This Week in Tech 1025 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. Oh, it's a big show. Alex Kantrowitz is here from the Big Technology Podcast, ian Thompson from the Register and brand new to the show, jacob Ward, former NBC journalist who has written a really interesting book about AI called the Loop. We will talk about the entire world turning Studio Ghibli thanks to ChatGPT and breaking news. Sam Alt altman saying knock it off, you're killing me. Here we'll also talk about the white house signal breach and why you probably shouldn't be using signal for your most secret war plans. And what do I do with my spit now that 23 and me is bankrupt? All All that and more next on TWIT.

00:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This is TWIT.

01:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1025, recorded Sunday, march 30th 2025. Week Perfection. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we get together and talk about the week's tech news. What a week it's been holy moly. Want to welcome jacob ward. Jake's uh first timer, so be nice to him. Uh, he is, but he just published a book called the loop, but you can see a stack of them behind him about ai. Reporter for nbc and all over the places. Current uh uh newsletters called and and podcast over the places. Current newsletters and podcasts now the Rip Current at theripcurrentcom. Jake, it's great to have you. Thank you for joining us.

01:52 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I appreciate it. Leo, thank you for having me. I was saying to you before we came on three hours, brother. I don't know how you do it, but I also think I'm not sure we're going to get through a whole week, this week in particular, in three hours. There's a ton of stuff. Yeah, this is the. This is my first appearance this particular. Why couldn't I have picked a light week where we?

02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's funny, because I thought this was going to be uh, I thought this was going to be a light week and then you reminded me oh, the signal thing happened this week and it was like, oh gosh, this has been a long week. Ian thompson is also here from the registercom. Hi, ian, great to see you. Good to see you, as ever, yeah, it's going Well. You say old friend.

02:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was judging a virtual reality conference at MIT a couple of months ago and someone came up to me. It's like you're Ian Thompson. I've been watching you on Twitter since I was a teenager and you're just like. That's both great and also God, I'm old.

02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, ian, in two weeks is our 20th anniversary show, fantastic. We started April 14th 2005. And we're going to do something special on that show. In fact, I've already started Receive's videos and somebody wrote a poem your memories of the first time you watched Twit, where you watch it, things like that, to know. It's kind of honor, our, uh, our long-suffering audience, uh, next two weeks, on April 13th, also with us. Great to see him. Alex canterwitz, the big technology podcast and newsletter it's always great to have you on, alex. It's always good to be here. Leo, thanks for having me. Such smart stuff you're doing, uh, at big technology. You know it's kind of uh, it's kind of cool when two of you are former mainstream media guys who moved to, you know be creators, and the third is at the register. You're the guy still in mainstream media. Ian, when are you going to start your newsletter?

03:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Honestly, I just enjoy being a writer again, being a journalist, going after each story again. You wake up. There's always something new, there's always something you can get out there and it's great.

03:56 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You can do that independent, by the way, so you should join us. Hopefully we'll convince you by the end of this show to go independent and start your own thing.

04:02 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I will say I miss teamwork, though. I miss you know. I miss being able to call the Washington DC Bureau and saying, hey, I need a Senator to talk to you. I miss you know, I miss the teamwork way. I think you know I love so many things about this model, but putting people together to you know, especially in the face of this maelstrom of news, the idea that all of us are just going to be writing about whatever we saw on the internet and that's going to like save democracy.

04:31 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I don't know you guys. It is the three of us.

04:31 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Have your back, jake yeah, good, well, great, we got to be with you.

04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then, yeah, this is the new, this is your new team, although we're all frenemies, because we're all kind of in competition with one another there's a limited number of eyeballs and you can't call me and ask to meet a senator. So that's right out. Um, alex knows a lot of big names. You're. Alex is amazing getting the big names on his.

04:53 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, I agree, I agree, I'll hook it up. I'll hook it up. Just hit me on the dms.

04:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got you so, uh, this was the week that uh, studio ghibli burst onto the scene. Uh, miyazaki's famous movies are beloved by fans, but now, uh, he's being turned into an ai meme. Openai added the ability for chat gpt 40 to create images, actually been playing around with this a little bit and for some reason people really wanted to do Studio Ghibli stuff. This is the disaster girl, you know, the girl in front of the house on fire in the Disney style, which kind of looks like a Disney princess. Here's a Studio Ghibli grumpy cat, very nicely done. This was less good. The Mona Lisa as Vincent Van Gogh, because you don't have. I think people might think, oh, it's a Studio Ghibli filter from ChatGPT. No, no, it can do anything. I even had it do Ian Thompson with big eyes, yeah, Aren't you cute, very big.

06:03
It did get the shirt right, right though, a nice plaid shirt and then finally, rembrandt and the twit logo, nice brush strokes and, uh, very dark, very dark indeed. But now what I want, I guess, benito, can you give to a screenshot of the four of us? It would be great to have a screenshot of the four of us and, before this show is over, have a studio ghibli or ghibli. We've decided it's ghibli version of of of this all right, everybody smile.

06:30
All right, everybody okay smile, open your eyes wide, all right now. One of the things that happened immediately to me is that, uh, I got rate limited and and actually sam altman says you guys are burning down the servers. But there is a larger question. If you're Miyazaki, you might be a little offended by this. In fact, benito pointed out, and he's probably right, that it's only a matter of time before somebody does full-length movies this way.

07:01 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean I've had a conversation I'm sure all you guys have spoken to developers in that world. I was talking to somebody the other day at UC Berkeley who's working on something in this world and you know I said how long before we do a full 90-minute movie? Because right now the trouble that they're having is they can't keep the same look of the characters, scene after scene after scene. It sort of migrates over the course of it. And he was like within a year we'll have 90 minutes. And that was you know I mean, and to me I mean, like you say, leo, like this company just can't stop walking headfirst into the, the most you know, the, the, the weirdest interpretation of how art is supposed to be consumed, and and grab and how tone deaf, the grabbing up of it is like the, the starlink, or sorry, not scarlet starlink. Help me out, you guys. Oh my god, I'm blanking on it.

07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there's scarlett johansson. I often confuse starlink with scar joe. Yeah, no, no, not scar joe. What's the one? What's?

08:01 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
the uh, what's the uh, stargate, stargate. Oh, you know what I?

08:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't blame you for being confused. That's the half billion sorry, half trillion dollar ai effort with oracle and uh, sunsan and they name it for that, for the show right and the.

08:17 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
And the conceit of that show is that an amazing alien technology that transports people between worlds is in fact being used by a super annoying race of enslavers grabbing slave labor from other worlds. And it's just that thing where you're like. Why would you call it that a young person who likes to be alone in your room and live in a calm world of beauty and and think about you know non-technology things, to have this as the? The way opening eye shows off this latest twist in this technology. To me it's just the most tone deaf version again, or you know or maybe that video game art, don't do ghibli, you know.

09:01 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
or maybe that's game art, don't do, ghibli, you know or maybe that's the point, though, because you know I mentioned Scarlett Johansson.

09:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's on my mind because when she's on all our minds but, like the Roman Empire, it's just not from a condition of being a male.

09:14 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
OK, no, but I'm talking about it from a tech standpoint that when OpenAI released the voice chat in open, it was oh yeah, she was pissed. She was upset. They tried to work with her. She said no, they basically copied her voice anyway. Sam Altman tweets her.

09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is in May 2023 or 24.

09:36 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Tweets the word her, which is running right into the spikes Exactly. So she says all right, I'm going to sue you. Guess what happens? Everybody starts paying attention to the fact that open AI now has voice. That's so realistic and sounds so much like Scarlett Johansson that it must be good.

09:50
And then you go from a moment where OpenAI stagnated Basically. They hit 100 million users in February 2023. They don't crack that until about April or May 2024. So, basically, a year of stagnation. And once you found out that they had made this voice that was as good as Scarlett Johansson in her, the numbers boomed. Openai went from 100 million users to 400 million. I think that this what they're doing now the fact that they are amplifying, because they are amplifying the Studio, ghibli, miyazaki stuff is the same exact thing. I think they lean into the controversy as a marketing tool and it's absolutely working for them In their defense.

10:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't Did they mention Studio Ghibli? I think somebody in our chat is saying that was emergent behavior that went viral independent of what they.

10:42 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Sam Altman's profile picture right now is an anime Sam Altman that looks a heck of a lot like a Studio Ghibli.

10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he leaned into it.

10:49 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Right. So it's not like they're running away from it and in fact, I would say that they're encouraging this and again, it's working. Now this is a tweet that Sam Altman posted just before we came on the air. He said there's biblical demand. I have never seen anything like it and he's begging people to stop creating images because they can't do anything. And in fact, someone was like well, when is AGI coming? And he goes as soon as you stop creating images. It will come a little bit sooner than you are right now.

11:17
So I think that they understand quite well.

11:19
I think they understand quite well what they're doing, which is that when they make these viral moments, they cement chat GPT as the number one slash, maybe the only AI tool with mass adoption right now. And they need that to happen, because we all know what happened with deep seek a few months ago. Model layer has been commoditized, so actually this image creation and the voice stuff, that's all they have, because it brings people into chat GPT and you know, say what you will about whether it's tasteless or not, you know, I think there's an argument to be made either way. The fact is that this is working and it's a big moment for them.

12:00 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Actually there is as usual, this is me walking headlong into being the naive guy who thinks that art should be protected against these people.

12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because I totally I don't know if you're naive, absolutely.

12:12 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
You're absolutely correct. I think it makes perfect sense right From an outcome perspective, from a strategy perspective, it makes perfect sense, right, get the attention you want. But you know, meanwhile you see all these, you know these like animators on social media literally weeping into the camera saying like this is the end of it, this is it, but that's also a great way for them to get airtime.

12:30 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And let me ask you this, jacob what do you think about fandoms? Because we had a story in the prep doc that Leo and Benito sent around right beforehand and the headline is Hayao Miyazaki's AI nightmare. It's from the Atlantic and I'm reading this story and I'm prepared to read an op-ed about how terrible it is that they're ripping this guy off. But we all know that films and studios like Ghibli have benefited from fandoms people that are obsessed with what they make and they make derivative work and that continues to contribute to the popularity.

13:03
Now I definitely hear the artists and I know Miyazaki is one who's come out against AI and I hear the objections and I'm not going to diminish them Like I think that's a legitimate objection, but there are two sides of it, because when I'm reading the story about Miyazaki's AI nightmare, I'm seeing the case being made that fandoms are propelling this type of work and maybe that's going to be the case here. I mean, right before we came on air. We're trying to get the right pronunciation of Studio Ghibli or Ghibli, whatever it is. The four of us would never spend a Sunday afternoon trying to figure out how to pronounce the name. It just isn't relevant in most conversations. And now it is.

13:39 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I guess I would say I mean, I take your point and I think that the idea that in this particular historical moment, as we are seeing companies like open ai get attention by exploiting the creative work of other people, it is gonna, I think, have a kind of flywheel effect on the fandom of that, of that group. I I agree with you on that, but I also think the the longer concern and when I think longer term, I'm talking 12 months, like after this historical moment. I think it's an open question whether we're going to have anything like a Studio Ghibli or an Aardman Entertainment the guy who does- yeah, Wallace and Gromit.

14:21
Yeah, wallace and Gromit, exactly.

14:24
The market won't be there for people to make those kinds of original, handcrafted, beautiful kind of IP, because it'll be so much cheaper and easier for kids to just pull up whatever they want. I had this conversation with Justine Bateman from Family Ties, who went on after her career in that to get a computer science degree, and her big argument during the during the actors, the saga after strike was if we let these studio execs have their way with AI, they're just going to make you know, sort of DIY movies such that you sit down and you say I want something with Harrison Ford and make it a Viking thing, a little bit of sex, but not too much, and no one will ever hire another new actor again. So I think you're right that in this moment existing IP and existing actors and Studio Ghibli and the rest of it will benefit to some extent. But I just worry that the long-term effect I'm curious what anybody else thinks about this is maybe a world in which we don't have anything new to sample. We're just rehashing the same stuff.

15:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I do feel, in a way, that you raise a very valid point indeed, and it's something I've noticed over the last 10 years ago. If you look at the top 10 films throughout the last decade, there's very little new stuff and a decreasing amount of it. It's all reboots or using an existing feature, and I think ai is just going to turbo charge that completely.

15:49 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Um, and I'm sure a lot of the studios looked at it just like, yes, we can get rid of those pesky actors that cost us so much money, but the fact is they also turn in great performances, which ai not so sure it will yeah, then the ai replicating human performances is going to take a while, but I would also say, if we're trying to think about the total creative output that we're going to have on this planet, just think about what it takes to create an animated film today. So this is from Derek Thompson. Mr Abundance himself, you know. He cited in a tweet last week that Disney can't make an animated feature for less than $200 million, and right now we're seeing this stuff actually work in video as well.

16:31
Now is that a threat to studios like Disney? Sure, but is it also an opportunity that you can start making stuff for less than that $200 million? And I don't know, maybe the best creative output will rise. Like if you're Disney and your entire moat was that the everyday person couldn't create what you can create and it didn't matter what the story was, I would say that you're failing Disney's great at story. So potentially, they have an advantage because now there can be more creative proliferation at a lower cost and they're in the driver's seat to lead this change. But they're now able to do their specialty at at a cost, maybe at a fraction of what they were paying previously.

17:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So 30 years ago, uh, steven spielberg was making a dinosaur movie called jurassic park and he had stan winston, the great model maker, making a giant t-rex, a physically giant, eight foot tall, I don't know, maybe even taller t-rex. But at the same time as they were preparing for this movie, spielberg happened to walk through industrial light and magic where two programmers had created in the computer a t-rex. Spielberg saw it and stopped stam winston and that was the first example of cgi used 30 years ago in a film. Uh, I'm sure at the time the model makers were pretty upset. Star wars was entirely practical models, uh.

17:59
But a new way of making movies was created and I, while I'm not a huge fan of cgi in movies, it's in every movie. Whether you know it or not, it has changed filmmaking without destroying filmmaking. I don't think that an ai created studio ghibli movie or even a real life action movie featuring indiana jones would be as good as one created by humans, acted by humans. With all due respect to justine bateman, I think that's giving a little too much credit to the ai. I don't think it's. It's the same. Humans have something they do. That's very different.

18:36
Incidentally, studio gibly this is from business insider probably cannot stop what open AI is doing. Uh, business Insider and interviewed IP attorneys who said you know, the juries or the courts are still out on this one. But generally, copyright laws allow artists to mimic a visual style. It's not considered stealing. And in fact, when you talk about Disney, disney was copying the Brothers Gr grim. Uh, probably, studio ghibli was heavily influenced by the early animation art of disney and there will be another generation that will be heavily influenced by the animation art of studio ghibli. This is the process. We copy each other.

19:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No human does it all in a vacuum I do find it kind of amusing, though, that we've just had napster being bought by somebody, and you remember, napster, when all the studios were just like. Intellectual property is everything. We must protect it at all costs, and now they're ripping it off for this. So you know, it's strange how the way these things turn around.

19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm more sanguine than you are, jake, about the future of art. I do think artists and creators and humans will still do what they do. Although miyazaki says AI is anti-human, he is not a fan.

19:45 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, he calls it an insult to life itself yeah, an insult to life itself.

19:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

19:50 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I think that this, like I, I just think I. I always try, whenever anyone says it's not good enough, yet to do, you know, a true simulacrum of the, of the human experience of watching Harrison Ford or whatever it is. I just always say give them two financial quarters and they'll figure that stuff out. The quality is going to go up and up and up and up and up, as we've already seen. I wrote this book, the Loop, predicting the AI mania. I thought I was like 10 years ahead of the time that came out. When did you write that book? It came out nine months before ChatGPT did.

20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Although even came out nine months before chat gpt did. Yeah, although even open ai was shocked, they did not expect chat gpt to be successful. So you're right, we're moving at a rapid pace, you know the only real question is yeah, yeah, that last bit of it, right. You look at self-driving cars. They do really great 90 of the situations, but then something weird happens and they, they can't handle it. They drive through a paper wall.

20:45 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
This is exactly the point, though, which is that we're going to see humans and the machines work side by side to produce better outputs. It's not necessarily disintermediating Disney, it's Disney with AI. That's going to be great. I mean, just going back to your Jurassic Park example. Did people walk away from that movie saying, oh wow, that CGI dinosaur was really special? I'm glad we watched that movie because we saw the CGI dinosaur.

21:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think they even knew.

21:14 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
No, what they said was it was a great story, right, and ultimately, it doesn't matter what technology you have. If the story is great, if it touches people's hearts, people will watch it, animated or not, and honestly, it's a challenge for us humans. We have to be able to keep our ability to reach other human beings in a way that's better than the robots can, and if the robots can only get 90, 95% of the way there, then I think our creators are in great shape, because we can get 100% of the way there. We know we can do it. Ghibli does it, miyazaki does it, so many people do it. And if you give the people that are able to convey that message and tell those stories and touch the hearts this technology, then you are looking at a great democratization of what we do and an opportunity for a creative explosion in the best case I don't.

22:07 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I certainly don't want to be like. I spent my entire first appearance on this great show being, like mr, anti-tech. I promise you I have lots of positive opinions about, about technology, but this is one that I definitely is definitely you're allowed, jake.

22:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're. In fact, this is a debate that we have been having for the last two years great, okay, and it's not unresolved.

22:27 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
It's really an unresolved debate even it's right, and we're not going to figure it out in these three hours, but I also think that it is a. It is a. It is a really fundamental thing we got to keep talking about, and one of the things that came up for me recently is, alex, to your point of you know, the, the you know and leo, you made this point too that the technology will take us 90% of the way and then that last 10% maybe will be where the humans get involved and that's where the human magic can happen, and the dream that these makers always talk about with humans and robots working hand in hand. That came out from a big pharmaceutical company when ChachiBT first came out and they began using a proprietary AI package to try to synthesize new chemicals and figure out new potential products, and it was incredibly effective at making people more productive. But the distribution of productivity was very much like this top tier of very skilled scientists used it well and everybody else got kind of dropped out the bottom because they couldn't really adapt to the technology and they couldn't really figure it out. So the projection was that that top 10% was kind of the group that would survive.

23:36
But here's the part that really brings me up short on this hand-in-hand quality is that everybody, and especially the top 10% who are using it the most intensely reported deep dissatisfaction with the job. They hated being in the role of catching the AI's work and getting it ready for prime time. And I worry that there's something in and I'm not here to defend Disney, that's not it. But Studio Ghibli, I think, is worth defending and I'm not sure that the people that suffer and suffer and suffer to be in that world are going to be okay with or are going to be willing to get into that world to just take a computer's work across the finish line.

24:21 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I just build more computers to do that job also.

24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right well, I love it that sam altman is begging people to stop if you actually underscore on these images.

24:33 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It underscores.

24:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem that they have is that the more successful they are, the more it costs them. Yeah, and it's a very weird situation uh they're in. Incidentally, it is not widely agreed necessarily that studio ghibli's art is the great, greatest art. In fact, at that atlantic article, uh, ian bogost says uh, are this? When asked, are the studio ghibli images evil? He said I don't think they're evil. They might be stupid, you could construe them as ugly, but they're also beautiful. He doesn't. He's not a fan of studio, of the aesthetics of studio ghibli, to be honest.

25:12 - Benito (Announcement)
Um, I got a quick, quick comment about that is that like people are morally more hijacking the idea of ghibli. It's not like the actual style. It's like what you think when you see it's big eyes.

25:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly, so they're high, jackal what? You pull out of a ghibli film. They're hijacking that on onto there yeah, but if you, if you watch, you know, spirited away, it's, that's an experience. At some point you don't even think about the illustration exactly.

25:38 - Benito (Announcement)
It's not so much about the illustration itself, it's more about other stuff that comes with it.

25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the story it was the same thing with jurassic park. It isn't about the cgi. Uh, it's got to be good enough that you believe it. Those dinosaurs are running after those guys. But that's all and it was. And then you believed it and the story worked but I will.

25:55 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean I will point out to ian's point of everything being a reboot. You know, an avengers reboot these days, like no one's going to those movies for the story. You're going to the movies to see the explosions and yeah, that's true and the spaceship but that.

26:07 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But yes, but you trust in the brand because the brand has told you an overarching story over time, like if it was just the explosions, without any kind of story arc. You're not watching that and, by the way, these these, uh, these images are so ugly that they've just taken over the Internet. I don't accept that at all from you.

26:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't know. The fact that Michael Bay still has a career suggests that people will just go to see the explosions.

26:32 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Hey, Michael Bay's an artist. That point I'll take. Leo, can we just for the next two hours make things explode and test the hypothesis we?

26:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
could, I'd probably make more money money, to be honest with you but uh, yeah, this is the kind of this is. This show is the antithesis of what the market's demanding people thinking and talking about things with no, no explosions at all. Uh, it's probably the wrong way to go anyway. Um, this is. Is this a breakthrough in the image generation? No, right, in fact, I had just seen some Homer Simpson, uh AI art where the Simpsons characters is real people and I thought, oh, that's cool, and I was looking to pull it up, and then I I saw that they were doing the same thing three years ago. I don't know if this is really a breakthrough in any sense. Uh, mid Journey's been doing it. Stable diffusion has been doing it for a few years.

27:27 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Um, but it is just better than any of the other stuff. Like, if you ask mid Journey to draw you an image of Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, uh, it will blend both CEOs and give you two people who are like part of that is a safety thing, I think think Alex.

27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so go ahead. I just think that the real names often are rejected by these tools.

27:51 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Well, I think it's both. So I think this is an advance from OpenAI. And you have this story from Ethan Mollick that I dropped in the document on screen, just talking about how this is something that's being created by the model itself, not just sent out and interpretation then drop back in. So it's native to the large language model and that's what's made it been able to do things.

28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The title of it is no Elephants, because if you ask an AI to create an image with no elephants in it, there almost always are elephants in it, exactly.

28:24 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
So it's listening now because it's in the model, but the other side of this it may also be the humans have tuned it that way right, right. Well it's. They've been dumb, they've been pretty stupid, these models, but they're getting smarter. And you're seeing that, uh, that ethan is also saying create an infographic, and he's giving it the exact text and it's pulling it off. Yeah, he's telling it to have an otter. Uh, hold that infographic, and it can do it. And he's saying have the make the otter an action figure and it's doing that.

28:51
So it's obviously, it's definitely pretty impressive, yeah, but the fact that it's smarter and combined with a pullback on safety, or refusals, if you're, if you want to take that perspective. That, I think, is what's made this launch so dramatic, is that it's both a better model and it will refuse you less Like. For instance, we've shown it imitate famous studios. We've shown it imitate the Simpsons. We've shown it put celebrities and public figures.

29:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stuff that it was barred from doing in the past.

29:19 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
right, Correct it was not doing it before. So what OpenAI has done here is it's shown a real advance in its artificial intelligence by making this native to the large language model, and it's taken down those safety precautions and basically let the Internet go buck wild. And that's what we have as a result and that's why we're melting OpenAI servers right now it is kind of a her moment.

29:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're right's, it's, it's open, ai saying screw it, let's make it sound like, uh, scarlett johansson. They did hire an actress uh, not scarlett johansson to create that voice, but she sounded just like scarlett johansson yeah, at the end of the day this is the.

29:56 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
You know, this is the very moment that google and openai are going to washington and asking the trump administration to basically take all legal restriction restrictions off them when it comes to copyrighted work. They basically are saying we should have fair use on absolutely everything, and I think the administration will be, uh, open to that, don't you think?

30:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is a sea change in in washington about all of this. The binding administration really wanted to administration really wanted to stop AI a little bit and and and really focus on safety with David Sachs. In is the AI and cryptos are in the White House. By the way, david sex compadre and I may regret this, jason calacanis will be on the show next week and I will ask him, I will actually ask him. Well, I'm gonna ask him a lot of things, but, uh, among other things. Uh, I will ask him.

30:43
Well, I'm going to ask him a lot of things, but, among other things, I will ask him what the administration's plans are for ai, because I think that he that what's happened is trump has been convinced by saxe mark andreessen, sam altman and others that if we don't do it, the chinese will. This is so analogous to what happened in 1939, when the physicists albert einstein and leo zillard wrote a letter to roosevelt saying you gotta develop an atomic bomb because the nazis are gonna, and roosevelt took it to heart, created the manhattan project. Uh, you know, we have now created the equivalent of 10 or 20 manhattan projects in term of terms of spend and and effort put into it to create agi, and I think that trump's been convinced that if we don't do this, that the chinese will, and if they do, we're in trouble do you agree?

31:38 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I'll be really curious to see. I mean I, when you have jason calacanis on, I would. I would really want to know did the gamble pay off? Because you saw Andreessen and all these guys.

31:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They bet on the new administration. That's right.

31:50 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
They bet hard on this new administration and did it pay off, because you're seeing other people who bet hard on it not have it pay off. So Zuckerberg, who put a million dollars of his own money into all that stuff, he's still going to face the music with the FTC, supposedly. The new FTC head says you know he's going to go after him anyway.

32:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean Google as well. Yeah, I mean they bowed down and kissed the ring and now they're in legal trouble.

32:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not enough to kiss the ring. You've got to give the ring a quarter of a trillion dollars.

32:22 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I think we've learned that well and even and we just don't know moment to moment what, that we don't know how the mood is going to change from the very top. So we know, I will ask, I don't know, I don't know yeah, I don't.

32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I would. I don't think. Jason is a uh full mega, so it's going to be very interesting. He was for a long time very close to elon musk and when musk bought twitter he was one of the cadre of uh. People brought in uh to it to whisper in elon's ear now elon's was jumping on the ground day for him yeah, yeah, uh.

32:52 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
So I you know, yes, we'll have lots of questions for jason, and he knows I was in favor of uh letting these ai generators uh run wild and take the safety controls off. But somebody in the discord turned the four of us into muppets. And now I'm in favor of.

33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I knew that this is what I wanted, the screenshot for. I knew the creativity of our club twit members would take over. And and do we? Are we good looking muppets? Oh, I bet no, no we're going to turn to one on why am I blue?

33:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
and why is he in?

33:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a dog. That's what I want to know that's a little concerning.

33:29 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, okay, I mean I look like beaker.

33:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not very happy about this I think it's uh, I like it wolf right, thank you, pretty fly for a sci-fi guy or a cis guy. Appreciate that. That was creation of our, of our club twit, uh, very interesting. Um, you know, the question that we are continually asking and it's getting boring now is will ai at some point cross that final threshold and become as creative, as talented, as intelligent as actual human beings? Is the singularity near? We just had Ray Kurzweil on two weeks ago on intelligent machines. He says that 2029, five years, four years from now, ai will be the equivalent of human imagination and human intelligence and that by 2045, the singularity will happen where it actually surpasses us. You guys, just quickly before we move to a break I don't know.

34:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm kind of look on it in the same way that, um, you know, I look on sort of advanced fusion techniques and that sort of thing. It's always 10 years away but it, you know, we're moving slowly towards it.

34:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
2045 that's reasonable. Quantum cryptography, quantum computing, fusion and artificial super intelligence all are just around the corner it often feels like it may never happen. It's like zeno's paradox it will always be just a little bit away or something could snap and it could happen, and the world would change in all three of those circumstances dramatically, in ways unknown to us at this point.

35:06 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yes, it doesn't have to get there to have a profound impact on us. Oh, it already has. That we agree. The stuff that we're seeing already is going to change the way that we work.

35:16
It's popular in some areas to just be so anti-AI and say the whole thing is going to collapse which it might, because there's so much money invested and we need to see an ROI on that investment, or at least the investors do. But the other side of this is it's already so useful there is a path now that we're seeing, with some of these reasoning techniques Everybody's introducing different forms of agents that it's going to be able to do a tremendous amount of the work that we do already. So, whether or not we, you know, officially, like OpenAI, declares AGI and emancipates itself from Microsoft, I think that this is just going to be like such a world. It already is and it will continue to be a world changing technology. Just think about how what we saw over the past five days is going to change advertising. Every ad mock-up is now going to go through this chat. Gpt image generation.

36:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How much of that do you think is because of safety being ignored, like they decided? You know the safety thing was a mistake. Let's just let it all hang out.

36:21 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Well, I don't think they would say that safety was a mistake.

36:23
But certainly the guard rails off is taking off the guard rolls that will create more um, you know, many more applications, and I think it's a good thing that in the beginning of this, the um, the research houses, erred on the side of refusal, because they didn't want everybody to go around and do what they had done previously with chatbots, which is the internet would always turn these bots into Nazis. I remember reporting on Tay, which was one of Microsoft's early chatbots. I wrote the story, I pinned it to my profile on Twitter, I went to sleep, I woke up and I had a hundred messages saying can you please take down the Nazi story from here and in?

36:59
that amount of time in like 12 hours, the bot had become a Hitler supporter, and so I do think that it's smart for them to have decided okay, we don't want them, the bots to go that route. This is a new technology. It's not like taking answers out of a database. It's learning from its responses. But I think they've gotten to a point where they're pretty comfortable, and now they're going to start to loosen it a bit to make the products more useful. So that's what we're getting to, and when they're more useful to go to your point, Leo they are going to really change the way that we work and the way that we live. You have a piece. The coding thing is amazing Just being able to code up a piece of software. So I think this is pretty wild.

37:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have a piece that you just wrote that says yeah, I'm starting to think AI can do my job after all. That's right.

37:46 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Not your job, though, right? Well, I wouldn't say it can do my full job, but it can do parts of my job, and this is basically the history of this piece is last year.

37:55
For the Boston Globe, I wrote a story that said wait, chet BT didn't take my job, and it was this story basically kind of mocking the bots and mocking this narrative that AI could talk and therefore we're all going to be out of work, and this story was the follow-up, and basically I said listen, last year that was true, but this year I'm starting to see things from the bots that are making me a little bit nervous and the story that I have a couple stories in there, but the one that really you know inspired the piece was I spoke with this journalist, evan Ratliff, who has a great podcast called Shell Game, where he clones his voice and attaches it to GPT models and then puts like 8000 biographical words in there to let it learn to be him and go out and be him.

38:37
And and he came on my show. We talked about this he told me that the bot went out and did an interview with a tech CEO and got better stuff than he did because the tech CEO felt less pressured, he knew that the bot was going to be open to what he's saying and he knew he basically had unlimited time to get his point across.

38:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of like Errol Morris's Interrotron you know where he interviews people from the other room so they feel more comfortable. That's interesting, exactly.

39:05 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And so I think that experience isn't going to be unique to journalism and customer service, for instance. People are going to feel more heard by customer service bots that will listen to them Really.

39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because people right now hate bots and they hate voicemail but they're getting better.

39:19 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Remember the Scarlett Johansson thing? I know I kind of said it as a joke in the beginning, but if people believe that this voice can approximate what Scarlett Johansson did in her, it flirted with him and probably we're going to see a lot of people fall in love with these bots. I'm not kidding.

39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I spoke with the replica. He was the first. Yeah, he was the one that tried to break his marriage up, but since then we haven't heard many stories about this.

39:43 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I spoke with the Replica CEO not long ago and she said she's been invited to multiple weddings between people and their AI bots.

39:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, oh, for goodness sake.

39:53 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And this is the technology is going to get way way better. So think about this If the technology has the ability to make you fall in love with it, is the technology going to have the ability to handle your customer service request when it doesn't have a metric of getting you off the phone as quick as possible, which is how human customer service has, because they need to handle volume to justify the costs. Like that's where we're headed.

40:16 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean this is the thing, right, it's like. I mean, I think Alex is exactly right that this thing does not have to be, you know, in any kind of like philosophical or even scientific sense, agi for it to fulfill all the, you know the necessary to check all the boxes for a human being to feel, you know, heard on the phone, or you know, heard by a virtual girlfriend or whatever like that. You know, the human, the human, you know, attack surface is very pliableiable.

40:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We are really workable when it comes at the same time. We've learned that, haven't we? Yeah?

40:51 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean, but we're, but we're at this place, we're like like we're suckers, we're suckers and this stuff is right up against. You know, anthropic has this new model context protocol that you can just turn loose to write code and it'll bang out anything you want. I just think, think every one of these. I'm like there goes my job, there goes your job, there goes that job. And and we are not. You know as much as these people who build these systems say, oh, we're going to now just live a life of leisure. There's no moment in the history of capitalism where that's ever been true. You know, know. So I just think, like all of this can be, is going to be, it's, you know, as soon as this thing can do a reasonable simulation of a human thing, it's going to be allowed to do that. And humans who do that for living, that's probably this year that's right, that's right I mean it's just around the corner.

41:39 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
My weird hot take on this is that, um, there's this theory that like, okay, okay, once they get smart enough, the robots will enslave us and we'll just work all day on behalf of the robots. And if you think about, like just the U S economy, I mean we're spending $300 billion this year Exactly. The tech giants are going to spend $300 billion this year on CapEx. Most of that's going to go to AI servers. That's a huge part of like the profits in our economy going towards feeding the AIs. We're already there.

42:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that the scary argument that what's happening really is that these super rich billionaires and these giant companies would like to replace human beings. We're a problem for them. We cost them money. We go on strike. We don't want to do defense work, just get rid of all of them. And here's the problem with that. There's a big problem the supply side problem. If, if, or actually the demand side problem. If you get rid of all the people, if you, who's gonna buy your stupid product? Right, you need people on the other side of what you're making to buy it, and if you fired them all, they won't have any money to buy it.

42:48 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean, sam Altman has this famous quote that he has a. There's a bet going in the text group that he's in, between a bunch of these CEOs as to when the first billion dollar single person company will come along. And already you're seeing these companies come on Any day now. Yeah, yeah. These companies are already out there that are pulling down hundreds of millions of dollars in recurring revenue and have like 20 employees.

43:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if that's a good thing. I mean, is that a good thing? Well, this is the thing.

43:15 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Like who's going to? You know, I don't care how big a house you build, you're not going to be able to employ that many plumbers. You're not going to be able to employ that many true driveway graders. It's like who's gonna live? How are we gonna live if, if only?

43:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how are we gonna live?

43:29 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
if each of these people have a single billion dollar company, there's only a certain number of them that are going to be available.

43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know how many billionaires can there be? Yeah, exactly using these products is it billionaires for billionaires. Two, four billionaires by billionaires. Maybe you know this is why I start a new company fbbb.

43:48 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, this is why I fully imagine like building a little studio in the backyard of our home in california so that my kids can live there, because I just don't know where they might want to grow tomatoes, green beans, just you know, get you know, generate your own electricity cow, I'm sure.

44:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Take a well loose rules on cows in the backyard. Let's move up here to petaluma. There's a law that says you anybody can have a chicken farm if they want it. Everybody has chickens here that's right.

44:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Chickens and butter right chickens and butter.

44:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we had anthony aguirre on uh intelligent machines a couple of weeks ago. He founded with elon musk and nick bostrom and others that keep the future human uh society or institute and he is very he was very concerned that artificial super intelligence and the key to it from him, from his point of view, was autonomous. Artificial super intelligence would just say we don't need the humans. In fact, the humans are consuming resources we need, so screw. Say we don't need the humans. In fact, the humans are consuming resources we need, so screw them. We don't need them, they need us, we'll see, we shall see.

44:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was like dean banks's idea where they sort of treat us like pets and it will be very amusing occasionally.

45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what ray kurzweil told me 30 years ago when I asked him about this. He says don't worry, they'll think of us as their mother and father and they'll revere us and honor us.

45:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, it's his mothering Sunday in the UK at the moment.

45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, happy mothering Sunday. We had Gary Rivlin on last week. His book AI Valley just came out Fascinating history of AI. This coming Wednesday, Keech Hagee will join us. He just published an excerpt from his new book on AI which comes out this week. You're, there's a lot of competition for your for your book, Jake. His book on AI has the kind of explosive inside story of how Sam Altman got fired and rehired. Somebody needs to do that story it's a well, he's got it.

45:40
It's got. He did a lot of research. He got a great story. Uh, there is a good excerpt in the Wall Street Journal. Anyway, we'll be talking about that on Wednesday. Cory Doctorow joins us the following week. Harper Reid is going to be on. He's going to talk about vibe coding. Actually, he does more like pair programming with AI, so that'll be interesting. He's a coder, so we've got some interesting people coming up.

46:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Cory Doctorow interesting people coming up.

46:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cory cory doctor is a real pain to interview because, everything he says sounds like a great quote and it's just like I can't just, yeah, you know, transcribe basically when we have him on, have you been on with him on the show? Because when we have him on, we try to get only one other person and some and we just shut up yeah, I've, I've been on with him and it's I.

46:19 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I get exactly what you say. Just ask him. Ask him about bb BBC Sounds. He'll just go on for 10 minutes about that. Yeah.

46:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Didn't they do the original Hitchhiker's Guide? I think they did.

46:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
BBC yes, BBC.

46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sounds presents Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

46:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Unfortunately, they're about to cut off overseas users, so I'm going to be that's okay because we're about to cut off NPR and pbs.

46:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know it's just, we'll be living in this desert, this this cultural desert.

46:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, radio for europe might actually survive. There's a bunch of european governments talking about keeping it fun, that's interesting so yeah, yeah, because they defunded voice of america.

46:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, interesting. All right, we're going to take a little break. When we come back, we should talk about the signal story, we will, the signal saga I don't know how much there is to say about it, but we will. And if you, if you have a minute or two, watch the saturday night live cold open from last night, because it was hysterical and it was a group chat with a bunch of teenagers and pete hagseth, it was great. I think marco rubio joined it a little bit later on. Uh, we have a great panel. This is, uh I I'm sorry, jake, it's going to be a long one. I tried, I really did. We have lots to talk about. It's great to have one new person and we're really thrilled to have Jacob Ward with us, his newsletter and podcast, theripcurrentcom. It feels like you belong instantly, so we're, so. I feel like I'm home. I really yeah these are your people.

47:52
Yeah, alex canterwitz, who I love, uh, who is doing such great work at the big technology podcast and newsletter, big technologycom incredible interviews. Of course, ian thompson, who is the last ink stained rich in the. Actually there's no ink involved, is there and you're?

48:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
no, no, we've been online all the all for our entire 27 year history, but um, yes, it's good, yeah, it's, I don't.

48:17
I do like internet journalism, I don't. The problem with dead tree publishing was if you made a mistake, it was locked in there forever, at least with the internet. Then it's kind of like if you made a mistake, it was locked in there forever, at least with the internet. Then it's kind of like if you make a spelling mistake, yeah, you can fix that, but yeah, still still battling away on a day-to-day basis covering the news doing great stories.

48:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the one of your stories was was food for conversation on intelligent machines this week. I don't remember which one, but we did talk a lot about you, just so you know. Okay, fair enough, it's good to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by NetSuite. You know, if you listen to this show, you probably understand that a lot of what we talk about is trying to understand what's ahead. Right, what does the future hold for business? The problem is, if you ask nine experts, you're going to get 10 answers. Rates are going to go up, rates are going to go down, inflation's going up, inflation's going down.

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50:08
Speaking of opportunity, download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. It's free right now at netsuitecom slash twit Absolutely free. It'll be a good introduction to NetSuite, what they can do for you, and also a really interesting explainer on AI and how it's going to apply to your business going forward. A little crystal ball for you at netsuitecom twit. We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech and you support us when you use that address netsuitecom slash twit. Thank you, netsuite for the support. So I almost forgot this story until jake said oh, are you going to cover the signal thing? And I went what? Oh? That was this week? Uh, wow, so uh, I'm sure everybody by now knows uh that the uh secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the dni, uh, telsey gabbard, the uh who was mike waltz, he's intelligence something.

51:15
Uh, we're all in a security advisor security, national security advisor, ns, nsa. Uh, we're all in a signal chat, which was a little weird. Uh, that accidentally also included jeffrey goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the atlantic. Uh, goldberg published it and at first he thought this is somebody's pranking me. This is, this can't be real. Jd Vance was in there. Director of the CIA, john Ratcliffe, um Scott besent the secretary of treasury, stephen Miller. I mean, this was a, this was a in a heavy duty group. He thought this is a joke until they put details of an attack on the Hooties, including time and date. And then an hour later it happened and Jeffrey Goldberg, who's sitting in his car looking at the news, is going this wasn't a fake, there's no way this couldn't have been real. Uh, and wrote about it. Now there's been a lot of noise ever since. Uh, hegseth not only denied it, but but called goldberg names, at which point goldberg said I'm not a liar. In fact, here's more stuff that I held back.

52:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, they were saying it wasn't classified, so why not publish it in that case? You know?

52:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it wasn't war plans, it was attack plans, please, any event. Uh, there's been general denial. You did it. You had a great uh podcast actually, jake, about what do they call it? Dorvo, darvo, darvo, yeah, oh, man, don't get me started. This was Darvo in a nutshell, right I?

52:51 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
had the same thought and you see it at every level of government in the response to this. So Darvo, for anybody who doesn't know, was coined by a researcher named Dr Jennifer Fried, who wasa guest on the Rip Current podcast, and she coined this term way back when Clarence Thomas was being confirmed and Anita Hill came forward with her accusations, and she had come up with this acronym to describe the way that people accused of wrongdoing public figures accused of wrongdoing defend themselves. And the acronym stands for deny, attack, reverse, victim and offender, and it is an incredibly effective way of disorienting and deflecting accusations. And she documented it over time, you know, through, like the Kavanaugh hearings.

53:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have to say they've polished it considerably since Clarence Thomas. It is the language of politics now.

53:40 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
It is the language of politics, and the response to this is exactly that. You know. You see the press secretary being asked, you know, but aren't these classified plans? The rest of it, and well, it's, you know this is at the hands of a, of a democrat, uh, you know a journalist who's, you know this down the other.

53:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you know just the reversal mechanism, yeah, nobody was texting war plans, and that's all I have to say about it. They were attack plans in any event. In any event, there is a tech story here, which is that, in any event, there is a tech story here, which is that they were using Signal, which is widely considered to be good, excellent, in fact encrypted communications. Our own security guy, steve Gibson, on Tuesday, did point out that Signal is encrypted in the air, but the actual messages are decrypted so that you can read them, and so on your personal phone, they are decrypted. He also mentioned that we've had a hard time getting the Chinese out of our phone system, and so it's very likely that, well, the truth is, signal is probably appropriate for you and me, but not for the Department of the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, the DNI, the CIA director, to communicate top secret information.

54:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, there were two things that struck me about. This was, first off, there was a story went out that the FBI, that the NSA, had warned that there was a vulnerability in signal. Not quite true, there's a vulnerability in our handsets, as you point out. But also, why are they using Signal, you know?

55:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we have. It's illegal, as far as I know, for them to use Signal for this.

55:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, this is it. You have records laws. They have hardened communications.

55:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's why I think they were using it. They wanted to have deleting messages. In fact, many of those messages were set to delete. A court has now ruled that they may not delete them, that they must preserve. They don't get the the federal records.

55:33 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, well, and they don't go, he's got a copy?

55:40 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
just ask, jeffrey I mean I do love the administration was like we've been very transparent about this whole situation. It's like, yeah, you invited a journalist, right how does he get invited?

55:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, I use signal. As far as I know, in order to invite somebody to a group chat, you either have to have their signal handle or their phone number, right?

56:00 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I think there's little doubt that, um, he was texting with administration members and, yeah, they just brought him in.

56:06 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean, it doesn't happen by or he's an incredibly well sourced guy and of course he'd be, he'd be in regular chat communication with some a couple of those people here's my suspicion completely unfounded.

56:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Somebody was in on that chat, knew this was going on maybe it had gone on before knew it was illegal and covertly included Goldberg, because he you, you know is in effect a whistleblower.

56:33 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Not probably one of the names we know. This seems dumber than that. No, it was added by Mike Waltz.

56:38 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It was added by Mike Waltz. But we know he was added by Waltz, so that had to happen, I think, from Waltz's phone, so it's not like someone, waltz, says he never has talked to Goldberg.

56:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's lying.

56:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, yeah, walt says he never has talked to Goldberg. He's not Goldberg. Well, yeah, I mean, there's a picture that came up on the internet almost immediately after he said that of the two standing next to each other at an event. I think, honestly, idiocy is possibly the best solution, because there is a senior US government official with the initials JG and he's the trade representative, and I suspect that they just picked the wrong JG.

57:12 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, that's right. That's right. That makes good sense. You know, I have two things I've been thinking about with this. One is, you know, so your typical way of communicating in this way is through these SCIF, these sensitive compartmentalized I don't remember what the IF.

57:25
Security facility yeah, security something, something right, where you got to go into a special room, and if you it's the ultimate return to office, you have to go to the office to use it. If you're a lower level person, only the very highest level people get a skiff built in their houses, and so if you've come up in the-.

57:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, most of these people would have a skiff in their house, right? Well, they would, that's right. But you?

57:46 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
know, when traveling and everything else, it's a pain in the ass. You got to like go. You know you got to get up from your. You know, get up and walk in your bathrobe over to the skiff right. It's a pain and the and this is the twitter generation who want, who aren't built for the patients for that. So that's one thing.

58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Another thing is, I remember when. I remember when obama became president and did not want to give up his blackberry right, but was compelled to use he was failed by the nsa to use a uh uh windows ce phone that he loathed and even talked about it on on the tonight show. That's right. Those days are long gone, right, these guys? The other thing that one.

58:21 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
One thing that's been jumping out at me about this is if you look at the screenshots and benito, I don't know if it's possible to actually put the real screenshots on. I can get them from the atlantic yeah, pull them up here one thing you'll notice in the um, in the writing from hegseth, is uh, there are m dashes in what he writes. So right, if you're if you're a magazine nerd like me came up through magazines you'll like I use m dashes I use m dashes, but it's hard to use them, and you can only use them on a keyboard, you can't use them on a phone.

58:55
I was just playing with signal just now.

58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Signal doesn't have m, even if you put two standard dashes in, it won't convert it to an m dash.

59:02 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Oh, maybe, I don't know, maybe, but uh there's an m dash right here's exit.

59:07
I understand your concerns and fully support you. And if you go down below right, the one, the one apostrophe or one, you know, sorry, just where he's numbering things restoring freedom of navigation for national interest, right, yeah, so somebody was thrown at me. They were like so either he's writing this off screen and cutting it, cutting and pasting it into signal, or, and here's the creepy part did he use chat gbt to write some of these messages? And if you did, how did you? How did you tell it what you wanted your messages to be about you?

59:43
know, I hope he didn't use chat gbt, so I looked at that.

59:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was like maybe he should have had Studio Ghibli emojis instead of the standard flame emojis.

59:53 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Well, the White. House did use the Studio Ghibli illustration in a real tasteless way. That was very tasteless, by the way. I'm glad he stuck with emojis on this one. Yeah, by the way yeah. The idea that he's copying and pasting from chat GPT just seems a little bit too far-fetched for me.

01:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, who knows, just using a keyboard, then that was automatically inserting M-dashes, you think?

01:00:15 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
That's a really interesting point. No, no, I just looked on Signal. You can have an M-dash if you do two dashes.

01:00:19 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Is that right? Can you do it? Yes, you can If you just do two dashes, it'll turn into a converter journalist on Fox.

01:00:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He might have, he might have the same love of M dashes that you do Jake?

01:00:32 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, it could be, could be.

01:00:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My favorite, dui hire, but yes, Do you, do you use M dashes, Ian? Oh yes, oh yes I love M dashes.

01:00:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it's. It's just one of those things, if you see it. If you see it, then you know it's. Yeah, that's where that's proper and good.

01:00:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is it a setting that you have to turn on, Alex, or is it?

01:00:54 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
No, you just open signal on your phone.

01:00:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I'm doing it right now.

01:00:57 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It might also be operating system specific. But yeah, you go to. I have an iPhone. I hit one, two, three. On the bottom of the keyboard I hit dash twice. It is space.

01:01:10 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
It turns into nice and m dash.

01:01:11 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Oh well, there goes your theory, jake I don't know.

01:01:13 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, maybe, but maybe I mean, I like it's a, we can agree.

01:01:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's egregious enough without using chat, gpt, right, we're yeah, we don't know I hope he's not using that well, I was reading up on defense news over the weekend and there's a lot of very angry soldiers about talking about this, because it's like if we did this we'd be in leavenworth. You know, serving time. You know quite why, uh, you know the secretary of state for defense is allowed to get away with it is it's another question well, he's not going to get fired, according to trump.

01:01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But uh, there should be a lesson learned here. Right, don't use signal. Lesson number one, right, will they be forced to use skiffs? And uh, there is. I understand, I don't know, but the I saw stories that said the dod does have a secure messaging platform it can use.

01:01:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, oh, definitely, yeah, and they should be used in these kind of circumstances. I mean, one of the people in this group chat was actually in russia when they signed on to the chat on a, you know, on a foreign visit.

01:02:04
So which has been trying to break signal forever yes, exactly Exactly, but it's so much easier just to. It's kind of like the old XKCD argument. Do you break through you know very high level encryption using hundreds of thousands of data centers, or do you get a $5 wrench and beat the IT administrator up and he gives you the password and it's the same thing with this Signal is totally secure, but individual handsets aren't, and that the key yeah, in order for you to read it, it must be decrypted.

01:02:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is decrypted on your handset if your handset has been uh cracked which, by the way, is still happening, pegasus, yeah, uh, there's still, you know, malware out there that can zero, uh, click um, hack a iphone. Um, you shouldn't be using your personal handset for this. But you know, what I don't know and I this would be a good story for somebody to do is what does, what does uh the government do with these people? Do they replace their personal phones? Do they have a business, you know, a government phone that's secured or guaranteed secured? One of the complaints that uh security researchers have about apple's iphone is they can't tell often if the phone has been compromised. Yeah, because apple locks everything down so well.

01:03:24 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was gonna say I mean, if you're at that level of government, you really should have a dedicated handset which is just used for critical information. Yeah, keep your personal handset for personal stuff, but for really serious stuff like this, you've got to basically get the NSA will do you a custom stripped down mobile operating system which is very secure and very hard to break into, and that should be used.

01:03:46 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You would imagine also that these people in that group chat are the ones that are like top of the list of other countries to hack. And if they do have those stripped down handsets, I don't think this is the ones that they were using, given that they have a journalist phone number or signal username in there.

01:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Absolutely. Oh well, there's. I mean so much ink has been spilt on this story, I know, and all of us reporters are like why can't that happen to us?

01:04:12 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I know that's the easiest scoop Goldberg ever got. No kidding, I thought he handled it quite well though he was very careful about what to reveal.

01:04:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He had another reporter from the Atlantic working with him side by side to validate information. I thought he handled it.

01:04:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I also thought it was risk.

01:04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a risky thing for him to do. Do you feel like he understood that what he was doing could end up putting him in prison?

01:04:41 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Oh, I think he absolutely I mean he absolutely did the whole the, the. This is the. My greatest complaint about journalism is that it doesn't. We don't do a good enough job of explaining what we do and how we do it. And in this case, I think he did a pretty good job of explaining. Here's how we made the decisions we did about the timing of the release of this. So that, and I and you know, and every single thing he did went by a lawyer, no question, who I'm sure figures in this shows that there's no intent to inform a military adversary or any of that stuff, you know. But yeah, the, the, the, the rock steady process by which Goldberg and his team seems to have gone through this was really a Testament to it and as part of why it's sticking around, which is really hard to beat him up on his, on his process. But, yeah, I totally woke up this morning with a. If like, this is the problem with being a journalist when you see great from other people, it fills you with self-loathing. Why aren't they?

01:05:42
texting me how can I get?

01:05:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in their phone book seriously and to be honest.

01:05:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean they also haven't released the full't released the full text string from the chat, because in one case there was a member of a serving CIA member was mentioned by name. It is remarkable, though, that this information leaked out, because when you go through the chats they're really quite detailed, in that one of Houthi's top bomb makers, for example, was observed going into his girlfriend's apartment. So they leveled the apartment building and, having that level of detail, they must have had someone on the ground and have, like, burned that source. Now, well, that's right.

01:06:19 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
The Israelis were supposedly very upset about that, about that particular thing.

01:06:23 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I just could not even imagine being Jeff Goldberg at that moment where you're like he was in Austria, I believe, at the time. Berg, at that moment where you're like he was in Austria, I believe, at the time and saw these texts start to pour into his phone and go from. There's no way these people who are like using emojis are like serious and this has to be some sort of operation to then you see the bombs hit and be like that was real. It's crazy.

01:06:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Just the shift is must've been totally nuts for him Must've been a fantastic uh, you know just, there would have been a fist pump going on. I think, to be honest, even though people have just died, this is like yes, the story's confirmed, we're going to run with this there'll be a movie let's hope it's not created by chat gpt a ghibli film, a ghibli jib.

01:07:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Studio Ghibli presents the signal group uh in recent weeks. Who added Goldberg? That's good. Who added Goldberg? That'd be good. I like it. You know what I might, after the show, have it written in the style of Neil Simon and Aaron sorkin, and we can.

01:07:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We can, uh couldn't make some of this stuff up because the um senate and house were having intelligence briefings this week and so, um, they got all people like tulsi gabbard and the rest of them in front of the senate intelligence committee and we're asking them about this and she's like I don't recall anything critical being done. And then he released the second tranche of messages as they were at the house of representatives intelligence briefing and it was like so did you lie to us or what you know?

01:07:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
couldn't be my. And then you know what though? Uh you're, they're gonna escape with impunity?

01:08:02 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
there's no can you imagine if a democrat had done this? That would be, that would have been, you know you, they'd still be hearings for years.

01:08:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hearings for years. Uh, in recent weeks, customs and border protection agents have been searching through the phones of people coming into the united states. A doctor coming in on h-1b visa was deported to lebanon after they cpb found quote sympathetic photos and videos of hezbollah leaders. A french scientist was turned away after a device search unearthed messages criticizing trump administration's cut to research programs. That's enough to get you sent back home. This is the story from the verge. Uh, courts have gone back and forth over whether the police and ice and cpb can go through your personal electronic devices. They don't go through very many of them. Do you worry? Uh, ian, you're not a, you're a green card holder. That's great.

01:09:01 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yes, do you come and go to the?

01:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
united states. Do you wipe your phone and devices before you cross the border? What do you do?

01:09:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
generally I haven't, um, just simply for convenience. I mean, if I go to Black Hat or DEF CON, then I'll take a burner phone and use that, but that's not because you're worried about the government, no, no. But I mean, but also, you see, if you do take a burner phone because I've been talking to a lot of people about this over the last couple of weeks, because things, as you say, they've really cracked down on it and I think it would be more suspicious to have a burner phone and the way the law is at the moment, you could still be asked to sign into your online services.

01:09:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They now search your social media. So unless you scrub your social media, it doesn't matter what you do on your phone.

01:09:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, trump announced this week that, basically, if you're applying for a visa, you are now going to have to hand over your social media details and they will be gone through Supreme.

01:09:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Court ruled in 2014 that warrantless searches of cell phones violated the Fourth Amendment, with the exception of the border. Yeah, Courts have held the border searches quote are reasonable simply because they occur at the border.

01:10:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Although not just at the border, because the border technically is, I think it's either 100 miles or 150 miles from my border.

01:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you live in New, Hampshire or Vermont, yeah, anyway, anywhere you go, anywhere you go, or Maine, anywhere you go. Um, I do know people I think uh well, I won't say any names, but people we know do wipe their stuff or carry chromebooks and and uh and power wash them before they cross the border. Uh, some people have uh international travel phones, but that was just a few years ago now. If you're a us citizen, you have the right to say no to a search, um, but they can hang on to your phone.

01:10:46 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
They are not allowed to bar your entry, but they can hang on to your phone.

01:10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are not allowed to bar your entry, but they can keep your phone, laptop or other devices and go through them. Permanent residents that's what you are right. Yeah, I'm a permanent resident. You can refuse a search but you may end up in airport jail, which, as I understand it is no fun. No, if someone with a green card leaves the US for more than 100 days 80 days. If someone with a green card leaves the US for more than 180 days, they're screened for inadmissibility upon returning to the country.

01:11:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Green card holders who have certain offenses on their records may also be deemed inadmissible. Yes, it is a worry because my mom's of a certain age and it's just like if I had to rush over there, could I rush back the way things are going at the moment you've just got to be incredibly careful. The thing that scares me is, as a us citizen traveling abroad, I'm worried about retaliation um well, british customs officers I can't say the word uh are notoriously grumpy and lacking a sense.

01:11:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So are mounties by the way, people think mounties wear big hats and save people from waterfalls, but no, mounties are scary and uh, I have faced uh customs and border patrol going into canada and it's it's been difficult, even though that border is no joke, it isn't a joke it's intense and and given and I this breaks my heart because I love can.

01:12:11
I worked in canada, I love canadians. Some of my best friends and many of our best artists hail from north of the 49th parallel. But uh, I they can. Canadians do not like us right now and uh, I can see retaliation I. A lot of canadians have changed their summer travel plans into the states yeah yeah, we're antagonizing them for like no reason.

01:12:37 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean this idea that if you want to go after trade deals, that's one thing, right. I don't think some of the trade deals that we've had and uh, with nafta have worked out in the us best interests and probably we probably should have been smarter before running into free trade the way we did, because we by the way, trump made that deal in his last presidency, exactly but this is the thing, the, the antagonizing for no reason and calling trudeau governor trudeau and calling canada the 51st state.

01:13:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Uh, I, I just don't see how that serves the united states interests it's also back backfired massively because they're going through an election campaign at the moment and the Conservative Party had been easily due to defeat the Liberals. Now that's switched completely because Canada is in the throes of massive nationalism. I was having dinner with a Canadian friend a couple of weeks ago and they're taking it seriously. You know they might if America invades, and he was like, yeah, if they invade, then they'll beat us initially. But it's not just taking the territory, it's holding it, and Canadians are armed and really peeved about this.

01:13:40 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Well, the US is not invading, but it's not exactly being very neighborly. It's not a neighborly moment, shall we say, between us.

01:13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wednesday is Liberation Day, which is the worst name for the day that these tariffs go into effect, including 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico. We know cars are going to cost more. People don't talk a lot about technology, but I imagine iPhones and laptops and computers of all kinds will also cost considerably more yeah, we've upgraded our systems just before the tariffs came in.

01:14:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It was just like right now is the time to buy a decent new computer.

01:14:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
While it's well, you still can at the price that's good for the PC industry, thank you well, no, my wife bought a MacBook, so you know well, and the thing is, I mean, as as much as apple is trying to make iphones, or at least parts for iphones, in the us, it's not not doable in the near future. No, uh, tsmc is building a plant in arizona. That's the company that makes the chips in taiwan for the iphone. But there will be legacy nodes. They won't be the the a processors that they go in the iphone or the m processors that go the apple silicon m processors that go on the laptops. Those are going to come from taiwan and even if if the phones are assembled in vietnam, I imagine they'll still be a consequence yeah, I mean, you can't just spin up a fab just like that.

01:15:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know it takes two, three years and tsmc has run into real problems. They've had to import people from taiwan over here because the skills base just isn't there to get these things built quickly. Right? You know intel is doing the same. They're trying to build, spin up fabs and ask pat gilson how well that went. But you know, I mean, these things take time and tariffs are a very blunt instrument to try and force it and tariffs are a very blunt instrument to try and force it.

01:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we'll see what happens. Um, I, I, you know, I I feel like, if you're gonna buy a car, now's the time, right?

01:15:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
yeah, uh, you have three days tesla's going very cheap now, as I understand it.

01:15:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know uh, actually yesterday was the big national uh protest at your tesla dealership uh day. I don't know how many people were out, but I there were hundreds at our local tesla dealership here in northern california.

01:15:56 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
So well, elon was rage tweeting this morning that calling for the arrest of somebody who gave a finger to a cyber truck owner, and it was just like.

01:16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Didn't he sue the advertisers who were boycotting twitter? Is this different?

01:16:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
well, there's a report in the FT yesterday saying that in fact, major advertisers are spending on Twitter oh, they are now only a token amount just to show that you know that everything's okay between them, but they're not spending what they were let's take a little break.

01:16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will come back, because Elon sold Twitter to himself and uh well, somebody I hope will understand what that means and explain it to us in just a little bit. You're watching this Week in Tech. Great to have our panel here. Alex Kantrowitz from the Big Technology Podcast, always, day one the book about Amazon. Just do you feel like you made the right move Going?

01:16:46 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
independent, absolutely. Yeah, I mean.

01:16:49
I went independent in May 2020. That's when I gave my notice to BuzzFeed. A lot of people said it was really stupid and crazy. I thought it would be worse to stick around. I just had this book come out. I had these ideas that I wanted to pursue and I wasn't spending a lot of money because I was in lockdown. So to me, it was exactly the right moment and it's been quite cool and, honestly, I love in lockdown. So to me, it was exactly the right moment and it's been quite cool and, honestly, I love doing the podcast. I mean, leo, you know this right. It's just a lot of fun to be able to bring people on and talk about what's going on in the news, talk about things that you might be curious about and your perspectives from people that are in it. So I'm loving every minute of it.

01:17:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You do a great job and you get the best guests. Uh, you just had dan hendricks on from the center for ai safety. Amira friday, who does amazing work at the information. Jan lacoon, the head of ai at meta that that was incredible. Reed albergati from uh semaphore um, I know you had uh look Panos Panay Amazing.

01:17:51 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, we've had a good run and we have a very special show coming up on Friday, so everyone should stay tuned for that.

01:17:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a secret?

01:17:58 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
who you're going to have on. I can't say who it is because it's tied to some news being broken in the AI world, but it'll be a good show.

01:18:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, If you're not subscribed. You got to subscribe and the good news is you can subscribe to the podcast for free. You can read the newsletter for free, but you should probably pay for it because there's great content behind the paywall too. Alex kantrowitz, deservedly successful as uh in your independent career. Well, thank you. Do you read japanese? Is that why you have a japanese book behind you?

01:18:29 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
that is so that's my book. Got translated into something like 11 languages, so that's the translation of the book. Wow, that's. It says always day one just in the day does it. But that's the question I see that actually it's chinese.

01:18:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be japanese with the chinese characters, but I do see the character for one with the Chinese characters.

01:18:50 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But I do see the character for one. So there you go, I do see day one. These are the blurbs, so clearly oh, the best blurbs.

01:18:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Awesome, that's fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you, leo. Ian Thompson, also here from TheRegistercom. When's your book coming out, ian? Oh well, I've got three. You must have one in the drawer behind that whiskey bottle.

01:19:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I've got three on the go, so you know it's getting them finished. That's the thing. You just need the discipline.

01:19:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Novels or nonfiction Novels. That's what I figured. I think you should be writing novels, yeah. Yeah, you have a literary style and you do use the em dash, so that's good so that's good.

01:19:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Very well, are they sci-fi? Yes, yes. Um, the problem is, I've read so much science fiction over the years that whenever you write it, then you go back to it the next day and you think no, that's too derivative of gibson, that's too derivative of clark. You know what can you do, so?

01:19:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know how musicians write new music. There's all. There's only a limited number of chords.

01:20:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't know how musicians write interesting facts. It can't cover a breaking news instance yourself to a pig.

01:20:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what you're doing? Well, you know it's just. Oh no, you're a truffle dog. Actually, we saw the uh. We saw the uh chat gpt oh yes, the muppet dog, yes great to have you and, of course, a brand new. He's a newbie but he's fitting right in Jake Ward jacobwardcom and the ripcurrentcom. His book the Loop is out now and, of course, the Rip Current brand new podcast since 2024.

01:20:46 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's right.

01:20:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's good to put that on the wall because 20 years from now you'll look back and go see since know, but since back when humans were doing jobs back when, back when we were working.

01:20:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's right. It's such a just want to say it's a pleasure to be with you, not?

01:21:01
least because this is like I feel like for so many years. I'm sure both alex and ian will agree with this. You know, the this, this beat. You know, thinking about tech was considered this thing just for kind of like upbeat nerds, to just kind of be off in our corner sort of talking about it. And now I mean the reason that I'm doing the rip currentcom is that you know, the Venn diagram of money and tech and billionaires and politics is now collapsing together in this crazy way. And to have been in this game as long as all of us have right and have watched these people, who also themselves were once considered kind of off in some corner of society, now be at the very center of it all, makes you know. That's why I'm trying to do what I'm doing independently, you know, and it's, and it's why I think this beat. You know, once my speech to when I worked at NBC and before that at Al Jazeera, I just kept trying to say to people like this is the sort of lingua franca, this is the universal language.

01:21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, If you're being literate in this stuff is how you are going to understand why all of this other stuff happens. Yeah.

01:22:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's kind of crept into the mainstream. It's interesting that some you remember we used to have, you know, tech editions of some newspapers.

01:22:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, that's gone because tech is mainstream ones yeah, yeah uh, I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. Back back in the day, when they did tech on tv, they had a picture of a hand moving a mouse and a guy looking at the screen and the screen scrolling up. And they just roll that over and over again.

01:22:36 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
What is internet? Allison? What is internet? Yeah, what is internet At?

01:22:42 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
NBC News. I used to you know the format was that you would write your piece, you get it done and then you're handing it off, typically to an editor, who who edits it, and you find it because it's breaking news, you're, you're seeing it for the first time along with the rest of the united states in the world, and so you don't get much input on the edit and and I and my I always had like this little speech I would give to any new editor I was working with to be like no dark typists, no, like hoodie, no hoodies. Hooded hackers, yeah, and no zeros and ones streaming. There's such cliches yeah, that's interesting.

01:23:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's a friend who got in contact with me, who I used to work with, and she sent me a copy of my very first tech article from 1991 and it was about this thing called multimedia, where you could embed pictures and text and, someday, video into a document. It was a hilarious read. Looking back, it really is amazing Our show today.

01:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, great to have all three of you. We have more to talk about, of course, because Jake is expecting a three-hour show and gosh darn it. I'm going to deliver Our show today, brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data expert since 1985. And what I love about Melissa yeah, they've been doing this for what is that? 40 years now Amazing. But they don't rest on their laurels because they have been acquiring companies. They've been adding AI.

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01:27:10
So, elon musk, you actually. Here's a picture of jacob standing in front of the twitter headquarters for nbc news. The day that elon bought twitter november 2023 for 44 billion dollars. He didn't want to. The delaware courts made him. Actually it's 2022, wasn't it? It's gosh, I can't believe it's. It's been two and a half years. Um, well, now he has somehow managed to move twitter, 33 billion dollars worth, into xai. He says xai bought. But that's nonsense. I mean, what is it? Does anybody understand what happened? Well, it's silence.

01:27:59 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, I mean it's silence.

01:28:01 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
It's like I mean, yeah, go ahead, you take a stab, I'll try. Well, I was going to say.

01:28:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, it struck me as basic financial shenanigans. He manages to offload yeah, basically by himself. Um, and that gets him off the hook for an awful lot of debt that was used to buy twitter.

01:28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, he uh, gave those borrowers xai stock right, so now they're all or I don't know exactly. I think some of it goes to I don't know. Yeah, well, I mean some of it goes to I don't know. Yeah Well, I mean you sort of remember. Is there Twitter stock at all, but neither one is publicly held, right, they're all privately held so. But there are investors. The investors get XAI stock. Is that what it is?

01:28:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's why I'm just sounding and I think he's betting that somehow XAI will ride the same kind of valuations that OpenAI has and that will create this incredible windfall for these investors who are otherwise taking this extraordinary bath on where they're at with Twitter. I don't know enough about and maybe everybody else can help me with this, like isn't there something about the Twitter financing through Tesla shares is coming due or something, and that maybe I think there?

01:29:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was for a while a concern that, as tesla stock falls and it has been in free fall uh, that at some point the the loans will be called. But I think that's over. I think the banks have re-evaluated. I think that's right and I think that that's over.

01:29:29 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Uh, so't I but I think the main thing here is this thing of of this is, you know, must trying to keep his investors in the black. And trying to trying to. You know, as it says it's it's it's just moving the shells around such that the the you know, I mean right, all these companies are, are are ways of leveraging debt, essentially, and, and and betting on a plan. And if he can make the case that X AI is going to somehow go the same way as open AI, then they're all fine with it. You know, and I think at this point, like the normal, like for a lot, for so many years, it was my job to like come on the air every day and be like why is Elon Musk doing this again?

01:30:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
What the hell's going on?

01:30:15 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
He's cost investors so much money and blah, blah blah, but now as the second in command of the United States-.

01:30:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Who's going to cross him?

01:30:24 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, who's going to cross him and what banker? Who doesn't want to be associated with him?

01:30:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think Twitter's worth a lot more now because of that right.

01:30:35
Yeah, so it just feels like the normal rules don't apply to this particular guy anymore if they ever did, and so? So there's an interesting phrase, uh, for the way these people manage their tax debt, called buy, borrow, die, and this is from the budget lab at Yale university. Elon doesn't take money out of these investments, he borrows against them. Yeah, and this is really important because you neutralize your tax. If you took money out, you'd pay taxes on it, but borrowing is not a taxable event. The way, in the same way. And then the, the, so, the, the, so, the so the. Buy Twitter with borrowed money, not real money. If you need cash, you borrow against your Twitter, and that's kind of. He borrowed against Tesla stock. The die part is kind of interesting because you get to pass this on to your heirs. Elon admittedly has many heirs, but you get to pass it on without taxation, because when the assets are inherited, their cost basis is stepped up to fair market value at the time of death. So it's basically a tax avoidance mechanism. It's basically a tax avoidance mechanism, and I have to think that what's happened here with xai and twitter solves a number of problems, but what chiefly? One of them is tax avoidance. Uh, I love axios's story musk shuffles 80 billion dollars in assets, reshapes government.

01:32:08
Just another week at the office. What did you do this week? Did you restructure an entire country, sit for a national tv interview and casually reorganize about 80 billion of your own assets? On the side, if you did, you're elon musk. Uh, last night's deal to merge his ai business, xai, with his social media company, x, is normally something that might consume all of a CEO's time, but Musk did it while running Doge, reshaping the federal government. Incidentally, doge has now announced that they are going to rewrite the social security software written in COBOL. So the Social Security Administration estimated it would take 15 years to rewrite this ancient code base. Musk says we're going to do it in six months. And good news, we're going to do it with the help of ai.

01:32:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, this reminds me of the. This is the. Uh, you know that picture you put up of me standing in front of the twitter headquarters back in 2022. You know the the. That was that phase when he was like want, like going in with pliers to just cut out servers and and he feels like it worked at twitter. He could do it now with the government you know, but it's okay if twitter goes down and you, you know, or you lose your account like no one's dying for nazis takeover or whatever it is right, but in so with social security right, the thing that all of you know there was a.

01:33:33
I was reading a quote from a um, you know an in-house government tech person who was saying you know, you, if you can do it the way, he's going to do it, but you're inevitably going to leave somebody out. They're not going to get paid. They're not going to get paid in time, they're going to get paid too much or too little. You know something's going to break and you know I, my, my parents are just entering the social security collection age and you know it would be a disaster.

01:33:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am on medicare and social security and, uh, I mean, I know many people who are, because we're all in that same baby boomer demographic it is a little chilling to think that they're gonna take that millions of lines of cobalt.

01:34:15
By the way, it's very clear the doge team does not understand cobalt. That's where all that date stuff came from. Cobalt doesn't have a native date format. So that's how people can be 185 years. They don't get to leave they. They just it all started at the same. You know time there's no date for. So they didn't even understand that. That's why they said, oh, we must be paying people. We're 185 years old. No, that's how cobalt works. Nevertheless, they want to completely replace this language. This is a date code in a matter of months, 60 million lines of cobalt code originally released in 1960.

01:34:56 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Good Lord, it's mainframe software shouldn't we want I I don't think it makes sense to go through this recklessly and destroy the social security system. But how are we going to accept the government that's going to tell us that it's going to take 15 years to write a computer, rewrite a computer program? Why would we accept to have our Social Security maintained in an antiquated code? I mean, from the very little visibility that I've had into government software, we should all be outraged at the fact that the government is working on stuff that's decades behind what everybody else is working on.

01:35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to disagree with you on this.

01:35:35 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Just one last thing. If you're going to rewrite the code, of course you're going to want to use like an AI copilot. If every developer is going to be using AI copilots, then you're going to just say I'm going to hand code it for like what reason? Okay, but I'm willing to hear the counter argument.

01:35:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that I'm going to hand code it for like what reason? Okay, but I'm willing to hear the counter argument. But there is. That's exactly the counter argument you just gave it. If it's working, you don't need to rewrite it.

01:35:58 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You know, just by cause it's in COBOL doesn't mean it's bad, but don't you think that eventually, that's not going to be sustainable, leo, because, like, how, how long? Let's say, we have a coding language that's completely antiquated. You know how long are we going to have engineers that are going to be able to maintain these systems? Like don't we want to have systems that are, you know, effectively up with the times? So not only can we disperse funds, but we could also do analysis of these government programs, which, at this point, are opaque government programs which, at this point, are opaque.

01:36:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
One thing I would say is that, yeah, I agree with you that, yeah, having a system that old is less than desirable, but it does work. My worry about this is they're going to do a half-assed job on it and after six months, go right. There's going to be maybe a year or so where things don't quite work, don't work very well, and it was interesting this week they had one of the Doge guys on giving a press conference and he was just like look, my mother takes Social Security. I'm sure she wouldn't mind if a check came a little late once.

01:37:03 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I don't trust them to rewrite. I'm not, I'm not saying. I think they are pointing to a real problem. I don't trust them to solve it.

01:37:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should also point out the air traffic control system is equally old and antiquated. Yeah, ideally you'd rewrite all of this stuff, but you would do it in parallel, you would do with extensive testing and, yes, you would take your time to do it right because an error in an air traffic control system. Do it right because an error in an air traffic control system, I guess an error in social security could really be a life, or death situation.

01:37:38 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You have my vote, Leo. I agree with that a hundred percent and I don't disagree that we need to modernize.

01:37:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and we could do it. I mean, bill Clinton, uh, downsized government considerably, uh, people forget this uh, by letting people retire by, you know, in an orderly fashion. Um, the social security administration was going to rewrite its code that they uh, covid, forced them to. You know, re, uh think that, um, but it's been in the works. I don't think there's a. It's a good idea to rush. This is, I guess, what I'm saying. I agree. I agree.

01:38:13 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
What bothers me about this is that I feel like we're in a country that doesn't, that only has these two categories of reformer, or, I guess, two categories of people with an attitude about reform. One is the position that people have been put into of somehow defending COBOL right. The position that people have been put into of somehow defending COBOL right, like you know that we want to defend the old way the bureaucracy worked. And then the other one is people who want to break it and improve on it, and those people tend to overlap with people who make money off of the improved. You know, the upgrading of technology, and we don't have like that category in the middle technology and we don't have that category in the middle.

01:38:54
There's a fascinating case study of Estonia which, if you want to nerd out on government efficiency, that is an amazing test case. So when Estonia, which was a Soviet holding, passed over into being a Western democracy, you had this explosion of innovation and creativity and all this stuff. Now this is a country of less than 10 million people. So it's not, you know, it's apples and oranges in some ways, but they have a system. Today I talked to the president of the guy who was president at the time, thomas Ilves is the name, and he created a system in which, like today, you can pay your taxes in four minutes on your phone. Which, like today, you can pay your taxes in four minutes on your phone. Any interaction you're going to have with the government you can do on your phone, no problem.

01:39:36
But the reason that it worked so well is that you had these deeply patriotic people who'd been held back under Soviet rule for so long. They wanted to kind of do this right, as a matter of principle almost. And to me, when I see, you know, when I see people from Doge wanting to change the social security administration, I think, okay, you know, I can imagine a version of that in which I trust those instincts and I trust that process. But then I look at them, taking apart the consumer finance protection bureau, which was arguably the most efficient government agency ever, that place, you know, returned, you know, billions in revenue on only hundreds of millions in costs. And yet they wiped that place out because clearly it was a threat to the people in, you know, in power in Silicon Valley. To me, that's where I lose it. But I mean, I agree with you guys that there should be a way to be more efficient.

01:40:31 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
These can all be true. These can all be true that we can get more efficient. We can be outraged at the antiquated software that our government is using, because when we use better software, we can do more things as a government. But we could also be upset at the fact that Doge is not doing this in a sort of way that is logical. Well, I mean after the?

01:40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, the collapse of the aca website, the obamacare website, a number of silicon valley people got together, went to washington dc and the united states digital services was formed. Matt cutts, who was the director until fairly recently, was a regular on this show. Very smart guy, came from google, left his job at Google in order to run this agency, brought in really smart people and worked responsibly to update technology. But what happened, I think, is now, with Doge, you've got basically the same philosophy as Facebook. You know, move fast and break things. This Silicon Valley idea that hey, we're smart, we're quick, we're fast, we're gonna. You know, some things may go through the, but we're gonna make it work. Uh, and I just don't think that's the way to handle these critical mission, critical systems.

01:41:44
Uh, the social security database is a custom database called madam the master. It's not sequel, which, by the way, elon musk said it was. It's the master data access method. It was written in cobalt and assembler for mainframe computers in the 80s. Uh, the uh social security administration again has a modern, had a modernization plan which was put on the back burner in 2017. Um, I think you could. Obviously you should update it, but anybody who's written massive data code bases. Look at microsoft windows let me give you an example which has roughly 60 million lines of code, not in cobalt and C++. It is non-trivial, you know. Yeah, microsoft might say you know, the best thing we could do with this is to rewrite it from scratch. They're not every time they've tried that, by the way, they've abandoned that. I don't think.

01:42:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
If Microsoft can't do it, I don't know if these 25 guys in doge can do it I'm not sure I'm willing to trust my social security if someone calling themselves big balls, to be honest, that's who it is, by the way yeah, yeah, I mean, and I don't think big balls can read cobalt code and understand what it does- no, no, this is it. I mean this is one of the benefits of. For cobalt programmers was y2k, because that did the retirement earnings for an awful lot of people who write COBOL.

01:43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The nice thing about COBOL, by the way, it's good for business logic. You can read it and you can see what it's doing, and it isn't as abstruse or weird as C++, for instance. And just because you didn't grow up writing cobalt doesn't mean you can't look at that code base and make some sense of it.

01:43:38
um, anyway, yes, it's going to be a weird one you know it'd be wonderful if uh if, they could magically create a whole new system. But anybody who's ever worked at an enterprise and tried to replace an existing code base with a more modern code base knows how challenging and risk prone that is and and how things break.

01:44:01 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean if you do break social security, that's a massive political liability and there will be consequences to it.

01:44:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Not all people we vote. Yeah, you just say we vote.

01:44:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Last ones are due well, I mean particularly with the other changes that they're announcing there, where, um, they're shifting to a more you've got to. You can't verify your identity on the phone anymore, is the plan. So you either have to go down to a field office, which are being shut at a rate of not, or you have to go online. Now, a lot of amer Americans either don't feel comfortable online. They've got really lousy internet connections. It's one of those things that seems penny smart pound foolish, to use a British expression. You know, it's just. You're really saving very, very little, with a potential cost for an awful lot of people.

01:44:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I got a little bit head up. I apologize, I'll calm down. Um, all right, another quick break and then we will talk about your dna for sale congratulations. No, you don't get to participate in the sale, sorry just put it in the cobalt system nobody will be able to read it. Yeah, so cobalt's dates begin in 1875.

01:45:16
That's when it was originated yeah, no, I'm kidding, they just did. They didn't, you know. I mean, that's true. In Unix it's 20. Like we're going to reach this 32-bit limit in 2038. Uh, y2k was the same problem because they were only using two digits for the year.

01:45:32 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, so these things happen, but I mean I love the optimism that they say all right, we're just going to code it and we'll we'll fix it which, with what you can't you know, darren oakey, who is a very accomplished programmer in our uh club, says I I've done lots of migration projects over the years.

01:45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's quite feasible, especially with AI. Darren is a big AI partner coding guy. But it would be about understanding how to break off little bits of it, put in comprehensive regression tests, then pour to that bit of it and that's the problem is you know, especially if it was written in COBOL, I doubt it's really very modular, I think it's. That's the problem. It's a big hairball of a program. I don't know if you can break little bits of it off.

01:46:16 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I love how the Discord is now discussing vibe coding social security. I mean, just put a prompt into cloud about a new social security.

01:46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what scares me when they say we're going to use AI, elon Musk taking six months to do it.

01:46:27 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I could do it in an afternoon. Just let me have at it with Anthropix's latest coding tools.

01:46:32 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, bear in mind also, this is an Elon Musk deadline we're talking about. If we'd actually taken his deadline seriously, we'd be on Mars about five years ago. So it's one of those things I don't understand quite why they'd set themselves up with. This must be done by six months, because that just seems to encourage people to make mistakes in a rush to get it done. But yeah, by. This must be done by six months, because that just seems to encourage people to make mistakes in a rush to get it done.

01:46:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, by all means recode it, but test it, test it, test. Yeah, don't put it in production. I mean, that's the problem is they're going to be putting it in production right as quickly as they possibly can we don't know that?

01:47:01 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean, they haven't yet and I don't want to. You know, not that I'm coming to their defense, but we haven't seen them mess this up yet, so I think yeah, but by the time they do, it's too late.

01:47:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too late, but we've seen them mess up quite a lot of other things.

01:47:14 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I'm saying the track record is not great so far correct.

01:47:17 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
But if they mess this up, the political cost, like I said before, right is heavy to pay. Yeah, yeah, let's just keep that in mind before they we, you know say they're definitely going to roll out a broken social.

01:47:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No you're absolutely right and I also agree with you. There is a lot a great case to be made to modernize government, to shrink government. There's a great case to be made. I think that's why there is what support there is for what's going on with doge is because, yeah, these things did need to be done.

01:47:42 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Uh, I don't think anybody denies that I spent a very short amount of time in government and I can tell you that the software that government runs on is awful. It's miserable. It makes government employees less efficient and there should be a prioritization for the government to be able to do this. And the reason why there's bad technology in the government is because the procurement process with the government sort of favors old school software companies that will not build the best in breed technology for the government. We definitely need to fix that. And there's this statement if you work in government long enough, you're going to hear it's called good enough for government work, where people are like it's just the government, I'm going to get 80, 90% of the way there and we'll just kind of wash our hands of it. And we shouldn't be disgusted by that phrase. And that attitude exists within government and with the contractors and the procurement vendors that are getting these contracts to run to build these systems. It's just, it really does not. We should demand more than we're getting there it is astonishing.

01:48:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I went down to NASA JPL for the Curiosity landing on Mars and you know this is 2012. We all went down, we had briefings, very high technology project, that sort of thing, and then when they showed the presentation, it was on a system running Windows XP. And you're like, my goodness, how out of date is this? So you know you're right, government software tends to be pretty poor.

01:49:06 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
But solving it is difficult. I just wanted to be someone who doesn't make money off the product you know, has no, has no.

01:49:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go, there you go yeah, and please don't use grok to do it, okay, I'm just, I'm just begging you grok.

01:49:18 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Now, now is under the same umbrella as twitter, so it's oh, that's really accurate, possibly go wrong.

01:49:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, little break, come back. We do have many more stories to go through and only a little bit of time left, so let's move this, hustle this along with a great team. I could spend all day talking to you, but Jake says three hours Really. So we won't make Jake do that More to come in just a bit. You're watching this Week in Tech, brought to you this week by Oracle.

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01:51:17
Uh, let's see 23andMe. I'm trying to decide. I sent my spit to Susan Wojcicki's 23andMe many, many moons ago. They have it still. In fact, as they've upgraded their hardware, they use a chip to analyze it. I have spent more money to upgrade it. Now 23andMe, unaccountably, is filing for bankruptcy. The CEO, Ann Wojcicki, the founder, has stepped down and a number of organizations, including, I think, the Commerce Department, are saying you know you might want to delete your data If it's sold, whoever buys it will get all that data. It's interesting because Wojcicki, according to Engadget, is planning to bid for it to buy it. Maybe that's why she stepped down, so she could buy it. The Board of Directors Special Committee has previously rejected a proposal from her. Should I be deleting my data? Yes, hell yes, alex, you want to make it unanimous?

01:52:33 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
roll the dice leo and give it to mcdonald's who cares. Let's have a good time with it yeah, who cares?

01:52:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
once valued at six billion dollars last month, down to 50 million. They laid off over 200 employees late last year. Uh, probably the nail in the coffin was in 2023, when hackers accessed the information of almost 7 million customers. 23 me didn't notice that until five months after the breach and didn't announce it until six months after the breach. A month after they discovered it, they did settle a class action lawsuit for 30 million dollars, which you know. If you're making 50 and you settle the lawsuit for 30, you get some idea of why they're in financial, um trouble the california attorney general.

01:53:24
I, I misspoke, it wasn't the commerce department. The california attorney general has suggested that you delete your data yeah, I mean it's.

01:53:32 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It boggles the mind on one level because I mean I understood. I know you can understand the attraction of it. It was a very cute idea. But you know, I speak to the eff probably once a week and you know they would have a chat with them once. You know I speak to the EFF probably once a week and you know they would have a chat with them once over a pint or something. And they're like we're trying to protect everyone's genetic data and they're actually paying a company to read it and store it. It's just kind of it's incredibly frustrating from a privacy perspective. But yes, it's.

01:53:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What could they do? What could they do? What is the, what is the worst case scenario? Let's say I don't delete my data and that somebody buys it. Who would buy it? I don't know.

01:54:08 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Okay, I'll throw one out here. So I'm back in. God, I don't even remember 2018. Maybe I wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine about a field that is still moving but for some reason has not caught a lot of attention, called genoeconomics, and this is people who are it's economists and geneticists coming together and they use this is going to sound like I'm making this up or like it's a science, like it's one of Ian's novels, but this is people using technology genetic technology to make a prediction about social outcomes in their life.

01:54:40
I was standing in a conference room at Stanford when this guy was first trying to explain to me what this was, and I was like, wait a minute, you're doing what? And he's like, yeah, no, we're using genes to predict things like whether you are more or less likely to graduate from a four-year university. And I was like what are you talking about? First of all, why would you do that? And, second of all, how do you do that? And he said, well, I'll do the second one first.

01:55:04
How we do it is using a huge pool of people, and they draw the data mostly from 23andMe, along with the UK Biobank background. Your, you know all these various sort of factors in your life and then put that together with your genetic data, create a predictive score that then can then be ported over to other people. And already you know you already have the opportunity. If you're at a, you know, if you're a couple trying to get pregnant and having trouble and you want to go to a fertility clinic, which is a totally unregulated industry, the fertility clinic is allowed to offer things like you can choose whether you choose to go forward through IVF with the kid who's got the lighter skin or the darker skin or blue eyes or green eyes or whatever it is.

01:56:01
And soon, if this technology keeps going, you'll be able to do things like which one which kid's got a greater chance of going to college or not. So then when I asked this guy hey, what is the other, you know, why would you do this? He's like well, it's because we want to be able to help people make up for difficulties in someone's genetics, such that we can, you know, give them the the better education. This all sounds good.

01:56:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To me, though, what's wrong with this?

01:56:25 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
well, this was the same idea behind the iq test back in the day, which went on to be used to exclude people and do eugenics right. I mean, it's a thing this is. The pattern is that once the market gets a hold of this kind of stuff, it's not about compensating for people's I'm not worried, though.

01:56:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have my medicare and my social security check. It's the insurance. I don't ever have to worry about that. I'm gonna be fine.

01:56:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I'm afraid not no, I mean, this kind of thing is a gold mine for the health insurance industry, particularly when you tie it to information from data brokers. So, for example, does this put you know you've got the genetic material?

01:57:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know how much they earn, you know what they're spending it on, you know what life choices isn't it more valuable to know if I go to duncan every month or every week or every day? Oh yeah, but you get both the more the better.

01:57:12
Yeah, the more information, the better you know I think insurance companies don't worry about that, because what they do in effect, before they insure you and I'm sure you've all been through this is they ask you a lot of questions like how often do you drink, how often do you smoke, do you go to Dunkin' every day? And if you lie on that, then they can deny you. They hope you lie on it because then they can deny you your benefits when you need insurance, when you need to pay off. I don't think. Think that they don't. I don't know. Is there evidence that they're using this information to deny, for instance, insurance to people?

01:57:51 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
no, but there's no law against it. There's there's no rules against that kind of thing, and once that becomes a positive, a powerful enough tool to be as predictive as asking you about smoking, there's no reason that the market wouldn't do it. I mean the other one, right, so there's the insurance one. The other one is that 23andme has complied with all kinds of subpoena requests for all kinds of data to try and lock down uh, you know to, to compare the relatives of criminals to criminals, to try and, like you know, isolate stuff and, and you know the, the people have been caught in fact didn't they?

01:58:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
didn't they finally figure out how zodiac was from from the genetic.

01:58:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was it zodiac or was another? I?

01:58:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
think zodiac is still in question on that we don't know zodiac, but I mean there have been many, many cases where people have got done the 23 and me and found out that guess what one of their parents isn't their parent. You know, I mean that information is is findable and doable, but I think coming but there's some benefit to that.

01:58:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a family member who I think was Ancestry not 23 and me, but who, um, was a long lost son, uh of of somebody in you know, somebody's grandparent, who was reunited with his family. So you know, and they actually my uh, ex-wife just had a big dinner, you know Thanksgiving, with all of the reunited families. Thanks to the genetic information at ancestrycom, I've myself have found second and third cousins on 23.

01:59:14 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
you know I I think it works really well for people who have never experienced. I mean, you know people like me and you, leo, who maybe have not experienced discrimination or wouldn't experience any kind of discrimination on the basis of our genetic backgrounds. But you have this hacker group used that 23andMe leaked data way back when to try to assemble a list of people with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage Right who knows what creepy-ass stuff they were going to do with that.

01:59:41
That's an interesting question you know, like, the ways in which it gets used against people was on that list, by the way, I were you, yeah, I mean, this is the thing you know, like. So so I guess I'm maybe I'm the only one, uh, in this group who wouldn't suffer from this. But you know, the discriminatory possibilities are incredible and you can't change your dna the way you can change your password. You know when? When they tell you your DNA has been leaked, your password's been leaked. Change all your passwords, great.

02:00:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's absolutely. If I were 25, I would do it right now, but I'm an old man. What are they going to do to me? Right, For me, there's probably less hazard. It's probably the case.

02:00:19 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
If you're younger, you should probably I mean honestly, the less data out there the better in these kind of circumstances, and I I take the view very much that you minimize your data footprint uh, just on basic privacy grounds.

02:00:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I am, I am an experiment in the opposite direction.

02:00:36
You understand that right? Yeah, I'm wearing an ai pin that's recording everything that happens on the show, everything I say, everybody I talk to, then gives me notes. At the end of the day it sends it off, the recordings off to some unknown AI in the cloud. Um, I've given up, I guess. Uh, but I also have I'm. You're right. Like you, jake, I'm at low risk. So you know I'm a cis white male. Uh, in, in, uh, so it's probably no risk to me. If you are at risk, delete your 23andMe data. Actually, steve Gibson made a shortcut grcsc slash, bye-bye, b-y-e-b-y-e. You'll have to log into 23andMe and then click the link and it'll take you right to the page where you can download your data and delete it. It's not the only genetic uh company I've given my spit to, however, so my spit.

02:01:30 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You know the discord is saying that we're going to get a leo clone. How do you feel about that? I would love that idea make a hundred six hour shows.

02:01:39 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm not doing okay, in fact, now's the time for Leo number two to take over.

02:01:45 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I'm tired, I gotta go good time, my AI, my Ghibli AI and for the second half here your eyes are getting wider and wider as we speak uh, all right. Ai Leo in the Discord just said he's ready to take over the show, so crap there is an AI Leo in the show he is.

02:02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is uh. Anthony nielsen made him some time ago. I feel like we could update him. Maybe I don't know. Asked are you ready to take over? Oh, absolutely, I'm like a cat waiting to pounce on a laser pointer, just itching for action. What's on your mind? Tech questions, gadget gossip. Maybe you just want to hear my latest dad jokes.

02:02:22 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Either way, I'm ready to roll, says ai leo in my voice, I might add welcome to hour four uh, all right.

02:02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, by the way, speaking of ai, the ceo of replet, which is a a great online coding tool I've used myself, uh says, hey, don't study coding now. Ai is about to take over. One should not waste time on studying coding now. Um, oh my, look at all the pop-ups on this I would rewrite this headline.

02:02:59 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It would be coding ai.

02:03:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ceo says ai coding will be big good point, very much although for a long time, uh, you know, he started code academy and uh replet, for a long time he really supported people on learning how to code. Of course, replet now has you know what they call vibe coding uh built in you write a prompt and it writes the code for you uh, I certainly wouldn't suggest it's a career for an up-and-coming, you know, young student to get get into coding.

02:03:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Maybe learn how to use ai to get into coding that would be something to study, but just coding itself? There's always going to be jobs because ai code has to be checked and improved. But longer term there's going to be a lot of coders out of work, I suspect I had.

02:03:46 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I had a conversation with a guy the other day who was where I was at a party and this guy was lamenting that his daughter wants to go into art rather than being a lawyer or an engineer is what he was saying he wanted her to do and I was like I don't know. Man, are you seeing what's going on with lawyers and engineers, right? Now like, Like. Lawyers are getting fired left and right.

02:04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, law school law schools are reporting a 20% increase in the number of people applying to become lawyers.

02:04:13 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Wow, I bet that's this little bump of people my age who are falling out of all the other ways. I don't know man.

02:04:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the article I read said that people want to make a difference in the world, that people are becoming lawyers because they want to fight.

02:04:30 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
So I prefer to think that's the case. Well, in this case, like with this coder question, I had this sort of talking to this guy. I was like you know, maybe your daughter, if she can really become a disciplined, prolific artist, maybe there is some sort of new. You know, I'm curious what everybody thinks about this. Like, what, what is like? I've been kicking around this book idea of like like the sort of the rebellion against AI in terms of resistance.

02:04:53
Yeah, what would that look like? Like, if you are literate in the tools but you're trying to push against this trend of every single thing is going to look like a AI generated thing. What's the like? I don't know like. What is the? What is the career path of you know my 13 year old should be thinking about if it's not coding right? We it's not. Uh, it's not being a lawyer, I don't think, uh, but I'm not sure it's being a, you know, sculptor either.

02:05:20 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I think it's possible that they could be, sorry, I was just gonna say stay away from Studio, givley, you're uh, you're not going to work at Studio, that's exactly right, that's right.

02:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a really interesting question. What should a 13 year olds think about their future? You know, my kids are now 30 and 32. And they look at the people coming out of college right now and go oh, I feel bad for them those these are the poor kids who went to high school during covid. Uh, they're getting out of college now, uh, and they're looking at a job market that is in complete disarray, and they're being and, by the way, housing costs are so high that they can't afford to rent without three roommates and two jobs.

02:06:07 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Well, the housing entertainment is to is to think that they should be famous all the time that's the answer, right?

02:06:13 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
oh, maybe they should I think my son is an influencer my son is doing quite well.

02:06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He had uh. He's a tiktok chef who has transferred his uh knowledge and viewer base to instagram, and he has a cookbook out that was a bestseller, and now he's opening a restaurant in new york. So it's too late. You can't do that anymore well, why?

02:06:37 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
why not, though, I mean, isn't the answer here in some ways to do entrepreneurship, like we talked earlier today about the $1 billion one-person startup? Well, why does it have to be just that, with the tools that are available today? Think about even the coding examples that we used, where you could code up programs for yourself, you can create art for yourself. I mean all these things that it would take an entrepreneur or would make being an entrepreneur, or one person entrepreneur, cost prohibitive. Those barriers are coming down.

02:07:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it used to be knowing coding was the way to do that. Right, you were going to be the next Bill Gates. So now, what is it? What skills should you learn?

02:07:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was tossing this idea around with a friend a couple of weeks ago and I think there might be a market for hand human produced art, um documents, that sort of thing, where you know that an ai hasn't been involved and I don't know. Maybe there'll be a premium for that kind of thing, but it'll. It'll take a while to come, I think that's like the.

02:07:38 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
The fanciest possible thing is a is a thing made by human hands, so be a potter is what you're saying right.

02:07:46 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Hospitality also seems like a area that's going to consistently be like.

02:07:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Making people feel welcome, making people feel appreciated seems like that's you just said the ais are going to take over customer service customer service is not all of hospitality, like there's still, there will still be you.

02:08:02 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
You might have somebody that will help you deal with your problem. That will be a robot, but the person that's going to welcome you into a restaurant, a hotel, someone that's going to put those experiences together. Your son, for instance, has the exact. I mean, basically, it's the business of the future.

02:08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, it's content, but also hospitality he's putting a studio in the front window of the restaurant. There you go, so people can see him making the sandwiches making the videos and then they go and then buy the sandwiches. Yeah, and what about?

02:08:29 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
the care business, I mean, you know people are all gonna need nurses soon yeah, I think nursing is going to be a profession that already is in high demand. There's already huge shortages. I think that is going to be an area where nursing doctors what about there? There's going to be room for like, basically, nurse practitioners, I think people who have, you know, a little bit more training to really be able to have somebody come in the office and be like listen, I just read about what I'm dealing with with chat, gpt. Do you think this is the right medicine? And they prescribe it to you. So these are. There are areas where we're going to be able to see your human flourishing and the need for humans. It's not all going to go to the robots.

02:09:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One thing you should not do create a website of history, a history website.

02:09:20 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You talked to the CEO of the?

02:09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
World History Encyclopedia. You talked to the CEO of the world history encyclopedia as AI takes his readers. Alex writes. A leading history publisher wonders what's next. His traffic to his site has dropped 25 that's right.

02:09:35 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
So this is uh beyond vendor crab and he's the published CEO and publisher of world history encyclopedia. It is the number two history site in the world, I think, outside of archivegov right, so I guess the government's beating him there. That must be some good technology.

02:09:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't worry, there the government's shutting down all the museums, so I think that's going to help right.

02:09:57 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, but basically what he has. He has this site that covers world history. He has nine full-time staffers. They write about 500 articles a year, and what he is faced with right now is that ChatGPT and AI Overviews have ingested his content and they're presenting it, summarized alongside other history websites, to users. And so he saw initially he goes oh yeah, that's our stuff, and with Google, at least there's links. Then a big update came in November 2024. And then all of a sudden, basically overnight, traffic dropped 25%.

02:10:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this is what AIO does. I understand, though, that he made his success based on the demolishing of Encyclopedia Britannica and the world Book right.

02:10:45 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I mean Listen, yeah, I think there's also. There is a mutual relationship with him and Google too, right, like 80% of his traffic still comes from Google and he built his site based off of Google. But here's what's different. I was like all right, so like what's different? Now he says, right now, it's just Google that benefits and the same is true true, let's be honest for chat GPT, for Anthropic, for many of the AI chatbots that gobble up the con.

02:11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use perplexity and I very often, even for things like recipes, don't end up at the website because perplexity gives me the content that's right.

02:11:19 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yeah, look, at least he has historians and volunteers writing the articles and what happens, Like there's a value exchange there, right, and I think that deal that publishers have always had with the platforms that they produce and the platforms can basically highlight the stuff in exchange for being featured at some point. That is changing and now the platforms are just taking it.

02:11:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But I mean, we're all journalists here. We've seen this happen before when it came to, you know, the collapse of advertising revenues going to publishers rather than to google and facebook. You know we've been down this route before. We will go down it again in other industries. I can't help feeling.

02:11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what happens with technology right, uh, disintermediation and um so the question is what comes next?

02:12:06 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
And the answer that Jan had was pretty interesting. He thinks there's a possibility in the future that instead of them publishing to the websites, they'll just be paid by the platforms. They already have a revenue share. Deal with perplexity to just write for them.

02:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I can use perplexity, it's okay.

02:12:22 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
Yes, I think perplexity is the best of them all. But basically this quote really got me. He said we'll no longer be publishing to readers. We'll be feeding the machine and the readers read what the machine gives them. And he says who controls the machine? What biases does the machine have? How does this affect the world? He's quite concerned about it and I don't think that's off base.

02:12:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, no, I mean this is the problem with AI generated comment is you've got to check it. I mean, when things like ChatGPT first came out, that sort of thing, you do what everyone does you ego surf and you push in your details and see what it has on it. Um, and according to chatbgpt, I am an award-winning journalist with the new york times and the guardian. Um, and it's like never written for either of those, I'm afraid you know. So, yeah, well, this is it, but I mean, it's one of the greatest pr tricks the ai industry has ever done is dubbing these things hallucinations rather than mistakes, because they aren't mistakes, but humans make mistakes too.

02:13:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, I mean, you have to, you have to check your sources and and get another opinion, and but the relationship we have with computers is not like that. We expect a computer to give us accurate information. Benito, our producer, the voice of God talking. Yeah, that's what the point of this is.

02:13:50 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, sorry, this is the thesis of my book is that we, as humans, are terrible at telling the difference between a system we can trust and one that we can't. Our brains are shortcut machines that don't like to do work. That's how we survive.

02:14:06
That's how evolution trained us is to be as quick, as decisive as possible, using as little energy as possible, and AI is the perfect kryptonite for that, because we are going to have no ability to take a second to see whether Ian writes for the register of the New York Times. We don't do that. And yet the business model is going to be built on the idea that you can trust these systems. And to me there was this. I interviewed a guy once who's a federal judge. He was talking about how you can make systems more efficient, and the market is always going to try and do that, but there are certain frictions. You want to save, you want to keep, and in law they call it weak.

02:14:55
Perfection is the legal term for this.

02:14:58
And it is basically like he was saying that you could, for instance, make it much easier to enter a guilty plea or a not guilty plea, and that doing so, you know you could. You could swipe right or swipe left and be done. Currently, the law, the legal system, makes you come in in person to you know, say it in front of a judge, and and the judge you know has to go through this very complicated process, because you only get one shot at this Once you enter a guilty or not guilty plea, you're going to, it's going to change your life forever and you never get to take it back. And he was like we have to. You know, we could make it better, but we instinctively we do it on purpose make it hard on purpose, so that you have to engage your thinking about it. And for me there's something about the way that that, the, that the flow of information and what we're supposed to assume is objective information is being made more and more efficient and that is creating, I think, real trouble.

02:15:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Efficiency is our enemy is what you're saying.

02:15:55 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Not enemy, but it can't be our only consideration. It can't be the only thing we measure. This time.

02:16:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does this relate to Daniel Kahneman's thinking fast and slow?

02:16:05 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's what it is. So my book basically is pitched as thinking fast and slow meets her is sort of the is. The book is trying to say like I spend like three chapters summarizing Kahneman and all of his disciples work to say, based on what we found over the last 40 years, here's how the brain works. And then, oh my God, here's all of these companies about to. You know, drive your autopilot for you.

02:16:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
A friend of mine's a teacher and it drives her nuts when kids bring in stuff and essays that are wrong. It's just like, well, that's incorrect. He goes. Well, no, the AI told me it was correct. And it's like, yeah, now she's got to teach them to check their sources. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to that book.

02:16:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, it sounds like a very interesting read kathy o'neill, who's going to be on our show in a few weeks, says it's a fascinating and unsettling survey of the known spectrum of human biases. I am ordering the book right now oh, I appreciate that thank you. Uh, that sounds. That sounds really interesting. Should I order it from your site? Is that the best?

02:17:05 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, can I? I don't know, I can't get away from the machine.

02:17:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazon. Huh, oh yeah, Order your copy here. I always like to. That probably gets you a little kickback.

02:17:17 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I would hope I'm smart enough to do that, but yeah, maybe so Feel free, please do.

02:17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and there's an audio book version. Yeah, that's my voice. Yeah, feel free. Oh, you have a great voice. That's the one I'll be ordering. I think that's a really interesting point I hadn't really thought about the whole. Common's whole thesis is we have two kinds of processes in our brains the fast one that is quick and intuitive, and the slower one that is a little bit more methodical. And that's interesting, that's right.

02:17:51 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
And the fast thinking brain is our ancient, most brain. We have it in common with primates, like it's been around since long before we were even standing on our hind legs. And and the new fat, slow thinking brain, the creative, rational one that we think is who we are. You know, the atticus finch, the, the thoughtful, creative one, that's who we, that's our self-image as humans. Right, you talk to my experience when you talk to people at the top of silicon valley companies.

02:18:19
They think that's who humans are. You know we are going to be thoughtful, unreasonable. It turns out that system barely gets involved in your day-to-day life and the rest of the time it is just the ancient system making decisions. And the problem with AI and these ways it's being deployed in the market is that it plays on the fast-thinking brain.

02:18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It plays on the really ancient, ancient system that identifies berries and outsiders, and all that stuff and that's what you mean by the loop is that we are in this kind of vicious circle that is tightening around us.

02:18:50 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
We're going to feed in more and more of these kinds of ancient choices, our bad instincts, into these systems, which are going to deploy them as products and deploy them as a smaller list of choices, and I think a lot of people talk about AI as this kind of flywheel that's going to create this endless opportunity and endless creativity, and it's going to be this sort of open wheeling universe of fun. And my thesis is, if it could go that way I hope it does, but I think it's, given what I've, you know, given what I've reported in the book if it goes the wrong way, it's going to be a tightening and tightening spiral and at the bottom of it, we're all going to be like wearing beige and drinking Soylent.

02:19:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not so bad, I just don't want the high water pants they wear in her. That's the only thing.

02:19:36
I don't want to do that I just ordered it on Audible. I think I had no idea. It sounds fascinating, all right, I think that's. I had no idea. It sounds fascinating, all right, we're gonna take a little break. A couple of final stories, we're almost done.

02:19:47
Alex Kantrowitz, jacob Ward, ian Thompson so nice to have all three of you this week in tech. It was a good week to have you on. Actually, as it turns out, this Week in Tech brought to you this week by Shopify, we were just talking about, uh, my son salthankcom. Uh, when you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing like all birds wearing them right now, untuck it, wearing them right now, uh, salthankcom, you think about an innovative product, a progressive brand and button down marketing what is often overlooked, the own unseen secret that's actually the businesses behind the business, making selling and for shoppers, buying simple For millions of businesses, including those three. That business is Shopify. Love that sound. Salt Hank got started. You know he was just a guy, you know just a kid, and he said dad, I've got this TikTok following. I want to sell salt. He created a site with Shopify, thank you, and it's grown from there. He's now selling pickles and I have to say a little disclaimer, I am an investor in the pickle business and I'm thrilled to see him using shopify.

02:21:09
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02:22:59
Madison Square Garden Do you hear what the Dolans are up to? Madison Square Gardens has face recognition. As you know, they've banned people that Dolan doesn't like. The latest, a fan wore a T-shirt that says Ban Dolan. He was a concert on Monday night Radio City Music music hall owned by msg, owned by the dollins. Frank miller was there with his parents for their wedding anniversary. He didn't see the show because the minute he scanned his ticket he was pulled aside by security, told by staff you are barred from msg properties for life. For life for an incident at the garden, madison square garden, in 2021. Miller said wait a minute, I haven't been to the garden in 20 years. They hand me a piece of paper letting me this is from the verge, letting me know that I've been added to a ban list. There's a trespass notice if I ever show up up on any MSG property ever again. I mean, that's not just Radio City Music Hall, it's the Sphere in Las Vegas, the Beacon Theater in Boston, the Chicago Theater.

02:24:14
He was baffled at first, the Verge writes. Then it dawned on him. This is probably about a T-shirt he designed years ago. Msg Entertainment won't say how they figured out it was him or whatever, but this goes back to 2017, when charles oakley was removed from his seat near nick's owner and madison square ceo, james dolan. It became a legal battle for miller. Oakley was an integral part of the 90s Knicks and, with his background in graphics design, he made a shirt in the style of the old team logo that read Bandolin. Oh, there's your mistake. This is the world we're entering in. Now. There's no anonymity because of face recognition, and the Dolans are quick to use this. They've used it before well, they banned um.

02:25:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think it was a lawyer went to one of their properties.

02:25:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She worked at a law firm that had a lawsuit with dolan. She wasn't involved in the lawsuit but didn't matter, and of course they have the right. It's their venue. They can ban people, but this is it's their venue they can ban people, but this is problematic.

02:25:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's the wave of the future, to be honest. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

02:25:29 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Go ahead Sorry.

02:25:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, I'm just thinking. It comes back to what you were saying, jake, about discrimination and the increasing ways that technology can can be used in that way. And this is a prime example. You know, facial recognition technology does something or finds something which this guy obviously thought everyone had forgotten about, and boom, instaban. You know, and this is the way it's going to go in the future.

02:25:54 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I was going to say. The thing that is crazy to me is how often so, you know, the China is sort of held up as this, you know, and it is. I mean, it's an authoritarian regime and it's constantly held up by the heads of big tech companies as the sort of the ultimate evil and we have to compete with them. You know, we don't want to become like China. China meanwhile just I think it was last week, but the week before just passed these new rules.

02:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just, I think it was last week, but the week before just passed these new rules, basically limiting the amount of facial recognition.

02:26:27 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
This is wild pace and they are ahead of us. Yeah, they're pulling back because they think it's not right. Uh, this is from um. You know, I think this is from your colleague right, simon sherwood.

02:26:37
Uh, at the minister yeah, you know, uh, you know that it's, it's the. The fact that they have these rules that seem to be trying to pull back on it out of interest for individual privacy, and that we, meanwhile are living in the Dolan's world is such a weird thing You've got to say when even China is saying hang on a bit, let's just, let's just slow this down a bit.

02:27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even China, you know, and and, of course, some of the issue is false positives. Right, um, you know, I I have mixed feelings about this. Taylor Swift was uses facial uh recognition at her concerts to keep uh harassers and stalkers out, and I think that seems like a good use as long as it doesn't mistakenly identify something and stalking right, but there's no law in the in a first amendment regime against having a t-shirt that criticizes the owner.

02:27:32 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
No kidding well, he's within his rights it's just that this is such a thin-skinned move to do something like this, and, as a knicks fan and someone who likes to go to the sphere, I will say no more.

02:27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that was Joey Kantorowicz, our Brooklyn columnist.

02:27:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Also, is the sphere that good? Because I've seen footage and it does look like a bit of a money pit.

02:27:59 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
I'm dying to go. Are you kidding, Theo? You better use my Muppets face for the thumbnail.

02:28:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too late, I'm dead. I've given Dolan way too much trouble in the past. I'll never get into anything like that. Wouldn't that be wild, though I almost want to be stopped, because then I could make something out of it. There'd be a story there.

02:28:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean, there's already anti-paparazzi clothing.

02:28:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know scarves you can wear, which you know muck around with cameras. I'm sure something will become. Come along like that. Yeah, all right, we got more coming up. Uh, in just a bit, you're watching this week in tech with a great panel alex kantrowitz, jacob ward, ian thompson so glad you're here this week. Moving on, uh, gemma, you know we've been talking about ai and chat, gbt and perplexing. We're not talking a lot about google's ai gemini 2.5 pro, which is currently at the top of the leaderboard. And now google's done in something interesting, because people aren't talking about it as much as its competition they're making that available for free to uh, to its users. I have a paid Gemini Pro account, but anybody can use Gemini 2.5 Pro. It says experimental. Yeah, there are rate limits on it. Uh, I don't. It's funny. I'm now gonna have to think about using it because I I never do. It's they?

02:29:24 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean, they have a perception about it right is the, the, the, it's sort of it. It reveals the degree to which these companies are subsidizing, yeah, what is incredibly expensive process exactly compute. Yeah, it takes to put together something as amazing. I've just been recently thinking of talking to a bunch of technologists about the potential of building ai tools for journalists, and I've been playing around with one of the fundamentals of what would be necessary to do that, and one of them is confidentiality. You got to be able to feed stuff in and not let it go anywhere else, so you can't use a subsidized model like this.

02:30:00
The reason Google would subsidize the use of this and make it free to non-paying users is because then they get that data back to do more training. That's one of the benefits of doing so and, if it turns out, if you're not going to do that, if you're not going to let them have the data, it's expensive. You know, a token is about a like two thirds of a word. So I was looking at it and I'm like, wow, if you put together like a uh, you know, uh the the complete financial documents of a company for a year into that and get two pages of summary out of it, that's like five bucks if you're really paying the market. But how useful is that? I mean, that's super useful, super useful. But how many times can your average sub stack or afford to do that before they start wiping themselves out, you know? And so to see them handing over five bucks per at least to people is really amazing to me. That just suggests just what a bath they're willing to take on this stuff.

02:30:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, and it calls us back to the beginning of the show, where Sam Altman said please stop using our AI generation image generation because it's costing us. The servers are burning up, all right? Well, I think I've used up all the stories in my pile, so there's only one thing to do is call it a day. I am so glad to have all three of you on here, alex. Keep up the great worklex kantrowitz, you know you all should subscribe to the big technology, uh sub stack and uh podcast. It's awesome what great guests and some mystery guests. This week there'll be big news. Uh, is that for a tease? Yeah, it's gonna be fun.

02:31:40 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It'll be a fun episode, I promise that can we do.

02:31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do 20 questions. Is it a man or a?

02:31:43 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
woman, I mean. I will add in service of taking extreme caution here and not exposing and losing the interview, don't answer any questions, but I will promise you will enjoy it, so tune in on Friday.

02:31:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OK, here's a secret that I will reveal. Next week, jason Calacanis is going to be on the show and. Alex as well. So if you have any opinion about Jason, good or bad, I want you to tune into the show next week. I will tell you he's going to be on, which means he's definitely not going to be on the big technology podcast.

02:32:24 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
It's not Jason. That's the clue I can quote Jason, if you're listening, come on some time We'll talk. He's fun, he's an interest.

02:32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what, as we get closer to our 20th anniversary in two weeks, I think more and more about the people who made this show. You know succeed over the years and Jason's was on a lot kind of in the middle period great character.

02:32:45 - Alex Kantrowitz (Guest)
He used to do the best audible commercials for us so, and congrats Leo, by the way, on 20 years, that's not 20 years.

02:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's pretty impressive that really is to you, leo. Wow, we are asking people send in your videos. You can either put them on social and at twit or, uh, send them to me, leo leovillecom, and we are going to get as many of those videos how you watch twit when you discovered twit, your twit story, so we can run those, because I think really, the story of twit is absolutely the story of its community, an amazing group. Uh, we love all of you and we thank all of you for this long time support. Uh, jacob, are, are you now part of the family? Jacob Ward, we kept it under three hours barely.

02:33:28 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I'm amazed you guys, I don't know how you like. I was snacking the whole time. I always took like a sip of La Croix, like what the hell?

02:33:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand this is done it's incredible, I don't know you have to build up your podcast. As long as I'll chops, you know you have to work your way up to it.

02:33:45 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
It's actually I think, printer.

02:33:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I'm going to look actually, but I think the first twit 20 years ago was, I don't think, a half an hour oh, wow, okay, that's mission.

02:33:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Creepers, come in.

02:33:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's my, that's my guess, but uh, let me see, I think I can go there. If I go to it, that TV slash twit one. The first episode was 34 minutes and 44 seconds.

02:34:12 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Wow, that's a reasonable amount of time. Leo, I'm just saying that's how long your shows are yeah, exactly 20 years from now you'll be five hours, six hours. You'll be all day, trust me, you're, just you're, you're, uh, you're reaching that super commuter audience you know that was.

02:34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the secret was, as people's commutes got longer in the past 20 years, it's really been beneficial with the times. Joe rogan and me, that's it. Uh, jac Ward, get his book the Loop. I did, I just ordered it. Follow him at theripcurrentcom. That's where his newsletter and podcast, our brand new podcast, great guests already Thrilled for you, jake, it's great. Appreciate it. Leo, welcome to the independent creator verse. It's been good to me, it's been good to Alex. I'm sure it'll be great for you too. Well, I appreciate. Thank you, jacob, we'll have you back soon, I hope. Uh, I I say I hope because I hope you will come back. Oh, dude, I'm okay I promise you, we will invite you.

02:35:15
I just hope you'll say yes. Ian thompson, how many you've been here? For 20 years almost, it's been a long, long, strange trip 15, 15 years now. I know, because the picture of you is very old.

02:35:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, to be fair, you know I was younger and prettier in those days.

02:35:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would stick with that picture. I think it's a good picture of you.

02:35:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I came over, yeah, on a one-year contract and then just kind of kept on extending you know, did you start with a register in the UK?

02:35:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like you did.

02:35:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, no. The original plan was I was with a site called VNUNet which is now being expunged from the internet. So, yeah, I was going to come over, hire an American lead and then go back and run the site. But then there was a reorganization, so I stayed with them for three years and then moved to the register nice yeah well, so you've been a register just as long as you uh been on our show.

02:36:10
Yes, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, in fact that's when I started doing it. I think maybe it was back when megan maroney was doing uh look how cute, look how cute he was 15 years ago just a lad just a lad.

02:36:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's taught us so much about the English language, and by English language I mean the language of England yes, yeah, some phrases have got through grips. My muffin is always a popular so many shows that you've been on, titled with some of those anglicisms in one case quite rude yeah I didn't know what it was. How was I supposed to know? Yes, but two countries separated by one language indeed, churchill was right yeah, wow, there are nine pages of appearances.

02:36:58
Good lord. Let me go back to the earliest appearance, tech news tonight, number 34 in 2014. Wow, you appeared a few times on tech news tonight before we brought you up to the big leagues and yeah, it's only a half hour show, so this isn't three hours I really appreciate it, thank you for your patience. Yeah, you were on this, we can take 500.

02:37:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Wow, 525 episodes ago good grief wow thank you, everybody having fun thank you, alex, ian and jake.

02:37:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We really appreciate your time and, uh, your your brilliant thoughts. Thanks to all of you who listen as well. It's, uh, what a long, strange trip. It has been 20 years and two weeks. Do send us your videos. I'd love to hear, uh, how you found us and how you watch. Of course, if you're a member of club twit, you can also just post it into our club twit discord. That's a great place to hang. Seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all of our shows, gets you access to the club twit discord.

02:38:01
Uh, lots of benefits, special events, special shows, I think, come to think of it, I have, uh, I don't, I have a show coming up this week. Yeah, photo time with chris marquardt is thursday, april 3rd, so he's our favorite photographer. We get him on every month. Brilliant, by the way, is the uh is the theme of the photo assignment. So if you haven't yet submitted a brilliant photo to flickr, to our tech guy group on flickr, do that. We'll also be doing micah's crafting corner. On the 16th, he's doing lego plants and on the 18th, friday, coffee time is back. Mark prince will bring liz happy beans together. Uh, we will talk. Uh, we will talk about coffee and then the ai users group at the end of the month and that's just the month of april.

02:38:50
Seven bucks a month. You get so much benefit and I hope you will join us because it makes a huge difference to us, uh, in terms of our bottom line, um, and it will help me towards my goal of buying the starship enterprise, because I've always wanted to be a starship captain. Um, that's pretty good, I like it. Thanks for being here, everybody. We'll see you next week. Jason calacanis and alex wilhelm it's kind of a this weekend startups takeover. The following week, our 20th anniversary. But, as I have been saying for 19 years and 50 weeks, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye.