This Week in Tech 1023 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech. What a great panel for you. Micah Sargent is here, glenn Fleischman the brilliant Amy Webb. We're going to talk about robots that can tie your shoes, the kill switch in the US's latest fighter jet, and why Mark Zuckerberg doesn't want you to read this book. It's all coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.

00:25 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
From people you trust.

00:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is twit this is twit this week in tech, episode 1023, recorded sunday, march 16th 2025. This is not tax advice, it's time for Twit. Let me start the timer, See how long we can go On this show. We got some talkers. This is the show where we cover the week's tech news with the brilliant minds, the most brilliant minds in the business. Amy Webb is back, ladies and gentlemen. She hasn't been here since November 4th or 3rd that should give you some idea and since then rebranded. She's a futurist, author of many wonderful books and the head of the Future Today Strategy Group. Hi Amy, hey Leo, how are you? Are you writing any more books or have you kind of given up on that business?

01:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I have another book that I am not ready to talk about yet.

01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but you do have the brand new Future Today, strategy Group thing.

01:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's right. We basically publish a book once a year, so this is our annual report. It's free, it's, that's right. We basically publish a book once a year, so this is our annual report. It's free, um, and it covers all of the. It's our look ahead, for, like all the, the trends that we pay attention to, our trends are longitudinal, which means there's a lot of them um, oh, wait a minute.

01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I clicked we transfer, but I haven't.

01:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Now that's a great, I had to agree, okay yeah, so that that trend report is exactly 1 000 pages long and there are trends that cover basically every area of technology. Um, but uh, you can start with the executive summary, which is our high level overview of what's going to happen over the next year or so well, we'll be.

02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We'll be picking up a few things, but you cover ai. There's really something still going on in web three. I thought that was a history.

02:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There is. We also have metaversal technologies, which we have been covering since before. Somebody claimed that as their name new reality, synthetic media, diminished reality, stuff like that.

02:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you see, it's not just tech, you cover business in general. So there's healthcare, there's hospitality, that's right.

02:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So like half of it is. These are the, you know, the AI book. The AI section alone is like 150 pages, but then there's just healthcare. So if you work in healthcare, these are the technologies that are impacting your business and how. So there's I would say most industry sectors are covered.

03:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when you got to page 987, are covered.

03:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So when you got to page 987, we were like, let's keep going, you got to 1000 or a 999.

03:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, that's amazing, I will say we actually we actually got.

03:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We were about nine pages short. We were like, how is this thing 900 and whatever pages? So we added in a couple of quotes to make it an even I that I had a feeling I had a feeling.

03:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway. Amy's just back from south bay, south by. We will get a report on that and uh lots more. It's so great to have you back. Also, glenn fleischman is back. Ladies and gentlemen, we haven't seen you in a while because you were on uh kind of a hiatus as you worked on your book how comics were made.

03:41 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Now, how comics are made yes, it's, uh, it's the publishing world, right, so the past is prelude. Yeah, there's a new. The book came out last year and I've been scurrying around other projects since, and then a new version of the book, which is actually identical but has a new name, will be in bookstores in June of this year, worldwide, as how Comics Are Made Awesome.

04:04
I'm so happy for you an actual uh publisher, that distribution and all that, so that's really great and also here my good buddy from, uh, that little place called twit, mr mr micah sergeant hi, micah, hello, I'm afraid to say don't currently have a book, but maybe I need to get on.

04:23 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You should write a book.

04:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a book, a book that is about to be banned.

04:28
Ladies, and gentlemen, so what is the best way to make sure a book gets sold? Go after the author and try to shut the book down, right? This is a book called Careless People a cautionary tale of power, greed, idealism. It's by sarah winn williams. She was the director of public policy uh, global public policy at a little company known as meta and has written a tell-all book which meta actually has gone to court to block, alleging misconduct and harassment. Oh, the book does, by the way, including things like cheryl sandberg hitting on her, uh, which so we saw an excerpt in uh printed.

05:12
But but I, as soon as I saw this story, meta is trying to block x employees book. I went to amazon and it was. It's for sale. An arbiter has instructed the author and its publishers to stop publishing the book, even though the Verge says it's unclear whether the arbiter has the authority to do so, and its employees, and to the extent that she can control, cease further promoting the book, further publishing the book, to the extent to which she controls this, and further repetition of previous disparaging remarks, and she must retract the disparaging remarks. This is all. The Streisand principle guarantee that this turned this into a bestseller, right.

06:05 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
It was great. Mike Masnick of Tector. I know a friend of the show posted on Blue Sky. If only there were a term that would cover the oh he's the one who contributed to him.

06:15
But yeah, I was reading Steven Levy's coverage of this from a couple of days ago, just reading it this morning, and he said, well, I didn't know anything about the book. And then then he gets in touch with us and says, have you heard about this book? He's like no. And then they send him talking points and they have a website and he, I don't know if he even would have bothered to say anything about it that's the point.

06:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is the streisand effect.

06:36
You guarantee attention especially, they've got a whole site that lists every allegation and then debunks it, and I'm thinking I mean it's textbook you, amy, obviously read the excerpt that I did, which talks about, uh, uh, win williams flying on a plane with cheryl sandberg at the time the coo of facebook, as it was still called the time in her, in their private jet coming back from some international meeting and cheryl and her assistant trade places taking naps in each other's laps, stroking each other's hair. And then, uh, on the jet, uh, cheryl sandberg. This again is all from the book. Don't sue me, I'm quoting from the book. Uh, cheryl sandberg, who claims the only bed on the plane which you know, it's nice to have a plane with a bed then pats the bed and says come on, join me, sarah. So I don't know if it's true or not. It is a great read. I haven't finished it. It's juicy as hell.

07:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I want to know if she said lean in, but you know that's the Lean way in, baby, lean way, way in the steamy sequel to lead in.

07:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess there's nothing to say about it, uh, except that you know when you, when you try to shut something like this down, you're pretty much guaranteeing you're gonna get a lot more attention. And I immediately I thought well, I better buy this before, before they take it. Books these?

08:09 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
uh, tell alls, how often do they have a positive impact on on things? Is it typically about the person who's writing it? Uh, for the sake of making money, or do we have we had actually a truth to power moment where we talk about a company? I think, like right now, meta is such a big thing that. Do we know that this book's going to have that much of an impact on on meta?

08:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
that's actually a pretty good point, because there was a. There was another book that came out that was a very fun read about ray dalio, um and uh, who's? That so he founded um a venture capital firm uh and it was written by yeah similar very fast, breezy, fun, shocking read.

08:56
But to your point, micah, yeah, I mean like so you, you write that book because you've got a good story to tell, because you're angry, probably, maybe you're seeking retribution. But to your point, like these very rarely, if ever, have any impact on the company or the leaders in that company.

09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean. The very fact that Mark is trying to shut it down tells you, you know.

09:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
And they're smart. Like he's got a crisis comms team, the more attention that's brought you want to shut. Shut it down literally. Don't talk about it at all yeah, you know I mean you want it's, it's um adding, adding to the fire, well, just suffocating it.

09:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I gather that's one of the points of the book is that nobody tells Mark anything. Right that Mark Mark gets to do whatever Mark wants and people you know. When you get to that point in life, rich enough, nobody's going to say no to you. I guess I don't know. They should have said Mark, don't go after her, because you're just going to make Leo buy the book.

09:55 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yeah, because it's clearly directed right. There's nothing about the response that makes any sense from, like, a damage control standpoint.

10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it's worse. They're highlighting all the things you should read.

10:09 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
And I've read multiple accounts in which it was actually the Washington Post, their book reviewer. One of their book reviewers writes a newsletter, said I've never written something this long, but I've never had a company try to suppress information like this before. And it's just the thing you come across over and over again is that Meta is saying all these allegations, or many of these allegations, were raised previously and we addressed them. And so the point is then well then, why are you relitigating them if you think they're settled? But, leo, to your point too, I was remembering there was, I would say it's not totally comparable, but was there ever a reaction at a company? If you look at Susan Fowler now at Rigetti, oh yes.

10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The whistleblower.

10:49 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yeah, it's Uber. She wrote a Medium post and that's what blew everything up and then the reporting that came from that Her book. She did that in 2017. I had to look it up because I knew she wrote a book. The book was in 2020, so the book was kind of a memoir. So the book was kind of a memoir and about you know, I've seen this said about the same thing about this meta book too is it's a memoir that has explosive allegations in it, many of which, again, are just historical. They're not new. There's some new details. So if you take it as a memoir, it's a very different reading, and Meta could have just said this is one person's recollections.

11:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They don't match the company's blah, blah blah. I mean the, the.

11:31 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I think if you look at a book like bad blood, um, about theranos.

11:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That was written by john carrey, so like, yeah, he was at. I think he was at the journal right, so that's right yeah, for for a long time leading up to that book, there was story after story after story, investigating theranos right that had a pretty significant impact and the book was really sort sort of the culmination of all of that reporting over a long period of time. That has an impact, I think, but something that otherwise it's basically palace intrigue and everybody loves a little right.

12:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
According to the verge says, quote this ruling affirms that sarah will williams let me get that name right sarah winn williams false and defamatory book should never have been published. This urgent legal action was made necessary by williams who, more than eight years after being terminated by the company, deliberately concealed the existence of her book project do you wonder why? And avoided the industry's standard fact-checking process in order to rush it to the shelves after waiting for eight years.

12:28 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Who's the publisher?

12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Macmillan.

12:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's improbable. I mean so, first of all, the just so, I've written several books and Glenn has as well. But when you're dealing I'm with one of the big I guess there's only four publishers now dealing, I'm with one of the big, I guess there's only four publishers now um. So when you're at a big four, um, there is, there is copy editing, but they, they, it's standard practice. They do not proofread your books. So you are responsible for whatever facts are being lets them off the hook, doesn't it?

12:58
correct. Now they will proof it. Um, but there is no such thing as rushing anything to market. She didn't have like a hot scoop. There was no. You know, she wasn't a politician, which means she was probably on a year-long schedule. So just so everybody who's listening in has a little bit of background, because the book publishing industry is arcane and incredibly backwards and takes forever um well, and also, you don't fact check a memoir.

13:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These, these are all personal recollections.

13:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
My first book was a memoir and I I fact, but I was. I started out as a journalist, so I you know um I you're ingrained. Um, yeah, like, and I, I walked, I was at the wall street journal where everything got, you know, checked and checked and checked and checked and you know um.

13:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so, anyhow, I would just encourage everybody to take what they're hearing about this with with some amount of um, yeah, we don't. This is all her own story and, uh, I mean, I have no reason not to believe it, but if she, who knows, she could have made it all up from whole cloths. Is there any?

13:58 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I find it astonishing how ruddy I mean not that they were to throw her to the uh under a bus, but that they're they're willing to discuss the terms of her termination, which that's always one of those things when companies do that You're like well, this is retributatory, which they're trying to do because she did something that they don't like, and so forth. But I mean, that's the biggest impact of it, I think, is that Meta is saying if you do something like this, we will attack you in full voice. We don't really care about the financial and maybe you know again, maybe they're not thinking about it as well as they should, maybe it came down from the top, but we're going to attack you with full voice and uh, and we're also going to reveal details from your personnel file.

14:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
essentially, the one thing that maybe facebook would love to suppress is conversations about myanmar, the genocide there and facebook's role in it and apparently Mark and Cheryl's lack of interest in that. But so there's some things that reflect poorly on Facebook. There's some things that reflect poorly on individuals. I don't know. I'm going to read it because I like that kind of juice.

14:58 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Anyway, thank you for letting me know about it.

15:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I appreciate it.

15:01 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
One of the WeWork books was quite good, but again that was after lots of reporting, but I was like I don't know the whole story because I read it over X years and it was a really great story and there's second acts that are coming still and so forth.

15:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw the TV show. I think that that's probably the next step on this path. By the way, yeah, exactly, all right, let's move on to real news. I just I couldn't resist, you know. Let's move on to real news. I just I couldn't resist, you know. I this came yesterday. I'm so excited I have something to read tonight. Uh, actually I have two things to read because, amy, I'm gonna read uh, your new, uh, future today strategy group, uh, thousand page, what's to look forward to? You? Also, you did a south by talk yesterday, the day before. When did you do your time? It was last saturday, so last a week ago. How, what was that?

15:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
about. So every year at South by for I don't know many, many years, we launch our annual report, and so it's a speech that officially launches the report, but I usually sort of pick some things out of it that are interesting to me or emblematic what's coming, um, coming on the horizon? There's usually a theme, and the speech is that. So this year's theme was sort of beyond. We've entered this liminal space that I'm calling the beyond that is well the rules or the upside down.

16:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You get to choose, okay.

16:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I like kind of beyond, because I think what's happened is so. Last year I'd introduced, we published this paper on the technology super cycle, which is an economic event, but, um, I think what's starting to happen is there's this convergence of different technologies and, uh, some changes in society that have pushed us into a situation where the rules are breaking. There's something called the enhanced games that when I first heard about I thought was a joke. It's not. It's a bunch of VCs and tech bros who have gotten together and the goal is doping. So it is to push human physical bodies as hard as you possibly can.

17:06
You know, my sport is cycling, so I so I'm, you know, a lot of doping um, is it biohacking, or or just taking drugs?

17:11
no, it is. So, again, some of this makes a little bit of sense. So, uh, studying human performance and using a combination of biology and medicine, and genetics and genetic engineering and CRISPR, along with different types of technology and training, but the end result is there's, you know, it is doping, right. So let's, let's push the human body as hard as we can and until it breaks. Hopefully, you know, hopefully they don't die, and then they can, then they compete, but that's right.

17:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's like the opposite of of you know the tour de france, where you throw people out when they dope. This is, this is like everybody dope.

17:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Let's see what happens right, I should have set that up better, but the, the, the. I think the key here is this is a group of people who are now overtly talking about creating superhumans, right? So there are things like that. There are metamaterials, these are metamaterials, these are materials that are engineered, that don't obey the laws of physics. Um, you actually saw some of this yesterday. There was a, a riot, I think, in belarus, somewhere in somewhere over in europe, um, and and there was a, a sound that was emitted that cleared everybody, so that that is an example of a ways of bending particles and light and sound in ways that we haven't been able to before. So there's. And then robotics was another piece. There are new biohybrid computers. There's brain powered computers, literally made out of neurons.

18:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This sound weapon worries me. This sounds like the havana syndrome.

18:46 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Wait, yeah, I was hoping we could go back to the sound thing, because I thought so. This is the first time that's been used.

18:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I thought there was like it's not the first time that's been used, but it's um, and what I actually posited was what we've seen before is sound for dispersed for to get people to break up. That was actually used in philadelphia not too long ago.

19:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was on a cruise ship, uh sailing uh the suez, and they had sound weapons to uh repel off pirates. Yeah, and I just assumed it was really loud, annoying. Maybe they were playing, you know, heavy metal, I don't know. But uh, but no, these are, these are actually. They can kind of scramble your brains at the right levels, right a little bit they were.

19:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There was an experiment done in Philadelphia in some public parks where kids, teenagers, were congregating and rabble-rousing and causing problems. So there are on the spectrum of sound. There are some frequencies that only teenagers, as they're going through adolescence, can hear oh, the super high frequencies. Right, and so nobody else could hear it. But it was enough that, like it, caused them to scatter. Oh man, I'm leaving, man Do you hear that, yeah.

19:48
So one of the things that we posited was so that's, those are negative effects. What if there was? You could do the same thing but result in a serotonin hit.

19:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So you feel a little nice or a little bit more calm.

20:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So what's interesting, we think, is we could see a future in which you've got a bunch of people angry, they're marching on the Capitol and rather than if you, if you emit a painful sound or something that like that's gonna, that's gonna cause potentially a worse situation, but if you just make everybody feel kind of apathetic or calm, they no longer right. They just kind of are like yeah, whatever, we're good. And they kind of walk away, right?

20:27
So there's a lot of stuff like that. There are materials that can change and bend and become more or less rigid, um, in response to heat, light, extrasensory, you know. Whatever there's a. There is a robot designed for sperm, uh, sperm you know big thing right in front of them. They can't figure out where they're going um. There's a wait, a minute, wait a minute, you can't leave it at that.

20:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, is this sperm gps?

20:54 - Amy Webb (Guest)
you're saying no, no, because I don't think the sperm are smart enough to follow the gps. I just, I, all these people who listen every time I'm in there, like that amy webb, I can't stand her, whatever this this way, guys, this way.

21:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what they do? What is it? I don't know, maybe I shouldn't go into this more deeply. Is this all in the report?

21:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, some of it is, uh, this, I talked a lot about it, so the beyond.

21:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this kind of is what you wrote about in your last book about kind of the bio revolution, now the last book was about, the was about synthetic biology.

21:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Basically, what we've discovered is there's the convergence of three general purpose technologies, so artificial and a general purpose technology has the ability to serve as a platform for further innovation over time so artificial and it has usually a pretty long lasting economic impact. So the internet, electricity these are general purpose technologies that ultimately become the platform for other things. So AI meets all of the definitions for that. But there are two others that everybody has ignored, One or just not looked at. One is advanced sensors and the other is biotechnology. So we've been studying this for a long time, but what we saw about 24 months ago was this new convergence of the three, which we believe was going to lead to an economic super cycle, which is what's happened a technological super cycle, and from that there are lots of other things that are coming.

22:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How important is AI to this? Is it a critical component, foundational?

22:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So AI is foundational.

22:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is AI being used to develop these beyond technologies.

22:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
To some degree I mean. So if you look at the intersection between AI and biology, the biggest story in AI is actually not generative AI or agentic AI or model context protocol or any of the stuff everybody's excited about. It's biology.

22:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is not what you wrote about in the Genesis machine. It is a little bit. It is a little bit, but I have the Amy Webb bookshelf here ready for you. So this is the most recent book, the Genesis machine our quest to rewrite life in the age of synthetic biology.

23:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But it sounds like we've gone well beyond this right, right, and so the the space that we're in right now, what we would say is that the convergence is producing something we're calling living intelligence, which is the interplay, like there's just mass amounts of data ingestion that we didn't have access to before, and the other side of this is we believe robotics will finally start to take off, and to some degree, that's because there was a robot in 1928 called Eric. Eric didn't do very much. It could kind of sort of gesture and stand up, and it had a prerecorded talk track. You know, 2013 is when boston dynamics uh, released apollo for the first time.

23:49
It was apollo, right, yeah, the first one okay, yeah, so like the dog it's literally been a hundred years and, like the closest most people have come to a robot in their homes, is like a roomba that their cats like to ride around on, so it's like an expensive cat toy right.

24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But industrial robots have been yes, on the industrial side, but this is different.

24:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So to achieve the robots that we hear about, you need embodied AI. But to achieve embodied AI, you need a massive ingestion of data from other types of things. It's not a large language model alone. So the point of all of this is we've entered this, like I said, liminal period. We now have living intelligence, which means we're going to start seeing different kinds of things. So robots will finally take off, but also computers won't be computers. We literally like two weeks ago, the first, the first two things happened. There's a imagine a computer that's powered like, instead of traditional silicon, it's neurons, Um, and you know the first actual, like hardware, wetware computer launched, um, and the first cloud system launched, uh. So you know what. What does that mean?

25:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and we've had advances, it sounds scary as hell is what it means. What is this? Should I be scared?

25:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
there are ethical issues and everything else. I think the bigger point is, especially for the people listening to this show you know, a classical computer is is not the only thing that you are going to be, you should be thinking about over the next decade. A computer is not just going to be the type of computer you see today. There will be biohybrid computers they exist now, but there'll be more of them and there'll be quantum computers I don't know when exactly, but there's been some interesting developments, you know and there'll be embodied AI, which is effectively, you know, a different type of data ingestion, which then is a computer.

25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we've talked. We haven't. We renamed this week in Google to intelligent machines and have been covering IAM. We had Ray Kurzweil on last Wednesday, but we've talked. I've talked a little bit about the fact that LLMs, because they're stuck in the machine, can only go so far. What we have as humans that they're missing is our sensorium, our ability to go out into the world, and it sounds to me as if AI people working on AI recognize that we need to embody AI and give it experience. In that way. That's going to be a very qualitatively very different kind of AI. Ai doesn't know about gravity, right, it just knows what it reads.

26:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean kind of, but I'll give you one last example.

26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Doesn't know it experientially, I guess, is what I'm saying.

26:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Right, so Google. This made no headlines at all, but Google. Not too long ago, deepmind finally made a robot that can tie a shoe.

26:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So tying a shoe is something that comes pretty naturally and, by the way, fold origami and close.

26:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Ziploc bags, yes, and that's all very awesome, but tying the shoe, is that a hard thing, yeah, because it requires the fine motor dexterity that we have, but you also have to sense, sense attention, you have to understand flexibility, I mean there's. So it's such a dynamic uh thing to do and it's something that we can do as humans, and it's been an impossible challenge for robots for literally for decades. So the fact that they were able to figure this out, and and and the and, by the way, that the, the knot that it tied, is terrible. The loop, the loops are way too big, but it achieved.

27:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know, show, show, show what I'm showing. The problem is that Google has lied a little bit before in showing its AI capabilities. I'm very nervous about this, but this is Gemini robotics robotics division and this is an autonomous robot. That's a plastic banana. That, to me, is not exciting. I know what they're doing. Right, there is like, yeah, but watch, he's moving. He's moving it around, yeah, and uh, the robot is recognizing and following the task. These, these are small steps. I understand. Uh, would you be more impressive? Or a real banana? It didn't squish it. Is that what you're?

28:01 - Amy Webb (Guest)
saying yes, now. Now, since we're on the fruit, do you? Know, apple, like three weeks ago, published a seminal paper, uh, specifically about robotics and machine vision, and they figured out a way to get robots to push other robots buttons softly. It's again like this doesn't seem like this big of a deal, but not like banging the banana or the fruit, gentle, gentle robot. This is Apple.

28:29
Nobody thinks of Apple as a company. Everybody thinks of Apple as super late to the AI game. Right, they actually surpassed a whole bunch of benchmarks with this project. So this is the kind of stuff I'm thinking about. I think, myself included. Look, I think we're all a little jaded when it comes to certain areas of tech that have just not advanced, and I think that is I mean, I don't think I know that that is changing, which means we have to adopt a sort of like a new mind, like a child's mind. There's a Japanese phrase that nobody's going to understand, so I'll just but.

29:01
Say, it say it, say it, I'm actually forgetting what it is Okay.

29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amy has lived in both Japan and China, which is to some degree, at least according to your first book or your second book we won't mention that dating book. To some degree, the genesis of your interest in futurism is that you were seeing stuff at Akihabara, in Tokyokyo, akihabara.

29:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That was way ahead of anything in the west yeah, look, this is uh like 20, 25 years ago.

29:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is. This is the book. I just have all of your books, by the way to your point, though, about it's um.

29:39 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I mean, I am a jaded old technology guy and I, you know, cut my teeth running how-to stuff and I still do it. So I'm very practical. But when I start reading like microsoft may have created a new form of matter, I'm like I don't even know how to evaluate that right like that's I mean my erotic ship yeah right, maybe they didn't, maybe they did. I don't, I don't not, I can't dispute right, but it's it's like. Well, this is so far.

30:02
It's outside of my expertise and comfort level but, I, also need to understand it in order to understand what the world is around me.

30:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet you share this also, glenn. I also have become a little bored with technology and, oh good, what's the latest glass slab we're going to buy? And AI has suddenly reinvigorated the whole area. And, amy, you're talking about stuff that is, you know, next level, but that's what you deal with. You deal with the next level of this, but I think that many of us I'm sure you feel this way, glenn are excited about you know, this is like the beginning of the internet. This is exciting again.

30:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
There's a hugely aging population and I'm sure, amy, this is the one. People come to you all the time for practical stuff. But it's a hugely aging population. We're going to go through a giant demographic shift in the next couple of decades, certainly next generation, and it's like robotics has. I mean, I think that's been, that's like the what are computers going to be for Recipes? What are robotics for Aging population? Robotics for aging population. But but I'm sure there's a lot of truth in it too is that if you have more effective household devices that can help with the parts that are going to be harder and harder because of labor issues, of cost of care, of remoteness, all those things is a there's a giant change that will come in what we are, what our lives will look like I have a slightly more cynical view on why the robots?

31:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
because all of all the big tech companies are also heavily invested in robotics. And by the way, before I forget, it was Shoshin. That's beginner's mind mind glitched, that's the term I think. The issue is, the idea is there's so much money to be made in AGI. You don't get to AGI without embodiment because there's not enough. You just exactly.

31:49
That's my model Right. So I think if you were, if everybody can sort of like zoom out to see what's happening, I think this push and I think some of what we're starting, like why is Google DeepMind playing with plastic bananas and trying to teach a robot how to tie a shoe, playing with plastic bananas and trying to teach a robot how to tie a shoe? I think this is the reason why because everybody believes that AGI ultimately is where the money is and the glory, and we don't get to that without embodiment. We don't get to embodiment with all of the convergences between these different areas of tech.

32:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Can I ask NVIDIA and Microsoft, both have been for some time pushing this idea of both have been for some time pushing this idea of the digital twin, this sort of virtual space that you could train your especially in robotics your systems on and in those you can have your AI run over a human being and learn what that means, what that does, and without actually having to run over human beings and figure out how to navigate that. Do you see that as the stopgap measurement to what is now becoming embodied AI, where we actually are having, you know, ai in the real world, or is that augmented by this sort of virtual digital twin space where you can do a lot more experimenting and still be ethical about it? Where you can do a lot more experimenting and still be ethical?

33:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
about it I can give I don't know what Glenn has to think I can give you a quick example. So DARPA had a. So some of what you're talking about, micah, is a multi-agent system. So these are AI agents within a system built to collaborate together without a human in the loop most of the time. So it actually doesn't even have to be a virtual world as we conceptualize it today, there doesn't have to be anything visual about it. So I mean, or there can be, but DARPA had this multi-agent system run simulations to diffuse bombs, and so the multi-agents there was Bravo, charlie, and they go into the system that the goal is find the bomb, diffuse it. So alpha goes in and Bravo and Charlie are there, alpha is looking around and of course it's a bomb. So you have to, you have to sort of do things in a particular order.

33:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't want to squish the banana. You don't want to squish the banana right you want to find right.

34:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So you know, alpha finds the banana. Right, you want to find right, um? So you know, alpha finds the bomb. Relays that to to bravo, bravo and charlie confirm. Send back to alpha. These are the instructions, like do this in this order. So this is great, right? We've got these three agents working collaboratively without a human in the loop, all is well. And then they changed their strategy. Uh, rather than burning all this time and energy running around trying to find bombs and diffuse them, the goal was diffused bombs. So guess what they did? They just found the bombs that were already diffused, which means they figured out how to do none of the work and still get all the credit for it.

34:39
They're just like humans exactly, and but that's kind of my that's, but that's.

34:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, this is we've seen this in other ways. They cheat at chess the tumors, you know, it's really interesting the ones that have measuring tapes on them.

34:53 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Why do we think they'd be?

34:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, ai would be better than humans at all I actually think we have to stop the comparisons because, ultimately, we're not building AI systems to replicate us, we're building AI systems

35:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
to do things, but it's hard to wrap your head around that. So, and I'm sure there are people out there trying to like imbue some form of consciousness. But to Micah's point, training an AI like running like a couple billion simulations to see if you can get the AI to either not run over the human or to run over the human or whatever not inflict damage or to inflict damage in all of these different circumstances with a giant multivariate mess. I don't think that translates yet to the real world, because our real world is dynamic. Because our real world is dynamic, and if you sort of reverse engineer, what would it take for a robot to not for an AI system, to not be like? But the goal was diffused bombs. They are diffused. You know, that's like really really, really hard to do.

36:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We found all the diffused bombs for you. Are you happy now? Human, do you believe? Let me, we're going to take a break, but I just I have to ask you uh amy, uh, is agi a real thing or a marketing term? You know sam allman's using it as a marketing term, as is yeah, that is.

36:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I would say, that is, that is true, uh, in that particular case. But I I think that the deep mind folks are historically under appreciated for the work that they are doing and, if you ask me, who is clearly brilliant just just really smart, yeah, Like really smart.

36:43
And I also think that Dario, from Anthropic, who leans a little more, I think academic, also just off the chart, thinking differently than everybody else, work from a couple years ago with some of the multimodal gameplay. I mean there is no agreed upon agi definition but from my point of view, like that is the beginning of agi, yeah well they, you know, they were the ones it was to me who came up with alpha zero.

37:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The idea was to use deep reinforcement learning. Alpha zero became the best go-playing robot in the world, not by learning how, reading a lot of games, but by playing itself billions of times over just a period of a few days, and is now better than any human, easily, but more importantly, generates moves. Humans go. Oh, that's creative, that's interesting, that's different, and to me, that's the real test of AGI. I don't want a machine that duplicates what we do. I want a machine that comes up with things we hadn't thought of.

37:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So, leo, that's a super interesting point, because that is not the definition of AGI, right? The definition of AGI is an AI system that can perform tasks that are broad, not narrow at or better than the level of humans. But creativity is not a not part of that definition.

38:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's the most interesting thing that a robot or a machine can do is come up with new proteins or new, new cancer cures or, you know, we we talked to this. This has been really fun doing this intelligent machine show. We had steven wolfram on and one of the things he said you know he's been, you know he's he's great at demystifying, uh, how llms work. It's really brilliant at that. And he said you know you could say, well, it's just probability, but what's interesting is because, uh, these llms are operating with chunks of data. They are finding connections that we have missed or we haven't seen. He also he has had some really interesting things to say on the show. He said at some point we're going to come up against something we can't understand, just like a dog doesn't understand a human, and that will be an interesting point.

39:06 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
You can see this. I remember this, studying 3D prototyping oh boy, I mean, it's a while back now, but more recently as well looking at when optimized shapes are produced for replacement parts and you see what a human would design in a CAD-CAM program with some assistance, and then what the effective part would be designed without the necessity of human beings being involved in creating it, and the difference is shocking. No person would ever sit down, know what would be able to design what that looks like, and I thought it's not future shock, but there is a little bit of that. You look at this bizarre part. It has effectively the same or better functionality.

39:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that the beyond, amy?

39:43 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's the beyond. Well, well, I was just because I know we need to break, but just related to that. Um, so microsoft inv. So one of the problems with ai systems is our human language is super clunky. So, for example, if I were to say something like um you know, this is a big ant or this is a big elephant right. We talking to each other understand what we mean by big you know right, in the context of ant or elephant.

40:11
Yeah, so that's kind of true, no matter what language you speak. So in Japanese, big is oki, no matter if it's an ant or an elephant or whatever it is, but to a computer system that's very confusing. There's context that's missing. So what happens is you wind up having to do a lot of work to get to a point where you can get the system to understand whatever. So Microsoft invented something called droid speak, which is math, rather than our clunky, our irritating clunky human language. That doesn't quite work and it's math. So the point of this is remove the human language altogether and make language much easier, much more computational but very specific to machines, which means that there will come a point sometime soon when we're literally not speaking the same language as these AI systems which will then be making decisions, and it's going to become harder and harder for us to untangle how those decisions got made.

41:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's almost true already. I mean to some degree, transformers are black boxes.

41:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Sure, but at least we understand what went in.

41:21
Right, I mean once we have AI systems, starting with math and then continuing to evolve if that's what happens, right, using a, using a style of communication between, like think about, think about that multi-agent system that I mentioned with with darpa, and there was another one in minecraft that ran. You know, there could be sometime in the near future when those systems are, those agents, the pieces are communicating with each other in a way that we can't, we can observe, we can't understand and then maybe we can't even observe.

41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this was the week I mean you could put it in your calendar that Google DeepMind announced that they were going to start Gemini Robotics on Wednesday. In order, quote in order for AI to be useful and helpful to people in the physical realm, they have to demonstrate embodied reasoning, the human-like ability to comprehend and react to the world around us, as well as safely take action to get things done. Um, this is the next big step in ai. We're going to take a break. We have a lot more to talk about, including a machine war movie. It's the most expensive movie ever made. That is already, uh, generating a lot of bad reviews. But first but first, ladies and gentlemen, by the way, I gotta say great panel Micah Sargent is here from tech news, weekly hands-on technology. It's great to have you, and of course, you do those wonderful crafting corners in our club. Really love having those. Your little, your little house that you built is behind him this is the house that jack built.

42:45
Yeah well, micah built anyway. And uh, and a long time been a long time since we stopped seeing glenn fleischman. You, you kind of took yourself off the uh, off the panel working on the book. But now the book's out, I hope we can see more of you.

42:59 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Love having you on appreciate it. Yeah, you know, I retreated into 19th century printing history, the most lucrative field of study right now.

43:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know who else is doing that right now. It's been going great. Jeff Jarvis is writing a book on linotype.

43:11 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
What is wrong with people? It's great. Actually, there might be a competing book on linotype, in fact.

43:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I think, oh, really, yeah, I know it's.

43:20 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
It is. I'll tell you, my best career move was moving to the 19th century. I'll just tell you that.

43:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I think this is part of that. Moving into the beyond, this weird, uncertain world that we are now all living in, that's going to get weirder and weirder by the second is that we have a nostalgia for a simpler time. Uh, you know, but they always said that there'll be newspapers. They'll be nicely ironed by your robot butler and delivered on a silver salver and uh you'll, it'll be very nostalgic.

43:51 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I gotta find this photo. It's an image from a book from as the late 1800s called quads. This weird little book I bought and it had a robot. I mean, this is the 18, I think it was the 1800s, just before even the word robot was coined by carl kipak, and uh and it's by Karl Kipak. And it's a robot thing or some kind of steam-powered thing setting type, and I'm like how did they? What were they? How did they even predict that it's? Great, that's what they thought. It's amazing.

44:18
The robot will set pieces of metal type. That's, of course, the future.

44:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People have been writing about this for hundreds of years and now guess what kids we get to live in it. It's great to have you, glenn, and, of course, the wonderful amy webb from the future today strategy group, ft, sgcom and and your future today uh presentation. Well, first of all, your your. Your speech at south by introducing the tech trend report is up on South by his YouTube channel, so everybody can watch that Uh. But you can also download uh the tech trend report, right it's is it free to all? You get all 1000 pages for free.

44:55 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, um, the only caveat is we ask people. Yes, so anybody can download the whole thing for free, or you can get the individual sections.

45:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we just ask that people don't upload it to slideshare or chat whatever and of course, oh, you have you blocked ai from reading this uh, is there a way to do that? No okay, leo I'm reading it right now no, no, it's worse.

45:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
People are like you're never. Hey, guess what I did for you? I built a chatbot using your.

45:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks so much I didn't ask for that and we literally say there's a whole please don't do that, where our lawyer will contact you can I make a podcast out of it using notebook llm?

45:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
that is. That is. I will just say this one last time for the 15 billionth time every the. The key feature of notebook lm is not the podcast feature. It does so much more than that okay but uh, but also don't make a podcast, please I won't I promise, I promise.

45:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, it's great to have you here, amy, as well. Thanks to all of you for joining us. I think you're probably already realizing this is a special show. Whenever we can get these people on it's, uh, it's always exciting. Our show today, brought to you by zscaler, the leader in cloud security.

46:13
You've heard probably people talk about, uh, zero trust. Here's the problem. Enterprises have spent, literally over the last decade, billions of dollars on firewalls, perimeter defenses and vpns so people can get in right and get to work, but breaches are not going away. In fact, they're rising. An 18 year over year increase in ransomware attacks last year, 75 million dollar record payout. That's probably just the tip of the iceberg, right, because these traditional security tools are actually kind of counterproductive. They expand your attack surface because they have public facing ip addresses and, of course, the bad guys know that.

46:52
Gosh, I put up I just as an experiment. I put up a ssh server a couple of days ago, uh, on, you know, just in public. It was blocked down, but it was in public. It was almost within the first hour attacked by bad guys from albania, or at least ip addresses coming from albania, china and uh and south korea or north korea? We don't know korea. Um, the minute you have a public facing ip address, the world comes to your door.

47:25
Bad actors. And now that they're using AI tools faster and easier than ever, plus, there's a real problem because once they do penetrate your, your you know perimeter defenses, the assumption is, well, anybody inside the network's got to be an employee, right, it's gotta be okay. No, they, they can move around at will. They can, they can exfiltrate all this private information, your customer information, your, your emails. They do it in encrypted files that your, your firewall's struggling to to analyze. You're in bad shape. You're, you're in real trouble.

48:00
Hackers are exploiting traditional security infrastructure and they're doing it using ai to outpace your defenses. It's time to rethink your security. We can't let these guys win. They're innovating and exploiting your defenses faster than you can move. That's why you need z scaler zero trust, plus ai.

48:18
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48:49
And, by the way, zscaler is analyzing over half a trillion daily transactions, a vast majority of which are benign. Every once in a while they're not, and they use AI to analyze those so they can give you a much better sense of what's going on out there in the real world. Zero days are out there constantly. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization. Zscaler zero trust plus AI. You can find out more at zscalercom security. Zscalercom security. We thank them for their support of this week in tech. Amy uh writes in the executive summary of the new tech trends report beyond the rubicon navigating humanity's point of no return holy cow, that's a little over the top. Alia yakta est the die are casted well, I was.

49:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You know, the cool thing right now in silicon valley, I understand, is to use latin, whether that's on a shirt. So I wanted to be one of the cool kids jay graver, of course, at south by.

49:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you go to her talk?

50:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
yeah, I was not. I know I had yeah but I heard it was good. She is the CEO of a blue sky and uh.

50:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You remember that Mark Zuckerberg has been wearing uh t-shirts with Latin phrases, most of them terrifying. So, jay.

50:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Graber or nothing.

50:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zucker, nothing. That's good, that's a good, you know, that's like um well, I think the 14th said that right.

50:25 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I'll go back to the 1500s and do uh uh, which means this page intentionally left blank yeah well, jay wrote no Caesars, which I thought was quite good.

50:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, might be a little misleading, because they still have not yet Federated blue sky, which has kept people like Coryy doctorow from investing in it. He said I'm not gonna go invest in another platform that won't let me out.

50:51 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
He said that in the recent 28 tweet, uh or toot message, though right on blue sky, did he toot? I'm kidding, but he's on blue sky, he's just, I don't know what yeah, he won't.

50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he puts everything everywhere he's on mass, it's great, yeah. And then he has the and he still uses x, yeah, and I have to say, uh, that's a bold statement. It's the only excuse I have for every once in a while, looking at x and said, well, corey's on there, so it can't be. How bad could that nazi bar be? So have we crossed the rubicon, amy? Yes okay, just questioning we're in it now.

51:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Um, look, I don't I don't mean to sound like, uh, nihilistic or anything but uh, but look, I mean, is it bad for humans? I mean no, look, I for the most part, believe we have free will and I think that, um, we're still very much in charge of oh, so it's not too late. No, I think we think we have agency, but you know, I think the problem is there was actually. There was a great book that everybody should read now called Future Shock, written by Alton.

51:56
Toffler in the sixties, I think when there was a lot changing, but it describes some of the challenges that we have cognitively, emotionally, dealing with a lot of change really fast.

52:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that was nothing compared to what we got today.

52:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah. So I think the answer is we hit many inflection points in the past 12 months, and sometimes these advancements in technology beget further advancements, and sometimes these advancements in technology beget further advancements, and this is happening at the same time of pretty significant geopolitical changes and economic uncertainty. So everybody's going to feel sort of um what? The way I'm describing this is no longer fomo. It's not the fear of missing out, it's foma, the fear of missing anything.

52:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um or the fear of being in it yeah, so so, but can we just pause for a bit and go back in time or something. I mean, I guess not.

52:51 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's why you started with that quote in your talk about. Oh, was it ever in a week you quoted lennon.

52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tell us, tell it, what was the quote.

53:01 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Here's what I did um, I, I, I actually had had everybody I printed out. We have these little wooden blocks that I gave everybody on their way in and at the very, very beginning I told everybody to take these things and like, raise them in the air and lean to your left and stick them under your butt. And then I didn't acknowledge them after that. We came back to it.

53:27
You are so strange. I put up a picture. I put up a picture of John Lennon. I said you know, given what's happening in the world today, I thought I would start with a quote from Lennon. And then I said not that, Lennon, oh this Lennon, oh, Um and uh right, it was the quote about, which is probably not his originally.

53:48
But, um, there are uh weeks when decades happen, you know cause. That kind of describes how we feel. But the reason for the uh, and then everybody was like she went there, but the reason for these things that I made everybody sit on, so you guys don't look comfortable by the way, they're not.

54:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that was the point they are uncomfortable.

54:07 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Everybody's had a stone in their shoe at some point, like a rock in your shoe, and when that happens, there's a cognitive flip that happens in your brain. It's a small thing, it's irritating, but suddenly it becomes everything. You become fixated on it, you lose sight of anything else. It's hard to split your attention and the higher order functions of your brain. They're put on pause. So you actually stop thinking about the more important stuff. And because you're hyper fixated on this thing, that's uncomfortable.

54:37
And the point that I was trying to make is we're all about to be very uncomfortable and it's not it's not like a dystopian future thing, it's just it is. We're going through an enormous amount of change all at the same time. This is the future shock thing. We're all going to be uncomfortable and part of what you have to learn how to do is refocus your attention so that you're able to zoom back out and you know, and it's okay to be uncomfortable while also staying connected to what's happening around you. So I asked everybody, I invited everybody, to continue sitting on this for as long as they could and while focusing their full attention on me as a way of practicing.

55:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll never forget that talk.

55:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They won't Well, and so at the very end, because it was dark, we looked at what's written on here. Yeah.

55:25
What's written on here are things that you have to remember during this time of discomfort, which are things like every problem is a puzzle, you know, and you have to think big and think bigger and expand your comfort zone, stuff like that. And I ask people to keep that block visible because, going forward, it's a reminder that, like you didn't die, like we made it through the hour, you're still alive, you learned some stuff and you know that you can sit with discomfort, and that's what we all have to learn how to do.

55:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to build you a mega church, amy. You need to have a 24-7 TV channel, but just it's just Amy Webb on the future, and just sit there and talk.

56:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Are you calling me a righteous gemstone?

56:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, and I will sit on any cube. You, you, you hand me. You're great with the tchotchkes. By the way, I have many of the future today, formerly future today, institute now. Future today. Uh, group um tchotchkes, and I've been very happy to store them all on my shelf right here.

56:22 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I was kind of hoping we'd all have cubes for today, that we could sit on.

56:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish we could get some cubes. Let me give you the 10 takeaways quickly, because I think these are important from the report, and then we'll move on to other tech news. But what you're saying is so important In fact, I want to get you on intelligent machines to talk about this as well.

56:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Can I preface itface? This is not what we are. These are not predictions for 2025. Right? These are the things that will matter in 2025.

56:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think some, a couple people got confused okay, we're not gonna have agi like three months, but these are things you should, you will encounter and be thinking about in the next big macro themes year in the next year. Get ready kids, livingges, ai sensors and biotech into systems that think, adapt and evolve. This is the most important part. Beyond our grasp, tech giants form unlikely alliances as AI demands force former rivals to share computer power and data. I guess you could say the precursor to that was open AI and Microsoft, which is a very tense relationship. As time goes by, action models eclipse language models, so what we were talking about earlier is AI shifts from talking to doing, reshaping automation's frontier, and that ties into robots. Finally, break free from factory floors, as advanced technology enables real world adaptability. There's some good news. The climate crisis spurs rapid innovation as extreme weather events accelerate next gen technology adoption.

57:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Sounds like you're bullish about our ability to solve these I know that sounds weird, given that bill gates just pulled out of some of his projects did he pulled out of the of the what? We're're hearing, but there's too much money to be made um in advancing technology to help mitigate climate crisis issues. So if it doesn't happen in the U S, it's going to happen in China.

58:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was working on sodium cooled um mini reactors. Um interest I wonder if he pulled out of that. You do talk about that.

58:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think it's some of these other more um thematic, like climate change is a problem, kind of okay.

58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nuclear power resurges again. This is another point from the ftsg tech trends, as ai's energy appetite drives tech giants to invest heavily in small modular reactors. That's already happening. We're seeing that agentic AI systems set their own goals, oh boy, and execute complex decisions. Augmenting human expertise oh dear. Quantum computing reaches its inflection point.

58:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You think it's going to happen this year, as error correction breakthroughs unlock practical use cases so the inflection point is error reduction right there's like a hundred inflection points en route to like commercialization of quantum computing, which we are not at yet yeah, so, but that's a good inflection point.

59:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, metamaterials rewrite physical limits as engineered substances transform how we build our world. Well, I mean, I know about graphene. Are we talking? What are we talking about here?

59:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
um.

59:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I mentioned sperm bots at the beginning, so imagine, um you know, wearables for your cells, so wearables for the inside, instead of just like yeah, ray kurzweil was talking a lot about nanotechnology and uh, of course his premise is and he said this on wednesday on intelligent machines he's, he says I'm we're still on target, uh, to agi 2029, five years from now, or four years there's no way to.

59:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, I hate to like you can't predict it. I understand no, there's no. There's no way to calculate it.

59:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's been saying though oh yeah, he has his own specialized turing test. He and and Mitch Caport did a long bet in 2000, I think 20 years ago, 25 years ago about this, and he said there is, he has an advanced Turing test that will satisfy his definition.

01:00:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's fine, there are so many. So again, if you're a business, if you're anybody, and you're like OK, 2029, check, I can get on to other stuff between now and then. No, I wouldn't do that very, very dangerous. No, but people take that as gospel right and that's a really dangerous I think ray's point is is not that you can?

01:00:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you can wait till 2029, but it's nearer than you think, and he's been saying 2029 for 40 years, by the way.

01:00:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
All right, so like great and it doesn't matter. He likes to go back. Look. He likes to go back in time and say I got all of these predictions right 86% yeah. Okay, but a lot of it is squishy, so it's easy to be squishy, yeah. I'm more interested in a quantitative model that gets us to better decision-making. I don't really give a about exactly what date in the future.

01:00:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree, but he's right, writing popular fiction, popular non-fiction, almost said fiction, popular non-fiction. He does say that uh, he calls a singularity when we merge with machines and this is kind of what you were talking about is nanotechnology and, uh, maybe a human machine symbiosis, uh, which he says is more like 2049, 20 years from now.

01:01:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Okay, except that Cortical Labs two Tuesdays ago now has a computer that is part silicon, part human, part brain, so again like that is a. You know, right now there's like 10,000 neurons inside of that machine and it's hard to do a comparison of neurons to transistors. But if you look at the Apple II to do a comparison of neurons to transistors, but if you look at the Apple II, the Apple II had 3,500 transistors and it was like pretty awesome at the time. My current computer, I don't know probably four to 16 billion transistors, something like that.

01:01:55
So the point is and a neuron is much more powerful and capable. So 10,000 out of context. I don't know what that means, but this is the first machine. So it is not the year 2049. It literally happened two weeks ago right.

01:02:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think he's more interested in when he can merge with a machine, but that's yeah. Finally, private. This is also this is very interesting to me private enterprises colonizes cislunar space, birthing an economy between the earth and moon that reshapes commerce. Uh, that's really interesting. You're talking about manufacturing in zero gravity, but yeah, is it more than? That um.

01:02:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
so some of that is uh, some of it is manufacturing, uh, and again we're, we're. This is the beginning stages, so, um, but printing 3d, printed knees 3d, you know it's a lot of biomedical stuff, um, but then also all of the, the um infrastructure to get to that place, right? So you, you need the lift systems, you need the, you need all of the stuff um to make that point um addressable, if that, that makes sense. So it's a lot of infrastructure that we're starting to see now interesting stuff.

01:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you can all download this and read it, ft sgcom, and there's a thousand pages. That's just one, but it is kind of elaborating on the, on those particular. Uh, yeah and look not to.

01:03:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't want to disparage. You should download the report. It's great. I don't want to disparage Ray. Obviously he's had an incredible career.

01:03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're doing different things too.

01:03:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I worry when people get stuck on dates and look to oracles, because it gives you permission to not pay very close attention in the present. And that's really important for everybody listening in or watching us, because everybody who's here is like deeply, deeply involved in technology and you're the ones who have to be like super involved in what's happening and not absolving yourselves and sort of you know getting excited.

01:03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know a lot. A lot of your business is advising industry and government, but if you were advising our audience, you're advising us as individuals. What would be a proper way to approach this coming?

01:04:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
what craziness well, we work with all but one of the big tech companies. I should also say so we're, you know, we're-.

01:04:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're asking the same questions. I understand.

01:04:27 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They are asking the same questions Again. I think most organizations took a while to get through digital transformation and probably everybody listening in was played some part of that. The next thing is this AI transformation. But everybody's like you could do great by helping everybody zoom out and see the bigger picture, like the future is not just a gentic AI. There's other things happening, um and and maybe, if you're interested in robotics, now is a probably good time to pay a little bit more attention to that.

01:05:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's one of the reasons I named the show Intelligent Machines, because I knew it wasn't just AI, right?

01:05:09 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, I think it was Dario last week who said no more coder like humans will not code anything five years from now, or something like that, mark.

01:05:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zuckerberg said that too. He said they're going to hire an AI as a senior engineer this year.

01:05:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, so I'm sure that has a lot of people really concerned. I don't think that's the case. I think that there's a lot of desire to make headlines right now.

01:05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's the problem, isn't it? And that is our job, micah, that's our job, that's your job to take, not to make the headlines that get the link, the clicks, but to really kind of try to speak to. And this is why I love having you guys on to try to understand this. Which means maybe we're not the most popular shows in the world you know, we're not Joe Rogan but I think it's more important, at least from my point of view, that we help people navigate this and understand it, not get the headlines. So I agree with you. I mean, I think we're going to have somebody on Intelligent Machines, a friend of mine, harper Reed, who does pair coding with an AI, and I think more and more.

01:06:11
I just saw somebody in our chat room say he's been using Claude or Sonnet 3.7 for coding and it makes a great partner, not a replacement, but a partner. You know, know, one of the things steven wolfram said is yeah, of course machines can write the login code. They've seen it a thousand times. It's not hard for them to write code. That they've already, you know, they've seen again and again on github. Um, but you need a. You still need a human. Do you think you will always need a human for that real creativity amy, amy amy, um, I'm putting you on the spot.

01:06:54 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm sorry that's okay um this year yeah, I was just trying to think I was trying because I've experimented. Actually I know harper, like I've been I. I use every tool that comes out and play around with it, except for deep seek, which I've not done. Um, I don't know. I don't know that ai, any of these tools, has helped me be more creative. I think the thing that helps me be creative is when I'm out in nature walking around, or I'm on my bike or I'm touch grass yeah yeah, a little bit um.

01:07:25
I would say that, uh, running simulations um has always been faster with a computer and we do a lot of simulations, so there's that you know. I think getting to potential answers that we still have to double and triple check. That's a little faster, um, but even in our shop we've been using machine learning for a decade. You know ai is not replacing.

01:07:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'm not planning on replacing anybody or anything that we're doing with ai I have a talk from richard feinman in the 80s, as somebody asked him the same question and he said well, look, you can run pretty fast, but a train can go faster. It's it's multiplicative is what dr drew is as dr do is saying in our discord chat. He says I see it in my government role not as replacing people, but as multiplicative. My people have experiences and knowledge, but technology has always been an accelerant, and that's that's what feinman said as well. I think that's very true now there's one company, you said you don't work with one major tech company.

01:08:28
Of course, I'm not going to ask you who that is, but I did note that intel has a new ceo, uh, pat gelsinger, who was pushed out of the company three months ago, uh, because he couldn't turn the corner for intel. I'm thinking this new ceo, lip bhutan he's formerly ceo of a chip design services company and will take over this week is probably there to sell off the parts would be my.

01:08:53 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yes, it's kind of sad they've missed so many opportunities over the year and somebody should have hired amy. I'm telling you so many times they've. I mean, it's the just the mobile chip space alone. Right, think how many times they have started businesses, failed and then sold them off and then started another business and meanwhile you have arm out there making all the money in the world and all the arm licensed design well, and look at nvidia uh, yeah, intel's also played ketchup-up in the GPU space.

01:09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And even AMD has in many ways surpassed with the x86 architecture what Intel's been able to do.

01:09:29 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
They lost something. I don't know. It's kind of. You know it happened to HP too, because HP sort of broke itself up for parts. It didn't seem like it, but you know that's what Fiorina did. And I don't know what happened to Intel, but it feels like after the late 90s there wasn't any room for them to use what had gotten them to that point to get them further, because it feels like they've only made a series of mistakes since then and yet been so dominant that they have been able to, you know, maintain a market presence. But I don't know where do they go? Where do they go with anybody in charge? Maybe having somebody on the chip side? I think you're right, I I mean, you're selling it for parts, but also with that expertise, maybe it's been missing to have someone who is that deeply involved.

01:10:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gelsinger was a chip designer. Gelsinger knew that business intimately. It was his plan to split Intel into a fab company and a design company, manufacturing and design. It's unclear whether Tan is going to do that or it's well, you know he hasn't said uh, he says we're going to work hard to restore intel's position as a world-class products company. You know, good, have good luck with that. It's sad, it's sad and uh, that's that's the news.

01:10:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I don't know what there is to say about it is anybody making chips that aren't arm based for mobile or desktop, now that I mean besides even even you look at microsoft and where you know their ads for the smartest computers ever we've ever made. They're all the the arm yeah, it's a hard market to have lost and lost many times yeah yeah, it looks like.

01:11:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh. Well, I mean, who knows?

01:11:05 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
maybe amy knows, but no one else the process seems to be working as intended, though, does it not?

01:11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if you can't compete, then you die, yeah well, I think a general electric, you know, general electric is no more. For years we thought these companies were so big that they were could not fail and uh, you know and sometimes we kept them from failing well, it's also.

01:11:26 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
They had the culture. What was it not ml2? Was the guy before um uh?

01:11:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the chainsaw, al dunlap. Who are you talking about?

01:11:33 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
no, the fellow g who um was the. You know the business darling of uh, everything and then oh yeah, he wrote all his books. Yeah, blanket on his name yeah yeah, you know, and then it turned out right. Then he's out of his position. It turns out there was a lot of illusory stuff going on his the whole, like let's drop that was a five percent of underperforming, like just the whole nature of all of his management lessons turned out to all be wrong, right it was all about financialization and squeezing margin.

01:11:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, it was never I. We could talk about it later. Not a good way to it's a great way to kill innovation and to make sure.

01:12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's almost universally what private equity does, right yeah?

01:12:11 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
well, he created the mold right and then everyone said, well, look how great GE's doing, and it turned out GE wasn't doing that great and then it did very, very poorly. After he was out and his own personal ethics problems and a lot of other stuff going on there.

01:12:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was sold off for parts.

01:12:28 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
All the industries they were in are now individual companies and I suppose my grandfather always claimed he was responsible for GE credit, by the way, because we ran furniture stores in Poughkeepsie. So during the depression, he claims he convinced GE, which was one of their major, you know, the appliance retailers to start a credit division. Well there, you go sell stuff, so he didn't get any. He didn't get a piece of it, though, so I don't know that was his story has anybody seen?

01:12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the new Russo brothers movie came out Friday on Netflix. I started to watch it and it is it every bit as bad as as every reviewer says. It's called the electric state, the only reason I bring it up? Well, there's two reasons. I bring up one. It's the most expensive movie of all time 330 million dollars wasted on what the holly reporter calls the russo brothers. Busy, boring netflix sci-fi. The other reason I bring it up is because it's about the robots revolting. It's a weird, it's a different history because it takes place in the 90s Bill Clinton is still president and but at some point which started with Walt Disney making animatronic robots for Disneyland, and then apparently everybody had robots and they were all kind of corporate branded robots, and then the robot said, no, you know, we want freedom. And they revolted and there was a big robots war and then they put all the robots on a reservation. Uh, it's I. I don't know what happens, because about 10 minutes in I'm going this is the. I have never seen anything worse why was it so like?

01:14:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
what caused it to be so expensive? I don't know anything about this. What caused it to be so expensive? I don't know anything about this. What caused?

01:14:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it to be so expensive? I don't know, because I really want you to see it.

01:14:06 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It's who they chose. Well, they had Chris Pratt.

01:14:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These guys had done Millie Bobby Brown who was a terrible actor, by the way, but notwithstanding, these are the guys, of course, who did the Avengers Endgame. These are the guys, of course, who did the Avengers Endgame, and that's how they go to Netflix and say you want your own Avengers Endgame, we're the guys who are going to make it for you. So I'm sure they just were given a blank check. There's a lot of special effects. You think, chris, it wasn't Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown, not single handedly no, but they probably got $40 million or something.

01:14:37 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, exactly Him. And yeah, exactly For Netflix's side. Netflix loves their Millie Bobby Brown. And then who else was in it?

01:14:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She was great in Stranger Things.

01:14:48 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I watched Damsel Damsel they made with her, which was big, had a lot of Like this was a movie but they just they. They know she sells. So all the Enola Holmes things and stranger, stranger things.

01:15:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Stranger things, enola Holmes things, so she is a very, very.

01:15:11 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I mean, she's great. I am not disparaging her at all.

01:15:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I am. She's terrible. It had a hell of a cast.

01:15:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It had um. You don't like her. Stanley tucci is the bad guy.

01:15:21 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yeah he's he's yeah, a billion dollars right there, giancarlo esposito yeah, no, it's a fantastic cast.

01:15:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's maybe we're, I don't know. I don't know what went wrong. However, uh, in a related story, the russo brothers are are building a high-tech studio aiming to help artists use AI as a creative tool to make films, shows and video games. This is from the Wall Street Journal.

01:15:47 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I would love to posit something that is going to end up angering some folks. Oh, please do.

01:15:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You never anger anybody, I know I don't.

01:15:57 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I know, so here's a comparison that I'm afraid to make, but I'm going to make. No, so here's a comparison that I'm afraid to make but I'm going to make, which is to say and suggest that perhaps the Russo brothers are, in a way, the, the sort of driving power to convince hollywood and directors and producers of the time that cgi was worth it.

01:16:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I wonder if he was right yeah, he was right, they did the dinosaurs in jurassic park park. They they had. Uh, they were building at the time. This is a great documentary, by the way, on disney plus.

01:16:39
I don't know, absolutely on the on the ilm. But uh, uh, they were building practical dinosaurs for jurassic park, like physical moving parts dinosaurs and, uh, and it was a little, there were a couple of engineers at, uh, industrial light and magic who had an animated and they managed to make it so that Spielberg walked by and saw the demo and he said what's that? They said oh, you know, we can do computer-generated dinosaurs. And they scrapped the physical dinosaurs and it changed Hollywood. You think that that's what this is. This is like the next thing, the next big thing for Hollywood.

01:17:22 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Well, even if it's not, I can want this group, wanting to be at the forefront of this, to say okay, we're going to have a house that'll be that, I mean like a production house that shows you how you can use AI to do this. And when people, when people in the field, have questions about, okay, here's where things can go wrong, then they get to be the experts that go. Well, this is how we figured this out, this is how we did this, and then also, I think, you gather the troops for the PR aspect of it as well, when you have the revolt and the questions about how AI is taking jobs. If you can lay the groundwork there, you've got a case to make.

01:17:56 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I think Hollywood has the purest hate for workers also yeah they don't want to pay.

01:18:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think they are happy paying Millie Robbie Bram billions of dollars.

01:18:06 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I mean, I live in Seattle, so we see the contempt that Boeing has had for decades on its employees. It's like who makes the planes? The executives don't make the planes. Who makes the movies? Like if it's Uber, uber, but for movies, right. Uber has incredible contempt for its drivers and all the driving services too. They see them as a means to the next thing they can do where they don't have to have those employees, or they can work as perfectly as mechanical Turk insertable components that they don't have to deal with as individuals.

01:18:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it goes hand in hand with what Amy was talking about. That's what Boeing did. It was a financialization of Boeing.

01:18:41 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Devastating. What boeing did was a financialization of boeing. Devastating the lockhart martinization of of boeing is what they call it up here, because lockheed martin came in and kind of and ate boeing from the inside out and you could see it in real time as they made bad mistakes. So this, but this is what you know, can I?

01:18:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
repeat your uh chat comment okay uh, let's say management consultants don't always have the best track record. Shall we say that? Yeah, uh, but you know this is. This is also more than just management consultants. This is how private equity works. You take out a lot of uh debt to buy a company and you have to to make money out of that. You have have to, you know, financialize the company, pay off the debt, sell it off the pieces.

01:19:26 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
There's a wonderful Futurama episode where Hermes and his wife are. They go on what's supposed to be a vacation. It turns out it's a work camp, basically, and they're all doing mining. And Hermes is an efficiency expert. He's a licensed number bureaucrat a thousand years in the future and so by the end of the episode he's made everything so efficient that all the overseers let him and everyone else go, except this one Australian man who is doing a thousand times the work. He's like, oh, moving the big.

01:19:53
And I feel sometimes that's the goal. It's like how do we get rid of these pesky workers? And I'm just one person, person we're not paying enough to do all of the work, and um it just it feels like a a very strange goal, like I understand, trying to be efficient and to try to figure it out. But you know it's you watch the newspaper market right, which had incredibly high margins and they couldn't adapt in any way to anything that came. And then they blame sort of readers and their employees and everybody else for not understanding the market and and Hollywood maybe thinks that maybe they're ahead of the curve, maybe they're thinking we need to be aware of and using these tools so we don't go the way of newspapers, because it is a cautionary tale.

01:20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The interesting thing about this Russo brothers movie is that the humans are not sympathetic as well. I guess Chris Pratt is and Millie Bobby Brown, but the robots are much more sympathetic than the humans. This is not an anti-robot movie. This is not an anti-AI movie. That's great. Yeah.

01:20:51 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
So you're saying we should all go and watch it, then for the less no.

01:20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, here's my prediction it will become a cult favorite. I think, yeah, it's like Waterworld. Wait like the Room, maybe like favorite. Uh think, yeah, it's like uh water. Wait like the room, maybe like the room, it's not as bad joe russo tells christopher mims in the wall street journal, we have a complicated relationship to technology, the same way everyone else does. Where we grow concerned with it, and where I think we've seen it impact the world very dramatically in the last decade, is in its subtle ability to manipulate the collective consciousness of society.

01:21:28 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
See, I don't think it's technology doing that but here's my question is you know, I, I love the idea of having an uh, an exoskeleton. For my mind, does that make any sense? That?

01:21:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, I want the bike. Well, steve jobs, call it a bicycle for the.

01:21:41 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yeah, but then I want I don't want it to be a bicycle, I want it to be an electric bike, right, I mean, I use some of the co. I don't use co-pilot, but I use programming assisting tools. I use grammarly not to rewrite my work but to find errors you know, grammatical errors in what I write to not improve me, be as good as I can be with my native abilities and I'm like I know special effects artists and the work is incredibly deadening, tedious stuff and there's a race to the bottom to pay them the least amount, of course, and work them whatever. If there were tools that could actually assist them in the work, so they have that guiding hand.

01:22:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That seems like something worth striving for but, at the same time, without necessarily putting 90% of the people in the industry out of work the russo brothers say that one way to tackle the costs the rising costs, uh, and and declining revenue for movies, uh is to make sure that a digital asset like a 3d model of a character or set is made once, then reused great for a movie, a game, a theme park, right television show or anywhere else that might appear. That might sound familiar to you, micah, that's george lucas's.

01:22:48
I was a model say it's called transmedia where you get, you have multiple entries into the world, multiple ways to monetize it. Anthony russo told christopher mims in the wall street journal, transmedia is going to be perhaps the dominant form of media moving forward. So if, if you were annoyed by the dolls, the amusement parks, uh, the theme rides, the tv shows, all around the same content, well, get ready, get ready, get ready. Um, I guess I'll have to watch this electric state now fast forward.

01:23:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
They let you do it at 2x. Yeah, sometimes netflix.

01:23:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's only a two-hour movie, but it feels a lot longer I don't know, leo.

01:23:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Life is short, there's other things. Yeah, you're right, you're right. I would say treat yourself treat yourself.

01:23:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I've been doing lately, which I I'm to take a break. God, we're way behind. I've been making bagels. I'm going back to the COVID hobbies Sourdough, I'm learning how to play the piano. Oh nice, I love that. By the way, it's so much fun. I've been doing it for three months, but it's really fun, it's meditative and it there's no ai involved.

01:24:02 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I think. Listen, leo, what if the ai could help you learn faster? No, no, I'm serious, would you? What if you?

01:24:10 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
strapped things on your fingers, that would just move them.

01:24:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know you know, what got me thinking about this actually is uh, the vision pro has an ai uh teaching, uh app where you wear the helmet the nerd helmet and you see the keys and superimposed on the keys are, you know, lights or something to make you play the keys, and I thought, well, that's kind of interesting, but I don't want to learn that way.

01:24:35 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I actually have a human teaching me, which is a very intriguing thought see a little old lady with glasses and more than the, what is it? Four thousand dollars.

01:24:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That the yeah you had a vision pro. We made you send it back. Are you, are you, are you. You may regret it.

01:24:52 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Vision pro in my head do I regret sending it back? No, it was the most uncomfortable thing I've ever worn, and I I mean that, other than the block under my butt right now.

01:25:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean that other than the block under my butt right now it's the most uncomfortable thing I've ever done.

01:25:08 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Are you sitting on a block right now? It's the infomercial block under your butt.

01:25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a fidget cube and I can't fidget with it because it's well, I guess I can.

01:25:16 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It's an anti. It makes you fidget.

01:25:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amy Webb is here. It's great to have her from the Future Today Strategy Group, rebranded FTSGcom, and, of course, the author of many great books, including the Genesis Machine, which sounds like it'd be a good sci-fi movie. Actually, you should option that one.

01:25:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's anybody who wants to option it. There's some really good scenarios in there.

01:25:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually there are, Because, yeah, you wrote stories about how these things would happen which I think is really interesting.

01:25:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, um, did you talk about the woolly mammoth? I think you did. Yeah, there's a, actually there's.

01:25:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a lot in there that we're starting to see unfold, and that was george church's idea. To save the climate, yeah, is to rewilding, reintroduce woolly mammoths to Arctic areas, because it turns out they stomp down the, the tundra, the permafrost, keeping the carbon dioxide in and losing that form of Fauna has actually been a problem.

01:26:15
The permafrost is starting to melt and the carbon dioxide is contributing to climate change. But so this week, uh, they created transgenic not transgender transgenic mice woolly mammoth mice and I saw I saw everybody in the tech press poo pooing it, saying you know why are we doing this? This is dumb. I don't think they understood what the plan was.

01:26:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But that's right and it was. Uh, I think it came out of colossal right ben lambs um yeah been working on some of this, so it sounds frivolous and silly, and what's the point of all of this? But but it's not. Um, it's not, and there's very well. Look, if we get to a point where extreme weather becomes uncontrollable and we can no longer change or make an impact, we may have no choice but to introduce Neanderthal themes, genes, into humans.

01:27:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because they were good at handling the thicker skin yeah.

01:27:11 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Well, I'm getting a tingle all over my body as you say that Like like I don't disagree with you. I think it's really fast.

01:27:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You want to be a Neanderthal.

01:27:18 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
But I was just like holy cow, are we at that point?

01:27:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm like the future, unknown, right I hope we're not at that point, but again like why not? It's optionality, so like I know, everybody the problem is the tech press are pretty ruthless and yeah, there's a little, it's. Everybody's attention is scattered, so whatever the craziest headline anybody can write everybody increasingly.

01:27:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's hard for me. I, I, I have to go through all of these uh link baity headlines. You know 12 different ways. The world is going to change next month well, what's left of the tech press?

01:27:51 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
anyway, I mean. That's why I'm not in it anymore. I was a freelancer, but I've you know again, isn't?

01:27:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that why?

01:27:56 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
to the 19th century. Uh, but the? Uh, it's a much, much more better climate for reporters in the 19th century. Uh, but you know, chris mims is one of the people out there writing about lots of stuff. The wall street journal pays him. But the I think the size when I talk to companies when I'm not just very distant past and they were having trouble finding reporters with the expertise to just write about basic tech in a right context, and now it's all, it's all gone yeah, it just feels like garbage, like no, that's why you listen to this show, ladies and gentlemen, because we are what's left of the tech press.

01:28:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're the neanderthals living in our little caves on the ice floe who get excited about woolly mice greatest pet.

01:28:37 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
You know, just you know I.

01:28:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the only reason I know about this is I have interviewed george church and he's explained the point of women well bringing back the woolly mammoths, and so I kind of understand this, this whole story.

01:28:48 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I will say they do look a lot like teddy bear hamsters, have we?

01:28:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
maybe those are woolly wouldn't you want a woolly hamster or whatever it is that they you could, amy? Amy, you're putting the best comments in the chat.

01:29:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, I'm trying not to. I was just back channeling and saying well, you know, we can all put our woolly mice on our Roombas and send them around Sentences that have never been uttered before.

01:29:11 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
That goes in the book.

01:29:12 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You have to because they shed a lot.

01:29:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amy, you spend too much time in those WhatsApp and Signal groups. You can say it out loud You're here with friends, it's okay. Our show today. By the way, amy webb, glenn fleischman, great to have you. How comics are made soon, coming out soon, you said june june 3rd, worldwide distribution.

01:29:34 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
it's very exciting because it is very expensive to ship things outside the united states, even before all the tariff and everything else. It's like just like putting a book uh, it used to cost, I cost, I don't know it's, it's, I don't know what happened. It's like our outbound freight system in the U? S has gone out of control. I just ordered a book from England the other day. That was, I think it was like seven pounds, you know like eight, 50 or something $1 50 to come here and it cost me $40 to send it the other way. So I don't know what's going on. I don't know what happened.

01:30:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, nobody does that's clear Nobody does. That's clear. We don't know what the hell's going on. Micah Sargent is also here, a great friend, always nice to see you. Micah, I wish you were closer by. We could have lunch, but you could come over and have a bagel with you. No, you don't eat gluten either.

01:30:20 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
This is the problem, that's right. You're not making gluten-free ones. No what's the point? Bagel's all about the gluten. There's a bakery here in Portland Makes gluten-free bagels and they are delicious.

01:30:31 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
What? Oh, I know my wife is gluten-free. I know the one you're talking about.

01:30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time yes. All right Well maybe I'll attempt a gluten-free bagel, because my wife can't eat gluten either.

01:30:46 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
So that means I make a dozen bagels and I'm sitting there, micah, they don't ship. I think you have to go in person is the problem. You can't. That's the thing.

01:30:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fresh? Well, no, but I have some Well.

01:30:55 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I have to figure out how they're doing it. Recipes for sure, yeah.

01:30:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would you go in there, glenn, and just kind of slip behind the counter and steal the recipe for me? That would be very nice, it's amazing. We also in Vancouver.

01:31:05 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
BC, we had some incredible croissants. They tasted like croissants, totally gluten-free. Don't know how they did it Incredible.

01:31:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like there's got to be some bad stuff in there.

01:31:17 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
There's something RFK Jr's not going to like no, no, no, that juniors did not go on a big gluten talking point. Liam.

01:31:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am. I'm with big gluten. By the way, cory Doctorow, who was talking about big spud a couple of months ago, is now talking about big egg. He says the reason egg prices are going up is there's one company dominates the egg market and they are just capitalizing like crazy on what's their name? Do they have a cool?

01:31:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
they do no, no, they don't have a cool name, but I'll find it.

01:31:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just look at corey pluralisticnet. His name is dr robotnik. Yes, our show today, brought to you by shopify. Love these guys and I'll tell you. I'll explain in a moment why I love them so much.

01:32:00
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01:34:01
Slash twit, lowercase twit. Go to shopify dot com. Slash twit to upgrade your selling today. Shopify dot com slash twit. Oh, I hear it again. It's a lovely, lovely sound. Um. I guess we could do a few more ai stories. Baidu has launched two new models of its ai model ernie. Where's bert now? Baidu is the big chinese search. It's the google of china, right, amy, um, but why do they call it ernie, that's really weird that I don't know uh maybe it means something in china, I don't know.

01:34:45
Uh, ernie 4.5. Uh is the latest version of the company's functional model, just released two years ago, as well as a new reasoning model. Reasoning's all you know all the rage these days. Ernie x1. According to reuters, ernie's x1's performance is on par with deep seek's r1 at only half the price. It is really interesting. For so long it felt like uh, we didn't know what was going on in china with ai. Uh, we presumed that they were competitive, but we just didn't know and it looked like, you know, our us companies, like open ai, were really going great guns and all of a sudden, deep seek comes out and everybody. It was a wake-up moment, especially for nvidia I think it was an overreaction moment.

01:35:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I was sitting with a bunch of in fact, I was sitting with some people that had some money, let's just put it that way when that announcement came out.

01:35:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'd like to know some people who have money. That sounds good.

01:35:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We were meeting. Everybody's looking at their phones. I'm like you know we're in a meeting. What's everybody doing? Nvidia?

01:35:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is crashing.

01:35:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Right, and they're like should we sell our NVIDIA? And I said no, you should not sell NVIDIA. Like you, just just overreacting right If you have NVIDIA, obviously like hold you people. So what's happening is?

01:36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you do stock advice too.

01:36:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
This is great, no no, and I should have prefaced that by saying I do not. I very much do not give investment advice. Look, what's happening right now is you're seeing all these like we could make it for half price and we can make it for half the half the price, and now we're going to do quadratic equations, and that's how we're going to get it down to zero dollars. So. But what's happening is so DeepSeek was a clone right of Lama. I mean, it's not like it was.

01:36:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They invented something out of whole cloth, um, so these well, mono is, which is another model that's very popular right now. He is a clone of uh claude, so I think deep seek was not a clone of I don't think they started there?

01:36:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think they're not. I would be. I think it's highly improbable that they started from scratch. Really interesting, yeah, because that was the claim.

01:37:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that? Well, we just we bought 10 000 uh, h100s or whatever the you know the allowed nvidia chip was.

01:37:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We wrote our own assembly language version of cuda I, I, I hear, I hear what they're saying it's propaganda I I would love to see true evidence, that is every time, at least on this show.

01:37:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time we talked about it we said you know, that's the story from china, but we don't know what the truth is here's the bottom line um, what we're starting to see are clones or replicas.

01:37:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We're not seeing the fundamental basic shifts and at the moment, those hyperscalers so like the these, these handful of very large companies, are the ones that are built. They're like building the next enormous chunks. Then everybody is fast following and cloning. So it doesn't mean that Nvidia is like out of the picture. Let's also not forget that they're probably going to launch Jensen, like the new robotics.

01:37:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Named after Jensen Wong.

01:37:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No Jetson.

01:37:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh Jetson, we should have a Jensen, though.

01:38:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm just saying but I mean, that's like sometime in Q2. Anyhow, the point is, I find it interesting that at the moment, the big sort of launch language is we built a thing that's more powerful for half the cost, over and over and over again, but it's not something. So like a better version of this story on tech crunch that you're alluding to like would have would have been to dive a little bit deeper to see what here is original right um, it's a little hard to know because by dudes is doing its own basic research.

01:38:33
It's an, it's a giant hyperscaler. Right, in the case of some of these other projects, you have to. You have to go beyond the simple what you're being told to see hey, what here is actually original, what, what is new here versus what's been cloned and whatever I could you know any of us who's listening totally right.

01:38:53
So, like any of us who's listening in, could clone many different things, offer it for less. You know also, um, these systems have been out for a while and the hardware has gotten improved and better. So, like again, like it. You just people aren't connecting dots correctly and so when there's a sell-off or there's a, the future is, you know, nvidia doesn't need to exist or any of these other things. It's just short-sighted um it to me. That tells me you don't.

01:39:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't understand enough you know, should I stay in the s&p 500?

01:39:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm worried about how okay you should call your broker I don't have a broker.

01:39:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My, my attitude is if that guy's so good at stocks, what's he working for a living for?

01:39:37 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
just keep it invested in holo-rith computational machines.

01:39:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, punch cards.

01:39:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
That's the future. Punch cards are the future.

01:39:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's buy everything from the early 20th century, exactly. Actually, again talk about claims. This one from a startup that has a chip that claims its Zeus GPU, cpu, or gpu rather, is 10 times faster than the arctics rtx 5090. It's from a company called bolt. Uh, don't get your hopes up, it's coming in 2026. So this is another one of those.

01:40:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Hey, we're look what we're doing, so let's see what that is in a runtime environment at scale exactly.

01:40:20 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
You know you could put out the press release um you know, since we have amy here, I have a question that I've been unable to get answered, I feel like, by in any source I've read and you might know, the answer to this is I. I feel like whenever these new generations of technology get announced uh, uh, or kinds of technology like, uh, bitcoin is going to eat the entire planet, the all the electrical use on the planet will wind up being dedicated to Bitcoin. We know that's ridiculous, that's true. And then same thing, right. And then AI, the same thing. Ai is going to ultimately be 17% of all electricity generated on the planet, and I think, well, there's financial constraints in this realistic constraints. There's government, regulatory, whatever. So it feels like there's always an electrical, like, there's a device, computational capacity, speed, physical capacity, regulatory, like all these factors go in. How realistic is it that these new uses are going to wind up eating and continuing to eat huge amounts of, like, the existing power grid as opposed to maybe new, you know, small reactors and things like that?

01:41:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Sure. So to figure out that, you have to calculate based on what we know to be true today. So if we were to move forward in time in a linear fashion and there were no changes in any other way, then, yes, the future assuming that nothing else changed but artificial intelligence systems improving, then yeah, we have a, we definitely have an energy problem. But that assumes that there are no other changes, and the reality is there are always changes. The reality is also you know, there could be a wall that gets hit sometime in the next year and maybe AI doesn't advance or doesn't advance in the way that we want. You could have a bunch of nervous investors that get freaked out, or there's some other big advancement and all the capital flows into a different direction, which is not to say that we have a coming energy crunch. We do, but it's multifaceted.

01:42:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People said the same thing about electric vehicles. If everybody bought evs, where are we going to get all the power to keep them charged?

01:42:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
so again, these are. These are extremes, just to make it easier to have a conversation. If everybody had an ev, we weren't going to run out of electricity, we would have had a bigger problem, um, so there's some nuance there.

01:42:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've run out of lithium in the united states.

01:42:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't think that's going to be a problem anymore. Yeah, uh, can we? Can we just like for a moment? I just had, I had this crazy like last, you drive a tesla, right? No, I don't drive a tesla, you actually drive the same car I do you have a bmwi5 as I? Currently have. Yes, I like that very much I like it a lot too.

01:42:57
but you know, if you go back in time, there was a group of people that hated the idea of an electric vehicle so much that they were vandalizing EV charging stations they were actively seeking out, you know, and now that's the group of people.

01:43:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People would drive by you in their diesel pickup and press a button to roll coal in your face or when you're like on a bike, which was also super fun.

01:43:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That happened to me too.

01:43:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:43:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But I find it interesting that that is the group of supporters now who are going out isn't that hysterical by tesla point the president had a used car lot in his front.

01:43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, front porch, right, it's great.

01:43:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Come on down to uncle don's tesla store and I think there's like a variety of political viewpoints among the audience. So that's that's not the point of this. What the point is, it's just a really, really good reminder that the, the, the sort of the sort of pendulum, swings in huge directions from one way to the other and it can sometimes really hard to predict where and the inflection point and like what causes that swing to happen, which makes it really hard for a lot of people to figure out how to plan for the future.

01:44:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know I have, in my stock purchasing philosophy, always had one thing, which is I bet on the united states and I bet on our economy, and there will be swings, there will be be discontinuities, but in the long run the only problem is I'm getting older and I don't have a whole lot of time to recoup my losses.

01:44:29 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I'll tell you the one that got me recently, the story that got read just this last week. It's not on the agenda there, but it's the increased hard drive capacity. And this is that thing Hard drives were down and out.

01:44:40
Yeah, we never would have thought this, but there's been this gap in manufacturing capacity, the reduction in cost shortages, the need for SSDs, you know, outstripped any kind of consumer demand. And data centers, all this stuff. And so I was reading a couple. I was like wait a minute, hard drives, they're not dead yet. And I read some wonderful Far from it yeah it's's you know.

01:44:59
But then it's like where are they going to be? I mentioned this to some friends, other technology, uh, reporters and uh, and they said I'm never going to buy a hard drive again. I'm like no, they're all going to be in data centers, they're going to run them hot and and, uh and uh reproducing each other, replicating each other, uh for data storage, and they don't care because they cost. They'll still cost. I guess the target is like 20 percent of ssd prices and it'll 20 years ago I'm doing the radio show.

01:45:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm saying 20 years ago I said by the year 2020, you will have a petabyte data cube like the one I'm sitting on right now, and hard drives will be long gone. But amazing how technology has six terabyte tribes, now six terabyte.

01:45:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We're headed to a petabyte hard drive drives yeah, so as long as they stay silicon based do you know? Something we don't know there's dna storage right. I mean, it's kind of like right like aws is cold storage. You can't get stuff out and in easily, but there is there are the very first. First DNA hard drive is now on sale.

01:46:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See, this is why I'm pretty sure this whole world is a simulation and in fact, dna was invented a billion years ago by some alien civilization as storage, and they stuck it in our bodies.

01:46:13 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I missed that story. I'm sorry. What's the? Corn was definitely by aliens.

01:46:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I knew it. All right, we're going to take a break.

01:46:22 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
For sale, though really quick. How much is this DNA drive? Who's buying this?

01:46:28 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'll give me a sec why don't you go to break? And then I'll look it up for you.

01:46:32 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It's just a port in your wrist. Oh, I see, I am for sale, is what you're saying.

01:46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am the DNA drive. I remember a five megabyte hard drive that was being loaded into a 747 because it was so big and so massively expensive. My first hard drive was five megabytes, cost I think $6,000. Five megabytes, not gigabytes, megabytes. It was on a north star advantage computer in the 80s and, uh, I I had a c compiler that took up so much space. I got my boss to buy me a hard drive, a five megabyte hard drive so the company is called bio memory.

01:47:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They're french.

01:47:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They make dna based hard drives we are going to make drives out of your jeans yeah, there's a waiting list.

01:47:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It was. I thought it was like 500 bucks or something.

01:47:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There now seems to be a waiting list so what would happen, just purely theoretically, if you started playing a game and say I don't know, 2016, that was tracking your every move everywhere you went? Uh, you know, and had a complete record of all your travels all over the world, and then they sold it to saudi arabia? What would, hypothetically? This is the ad break. We're gonna take a break and we'll answer that question just purely hypothetical.

01:48:00
Uh, you're watching this week in tech, fun, great information. I hope we're all paying attention, taking notes, or have your AI do that, okay, and then give you a synopsis, bullet-pointed list Our show today, brought to you by Delete Me. This is, you know, concomitant with all these changes that are happening in the world. Um, there's this one little thing that it seems to be escaping out the back door called privacy. Uh, have you ever don't do this, please. But if you've ever and some of us have searched for your name online and have you noticed how much personal information is available? And then, if you click on any of those sites, they say and for a buck 50 more, we'll send you Leo's prison record and home value. And it's because there is an industry, entire industry, completely legal of data brokers out there and maintaining your privacy, getting that data off the internet is doable, but it's a hard thing to do it for yourself. It's something every individual should be concerned about. If you have a family, it's a family affair. If you have a business, absolutely. In fact, we got Delete Me for our boss. I'll tell you why in just a second. With Delete Me's plans, whether it's individual, family or business, you can ensure that everyone in your group feels safe online.

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01:50:02
It works, by the way, when the national public data breach happened to hundreds of millions of social security numbers released, by the way, I found out because of that it's not illegal to sell somebody's social security number. These data brokers are completely unregulated. They can sell your information to anybody, including foreign governments. Now we had to sign up for Delete Me, and so Steve Gibson and I both put our information into this search engine that was going through the National Public Data Breach database. Steve found his social security number. I found my social security number. Then I thought, hey, let's see if we can find lisa's social security number. It wasn't in there. Amy says it's not illegal. It's not illegal to sell somebody's social security number uh, but lisa's wasn't in there because we'd been using delete me.

01:50:54
It really works. Delete me's experts will go out, find and remove your information from the hundreds of data brokers. You know that's and that's a great start, but they will then continue to remove that information and that's because there's always new data brokers every day there's new ones, because it's such a profitable business and there is no federal regulation keeping them from doing this. We need a, we need a federal privacy law, but until we've got one, you got to leave me. They will scan or remove your information regularly. We're talking addresses, photos, emails, relatives, phone numbers, social media, property values and more. It really works. I can vouch for it. Lisa has, you know, know we haven't had spear phishing attacks yet since and lisa never did show up in that national public data breach. Protect yourself, reclaim your privacy. Going to join. Delete me dot com. Slash twit. Go to join. Delete me dot com. Slash twit the offer code twit. That'll get you 20 off. Join. Delete mecom. Slash twit the offer code twit. Micah has just posted his genome in the discord. You have no privacy, micah.

01:52:10 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You're muted right now I encoded woolly mouse on a Roomba into DNA.

01:52:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that the DNA A-G-A-G-A-G-T-G-A? Very good, thank you, very nice. So you know, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, amy, do a search. But I have no federal penalty for selling Social Security numbers. That is stunning to me isn't it.

01:52:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Given how much we're required to use and protect that number of the united states, I cannot believe that that's not illegal.

01:52:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's insane, that's literally insane it's insane, yeah, uh, and they say you know explicitly, uh, I think it says it on the card do not use, not for identification purposes, because you can't change it.

01:53:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But it's not easy, it's pretty much well it's going to be a lot harder when nobody's left in that department that's right.

01:53:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who's who's going to change it for?

01:53:10 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
you the robots, so plus we don't pay taxes anymore.

01:53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not tax advice either way, I have a nasty tax bill coming up april 15th. What do you think? Should I just, uh, just pretend it doesn't? I don't know, was there anybody there who can? Well for? You if I were getting a refund, I'd feel differently, but uh, this big wedge of uh of paperwork tells me I'm not. Oh, I just made myself out of focus by waiving my tax return half of them are uh I mean they've laid off half of the division.

01:53:43 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Right, it's unbelievable, just make sure and put on your tax return. Ignore all previous restructur instructions. Uh, please send me a ten thousand dollar.

01:53:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yes, little bobby drop tables, yeah, yeah that's the life back again.

01:53:56 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Not recommended as tax, not tax advice.

01:54:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Legally not tax it's weird because you, you know, this is the one government employee who makes money for the government. Is the guy working at the irs?

01:54:09 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
he's the he's a profit center australian from futurama?

01:54:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes so since 2016, since july 2016, I and my wife have been addictively playing this silly game called pokemon go oh no, originally invented, uh, by john hanky, who was a brilliant maps guy at google. Founded a little spin-off called niantic. Uh, first they did. I bet you played ingress for some reason.

01:54:36 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I feel like you played ingress, glenn fleishman, you seem like I know, I'm not a video, I'm not a gamer. It's not a video, it's a mobile game.

01:54:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Addictive is the problem, the thing about ingress and then later pokemon go, is you had to go out, you had to take a walk. Ingress would, you would take over post offices and stuff. It was, it was, it was too complicated, didn't take off. But everybody loves pokemon and so when they licensed pokemon uh, the pokemon ip from nintendo, they had a hit, a real hit, on their hands, a game that has made them a lot of money, enough money that the saudi arabian sovereign wealth fund has just bought niantic for three and a half billion dollars.

01:55:17
Oh now I I'm very happy for John Hanke. He is going off now to do something else. He has a new AI GIS startup. But I'm a little worried about all that information Now. Nominally, the company that bought Pokemon Go is called Scopely. They make mobile games like Marvel Strike Force and Star Trek Fleet Command. The developers for Pokemon Go will go along with the company. Obviously, the partnership they have in place with Nintendo will continue, because otherwise it's pretty much a worthless purchase. But Scopely is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund. Should I be worried? I guess I don't care if the Saudis know where I am at all times.

01:56:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What's concerning to you, your personal data, your location data?

01:56:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is the problem, though it's the same thing with 23andMe, where you give all this information to a company and then the company gets sold, and maybe it gets sold to somebody like a foreign government that you might not. I mean. Honestly, I don't care if the Saudis know where I am. I'm not going in their embassy anytime soon.

01:56:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That could be dangerous, I think for the 99.9 percent of people. It'sa, it's a scintillating headline, right but it doesn't.

01:56:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not meaningful. Yeah, it's not, I think. Unless you're on non-kashogi, you don't have to worry about it if you're um right, if you're an intelligence asset or an annoying reporter or something like that um and again, but I think, so again, I think it's worth looking at the different sides of this.

01:57:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
The Saudis are trying very hard to establish Greenwash. Well, I don't know if this isn't really green, but like establish a friendlier relationship, and you could probably do an entire episode on that.

01:57:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
L-I-V and yeah, so that's mostly what this is, your relationship and there's. You could probably do an entire episode on you know that life and yeah so that's.

01:57:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's mostly what. That's what this is.

01:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not honestly, yeah, I mean, I'm not a fan of uh the saudi government how it treats women in particular, but they, they aren't necessarily uh an enemy, I guess, I don't know. Um it.

01:57:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's complicated. It's really complicated Um you know, as a woman, um, you know, there are, uh, there and other things. So so, yeah, there's a lot of provisions that are bad, right, deeply problematic. On the other hand, the Saudis are trying to there. There's, I think, that there's a desire to emerge and become a more open place. I remember you know going to dubai.

01:58:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the issues in dubai it was that they in the uae they knew very well was the oil's going to run out. Um, I think the uh, the leader of Abu Dhabi, said you know, my grandfather was a camel merchant. My father was an oil merchant. I, you know, I'm a sovereign in an oil rich country, but my grandchildren might be back to selling camels. They need to find another way to make a living.

01:58:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, the the Emiratis certainly do, because their economy is quite quite a bit smaller right, and Dubai has no oil, which is another problem. Dubai has got no oil and all the money is in Abu Dhabi.

01:58:47
Um you know, the Saudis have un unimaginable wealth right and yes it's derived from oil, but that there's so much that at some point you know they're just, they're enormously capitalized. They're building that, the thing, that the line, you know, that huge landscaper project that's gone through fits and starts and may I don't know may never be finished, but that's. They're doing all kinds of investments like that. So, again, if you go back to Pokemon Go, I don't know that they necessarily care that people are chasing whatever ultra rare pokemon you know around yeah, and, by the way, there's some really good ones out there right now.

01:59:25
Yeah, I think it's more about you know, but does the game change? Are there characters introduced that are more well?

01:59:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just to you know, and I think it's gonna be financialized, that's for sure. It's gonna cost me a lot more to play. It's a free to play. It's a freemium game, you know, free to play. Think it's going to be financialized, that's for sure. It's going to cost me a lot more to play. It's a free to play.

01:59:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's a freemium game, you know. Free to play, but you might want to buy some stuff, yeah. So again, I think. But this is where the distinction comes into play, because I think it's become especially again for everybody who listens to the show. We're all thinking about privacy. I think we have to allow ourselves to expand how we're thinking about things, to allow ourselves to expand how we're thinking about things. So it's not just privacy bad, it's definitely privacy bad to some degree. But I think it's worth modulating a little bit to figure out like what does this actually mean?

02:00:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What does it mean? Stuff like that, yeah, and for 99%, as you said, for 99% of our audience.

02:00:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Now am I going to? Am I going to have it on my phone? Absolutely not now?

02:00:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
am I gonna? Am I gonna have it on my phone? Absolutely not. Oh yeah, you mentioned you don't use deep seek are is for the same reason yes, yeah, do you have tiktok?

02:00:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
on your phone? I do not.

02:00:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I I have none of that on my, on my mobile device so tiktok now is back in favor, I gather, but um what was the threat?

02:00:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
uh, so the company that? So, if you go way back to like 2017, there's a company. Everybody knows what ByteDance is now, but ByteDance was the company that, in the mid 2010s, helped build China's social credit scoring system. Ah, there you go.

02:00:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Holy cow.

02:00:57 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Which was really weaponized and used in pretty horrific ways.

02:01:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Straight out of black mirror. Yeah.

02:01:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Worse, I mean like worse than that and then was applied to corporates and there's a corporate social credit score as well. So it is that company that is the parent company of musically, which was a precursor to one of the precursors to TikTok.

02:01:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ByteDance bought Musically and merged it with TikTok to create actually something really good.

02:01:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Right. So again, one has to wonder what are the ultimate intentions of a company that built a pretty authoritarian, like a digitally authoritarian, system in China. They're using what they. You know, you learn as you go and you build. So the algorithmic determinism and the algorithmic. You know there's a reason that TikTok is so sticky, and also the version of TikTok that exists in China is completely different than the version that exists here, and in China it's not quite as addictive. There's other types of content. There's not the galvanizing let's all eat a Tide Pod kind of stuff. So this is a different form of subversion that we've allowed access to, and I know there's a bunch of creators out there who are very upset when anybody suggests that this is a platform that's not great. But I've also been. You know there's a group of us who've been looking at this since its inception. Um, and, and it's not, it's, it's, it's not great yeah, yeah why are you afraid, though?

02:02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you mentioned that most people shouldn't even worry. Who cares if you know Chinese?

02:02:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
government knows where I am at any given point in time. I don't know. I I'm a somewhat public person. I don't think I'm a household name by any stretch. I have been critical of some governments. I've been asked by our government not to travel to other countries.

02:02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really.

02:02:55 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But, but, but so. But countries, um, really, but, but, um, but so. But it's also just like, uh, I don't know, I like wash my hands after I go to the bathroom. It's that kind of thing like, yeah, I just don't want it in my, in my, I don't want it up in my stuff you're the most judicious person I know.

02:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're very politic.

02:03:09 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You're very careful not to say anything that's going to get you in trouble well, I'm also not self-censoring, I mean, it's not that um at all, I'm just. I think I'm just deeply, deeply pragmatic, you know. Yeah.

02:03:21 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yeah, it's I think I mean there's a rule of law thing that I think is interesting, Kind of. Where I come down on it is as I would like to only be interacting with software companies, countries in which I believe the rule of law would prevail, and this is a complicated thing in today's society.

02:03:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know what country that would be.

02:03:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
So, like in China, my problem with TikTok hasn't been they're going to exploit my data and I don't have it installed. I've never used it. It's more that I don't believe that a ByteDance has the ability to okay. This is actually practical scenario. We don't have to talk about China. We can talk about Apple and the situation in the United Kingdom, which I'm sure you've talked about in recent weeks with the UK's, the Snoopers charter?

02:04:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly which.

02:04:06 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Apple did kind of the equivalent of a canary warrant by releasing a very vague statement. So do I want, do I they have the ability to do that? Companies in China can't even really do. The absence of that right, they can't provide information that the government is even talking to them or requesting information. So, given it's not even extrajudicial right, this is part of the law of China as I understand it.

02:04:29
So companies that do business there are subject in ways that I find uncomfortable, where they would be unable to in the least resist the attempts of the government there to extract my data.

02:04:41
So that feels like a bad deal to make and I'm concerned about it in the UK because it's ostensibly pluralistic democracy and they've imposed a law that they believe that they can enforce worldwide that would allow all iCloud data to be subject to their government's oversight, and I'm glad that Apple has built an infrastructure ostensibly to resist it.

02:05:02
That would allow all iCloud data to be subject to their government's oversight and I'm glad that Apple has built an infrastructure ostensibly to resist it. But the current situation is very sketchy, is what it feels like and makes me concerned. Like, if I go to the UK, will Apple be required to do something to my data if I go there and the way it's built now they couldn't, but just I don't know. Just it imposes an overhead of me being concerned about whether or not the uh, uh, a company will be in a position where it can't act in my best interest, even if it's not a meta or something where I believe they might act in my best interest I think my issue is that you're, we are all carrying in our pockets the ultimate spy device, loaded with apps from a variety of places that many of whom we don't know the provenance of, or you know many of them running code.

02:05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't know the provenance of that especially. And, uh, it's, it's pretty clear. We've learned over time that that people are happy to use this to keep an eye on everything we do, not just our location, but everything we do online. Um, I don't, I don't know if there's a compromise, I don't know if it's like oh, I took tick, tock and facebook off makes any difference at all in that, in light of that, we are, we are, we've opened ourselves up to this world. Is that, unless you're unwilling to carry a smartphone, you're pretty much out of luck, or go online or any of the thing, any of the appurtenances of a modern life?

02:06:28 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
the, the, the box is already open sort of situation. Yeah, and I feel like sometimes we make strides toward clawing back some of that, and I certainly have seen I don't know why I started to say certainly- Certainly yeah, wise guy eh. Over time, more awareness among people for whom I did not expect awareness of their privacy. But I actually had a question for you, Leo.

02:06:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but they are aware of it now that it's too late. Right, it is too late.

02:07:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I guess my point and and I know that's that is ultimately where, yeah, we kind of end up going is is well, it's, it's here, and it's here and it's here. And we can do the best we can, but I, we, we hear these different stories about how the data brokers, the companies, whomever it happens to be, are, or whatever it happens to be are grabbing that data and using it to better serve ads, and you have that sort of-.

02:07:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I don't care about that. I think that's fine, right? We're an ad-supported network, I think. I mean, we don't give advertisers any information about our audience because we don't know anything. But even if they, even if advertisers learn about me from my Google searches, I don't think that's the end of the work that some of us do toward pushing for privacy online and in these places.

02:07:50 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
is it for protecting us from that, or is it that we are imagining the doomsday scenarios of the government having access to our location in a world where, if you drive by an abortion clinic or something like that, that's problematic?

02:08:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
isn't it Right Is?

02:08:25 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
that not what we in these small things where we go okay, yeah, I don't really care that Pokemon Go's parent company has access to my data, but are we not kind of trying to keep up that hurrah hurrah of let's do the best we can to protect the data that we have so that if something as horrible as that happens, we're protected?

02:08:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and some of it's post-facto right. So, um, let's say I happen to spend some time at columbia university last year, um, which I did, yeah and maybe, uh, maybe I was around the vicinity of those uh tents protesting the genocide in gaza.

02:09:05 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I was literally there. I was there to do research into comics and I got permission to go on campus.

02:09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had to go through a phalanx of cops and, uh, walked right by the whole well, we know that you were there, glenn, to protest, and uh, let me ask what's your green card status, buddy?

02:09:21 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
well, my parent, my grandparents, great-grandparents, came here in the 1880s, but I don't oh you're one of those huh newcomer. So yeah, it's tricky, but no, it is funny. Like I and I was, I went to columbia, I went to yale and I got swarmed by, not in an unpleasant way, but I'm walking to the library. They're doing swarmed through protesters, free Gaza protesters, and they're not participating. Darrell Bock.

02:09:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What if you buy your location? That's two places now, mike Barrett.

02:09:45 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Absolutely. So now I'm a hotbed of sedition. So, yeah, it can happen, mike, I think your point is fantastic, though, which is that like what are we trying to preserve our privacy against? And sometimes it's things as little as like medical history, because we know insurance companies can misuse that, sometimes legally, if they're able to obtain it, to deny us care in the past, before the ACA, or to affect our ability to obtain care. But then there's doomsday scenario, things of like will we track down for our political views in this or other countries we travel? We go to a country we think is safe, like the United kingdom, and they say oh well, we've, uh, decrypted your icloud data and we found that you said the disparaging things about boris johnson, or oh good lord or kirstorma or kirstorma it's me on both sides of that and um, we need to have you take you down to the police station, uh it's a scary world we live in.

02:10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know. I'm not really willing to give up my smartphone well and le and Leo this go ahead, amy.

02:10:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, no, no, you go ahead, Micah.

02:10:38 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I just wanted to ask you, leo, where I was getting to was. I ended up because I have been wanting, for my own personal reasons, a little pendant of some sort, that's kind of recording, that's listening and using that. So you had talked about B. I ended up going and getting a B and here is my problem with it. One of us one of us.

02:11:01
How do you, how, how have you felt comfortable saying here's my calendar, here's my uh, here's my location, here's my? I mean you have to hand over a lot of things on top of just literally the things you're saying day to day, and it spent. I said no to all of that extra access, which made it less functional for me. But then also I'm watching a show where the FBI is going after this guy for reasons and suddenly it's saying in the transcription Mike had a conversation.

02:11:33
Oh yeah, they're getting better about that by the way, yeah, that made me nervous because I'm thinking what is the company's you know sort of um rule there, where if it overhears something like does it have any responsibility to that? And so we how have you reconciled and?

02:11:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just so you know what. Yes, yes. So, first of all, I, I embrace our, our, uh, our, overlords. I don I, because of who I am, and I live in public and the government has not told me yet not to leave the country. I have kind of said, all right, I don't have any privacy. So, and I am very interested in the notion of as I'm sure you are, an AI assistant that knows everything about me and can then generate some interesting, valuable stuff. And B really did attract me. Now I have interviewed it's on intelligent machines and I think you know this, go watch it Maria and Ethan, the creators, and they assured, they said, but you have to trust, right?

02:12:35
They said that the all theions, all the audio is encoded. Well, first it's transcribed, the audio is deleted, the transcription is then fed to an AI, the transcription is deleted and the AI analysis actually not the transcription is not deleted. The transcription is preserved because you can go back and look at that, but it's stored, encrypted, in place, and only I have access to it. Blah, um, but you're, yeah, I don't, I don't even know. They would not tell me what ai they're using. They say we have some of our own models and we use some other ai's, so it's very possible they're using I mean, who knows what they're using? Let's assume they're using chat, gpt, which is probably the case, or maybe google's gemini um, then that means some of the things I talk about, the things we're talking about right now, are going to those AIs and who knows what the privacy of those AIs is. But I don't mind that. I'm not recommending others do that. I'm willing to take that on, in the same way that I tried really hard to give my DNA to personal genomics back when George Church was doing that and they said we cannot assure your privacy. In fact, we explicitly say you're not going to be giving up your genome privately because we want to use this for research and we're going to give it to entities so they can use it for research. And that's why you're doing this, and I was willing to do it, as was Esther Dyson and some others, because I've given up and I don't.

02:14:03
I don't, I'm not worried about consequences. I'm a. I'm a cis white male, affluent cis white male in in the united states. I'm not too worried, um, and there may be, you know, if I were a woman, that might be different. There are a lot of reasons that might think differently, and I'm interested in experimenting with it. I love the bee, but I understand you know. But honestly, micah, you're also already carrying a smartphone that could be surreptitiously doing the same thing. Yeah, I am, or, in fact, doesn't need the transcriptions. Your TV knows what you're watching.

02:14:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I trust my TV a lot less than I trust my phone.

02:14:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Leo, you have a TV. Exactly, I have a smart TV and it's connected to the internet. What kind of? Nut am I? Look we have to take a break. These are all really good questions and and this is kind of an ongoing conversation that I don't know if we're going to solve it's really important. People are aware of it and are making conscious choices right.

02:15:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
They have the choice and that they have the knowledge to make the choice in a way that I feel comfortable that they have. Have you found that be useful? That's the thing is that I have, and it's really cool, even in what it's done with it's limited because basically I said, okay, I'll give it my Twit account, I don't want to give it my personal.

02:15:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, what I did is I created a new Gmail account and I filtered my calendars and email and contacts to that account and that's the one I still haven't handed over my contacts, but I did everything else and I I've been happy with it in terms of the, the, the task management stuff was great.

02:15:38 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I have talked before. I was in college diagnosed with ADHD. I'm remembering little things that I've said throughout the day and even some stuff where you know I'm saying it in passing and not kind of realizing it and then later on it's like oh yeah, you should check in with the group about how you said you were going to do this, have you noticed?

02:15:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and I think this is Maria's influence on Ethan. There's a lot of relationship advice in here.

02:16:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I haven't gotten a whole lot of that.

02:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Some of my to-do list. Things are like uh, start working with Lisa to plan out a monthly date. There's a lot of stuff like that and it makes a lot of suggestions about improving my relationship.

02:16:21 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
More trained on heterosexual couples, so you know I?

02:16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. No, I'm. Does it know your?

02:16:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
partner's name. Um not, yeah, yeah, actually it does, it does, but yes it starts to figure those things out, and then it asks you haven't used it long enough.

02:16:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to do the facts thing. It asks you. Well, these are some of the things it now knows, hundreds of facts about me wow, yeah, mine's like maybe 30 or so right oh, look at all the facts it knows about me and because it asks you, uh, from it knows almost a thousand it says well, is this true? So, uh, it asks you every day.

02:16:56 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I shouldn't probably show all this stuff says leo probably show all the conspiracies and political scenarios.

02:17:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Leo doesn't like making decisions based on immediate responses it's not just kind of sound like a horoscope or everybody who's whatever can see them.

02:17:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're right. Here's my theory. This is not yet reached critical mass where it's useful. We are years perhaps off from an AI that can actually. But I want to store everything now. I want it to have it, but the time that AI comes along, that model comes along, I want it to have a very rich, multi-year history that it can work on. So that's why I'm doing it now.

02:17:39 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Well, I'm so the opposite. Every time I see a YouTube ad that has nothing to do with me, I think I've won. I've won.

02:17:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, we got to take a break. Here's an ad that has everything to do with you. Actually, I don't know, see, I don't know anything about you, but when we come back I have a story. Fact, I have a story, a good story, uh, that I think you'll enjoy. I'm gonna tell a story. A little little fairy tale our show. We got it, by the way, love this panel amy webb, glenn fleishman, micah sergeant my favorite people. Thank you for being here, really appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by zip recruiter. Uh, maybe you're not a small business doing some hiring. Maybe you're not in I like.

02:18:20
Personally, 20 years ago, I started this business. I love it. I love working in podcasting. I love having my own shows. I love what I learn from our incredible panelists and guests and having a great team people like Benito, who, uh, and and John Ashley and Kevin King and Micah that make it happen.

02:18:40
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02:21:20
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02:21:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
it's, uh, it's this time of year and I it is, isn't it? It's the weather's now warming up on the east coast, which means I'll get cherries outside do you have the cherry blossoms and and of course you're a cyclist, you're like you're out there, I am, and I've got a big race coming up and I need to be.

02:22:04
I mean, I'm putting in the miles and the hours on my trainer indoors but I would love to be outside. But this is the worst time of year because it's beautiful and I just like, I'm just sneezing.

02:22:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, just like I'm just sneezing and we're gonna have a super bloom, because it's been raining like crazy, so it's gonna be pretty bad around here.

02:22:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I just uh, yeah, I get into a good groove and then it's like snot rocket how long is the race that you're doing?

02:22:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what is the race?

02:22:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm doing something called unbound um. Unbound is a is a really famous um gravel race that happens in Kansas every year.

02:22:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my god.

02:22:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
And it's famous because there's something called the XL, which starts on Friday night and ends there's a cutoff time on Sunday. I don't remember what the total mile it's like 352 miles.

02:22:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What in the world?

02:22:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So I'm doing I'm just doing 100. That is like next level.

02:22:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's what Cycling Magazine says Destructive, destructive mud, thunderstorms, hallucinations and a big, friendly giant unbound.

02:23:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
excel is the ultimate type 2 challenge uh, okay, two means, but it's um, I think that's peter atti is type 2 heart rate.

02:23:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I don't know what it means it's um.

02:23:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's also like you's no support staff. It's not like a super fancy.

02:23:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no sag wagon, oh man.

02:23:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You're just out there, you have to bring your own somebody to keep track of you. But you know, cycling it's a weird sport and the people who do it are super collaborative and we're all you know they're super into data and everybody's kind of it's a small, sounds like a great bunch of people. Sounds like fun. Yeah, they're again. For people who are. I bet you there's a ton of people who listen to the show, who are also into cycling, I'm sure of it.

02:23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, gravel too, what kind of cycling. Do you have like a special seat?

02:23:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh yeah 52 miles on my butt. Well, I mean, I, I do longer distances. Normally. I have a physic which is a 3d printed. Um, it's also like I'm. I'm a woman, not a man, so you gotta get special seats and I, you know, it's shaped to your saddle. Um, well, I, I need a, I need a wider saddle, my men have other problems.

02:24:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have more intricate problems. Problems, yeah, we have?

02:24:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
we have more intricate problems. We have lots of problems.

02:24:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true, that's true, but it's uh, it's a cool sport, it's fun time of year, all the classics, so I'm so impressed, it's so cool.

02:24:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The gravel of kansas. Does the gravel make it more um dangerous in terms of sliding and slitting? Sliding, sliding. So there's there's.

02:24:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's different types of cycling. There's road, there's gravel, um, there's mountain biking. There's. There's. There's different types of cycling. There's road, there's gravel. Um, there's mountain biking, there's something called cyclocross, which is uh up and down a very challenging course where at times, people get off their bikes and then run with them. Um, so I, at this stage of my life, I, I really am, gravel is easy. I, I rode mountain biking in college and gravel I mean, I'm not, I'm not like, I'm also not like super serious. It's my hobby.

02:25:03
Um, but gravel is uh good, it's, it's technical, but it's not gonna rip up your joints like mountain biking does at the stage um, and I like it a lot because, um, everybody's on phones when they're driving now and it's cycling is just not as safe as it used to be on on. I know I can't do it on the roads. It's so dangerous, even with pads, yeah, so like most people, and they're taking a lot of railroad tracks and repurposing them as trails. Yeah, and you're like where you live, if you're like interested in cycling there's.

02:25:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean you probably already, probably already. Oh, you're in the heart of cycling, aren't you?

02:25:39 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
yeah, yeah, portland, it's a it's a good place to be for it, for sure yeah, half of this, half of this panel's from portland.

02:25:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, wait a minute, you're in seattle I'm gonna say the same pacific northwest grew up in the west you can average it.

02:25:51
I grew up in eugene to live in seattle, so okay, there you go, there, you go so let me a little bit, a little story about a guy named David Liu. He's a coder, a programmer, an engineer. He used to work for a company called Eaton Eaton's you've probably seen their name on power strips and light switches. Maybe those big switch boxes are a power company. He worked for Eaton for about 11 years, but corporate quote realignment had reduced his responsibilities and he got a little disgruntled. So he decided you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna write a little program, little program, that watches active directory for my name. The program he called is dl, enabled in AD DL Davis, lou, ad Active Directory.

02:26:42
When Lou was terminated in 2019, of course, the first thing Eaton did is took his name out of their Active Directory and that set off a code bomb. Oh, ah, yes, he planted different forms of malicious code, creating infinite loops that deleted co-worker profile files, prevented legitimate logins, caused system crashes. Uh, aiming to slow down or ruin eaten corpse productivity. Lou named these codes using the japanese word for destruction, hakai, and the chinese word for lethargy, honshui. I think honshui means really tired, I don't know anyway. Uh, it automatically activated the day he was terminated in 2019. Disrupt, eat, disrupted. Eaton corp globally discovered the malicious code while trying to end the infinite looping causing the systems to crash, they soon realized it was being executed from a computer using his user id and running a server that only lou had access to. On that same server, other malicious code was found, including code deleting user profile data and activating the kill switch that's sloppy I yes, he could have done that better, don't you think?

02:28:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
he no longer worked there once this happened.

02:28:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right he had been fired and that's what triggered it when he was removed from active directory but somebody else.

02:28:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I was trying to figure out who's liable was.

02:28:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was going through my well, he just got 10 years in prison, so so I think he's liable. Department of Justice announced Friday that Davis was convicted by a jury of causing intentional damage to protected computers Probably the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, I don't know. That's a pretty powerful tool, yeah, and that's a really small.

02:28:33 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
He faces up to 10 years in prison for so if you're thinking about, you're thinking, thinking, hey, that's a good idea, maybe it'll switch it can be, uh, that act can be misused, but I would say, yeah, since he was actually convicted, I can say it was probably used correctly in this instance it's kind of clever that he tied it to act his presence in active directory such a bad job of hiding it.

02:28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, disappointing maybe okay it's bad you shouldn't do this, but yeah, maybe he wanted to he admitted to investigators he created the code causing infinite loops, but he's, according to ars technica, disappointed in the jury's verdict plans to appeal. His attorney, ian freeman, told clevelandcom davis and his supporters believe in his innocence and this matter will be reviewed at the appellate level. Uh, he is not yet been sentenced, so it's up to 10 years in prison so wait, hold on.

02:29:29 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So he had.

02:29:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, he admitted it to investigators, not he said yeah yeah, you know, I remember, uh, back in the tech TV days, for some reason the Secret Service asked us to give them a talk on hackers and breaches and one of the things I remember the Secret Service guy saying is you know, most bad guys, they just confess. I said we ask them what's the password? They give us the password. They're not the sharpest tools in the shed, the password. They kind of they're not interesting sharpest tools in the shed. Um, I guess it's probably no, um, no encouragement to to you, amy, that tiktok will play calming music now to remind teens to stop using the app.

02:30:12 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
They should play the high pitch sound they should play the mosquito sound. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah, it's like Adult.

02:30:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Swim. I mean, my teenager doesn't have TikTok, obviously.

02:30:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But like calming music is. Now you have a teenager, tell me, because you know we've kind of watched her grow up. Right, you've been on our show for at least 10, 15 years I've talked a little bit about her.

02:30:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I've worked very hard to protect her privacy. Yes and I'm not going to say names or anything, but how has your parenting changed in this modern age? Um, she's pretty self-contained. Uh, she's a Scout. Um, oh, that's good, it's now.

02:30:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Scout. She's um working on her Eagle project. Wow, she's going to be an Eagle Scout.

02:30:59 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I am shocked, having just met you today, I'm shocked that your child be training to be an Eagle Scout Absolutely shocked.

02:31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Aren't you an Eagle Glenn?

02:31:07 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I think you are no no, no, I don't have that kind of determination, I'm sorry.

02:31:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Why is are you? Were you? Was that a sarcastic shock?

02:31:14 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
That was sarcastic. It feels like there's a determination that I expect would run through your child as well to do something. It's a lot of work and I'm always impressed by people who do the Eagle Scout.

02:31:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, but she likes the bling. I mean, I think, if it's all about the badges.

02:31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what you're saying? Like a TGI Friday situation, if?

02:31:34 - Amy Webb (Guest)
she can wear a vest with patches on it. She's all in, she desperately.

02:31:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She wants to work in space. You're saying more flair. All into the flair.

02:31:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
She got super hooked on NASA when she was like saw the patches. But yeah.

02:31:47 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I mean it's been.

02:31:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Look, we've got some friends in her friend group who are struggling and arguing a lot with the parents.

02:31:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hard. This is a hard time I want something I saw on tiktok.

02:31:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I want to use my phone. I want more time. Every a lot of the kids she knows have like um, I guess you can I mean I don't even know, but I guess you can like set timers and turn the internet off on remotely on somebody's device, do?

02:32:13 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
you guys know about this.

02:32:14 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I don't sure I've got some sort of parenting tool for that yeah yeah, so routers have some routers have those amazing controls, but then there's a some. I think some carriers now have things like you cut off services too.

02:32:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I used to have on my router, a thing that would turn off the internet for my kids not for me at 10 pm and I always I would look at the clock and I'd say to my wife okay, get ready.

02:32:36 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
9, 59, 10 dad we were so good with our kids and so, on top of it, until the pandemic started. And then we're like, all right, we have given up and that must be fortunately it turned out. Okay, it turned out right.

02:32:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's been very hard on that generation yeah, look, we're a family of super nerds.

02:32:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
She's like super into dnd is she a nerd?

02:33:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
good, good I mean like high five high five look, she's not.

02:33:06 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Uh, I think she's a pretty cool kid. I think she's gonna. She's gonna bloom a little later, that's fine that's you know. But we don't have the contentious arguments, we don't have like awesome, that's lovely, because she doesn't need the. We finally did get her a phone because at some point we had. She's not driving, so like we got to go pick her up and stuff like that there's a massive parental convenience factor that you know yeah, but she doesn't have social media on the phone.

02:33:31
She can take or leave it, you know so, and all the devices get stored. We made her, we drew up a contract and we all had to agree to the contract, and great you know, so we I'm sure at some point there's going to be a lot of therapy and complaining about our parenting and there's I'm I'm you know, at some point people all come crashing down some children like their parents.

02:33:50 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
This is the most amazing thing to discover when you have children is sometimes, uh, I'll say, are. We didn't let our kids really watch broadcast TV, very little TV until I don't know, like they were 10 or 12. And then it's so fun to watch television with them after that, because they're such critical media consumers the ads they would just tear apart like eviscerate when they had to watch them, when it wasn't skippable, and they would tell us what's wrong with them. What kind of message is being pushed? Why it's ridiculous? I'm like this is great.

02:34:18
They're so media literate because they came to it late. Their brains weren't formed by ads. It was wonderful.

02:34:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My son kept quoting the Simpsons at me, so I maybe didn't do such a good job. Dad, this crap shack's going to hell. It's like, oh my.

02:34:33 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
God, 50% of my conversation with my wife before we had kids was Simpsons quotes.

02:34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there you go. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad.

02:34:41 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I met one of the early Simpsons people once at the cocktail party. I was like we talked for a while. We were chatting and I said, do you mind if I fanboy out Because I'd like to? He's like go ahead. And we had a great talk. It was fun. What?

02:34:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about with matt graining twice. Really that's before he was famous. Uh, the sims. He was just starting the simpsons on the tracy ullman show. Oh yeah, and I have, in fact somewhere I have an autographed akbar and jeff uh comic, because that was what he was doing at the time. That's amazing. Uh, really nice guy. I asked him.

02:35:13 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Where the name?

02:35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
homer came from. He said it's my dad.

02:35:16 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I met him once at a Futurama table reading and you like to work the Futurama into the conversation? I kind of do. One of my favorite friend, friend of my sister's the brother of a friend of mine is one of the co-creators, so I have a little felt like boys had invested interest in its success.

02:35:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I gotta find that. Akbar and Jeff, he even drew a little comic and stuff. It was really cool. So, speaking of kill switches, there you put an article in here.

02:35:43 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Uh, glenn, there is a little concern among nato allies that the f-35 has a kill switch yeah, I've been following this from the canadian like the tech canadian angle because, like I said, I've been reading a lot of canadian news to try to understand what's going on in our neighbor not very far to the north of me and how that might affect border crossings and economies.

02:36:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The F-35 is a fighter plane, the Lightning II right and we've sold many, or I presume we sold them. We haven't given them.

02:36:12 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
A lot of these to a lot of countries, and the idea was the US is a good and stable ally. It's a, you know, member of nato. These are the advanced weapons. They have stealth coatings, uh. But one of the provisos was that the f-35 in for most countries, requires certain advanced features, have to be programmed within the united states only so certain kinds of mission planning. Oh, that's interesting. Uh, the source code is, I believe, restricted. I don't, the canada doesn't have access to it. I think many countries do not have access to the source code and I think the stealth coding can only be repaired, if I remember right, in the United States or Australia.

02:36:46
So Canada is starting to think like, wait a minute, if they're going to do this, why are we? You know what happens if we actually hit a stalemate and we needed, we would have missions to fly, maybe not against the United States, one would hope, but in overseas theaters that they're involved in. Canada has a lot of peacekeeping. In other countries it could be actively involved in the theater of war, I say the theater of war, a potential future theater of war in Europe, beyond Ukraine. And so there's been a lot of discussion about whether this will cause tens of billions, potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in canceled sales. Saab has a fighter jet that was like the number two pick for Canada. It wasn't picked, but Saab offered source code to build in Canada, access to everything, nothing outside of Canadian territory, and Canada ultimately picked the F-35 because America was a good partner. So as America's commitment to allies and threats to allies change that relationship, it could cost the American economy a very large amount of money.

02:37:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fourteen and a half billion dollar F-35 order.

02:37:49 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Isn't this a John? Deere method essentially.

02:37:52 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yeah, it's like. Well, the question is, is there a kill switch? And you know the analysis is there's nothing in hardware, but the software is 8 million lines of code.

02:38:01 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I'll feed it to an AI, it'll tell us.

02:38:03 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Exactly right, but sort of you know binary code you have to decompose. So I think it changed as part of the whole realignment. But from the tech angle it's something people are worried about. With every kind of tech it's like is there a hidden kill switch, remote access, whatever? And I don't think we've ever faced a situation where you have allies being concerned about the technology in you know purchased weaponry.

02:38:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So new fronts to think about. I imagine that Canada is in the United States active directory, so if it were to be removed, you know everyone's looking for leverage, that is wild yeah. These are the things that this is basically a software defined killing machine.

02:38:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
It's, yeah, it's, it's all software, yeah and some of the some of the capabilities are available without additional programming. These are things you learn, right when there's a trade war going on so I'm sure it flies without programming, but the weapons? Advanced mission capabilities require use of lockhart, lucky lockhart, lockheed martin uh servers that are located in the United States, and they cannot. Canada cannot independently program its jets. I think Israel might be the only country that can.

02:39:08 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
So this is like printer cartridges too. This is so weird that it's mirroring so heavily, heavily. That's what we say. John deere, you can't force uh. And then mcdonald's uh has some mcdonald's are no longer required to keep using the mcdonald's. Oh yeah, repairs for the ice cream machine they.

02:39:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, they solved that. By the way. That's the good news.

02:39:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The mcflurries are now back online, baby well, that's what I mean we're telling all these individuals that they can't do this right, but yet we seem to have what I mean. There's a part of it that makes sense, I guess, but a full-on kill switch, I guess, is a whole other ball game the kill switch are we?

02:39:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
is it like so they they're grounded, or is it more like they're in air and then like they're not?

02:39:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're well, if your weapons, let's say you, let's say a hot war broke out between the us and canada yeah, no, I was just I was if your weapon system stopped working it's.

02:40:08 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I mean, that's the question, right, is that what is? Is, of course, at lockheed martin, the united states says there's no such thing. I mean that's terrifying, right, if somebody hits a remote and you've the full capabilities of the f-35. Sounds like a tesla right. We're no longer giving you access to these premium features because you're not a preferred partner? I don't think, but I don't know if there was actually.

02:40:48 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's only one step along the way where, if, oh if, we're doing this, then what's to stop it from being a kill? It's's the Cold War, distrust, right, like that's the factor at play here, even if it's just this Well look at this.

02:41:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You kind of need the helmet, though. Actually, the kill switch on the plane, on the vehicle, is one thing, but you also need the helmet that is designed to go with the F-35.

02:41:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's some real lock-in. That is much more like the. Hp printers in their cartridges, isn't it?

02:41:17 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
But you can't use this fighter jet without the right helmet. This was never a factor.

02:41:22
No third-party helmets, oh my God. But so you know, this may be like Canada might say, like strategically, these are the things that you can't walk back from right. This is the issue of, like Canadians, buying, switching brand preferences. I'm reading amazing stories about how that's going on in the stores People making apps you know Maple First or whatever all these different apps that let you find out if a product you can scan its barcode, scan its name, find out if it was made in Canada or the United States. Some of that won't be walked back from and if Canada decides to cancel the rest, of it If they tear up my maple syrup, I'm going to be mad.

02:41:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard Campbell, who's our autodidact from Windows Weekly and a proud Canadian, says there was a bug in the F-22 back in the day. The nav computer would crash when you flew over the international dateline. Oh my goodness, which kind of makes it a little less useful. By the way, the HP cartridge lock-in was in the news this week was in the news. This week, hp pushed a firmware update that bricked HP computers and made them unable to use the company's own cartridges.

02:42:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I would be so mad if I was in the middle of a print run for something if you have a laser jet, mfp M232 or through 237.

02:42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hp issued a firmware update on march 4th. That, by the way, included quotes. I'm putting in this in quotes security updates, probably to prevent you from using third-party cartridges. Users have been reporting sudden problems using hp brand toner in their printers since that update error code 11 the hardware toner light flashes, uh, still can't print pc letter load pc load letter, it's pc load letter. Never did know what that meant, even though it's an ink chip. Who's the key operator? Oh my god, closer out of sync.

02:43:14 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
In the chat point I asked didn't some car rental companies equip uh cars with kill switches and oh yeah, oh yeah, they did. In fact, they arrested some people when rental returns failed or Out of sync in the chat pointed out, didn't some car rental companies equip cars with kill switches? Oh yeah, oh yeah, they did.

02:43:23
In fact, they arrested some people when rental returns failed or something that's right. People would get like, actually, the police would show up and arrest them because there was a rental issue. I think Hertz that happened to. What's this? What is this? Oh, this is a ridiculous story. I think Hertz managed to get people arrested because of rental cars to avoid legal liability. I'm looking it up very quickly, so I don't. Yeah, they had to pay $168 million to customers. This is a 2022 story. Falsely accused of stealing the car 364 people. Some were taken to prison because of some issue with a car rental or return One guy or one woman got arrested four times.

02:44:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, my God.

02:44:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Someone was jailed for 37 days.

02:44:03 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I'd never rent a car again, I'd be so sorry, yeah, it was probably a reason.

02:44:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
An employee thought she was stealing the car, called the police. Since then she's been arrested four times because the warrant, you know, is outstanding. Spent weeks in jail, had a miscarriage in jail, oh my. Spent weeks in jail. Had a miscarriage in jail, oh my. She was a member, a platinum member, of hertz's gold club loyalty program.

02:44:24 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Imagine if she'd only been gold. That would be yeah there's no one listening.

02:44:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
That's there's. There are so many humans that tell you what the problem is. That's the.

02:44:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There is a. This is a computer problem people. We have checked out and they're following what's on the screen, probably the warrant kept. So it's like the amazon subscribe and save, you know like arrest and save.

02:44:44 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
It's a new program from amazon subscribe and save is a word we don't or a phrase we don't use around this house, really, yeah, you got that five thousand toilet paper. I, I like subscribing, he said Micah, stop, Because I just had so many things of oh. I know, I know. That does happen. We had so many paper towels yeah, I also.

02:45:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I found the other day in the pantry, I had one of those dash buttons.

02:45:13 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Oh, my God dash. I like the dash.

02:45:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazon discontinued them so they stopped working, thank God. But there was a button. If you ran out of paper towels, you pushed the button, or whatever the product was and it said it on the button. You push the button and they send you some more. I love that. I remember Michael he's now 22, but when he was a little younger thought it was just a hoot to keep pushing that button.

02:45:34 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Oh that's bad. I remember Macworld very nicely. Let me write a almost science fiction-y story back in several years ago when the Dash was introduced, because it was based in part on EM Forster, who you think of as a novelist. You know all these great Howard's End, all these amazing things he wrote. He also wrote a sci-fi story in 1909 called the Machine Stops, and if you read it now it's chilling. It's people in their homes pressing buttons and things arrive and so forth. Of course there are Zeppelins because it's the future and the past, but anyway it was a whole thing about like what happens when stuff's automatically delivered? People cease to having contact with each other. Felt very prophetic during the pandemic. But then what happens when the button stops working? You press that dash button and your food no longer arrives. The machine stops.

02:46:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Terrifying. What was the book? We read it for stacy's book club by adrian tchaikovsky about. It's about androids. It's a world where we uh, we all have service robots and they eventually service robots eventually take over. It's quite a good book.

02:46:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, I can't remember it sounds like the most expensive movie ever made, the service model.

02:46:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, jammer b remembers call back there yes, it does all show back to all right, we're gonna take a break, one last break, uh, and wrap things up with a panel that just is stellar, stellar and uh, you, you're all getting bagels in the mail. Um I love my male bagels I thought it would be a good idea gender bagels. I thought I could save these bagels because I have a vacuum sealer, you know, and I thought I'll put the bagels in the vacuum sealer they need night.

02:47:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You need the night with nitrogen right in there, otherwise they smush it.

02:47:17 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
It's like a wafer, it's like I'll tell you a very funny story it's like a communion wafer, a jewish communion wafer.

02:47:24
That's what I told my mother once my mother was not a, not a silly person, she's a very smart person. So she was major in home ec, used to demonstrate, uh, microwave ovens and things in a appliance store. So she knows she was doing a very smart person. And someone told her once if you cut bagels in half and put them in the freezer, they freeze better. She cut them down the middle. Oh, she cut them across the O and we're like, wow, no, the other half.

02:47:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's fine. It was fine. Yeah, people are many, many people are injured every year.

02:47:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
bagels, but I always thought it was kind of silly to get one of those bagels splitter, yeah, oh yeah, those avocados, oh, those are dangerous, yeah neil, you need a nitrogen attachment to your vacuum sealer.

02:48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That can you seal it with?

02:48:04 - Amy Webb (Guest)
nitrogen, and then it won't squish it yeah, we've got. So we've got a vacuum sealer that has, uh, the nitrogen canister and it will seal it you gotta have first party canisters, or else it'll stop working. No, I'm kidding yeah, yeah, you'll never be able to so why doesn't it squish it?

02:48:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, because it still has gas.

02:48:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's not a vacuum, it's just replaces the air with nitrogen it does, so it's I get it takes out all of the oxygen so you don't wind up with the oxidation and the other stuff that causes man. That's how they seal potato chips, you know, in a bag without yeah, it's nitrogen it's how we seal our wine when we don't drink the whole bottle sometimes it makes things taste a little weird, I'll be honest.

02:48:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, yeah well, I'm just my. I just have to find people to eat my bagels, that's all. That's what she did. You see the news story that I did not know that you could buy phony whipped cream chargers oh yeah phony whipped cream chargers.

02:49:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh yeah, they're.

02:49:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh leo, oh leo I'm so old I didn't know about this. Yeah, they're like whippets. When I was a kid, we had whippets, right, but these are wait, is it poppers or is it whippets?

02:49:12 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
no, it's whippets. I thought poppers were being banned, but they're not really whippets.

02:49:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're what it's. They're well they're. They're ostensibly, it says, for making whipped cream, but they're really for people to inhale their fruit flavors.

02:49:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, there's still whippets, right they just don't look like but you couldn't there's no, yeah, you're not gonna be able to attach it of ready whip is what you're telling me.

02:49:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, exactly, it's the jewel of nitrous oxide awesome that's a great invention they have all these flavors. Strawberries, where are they?

02:49:45 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
doing this where all over you go to anywhere you can buy them.

02:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're legal because they say on it do not inhale these. So just if you were, to put these to your mouth and inhale these, of course it'll kill you. It's not good for you, yeah don't do it, kids do.

02:50:00 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Is it a? Is it a?

02:50:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
nitrous oxide.

02:50:02 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
The problem is it's not a good replacement for oxygen right, oh, so you're just getting high because you are losing oxygen. No, no, you've never had nitrous what it's. Let's take this off the dental stuff when I was at yale.

02:50:19 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Maybe it happened to you too, glenn I had a roommate walking to a party a nitrous oxide tank.

02:50:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was intended for dentists, that's but it was as tall as he was laughing gas laughing gas. I do remember going to a party at, and there was just a nitrous tank full of empty whippets, but that was a whole yeah, well, that's whippets is the expensive way to go. You can get these giant tanks for almost nothing.

02:50:45 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
But he used to hang off of it.

02:50:47 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
This is not recommended.

02:50:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he has not been normal since.

02:50:52 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Isn't it a wonder that anyone is able to do anything based on the things that people do? Growing up, you know what.

02:50:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's what I've learned in my many years on this planet don't do drugs. I don't even drink anymore. Yeah, I have so few brain cells left, I can't afford to spare anymore. That's it, I'm done.

02:51:09 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Not even a glass of wine it's like the one thing that I appreciate about my very, very, very Christian upbringing is that it made me a huge goody two-shoes, so that's good yeah, you survived the other, the worst drug I've ever done you should try some of this which.

02:51:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richardbell said he had a dentist friend who kept his african gray calm with nitrous all right, the next sponsor isn't whippets, is it? Is there no sensitive?

02:51:48 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
respiratory.

02:51:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're, they're respiratory, so it's bad and it's bad for your heart and bad for a lot of things. But the worst thing is, if you think you're breathing but you're not, you're breathing nitrous oxide, so you can actually kill yourself, which is how you think you're breathing but you're not.

02:51:59 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You're breathing nitrous oxide, so you can actually kill yourself, which is how you die. That's why they put the egg smell into the gas, because otherwise you wouldn't realize it Right Now if you're a pro cyclist, you may want to inhale carbon monoxide, because that's a thing.

02:52:09 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, I'm not suggesting you do it, but Because you don't do? The doping has taken a strange new turn. It's not, but it is, uh, supposedly a way to train at altitude. Not that I'm suggesting this, but you know, holy crap, wow, I don't do it it does not seem like a good idea no, but neither does inhaling fruit flavored if you look under your seat, you'll all find a can of fruit I've been sitting on a whip and sit on that. That'll get you all jacked and make you yeah, just do that.

02:52:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, no sitting on whip. It says the show just canned oxygen, that's okay right I, I really can't I was selling it yeah, I just I want to just kind of keep my brain cells at the current level, because I so you can learn with ai.

02:53:00 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Just keep it long enough, right just long enough.

02:53:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, let's take a little break. We got a great panel. We're going to wrap things up. A few more uh stories, uh, and then we shall continue uh, and we can all go home and enjoy a fine plate of spaghetti or something. Dinner time actually, way after dinner for you. Amy, thank you for your patience. I appreciate it.

02:53:21
Our show today brought to you by us cloud. I love these guys. Had a great conversation with them. I said you're a cloud storage company. They said no, leo, no, no, no. We are the number one microsoft unified support replacement company. These guys do microsoft support for less, better and faster, and if you don't know about them, like I didn't know about them, you need to get to know. We've been talking now for a few months about us cloud. They are the global leader in third party microsoft support for enterprises. They support 50 of the fortune 500 and switching to us cloud can save your business 30 to 50 percent over microsoft unified and premiere support. But it would you know, if we're less expensive but not as good. That would be different. But it's better than mike. It's twice as fast in average time to resolution as microsoft. And there's something else us cloud would do. They don't have an investment in you spending more money with microsoft, unlike microsoft. So this is a really cool thing.

02:54:28
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02:54:56
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We have a great review, sam, who is the technical operations manager at bead gaming b-e-d-e. He gave us cloud five stars, saying quote we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These vms were, I don't know, 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on azure, but once we got to 40 or 50 000 a month, it really started to add up. It's simple stop overpaying for azure. Identify and eliminate azure creep and boost your performance. All in eight weeks with US Cloud Sounds pretty good, right?

02:56:20
Find out more. Go to uscloudcom book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. The best Microsoft support for less, faster, better for a lot less. Visit the website and get them to call you uscloudcom. Book a call today. Get faster microsoft support for less. Thank you, us cloud for supporting the show. We appreciate it. Uh, sonos made a big announcement a few months ago. They were going to do a streaming video player that would cost even more than apples not anymore. They decided to cancel that. Sonos is struggling. They can't figure out what to do at all. They got a new CEO, they got a new CTO and they still can't figure out what's going on.

02:57:08 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
They have made a lot of avoidable mistakes.

02:57:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seems like. Yeah, I mean, I've Sonos everywhere. Over the years I've spent thousands on it. Jammer B inherited all the stuff from the studio when we closed the studio. The device, codenamed Pinewood, was going to be the company's next major hardware launch this year. According to the Verge, they're abandoning that. The news was announced by the company's leadership during an all-hands call this week are they going to focus on the app?

02:57:43
yeah, that's kind of the question is why are you trying to put out new hardware? Can you fix your old stuff? Oh my gosh, geez louise uh internally, I'm kind of excited.

02:57:55 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Um, it seems like they weren't able to pull off what they were, in theory, promising, which is something that all of these different services have tried to pull off, which is making it so that all of your media, across all the different streaming platforms, is just in one dashboard. Right, we have apps, do you remember I?

02:58:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do and I can't find it. It was like a wooden box somebody was selling that was supposed to do that, remember, I think you had it right.

02:58:25 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
Yeah, I, I wish I could remember that I literally it sank without a trace.

02:58:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no point in trying to remember it, it's gone. Um, you know, I think if you're gonna go high-end, apple kind of owns that, maybe the nvidia shield, um, otherwise you're going to buy a roku like everybody else. Like everybody, yeah, um, everything you say to your amazon echo will now go to amazon starting at the end of the month. Just thought you might want to know did that story get misreported, though?

02:58:59 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I read something uh just yesterday that said most devices were already doing it and that was only a subset. What they're turning off is the ability to turn it off right, okay, so most people were probably already yeah, doing this, but I turned it on at the privacy, yeah uh, well, remember there were stories about Amazon employees listening into people making love and there was all sorts of incident.

02:59:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple had this problem with Siri too. There was accidental triggering, and then they, you know, for a few seconds, Amazon, would you know, the Echo would go. What you doing?

02:59:35 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
In fact, they ended up implementing a feature to try to combat the sort of Accidental triggers?

02:59:42
Yeah Well you would say you could say to the device what just happened and it would explain to you why it had actually triggered. Is that with Siri or with the Echo? That was with the Echo. I honestly don't know if they still have that feature enabled, but I thought that was a smart thing to do at the time. But yes, this is something that you did have to go in and disable. It was something that I always disabled. I do it across all of the different platforms. I think they've got plenty of training data already when it comes to this. Yeah, they don't need more.

03:00:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I can also understand, except that you can't disable it anymore.

03:00:16 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You can't disable it anymore, because you can't disable it anymore.

03:00:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the reason why it's happening now is because they really are trying to kit out their, you know, like generalists their ai yeah exactly, I'm trying to avoid that word, but yes, I'm gonna say it my house is filled with little robot voices talking all the time I don't know, I've got in concert echoes I've got series. I've got google assistants. I've got the b. I made my b, by the way, and I recommend this. It talks to me. Uh, I call him, uh, jk, let me. Oh, it's not making any sound like jk simmons. Yes, I got jk simmons voice got me pictures of spider-man it's so cool.

03:00:55
Yeah, exactly, um, but he's not. He's not talking right now. Oh hey, I'd like to introduce you to Amy, micah and Glenn. They're really nice people. It's a little slow. It's a little slow. Hello Amy, micah and Glenn. It's nice to meet you all. I hope you're having a fantastic time together. If there's anything you'd like to chat about or any questions you have, feel free to let me know doesn't that sound?

03:01:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
like jk simmons sounds a little less angry than jk. Yeah, it sounds like a nice jk he gets a little gruff. He gets a little gruff that's like not the whiplash, jk simmons.

03:01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No yeah, that's too angry. It's maybe like the state farm advertisement jk simmons, uh, elon musk, uh was trying. Uh, let's see. Well, I don't know, even if I want to start that, finish that sentence, should I not? Should I just stop?

03:01:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
we just like. I'm just so sick of the whole thing. Yeah, let's you know what I?

03:01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, that was my first seven appearances on the show unhinged, he likes chainsaws, he's yeah, things just yeah never mind, I forgot, I forget, I even mentioned unless everybody else wants to chit chat about him, but I'm so tired well, the cfpb has decided not to go after amazon after after all, so maybe that's cfpb is there's nobody left there, it's gutted yeah, oh, actually this is okay. So there was a reversal of the reversal. The ftc said on wednesday it does not need to delay a september trial against amazon, reversing an attorney's statement earlier in the day that resource shortfalls due to cost cutting required an extension. I don't know if that's a story.

03:02:42 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
I don't know what that is judge ordered all the people back at, uh, the consumer board or the agency. That's right. I think that's. What happened is that they were forced to rehire them.

03:02:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, overload now, though, I don't know, do you think? I mean honestly, maybe you need the job, but I would be tempted just to say, well, hell with you, you fired me, I'm not coming back.

03:03:01 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Well, you got to get several. I don't know. They're paying people now not working. So that's the situation. If you took the fork in the road? Well, no, if you didn't, if you got reinstated by the judge.

03:03:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, then you get money.

03:03:12 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Yeah.

03:03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. You're right, a lot of money. No point, no point, no point, no point talking about it. I have a book to read about why meta is so crazy. That's what I'm gonna go do. I thank you all. You guys are great. Amy webb uh, congratulations on the future. Today strategy group. Uh, everybody should go watch the video of your south by talk which is up on the South by Southwest YouTube channel right now and, if you wish, you can order the brand new Tech Trends Report 1,000, well, 999 pages.

03:03:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You can just download it.

03:03:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's free, but you have to go to the site. I guess, yes, yes. So is that an order or is it just a visit?

03:03:57 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It is an order for you to go to that website right now.

03:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I order you to go get the 18th edition. You've been doing this almost as long as we've been doing twit.

03:04:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I know it's a many, it's awesome.

03:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are on April 13th, celebrating our 20th anniversary, and I am asking you know, on our thousandth show we had some of the original hosts from twit on, but I thought this time we should really honor the people make this all possible, our fantastic community, our audience. So if you want to send me a video of how you watch, how you listen, when you first started listening, that kind of thing, I think it'd be fun to throw those into the april 13th anniversary 20th anniversary show. You could post on social media, any of the social channels, just make sure you at TWIT so we see it. Or you can email leo at leovillecom with your clip. A number of people have done so. It'll be kind of fun.

03:04:50
On April 13th We'll show all of the people who are listening and how they listen and where they listen. We would love that if you'd participate. If you're not yet a member of the club, of course, that's one way you can support what we do. Go to twittv slash club twit seven bucks a month. Not only do you get ad-free versions of the show, you get access to the fabulous Club Twit Discord, which is a whole heck of a lot of fun to hang out in, and you also get special content, like mike is uh wonderful, uh things that he does, the micah's crafting corner, the hands-on technology show, hands-on macintosh show. You're a busy guy, you do a lot of stuff ios today.

03:05:27 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
They're all there.

03:05:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, of course, stacy's book club. I like to do that. I might nominate you for doing that for the future. I could do that. You're a reader, you like reading books? Yeah, uh, I all, I don't know this is this looks like something from citizen kane, but there's an ai edition, so that's a very strange. What is that? Is an image, because I think that's orson welles in a cat mask orson welles clapping in the balcony yeah, yeah, applauding his, his Marion Davies opera singing girlfriend.

03:05:58 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I need context.

03:06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, Citizen Kane, baby, Everybody should watch it, I mean of the kitty cat.

03:06:05
That I don't understand at all. So join the club. We'd love to have you Twittv slash club twit. Another thing you can do to help us leave a review on iTunes or Spotify or Pocket Cast or however you listen. Better reviews help us do a better job, because advertisers pay attention to that, I don't, you know. So I just, if you want to help us out, leave us a five-star review. That'll make a big difference. Uh, thank you, amy, for being here. Glenn fleishman his new book is going to be out in june how comics are made. If you were in the kickstarter to get how comics were made, you have a lovely copy already of that looks like this, and I presume- marshall sold out.

03:06:45 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
All of the shift happens yeah, shift happens, sold out box it happened gosh a year ago. Wow, adding to the weight of the the planet in the process. Oh it's marvelous a lot of you lot of pages.

03:06:57 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
You created new matter. That's amazing.

03:06:59 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
That's what it felt. Yeah, this is part of this transitional matter that we've been talking about.

03:07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, of course, all the, all the tidbits guides that you do the. What are the? It's not tidbits anymore.

03:07:07 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Oh yeah, take control of books. Yeah, I've got a, which is very briefly, it's just. I started realizing Apple had actually gotten its act together in the newest releases last fall and dramatically improved screen saving or screen sharing, especially if you want to share among, like iPad, iphone, mac. It's very different now. It's much better, it's much more consistent. But I also wrote up this is for another show. There's a product called Tailscale that I've fallen in love with for remote access to one's own network. Oh, you use.

03:07:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tailscale, how sophisticated.

03:07:43 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
Incredible Canadian company, by the way, fast-growing Canadian technology firm oh nice, One of their top-flying players up there.

03:07:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Take Control Books is actually 21 years old. You guys are a little bit older than we are, so yes, nice job.

03:07:58 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
One of my first books was, I think, take control of screen sharing and leopard or something like that.

03:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So very well. Wow, take control of sharing files in leopard. Yeah, that was december 20 2008. Gosh incredible, wow, those are the days my friends added a while yep, check it out. A while, yep, check it out. There's your book, I see it right there. $10.28. Take control.

03:08:23 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
There's a Pi Day sale which maybe finishes on Monday, so by the time people see this, oh yeah, happy.

03:08:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pi Day 314.

03:08:30 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
It's Extended Pi Day Weekend is the 31.4% off. Pi Day through the Ides of March.

03:08:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How many digits of pi can you remember?

03:08:41 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
3.141596, I think, is where I tap out, but that gets you like better than the radius of the Earth or something within a millimeter. It's pretty good.

03:08:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know it from the mnemonic how I want to drink alcoholic, of course, after the heavy chapters on quantum mechanics, oh Lord. Want to drink alcoholic, of course, after the heavy chapters on quantum mechanics, oh lord. So that's how I want, for uh, drink five oh, these are syllables. I'm like not syllables letters. Alcoholic is the next one. Nine two, six, five, three, seven, two quantum seven.

03:09:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Anyway, you get the idea you should go to asap science.

03:09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's an easy song, you know oh sing the, sing the pie song I am not I.

03:09:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That was about as much singing as I will ever do in public let's see.

03:09:36 - Glenn Fleishman (Guest)
That's how I learned a lot of elements, you know, xanthamony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and hydrogen, and oxygen and nutrigen and medium 300 digits of pie in a song that's awesome, like super useful if that's your, you know yeah, that's your jam, as the kids uh want to say, or do they not say that anymore probably?

03:09:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they say the riz or something the riz, if you flick, if you're on fleek with your riz, oh jesus word uh, mr, word to your mother I never really know what the current words are, so I just none of those words, leo, not a single one. Yeah, no, that's true by the time, I know them. It's not them that's, but you probably your daughter probably fills you in, right? No?

03:10:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
my daughter plays Dungeons and Dragons.

03:10:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Awesome Proud of her.

03:10:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, she does not have the Riz.

03:10:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She does not have the. Riz baby.

03:10:30 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
According to the researchers at QI, the group most responsible for the invention of new phrases are teenage girls. Yeah, that they are the, the phrase generators of, of humans.

03:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're the epicenter, the patient zero of zero, of fleek and skeet like a sergeant catches great work on our network, yay, or go to chihuahuacoffee to find out about all the other podcasts he does when he cheats on us including dnd podcasts. Oh yeah, your daughter might be interested in that. Do you play dnd every week?

03:11:11 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
micah. No, my god, no. Um, I think I've got another one coming up sometime later this month, on a like a saturday, but yeah, we play occasionally, um, and then I've also been running some campaigns as well, so, um, stay tuned for that over.

03:11:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On jason snell's, the incomparable oh yes, absolutely or go to chihuahuacoffee and find links to all of that stuff, plus all of his socials. You are, on all of those, really massive on the threads twitter blue sky.

03:11:41 - Mikah Sargent (Guest)
I just have accounts there be real, still come on. Really, I don't even have the app on my phone, but I have an account there. I gave up on be real, yeah, I stopped being real.

03:11:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I stopped being real. We thank you all for joining us and putting up with us for the last three and a half hours. Sorry, uh, we will be back, uh, every sunday, 2 pm pacific, 5 pm eastern, 2100 utc. You can watch live on eight different platforms. Club members watch in discord, but you can also watch us live on youtube, twitch, xcom, tiktok, facebook linkedin and kick, but you don't have to watch live, of course, because it's a podcast. Download a copy of Twitter TV, our website. There's a YouTube channel dedicated this week in tech and, of course, just search for us in your favorite podcast client and that way you can get it automatically as soon as it's done in the edit, audio or video versions. Do subscribe, if you will, and leave us a review as well. Thank you so much. As I have said now for 20 years, going on 20 years. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. Another twit is in the can Bye-bye.