well, good morning and happy new year. i'm scott mcgrew. we thought we'd take a moment to look back at some of our interviews over the past 112 months with some retrospective. it also has a side perspective of giving the crew the day off to enjoy time with their families or sleep in. this one is from taser. i couldn't help but ask rick smith if he were tired of hearing "don't tase me, bro."

>> you know it ended up being a bit of a light-hearted event. it got so much attraction in the pop culture, it's been something you just get used to. >> some of your controversy has been -- you're a bit like clie next because not every stun weapon is a taser, though people tend to say they are. >> that's right. although in law enforcement. it's us. we're the 90% market share. >> what's the latest with your -- you brought it up, so let's get it out of the way. with legalities. you have constantly said a taser, an energy weapon, has never been directly equated to a death. >> yeah. well, we actually used to say that because it used to be true, although now we have 600,000 of these weapons in the field, so there are some cases where tasers have caused deaths, and they're primarily injuries related to falls. >> oh, that's interesting. >> you taser somebody at an

elevated height. for example, one in new york fell off a second-stroir. they're not safe by any stretch but they're safer. >> a review from the university of california reviewed 50 published studies on taser. can you argue that there are truly, truly independent studies that say that tasers overall are not deadly weapons? >> oh, absolutely. i mean, like i said. the department of justice just finished a five- or six-year study that just came out in may, and they were meticulous about making sure that enough of the researchers had any affiliation with taser, and the conclusion was the taser is the safest force option out there and has saved potentially hunld dreads or thousands of lives. so that criticism is actually interesting. if you look at any other industry, in the drug industry, the percentage of research funded by the drug manufacturers is like 80 'em or 90%.

in our case with taser it's only about 20% because there's been so much controversy that many governments have stepped in and funded studies themselves. we get the criticism but, affect, in fact, you dig to facts, it's way less than other injuries. >> now, the american civil liberties union on the other hand has repeatedly questioned the efficacy of the taser saying oftentimes it's used not as a slightly as a less -- leslie thal option to firearms but as a more lethal option to things like restraint, physical restraint, pepper spray, whatever. so where in that continuum does the taser actually fall. >> yeah. well, actually if you look at the aclu members that have actual experience with taser devices, for example, scott greenwood in ohio who saw the taser implementation as part of a consent decree in cincinnati, he actually has shown -- he's a huge supporter because they saw injuries to the community drop

dramatically and they went from having racial riots and many incidents unfortunately with white officers involving lethal force with minority kids that went away with the implementation of tasers. ly may have been one or two, but it's dropped dramatically. >> not in every case but in many it's fired instead of a service weapon. >> that's only in about 5% to 10% of cases. the majority of the uses are actually leading up into what we call the escalation phase, and that's where some of the department of justice studies are really interesting because people tend to think, well, taser should be used in the same place as a gunful but, in fact, if you look at the probability of being injured, the taser injury rate is about three injuries of about every 1,000 exposures in in the field. that's a department of justice study. if you look at batons, firsts, other things those go from 80% to more.

it's remarkly safer than not just a firearm but going in and gets in a hands-on fight. >> the taser model, the policeman can't hold it down. it delivers it in bursts instead of one long -- >> that's a fact. we issued an alarm the tells the officers that it's about to shut off to avoid overexplosion. >> how many times have you been tased? >> seven. >> do you test out all your products? >> i have been hit by every technology that we have produced. not every individual skew. i don't enjoy it. it's not fun by any stretch. >> it must be great part of the job. hey, let's get the boss. >> are you like quality assurance? >> no. when you talk about safety, i can sit here and quote the department of justice to you all day long, but when i tell you i've taken seven shots myself,

here's car yad sakety, he took a shot to the chest right over the heart. it's more compelling than any data i can say. that's why we step up and put our own personal safety on the line when we talk about the safety of our products. we touch on politics here on the show, especially when it intersects with business and technology which is why we invited president obama's right-hand man here in california to tell us as much as he could about a famous but secret dinner meeting with the president. >> we saw the back of your head at the dinner with the president. i know it was you. but i'm wondering, we didn't hear much about what was discussed there. i'm wondering if you can maybe touch on a couple of the topics. one i was curious about was energy because you've got google and facebook there and they're observing a ton of it through data and data centers. can you give us a little bit of an outline of what happened? >> the dinner discussion's off the record. what i can say is this. everybody came to the table with a very detailed provocative question for the president.

i think everybody walked out thinking, good, god, this guy has complete con very sancy on my issue. the president really understands silicon valley. he comes here. it's fairly unique that he's come here to say given me advice on how the u.s. can continue to be the global's gsh world's innovation leader. i will say, the issue you just touched on, data centers, is a big deal. most people don't realize to run these things like facebook, twitter, linkedin requires huge, huge buildings with literally 32 million servers in the world running our data centers. there's another firm, samsung, which is korean that has offices here in the silicon valley, has come out with a green chip that alone saves about a quarter of the power in servers. it will save more energy in the entire nations that ar jean tina and others will generate. this is an example of how innovation is really changing the world and making planet a

little different. >> there was a statistic that google was going to run a nuclear power plant. it would be one quarter of it. >> and growing all the time. and the same thing for facebook. and that's why when a firm like samsung can show we can make greener products, great thing. >> we have about three minutes left. this amazon sales tax thing. you used to balance the books forty state of california. >> collect. >> should the state of california taxing out-of-state internet purchases? >> in my opinion, they absolutely should. i'm all in favor of online commerce but there's no reason in the world that the ebay and apples of the world shouldn't have to compete on an even playing field. >> is this something gates should do or should it be a fed raleigh-durhamly mandated -- >> it should be a federal law.

i hope congress will act quickly to say online retailers should have to pay the same taxes as everybody else. online retail is great thing but everybody in america out to play by the same rules. >> you're in such a unique position. you're on both sides of the coin. ebay as a kontroler. two years ago your answer might have been different or let me ask you. two years ago would your answer have been the same? >> no. i stood up and said the same thing. i took arrows in my back from a lot of my friends in silicon valley. the fact is in america everybody ought to play by the same rules and there's no rules that retailers on wall street should -- >> i think it's going to catch on. i think it's going to catch on. >> i've got to tell you. we started ebay. people said how big can this business be? $50 million on? it's now a $450 billion business. more than people thought. john swartz of "usa today."

if you're just joining us, we're looking back at some of the year's interviews, and we'll continue doing that after the break. 6

here." we all have favorite authors and i have the particular advantage to of inviting my favorite authors on the show. as we continue to look back at the past year here's business author jeff moore talking about then ceo of yahoo! carol bartz. >> i've known carol for 20 years, right? so when carol was recruited to go to yahoo! it was presented as management problem, and yahoo! was a management problem. and i think the feeling was if you could install adult supervision and put in place strong management the imaginative innovative juices of the company could make it work. i think what happen and part of

it is internally created is that the world changed very dramatically over the last several years is it bake a leadership and management problem at the same time. >> wait, wait. what's the difference. management is looking after staff. leadership is -- >> i think management is morer managing performance, executing to a plan where leadership is more about anticipating the next change and then reallocating resources. and, you know, this is not carol's take. carol was not raised in the media industry. thinking the feeling was that the leaders in place understood the dynamics of the industry. what they really needed was management. >> isn't the whole point that companies don't get past their past, they die, and new companies come along and do something better and better. we shouldn't be sitting here mourning yahoo!. we should be celebrating facebook. why should we be sitting here talking about why yahoo! saved itself? >> well, because the host

brought it up. >> because it's my show. >> he can say what he wants. >> right. >> so the problem with that is there's an awful lot of rebuilding the same infrastructure over and over and over again, which is a fundamentally wasted amount of capital. now, if you were the fastest growing market in the world with the highest standard of living and everybody has to come and play on your turf, great. guess what? new century, new world. we're not the fastest growing market. we've got to get smatter and more prudent with our capital and we can't afford to though companies away. >> we have to rebuild them. >> obviously if you can't rebuild them, you disassemble them. >> yahoo! was a company whose tame came and went onto to be replaced by facebook and google. that's inevitably what happened when she was hired. it was almost inevening itably a no-win sfwhiegs let's push it there. in the book i list 40 different companies for which -- okay.

wang, prime, deck, kodak. the point is we don't miss them and we could afford, frankly, the see chaen willfu essentiall institutional capital. if you have to and that's the only way to get innovation back into the game, you will. so, yeah, the norm is we don't free ourselves from our past. >> can i ask you this? in the internet age when everything is moving much faster are cycles slortenning? are companies having their heyday and falling off the cliff? i think of my space to a lesser degree. i almost think of what facebook might encounter later. >> net scape. >> yes, i think so. i'm trying to think. how many were other companies in the sun? it's certainly longer than it is now. and to be fair we're at a crucial change. if you think about we're

digitizing all of human culture. i mean all of it. it's not just media. it's not just -- it's education. it's health care. your previous guest. it's warfare, it's dating. you know, it's -- so -- so -- and everybody's reengineering their institutions around it, and there is going to be a lot. jeffrey moor in conversation with reporters from saus today and the financial times. steven leavy is a long-time technology writer. for his latest book he spent years inside google. here we discuss whether google is trying to do too much. >> you know, they're trying lots of different things from the windmills to the cars to the whatever. you know, sometimes only having a few people in charge is pretty handy. i mean if you want to pull out of the world's largest internet market for some reason. but can it also lead to kind of other ideas? >> definitely there's more of a

coherent leader -- leadership in something. they allow a certain amount of chaos, but there is a small group of people, like google learned, that really make these big, big decisions. now larry page, who's the former and now current ceo after eric smith, you know, in essence, ran the company for ten years as more autonomy than eric ever had. he's really running the company more like -- according to a single vision than anyone ever has before, so he's going to pursue things like cloud computing and, you know, moon shots while trying to strengthen the core things and get into social. >> maybe it's a bit of a bad comparison, but what's happening with cisco, they became maybe overly ambitious and overstepped and they're suffering the consequences. i wonder if google is smarter than they are. i know the last quarter they're hiring to the point where it affected their profit margin. i'm wondering if that's something that's in the back of their minds. >> i used to think the opposite,

really. in order to avoid the innovators' dilemma, and that's a very, very big trap. a company that dominates in one paradigm gets wiped out in the next. they have to look at new areas. they don't want to be like microsoft is now, just living off its cash cows. they want to be ahead of the next game. the thing to look for is something a product that maybe we're not even thinking of now that runs on the same strength that google has, which is artificial intelligence, a massive infrastructure and handling lots and lots of data and doing something that was impossible before the internet provided this. >> i always thought that about apple, that it has moved away from selling music at exactly the moment in which pandora is in our car and we don't buy music anymore. and we never saw that coming and somehow they did. they're one step ahead and their competitors try to get in, let's build a pad 2 and apple is thinking ahead.

if larry's a genius, then put your money into google and step back and say the guy's a genius. but a lot of people don't behave that way. they want results. what are you doing this quarter and why are you making stuff on the moon? >> well, google said from the get-go, if you thing that way, invest somewhere else. they say this is not a test of us. it's a test of wall street. can wall street handle a company that actually thinks long term in a way that's not only good for shareholders but good for the world? so google doesn't always meet its high moral standards but it has them. it puts down a challenge to wall street saying, hey, you know, this short-term thing maybe isn't good for the world at large. maybe we are. >> "press: here" will be back in a moment.

welcome back to "press: here." nowhere else are you going to find a bigger group of technology reporter than right here from fortune 500, new york times, we often invite the reporters to take us behind their stories. like lauren seidel. she and alex blockberg created an amazing. here's a clip from the report itself. >> he led us into a narrow corridor lined with doors with gold office name plates sneer we go. suite 190, oasis research. >> it's a late morning on the weekday, not a holiday. but the door was locked. three u the crack underneath, you could see there were no lights on inside. >> does it have any employees that you know about? >> not that i know of. >> what's -- if you don't mind, i'm going to knock on the door and see if there's anyone here today. [ knocking ]

>> i know this is kind of a cliche at this point, knocking on the door of this office, but we've come a lock way. >> the woman's voice you heard was laura seidel. she along with alex bloomberg created the hour-long report. it was disheartening to hear that nonexistent shell companies are going to shut down my start-up. that's not silicon valley. >> no. you would think it is not silicon valley. i have to say we started out on this. we really knew nothing about it other than i heard a term that you hear in the piece, patent control, which is a derogatory term that people use for companies like oasis research which don't make anything and we could never actually find out who owned oasis research. >> or meet an employee. >> exactly. we never found anyone to talk to and we found their lawyer who wouldn't tell us who owned the company. so this is a company that is suing people with a patent that we went to the patent office and we discovered it was a vague pa

tent that had to do with cloud computing, and it was now being used to sue at&t, go daddy. i mean all these companies ooz. and a lots of them just settle because to go to court is expensive. it's $2 million to $5 million to go to court when one of these patents is brought against them. >> here's the thing. it's not just oasis research. oasis research is a tiny little speck of sand. there are thousands of research offices out there with empty offices. >> there are. >> also it's not a lone thing that at&t and godaddy are dealing with. anybody you talk to in silicon valle valley, you hear it. you talk to any entrepreneur in the valley and you hit a certain point of even getting funding and it's like having, you know, the power guy come or -- it's a -- it is a fee that you have to pay to be a start-up in

silicon valley or anywhere. >> i should say that a lot of it is focused on intellectual ventures which was founded by the former cto of microsoft. when it was founded they had nearly 35,000 patents. he went around saying we're here to protect you from these patents. >> join my patent co-op and you won't have anybody suing you because look at all these patents you'll have. >> exactly. we had somebody in the piece, chris, well known in the sill cob valley, compare the business model to another well known business model, the mafia. >> i come to you and say, listen, it would be a shame if something happened to your little start-up. you send me a check, and that will happen. and then if you don't -- >> now, let's give them the benefit of the doubt. you know, it is actually somewhat of a mystery to me. what are the intentions of the business and what goes on in the business? because there are clearly -- you

detail it. there are pieces of how this goes incredibly badly and how they're causing a bad harmful ripple effects. but do you think that intellectual ventures have sort of got trapped in something in do you thank started out not wanting to be the mafia but legitimately wanting to sell the problem, of let's help the inventors, let not's not just dismantle software panels where they get nothing. they need to make revenue. their i dea of invention hasn't worked. >> let's put it this way. i will give them the benefit of the doubt that they started out wanting to help inventor. but ultimately they got $5 billion worth of investment from people who expect a high return, and to make that back, thus far they've made about $2 billion. to make that back, there's really no way to go forward without getting everybody to sign up. and if everybody -- and if people don't sipe up, you have have to say, well, you need to sign up.

>> or there's got to be a penalty of some sort. >> exactly. i have to tell you within the piece, oasis research, here's the hook, was a patent opened by intel correct luol ventures. they sold it to this company, they have a back end deal and they're making money off of it. they're saying, okay, we're not telling oasis representative to what to do, but i said, come on, you guys know they're probably going sue somebody. >> for the viewer who got a little lost there -- >> i'm sorry. >> it's okay. a big company full of patents sells it to tiny little disstaunlt employee company who nobody can figure out who owns it. little tiny company sues all of these people and the big company says i don't know what's going on. but as it turns out, there is a financial relationship there that oasis research gets money. >> correct. >> -- some of it gets filtered back up again. >> you've got to wonder. maybe they started out thinking this is great way to -- you know, there's this myth we have in which is one of the things that intrigued me about this story, the lone inventor, the jean just, going back to one of

our founders, ben franklin with the kite, discovery electricity. it's in the constitution. blievg it's important. i was in no way in this piece trying to knock that. i think the idea was, okay, here's this guy. sometimes he needs great businessperson but he has great idea. shouldn't he be rewarded? we want to reward him. you also have a patent office that grants patents that are good patents, valid patents. what we discovered is particularly in the realm of software. i'm not commenting about other areas. but in software, what they call business me method patents, a lot of those patents are really vague and easy used to sue people. >> laura seidel in conversation with sarah lazy and myself. we have a link to laura's original radio report as well as a linch to an earlier work where she rode with families on a bus headed to visit loved ones in

prison. it is well worth your time to listen. we'll be back in a minute. lot of those patents are really it is well worth your time to

that's our show for this week. we're back next week. i'm scott mcgrew. thank you for making us part of your sunday morning.