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and good morning on Monday morning 6:28 they almost said Wednesday I have gotten way ahead of myself here it's time for the 359 podcast and it's episode 273 and we've got Alfred Aang Roger Chang and Derek ER in the studio today and we are talking about uber go figure yeah super finally get this new CEO I still need a practices name but look at well we'll get it right well we're also gonna be talking about Alfred story on hackers preying on new students back to school baby yep and then lastly we'll be talking about our latest roadtrip feature which Dara and rich Nieva or other intrepid reporter from SF went out to angola to go hunting for land mines essentially yeah very cool story we'll talk a little more about that as always if you have any questions leave them in the comment section Brian we'll get to the best 59 seconds and here we go in three two welcome to the 359 I'm ready Chang I'm Alfred Inge go ahead I'm Derek err uber finally has a new CEO say hello to Derek Asahi formerly the CEO of Expedia he's a business of prize pick since a lot of the rumors is centered around Jeff Immelt the former GE CEO and make Whitman the HP CEO both of which who basically said no we're interested this job Dara who you sort of share the same name kind of but well one of you know let you figure out who's who who is this guy well I'm myself I'm just learning a little bit about him he was kind of a dark horse in the running not a name that was flown around at all and but he's originally from Iran he came here went to brown and then worked on Wall Street during the 90s and he kind of got this reputation as this tough you know hard-ass all right yeah and abrooke I use a hard-edge yeah they need somewhere I need a disciplinarian crack the whip yeah and then in 2005 he became CEO of Expedia and he really helped grow the company number of acquisitions so seems like he's been a pretty good businessman on that front what's he gonna be able to help her out on though uh well he has his work cut out for him I yeah uber is facing several lawsuits allegations of everything from you know chaotic parties to sexual I mean things like there's a whole cultural sort of institutional problem that uber has to deal with right it's basically that most of the folks that don't think that should have been right yeah he had quite a following and people there I mean I've heard from people who've worked there that a lot of employees try to emulate Travis kalanick he had this thing where he would pace a lot and then everyone started pacing during meeting so it's gonna be really interesting to see how a new leader will affect the company and its employees all right well next up we're talking about back-to-school season Alfred you wrote a piece about how hackers love to take advantage of students new students going into university yeah so a lot of universities their IT department have a lot of work cut out for them especially around the back-to-school season because you know about 1,500 to 2,000 students come on campus every year like mostly freshmen and they all bring their laptops with them and then the IT department has to basically manage and make sure that you know there's no malware on those infecting their system so there's a lot of work cut out into it a lot of them they use like DNS management on their systems which basically it manages the network because they can't go to every student's new laptop and like you need to get rid of those you need to get rid right they can't touch your laptops but they can manage the network so if you're a student and you have malware on your advice and you try to log on the network it's basically you're not gonna be able to get on or Wi-Fi with your disgusting like virus field computer ok a lot of things like that they also do think some universities like Carnegie Mellon have like specific courses targeted towards cyber security so you actually have to go to these classes and learn about how to avoid phishing attacks why you need to factor auth and occasion and things like that right stay alright lastly Dara and rich neova went to Angola for our latest road trip feature this is a fascinating piece on the demining efforts talk a bit about the tech that you know some of the tech and how that kind of got incorporated story yeah so we were basically embedded with this organization called the halo trust and they are using we heard about them through Google Earth Google Earth is helping them map our land mines and it's it's really before that they were using old Portuguese colonial maps and so it's it's a big help because they can take the GPS coordinates of what they think are land mines and then put them onto Google Earth and then lay that over and see what they need to clear and what was that like walking through a minefield that had I mean I'd be freaking I don't think my wife would even let me do this yeah I'm surprised we were with the photographer James who has two kids and a wife and she was not very happy oh it was it was really scary yeah I mean there's it's there's no way around it you would be walking and there'd be a landmine literally you know 1 foot away Wow and if you stepped on it you would theoretically die or lose somebody I was thinking as I was reading this tournament well I just went to a lunch so those are really stressful but no look for more of these stories chickens on CNET I brought your Chang I'm Alfred Inge I'm Derek Kerr thanks for saying my microphone is utterly terrifying I'm delayed here and I'm like it's fumbling over my buttons just thinking about what you went through in a minefield a little minefield well what's really crazy is the people who work taking out these landmines and they're there every day digging up these explosives it's really crazy it's very admirable work and we'll set things this was like the last yeah so we were there on the very last day and this area's that most we mined land minefield in all of Africa and one of the most on earth and they you know land mines of I think in that NGO world have kind of gone out of vogue as Mars funding right right so kind of celebrities because right so you know back in one of the reasons we went there is cuz Princess Diana had walked in these same minefields and so but you know where there's no Princess Diana now doing that kind of work the insane thing to me was how relatively like up until recently how relatively like low-tech this like yeah readily dangerous effort was and you know to going into something like that using like pen and paper you know I don't leave my house like to navigate somewhere with pen and paper I like to do something like that you know using such low-tech is insane to me yeah and they're still it's still pretty low-tech I mean they're using Google Maps there some groups are trying different types of mechanisms to find the landmines but really everyone says it's just boots on the ground there's no silver bullet yet okay this is their last day didn't mean that the mines are all cleared like they're still yeah there's there's so so many left and there's there it's unclear how many's left but they're thinking at least that they know of 35,000 Wow and that includes one minefield that's 30 kilometers long I mean it's it's insane it's hard to even fathom Brian do we have any questions thank you for the cue I was waiting for so yeah let's go ahead and jump into the chat first up shout out to our Cass who is a longtime listener first-time contributor from okay welcome enjoying your evening we hope we have a question from Satyam Das who says asking how come ooh BRR can work without a CEO until this point so just oh you understand how business works I don't know how business works how could a company like that stay afloat when the head honcho is gone that's a great question yeah I mean Roger you might be better to answer this then they mean they had they started their board of yeah it was all there was no interim CEO this no which is kind of interesting cuz usually there's there is an interim that's usually how this is run without CEO there's yeah there's a temporary head honcho and this is a little bit more than usual because they were was run via the board almost yeah which isn't normal yeah but also for like the last you know few weeks what wasn't over just not making any like major decisions that would require a CEO to begin with in the first place yeah that's true I mean the only thing the only decision was choosing the CEO really was there also when the former CEO was asked to step down they were in major searches for all sorts of heads of CTO yeah just all the top well the kind of goes to show you at least a company like uber it can kind of run itself for a while I mean it's because it's ultimately it's based off of local drivers in the road I mean as long as you're not doing a huge strategic shifts or nothing really breaks down like a cupcake basically keep yeah yeah maybe their new CEO that could be the new model just a seamless company driverless cars and a trial yes a driverless company that would be cool no keep pointing that wrong all our decisions are made by AI or you love us it'll created the AIC all companies that are out there no way he's an ta yeah he's gonna save the world from from itself you see like a announcing though of like Callen ik loyalists I don't know okay good question I mean they may depending on how things go they may quit on their own rather than an Austin yes especially if what you're saying is true like if he's like a more sort of hard-ass you know new CEO comes in like that's usually when there's a big wave of turnover my real CEO would let me stay up past 11 yeah there it's a notorious for a hard-working workplace under the last CEO under manic right long hours so but yeah who knows it I mean there's definitely people in the company who one who wanted change but there are there is a huge cohort of loyalists yep so before we move on you want to Cheers to our loyalists Michael Brown imagine soccer a green guy guys Michael Browns asking what are your thoughts on this new CEO you kind of brushed on this earlier you said he's kind of a hard-ass right the did you did you meet him yeah actually and I personally I don't know that much about him I know yeah he's a complete surprise pic yeah um you know and I haven't written much about Expedia and so I will know more at the end of the day I know Expedia is one of those companies that it's a tech company but it's not one of those tech companies we write about a lot I think I use it I'm fairly common fairly frequently actually what does Expedia is it like a Wikipedia thing it's like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute outdated at all it's still quite oh yeah I've never used Xperia Lee no I don't travel that much either yeah I bounce back and forth between it and kayak for a lot of the same reasons yeah so what is it like compare like flight rate something yeah you actually I I know it's a travel website yes so it's Weiss hotels rental cars basically any kind of travel site that does comparison what did you just go and like Google like your flight prices and you probably land on an expiry date to the airline that's where I go to like well that's a thing if you want to compare JetBlue with Delta this shows how much I travel airplane tickets no wait you're saying you don't still go to a travel agent on the corner apologies to people who actually are employed as travel agents you do good jobs but it's hard to not make sense just seventeen we have a question from Jacob Kraft in the chat it says do you guys think it's too late for uber to give in to all the controversy didn't Eve I give in yeah I'm not really sure Jake clarify yeah Jacob could you clarify for us he's saying given all the controversy Oh do you think it's too late for uber given all of that controversy I see I'm an idiot I can't read today apparently that's a really good question because there is so much controversy I mean there's a lot of backpedaling and a lot of smoothing over things that the CEO is gonna have to do but I mean if they could exist without the CEO for so long does that really kind of leave them as self-sustaining yeah I don't think people care about yeah yeah chick-fil-a despite their controversies and like Under Armour back when they were still most people I talked to either the drivers or just customers like they just want things that work so like I had this issue I was getting picked up from JFK this past weekend I use lyft initially driver like couldn't find me or whatever and I just ended up switching back because it worked and ultimately like I don't necessarily feel great about using it but like if it's if my alternative service isn't gonna work as well I'm gonna just use the one that works yeah garlis of the controversy right and that's when it kind of comes down to like as a company it's not represented just by Colin it's a number of people who work hard and have done a good job right yeah I feel like they're just some things that you can't boycott and I'm like I haven't used ubirr since their controversies in news live but I know there's a lot of people that like uber is kind of like their only option or something yeah driver they were both they were from both but they're like uber all the way they well I haven't talked to any drivers in New York but everywhere else every drivers likes left Waymarsh they they're treated better by the company well know that I get better I hear that but I also hear that yeah I think that kind of reflects as part of the location as well like coming down to New York is a fairly easy city to navigate an app itself really functions better and I think arguably on a more objective level the uber app functions better than the lyft app not saying one versus the other as a service functioning just simply as an application maybe that's why they make more money off overs because they yield back you just do the algorithm it's been around longer it's more established there more people using it I think in general that ball kind of thing right there to get right from left well they yeah they've been hyper competitive too and trying to squash their competitors but yeah it's - you know my grandparents would have heard of uber and not lift probably so it's become kind of a household yeah do you think your grandma know about the controversies with it also like the lobbying that they did and the way that they treat the average person like doesn't know all the shady yeah just know that it's really cheap they don't know that like people through use that to get there you brought up a good point about chick-fil-a right like people I mean it's a hugely successful in New York and you know regardless of their stance on yeah yeah speaking of stances chick-fil-a is extraordinarily overrated you know it's just as fine as any other fast-food fried chicken I don't know if it succeeds I won't say this I've had I've only had twice it's not here in New York like what's an airport and I had a sale I ate the sandwich I was like all right whatever I walked away from a chicken it's always a good five minutes later is like kinda worn otherwise it's okay later all right we should probably knock out another question or two before we call it a day Mike Brown asks do you think driverless cars slash service is the only end game for uber what else can they do I think if I think it should be because you know if they don't end up at it lift will or in any all these other companies well they're going to get shut out yeah it's - oh no I think the actual true end game is the yeah I mean the uber is working on that - hey I remember the pad for that like lifts off from with it it was it was it in Dubai right like where they said yeah no it's a tanning palace and was it travel ready that made the great statement about it you know it's better because it's essentially like a dictatorship there and you can make changes faster I'm paraphrasing you but it was about that like you know we don't have to deal with this government red tape yeah they launched in there and Dallas at the same time but Dallas is no but they're they're very friendly to tech and yes yeah and there's a big airline it's an airline hub because they usually yeah yeah they had a big conference I mean who knows it's a lot of smoke and mirrors in my opinion but and that basically they just look like little helicopters yeah laughs and I appreciate it yeah durable weather that Kitty Hawk thing from like Larry Page it funded mm-hmm oh the durable yeah it's like a her roan that you could ride except like I'm like no state would ever approve that like no a huge manatee self-driving cars that's gonna be a hard Pitt because uber is its business is built on drivers yeah and so I mean drivers are also what is making it not profitable because if it doesn't have drivers and it could keep all of that money but um yeah that's I think it's gonna be a rough road and I actually you know all these companies keep saying 2020 they're you know they're gonna be out and about I don't I'm not as yeah I mean they'll probably like three or four of them out and about yeah I don't think you'll be seeing I was like traffic let me I think I never start seeing them in like like there's like grades like level one yeah yeah yeah so like they'll be kind of like half-measures but you can see a completely driverless car from I mean that rollout in San Francisco it was a fiasco yeah yeah because they were jerks about it forget the city we're just gonna do it anyway so many incidents just in the first couple of hours and the part that they didn't get permission we gotta wrap it up soon but I just want to point out a comment from the chill one who backs up the validation of how uber is a little more widespread says that uber is in an ghana lift isn't for example uber is just going harder i think that's a good point and then as a sidebar i like Josh's comment uber and lyft is like Google and Bing yeah things really irrelevant also Ben came like way later than Google dad whoever and left kind of start around the same time was it I thought was a little later later a teeny bit later but lift started the whole the idea of carpool yeah being it was like big was years way yeah like relatively lift was closer to alright we good yeah we do have to wrap things up we do sorry alright sorry guys you and your stupid meetings trying to keep the company going I know the radio hit like in 10 seconds so anyways the only thing that you saw her here checks out CNN our podcast is also available on iTunes stitcher SoundCloud P burner and sound and Google Play Music sorry I'm in a rush you