his leave of absence yeah I don't see a lot changing with Callan ik still you know at the at the wheel they need a new CEO like and they've needed a new CEO mark my words is gonna be a law-and-order episode about this this year sweet oh yeah a couple quick comments filing through uh rüdiger says uber should make a background check not a bad idea but really the drivers at the ones in question having a background check on their see yeah I do you do require background checks but I think they're fairly little and they've been fighting more stringent background checks I understand but yeah the background check wouldn't really fix this particular problem because it yeah me the CEO would have probably clear the background check imagine soggy says I had ajan soggy hey I haven't deleted it but I use lift first now before over so fair enough fair enough yeah and lastly Lim Ming Quan is asking are those two headphones Sennheiser HD - OH - s yes they are sir Wow fear uh-huh very good I we have good taste you have good taste all right so it's you causative why - I know that's wrong man on a happy note yeah talk about nice technology thank you thank you aiming that that's comfy of the years you helped us save the day let's before we wrap it up for next episode for tomorrow let's all put our thinking caps on who's going to take over ooh BRR now that Travis is out mmm who's gonna be the new CEO that's that's a rhetorical question think about it meet us back here ty you didn't put us on the spot the bald guy from Silicon Valley you know that guy Jack something Jack bark Jack Barker action Jack action Jack is gonna take a see it I can see them in that place out selling a box a box will cope with every ride all right bring us home have you think you liked anything you saw or heard here check us out at see net our podcast is also available on iTunes tune in stitcher SoundCloud feedburner and Google Play Music scale tomorrow zoo tomorrow thanks you