This Week in Tech Episode 952 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.

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Twit. This weekend tech great panel. Mike Elgin is here. He's in Mexico City, all the way from a pineapple under DC. It's Shoshana Weissman from our street and my favorite, christina Warren from GitHub she's sitting right next to me. Is an executive order on AI a good idea or a bad idea? We'll talk about Amazon's project Nessie, designed to keep prices high, and Then it's the end of the line for mint. We'll say goodbye. All that more coming up next Podcasts you love from people you trust.

This is twit. This is twit this week in tech, episode 952, recorded Sunday, november 5th 2023 a gathering of the protons. This episode of this week in tech is brought to you by Express VPN. Secure your family's online activity and unlock hundreds of news shows by visiting express VPN comm slash Twit. Take back your online privacy today and use my link to get three extra months free with a one-year package. And by collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies. With octa, collide ensures if a device is Intrusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit collide comm slash twit to book an on-demand demo today. It's time for twit this week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Love this panel. I say that every week, but this week I mean it. Shoshanna Weissman is here. She is, of course, the chair of the sloth committee, but maybe more interest in her day job, head of digital media at our street org. Hello, senator shoshanna.

0:01:59 - Shoshana Weissmann
Hey, thank you so much for having me.

0:02:01 - Leo Laporte
I see you've moved in back into your pineapple under DC. It's hard to get my husband, you know sponge Bob. Yeah, he couldn't take it away from home.

0:02:15 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, he and I are just really close and you know.

0:02:20 - Leo Laporte
Nothing more to say To your right, shoshanna. Say hello to Christina Warren From get hub. She's in town because the get hub universe is in town.

0:02:30 - Christina Warren
That's right. That's right, and so I'm you're kind enough to be able to let me come in studio this week.

0:02:35 - Leo Laporte
I'm so glad we love having you. Yeah, and I should have brought my name tag from last universe.

0:02:41 - Christina Warren
Yeah, which was great Good, which, um, we're still doing things like that. There've been some like you can still program that and do cool things with the badge. It's so fun.

0:02:49 - Leo Laporte
Is there like firmware I can update?

0:02:51 - Christina Warren
Yeah, I mean well, for so technically. Yeah, I mean, like we just were using, I think, some of the base little stuff. But that's what's neat about it is that people do update and add things to. Those are pie zeros all the time.

0:03:03 - Leo Laporte
It was an our pie zero Name tag.

0:03:05 - Christina Warren
Yes, you could program it with your name and your company and, and you could use some other things with it too Like it would even show like your, your um, you know get commit, you know activity.

0:03:13 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, things like stars. Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, I haven't used mine since last year. That's okay, I'm gonna have to. I should have brought it.

0:03:20 - Christina Warren
I didn't wasn't even thinking that's okay, find it and like it'll just be like a fun project. You know, bring out when, when you're out, when you're back from your retreat and you're allowed to have access to a computer again, you can that badge on the retreat and see if they.

0:03:34 - Leo Laporte
I was telling everybody that I'm going on a Electronics free retreat November 25th. We've gone for a week no computer, no phones, no air pods, no music. I can't even bring my Apple watch. I have to get a time X. It is that I'm gonna be, but that's why I'm doing it.

0:03:53 - Christina Warren
Yeah, see if I can see if you can do it I mean I'm turkey it. I mean genuinely that that is something that I would like to do to myself. I think I'd be miserable, but it's one of those things. Like I will, I'll send you the info. Yes, me the info digital detox.

0:04:05 - Leo Laporte
Nobody should have to do this and all the way from the largest city in the North in the Americans I don't know, is it in the west? Largest in the Americas?

0:04:16 - Mike Elgan
in the Americas, yeah, they're bigger cities in in Asia, but yeah. Mexico City. Yes, and I got an idea. I think we should have a betting pool in club twit. For how many days you can last without electronics? I'm gonna go.

0:04:28 - Christina Warren
That's a really good idea.

0:04:29 - Mike Elgan
Yeah. I'm gonna make maybe one.

0:04:33 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, it's funny because Lisa went a couple of months, a couple of weeks ago Actually, and I'm watching Saturday, the first day. Oh she's, she's still there Sunday. I'm thinking if she makes it through Sunday night then she's gonna do it. But I was, I had the same thing, like really, but no, she loved it. So we're gonna both detox and then we're gonna ride off into the sunset. I'm gonna live the experience through you, leo.

I would never do so. Nobody would ever want that. Well, how would you go to sleep? What would you do when you wake up at three in the morning? Well, how do you doom scroll if you don't have a?

0:05:05 - Christina Warren
I mean, I guess you just have to be alone with your thoughts, which might actually be frightening. I think that's a no.

0:05:09 - Leo Laporte
I hate to say it, but I think that's the point, and what a terrible idea. So Mike Elgin has been going around Wahaka. Yes, we're in his meta glasses. Did you did? We did any was, so show me. Do you have them with you? These are the new Ray Ban, the second editions. Yeah, they look like regular spectacles. Do they zero light? That's on when you're recording.

0:05:35 - Mike Elgan
Yes, there's a light that that goes on. I can demo these. Hang on, let me. Let me switch glasses here, so nobody could tell anything, and when I was doing this. So I basically say, hey, meta, take a picture, and then oh, it did.

0:05:52 - Leo Laporte
I heard a little sound and, if I so, the person hold this little button, it's.

0:05:57 - Mike Elgan
It's. It pulses when you're doing a video, yeah, and you can preset it to be a 15 second, 30 or 60 second video, and then it stops by itself, or it stops if you push the button. But the surprising thing is that it's got a voice assistant like Siri. It's really good. I mean really really good.

0:06:13 - Leo Laporte
Is it called Jarvis?

0:06:16 - Mike Elgan
No, no, it's, that's Mark Zuckerberg's personal Exactly.

0:06:20 - Leo Laporte
May I show? Oh, he's talking to you, sure, I don't sorry. Yeah, I mean I show the video. I think it's on your Facebook, actually it's not on your sure, absolutely, please do.

0:06:29 - Mike Elgan
Okay. I have a gazillion picture. I was there for a day of the dead and just walking around Taking pictures of the street scene and all that. It was really great. Let me see if I can find it.

0:06:40 - Leo Laporte
But we were there two years ago with you guys for the day of the dead. It was incredible what an experience, it's yeah it's really something. It was nice because you let me keep my I smartphone. I was really.

0:06:52 - Mike Elgan
I wanted to ban all electronics, but no, no, it's. But these are so. Just to put it in perspective, google glass which I was a glass hole back in the day 10 years ago, or something cost $1,500 and these cost 300, and the camera is vastly superior.

0:07:09 - Leo Laporte
It's a it's just decent looking camera. This is the mirror your wife walking downtown. I recognize the street in Oaxaca. That's really good.

0:07:15 - Mike Elgan
It's day of the dead. So we spoke yeah, optimized for Instagram, and you can live stream to Facebook and Instagram that which is really interesting.

0:07:23 - Christina Warren
That's really cool.

0:07:24 - Mike Elgan
And it's a little wobbly like you're walking around.

0:07:26 - Leo Laporte
I can see it's got some stabilization, but it's but it's not like it's a. I mean it's a little wobbly.

0:07:31 - Christina Warren
I mean these are coming from a sign? No, I understand, but I guess you got it's a first-person experience totally.

0:07:37 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, yeah, and I did, I made. I didn't post the pictures yet, but I made pizza before we went to Oaxaca and I was just like tossing the dough and like had it. I was timing it so that would take a picture of the dough in midair when I was like spinning it and all that stuff. And that kind of thing is pretty cool because of course you can't use your hand.

0:07:58 - Leo Laporte
This is horrible. There's a child, yeah.

0:08:01 - Mike Elgan
Well, that's day of the dead. There's children lay in the street, acting like, acting like they're dead.

0:08:06 - Leo Laporte
It's kind of a but you know, I like the day of the day because it is this kind of embrace, your morbidity thing, right, and it's unlike Halloween. It's like right up it right in your face. It's not like, oh, spooky, spooky, no, no, it's like you're gonna die. Yeah, let me see exactly you look cool and I'm you don't look.

0:08:25 - Christina Warren
I mean they know, I mean they look just like ribbons.

0:08:28 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, exactly, and but I was surprised by the quality of the assistant. I was asking it how do you say stuff in Spanish? It was just telling me immediately and you could use that immediately. Yeah, it was really, really great. And should I buy some of?

0:08:42 - Leo Laporte
these 329? Oh yes, absolutely you should buy no.

0:08:47 - Christina Warren
Okay, here. Okay, here's my counter argument.

0:08:49 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and I'll have a normal fair my hand.

0:08:52 - Christina Warren
Okay, a normal pair of way. Why a normal pair of way? Fairs is like a hundred ninety eight dollars, so you're talking about a hundred dollars more.

0:08:59 - Leo Laporte
It's so bad.

0:08:59 - Christina Warren
That's what I'm saying. Oh, you're telling me to buy. I am, I'm going to buy.

0:09:03 - Leo Laporte
Shawna, help me I.

0:09:05 - Shoshana Weissmann
Know I'm gonna get a a garment smart watch just so I can see my altitude when I'm hiking. But beyond that, I'm like I'm trying not to become a full robot like just yet.

0:09:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, fair wouldn't you like to wear these, though, on your next hike? You take amazing pictures of these beautiful venues You're, you're hiking in, and oh, thank you.

0:09:22 - Shoshana Weissmann
No, I I hate wearing. I actually can't wear glasses or gloves very easily. I hate they get in the way of me doing stuff. I'm the only person on earth who has this problem, but I feel like a moron and I like trip over myself. So. But the fun thing is I have rain odds, which means my hands and feet go cold really fast. So I avoid wearing gloves until, like, they will not unfreeze. Then I'm like fine, all right, I'll do it.

0:09:43 - Leo Laporte
Maybe meta will make some smart gloves for you, and then you well, you can benefit.

0:09:47 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, here's the thing that people don't talk about with the, with the glasses, that everybody talks about the camera, but it's really about the audio. The audio quality on on the Ray-Ban Metas is very, very high, and the microphone quality there are five microphones in it.

It's very, very good, but you can't wear Airpods all day right you can have something in your ear all day, but you can wear glasses all day, and so what's the battery life? Oh, you can't listen all day. If you're actively using it, using the camera and streaming all that stuff, I think it's like four hours. It has a case that has a battery inside. The case has a battery life of 24 hours, something like that.

0:10:25 - Leo Laporte
So you have the wayfarers, which are the kind of the classic Jack Nicholson Ray-Ban right style exactly, and I have worn them at night and I did look like Jack Nicholson.

0:10:34 - Mike Elgan
Do you have? Do you have the?

0:10:36 - Christina Warren
ones with the, the transition lenses, or do you have just like no polarized ones?

0:10:42 - Mike Elgan
I polarized, I made the mistake of not getting those and yeah, I probably am gonna get a second pair, that is clear and.

0:10:49 - Leo Laporte
Prescription is available right you can send them your prescription. Which is probably what. I would do, because I do wear glasses. I mean, I could wear them over my contacts. But I think. I'd probably want to wear them as I glasses.

0:11:01 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, but the the power of just walking around and having audio ready to go, where you can just use the assistant or you can hear your Notifications or you can have a phone phone conversation and the audio quality is excellent and have nothing in your ears. It's really. It's really kind of freedom, like feels liberating, to have nothing in your ears and still have good quality audio Available. So I really like them.

0:11:26 - Christina Warren
No, I mean that. That was the thing for me too, so I think we're going to buy these. I think I'm gonna get the transition lenses, though, which are more expensive.

0:11:31 - Leo Laporte
I thought you know I would. You thought I was holding my hand to talk me out of it.

0:11:35 - Christina Warren
Now I know, not at all, because the audio thing you pointed out. So I almost bought the Bose Sunglasses with audio thing. I was bought this a few times. Those were again not much less expensive. I didn't think they looked as good and didn't have the camera thing. So I don't know for me, even if I only use the camera occasionally the fact that it's a pair of wayfarers of which I have many, and Does it audio?

0:11:57 - Leo Laporte
does it Give you pause? That Apple very much wants to be in this space and we'll probably do something with air both airpods and Division pro next year.

0:12:07 - Christina Warren
No, at the time that happens. I mean I've already bought the sunglasses, leo, like.

0:12:12 - Leo Laporte
She's actually ordering them right now.

0:12:14 - Christina Warren
I am ordering them right now. I mean because again, you don't understand. I buy a lot of Ray Bands. I'm not gonna talk you out of it. I was gonna say I think it's actually weirdly. I think that this is one of the as I agree with Shoshana. I don't want to be a robot, but at the same time I'm kind of like you know what I kind of.

0:12:31 - Leo Laporte
does it give anybody pause that this is Met us but at the same time, yeah, they have my information anyway you know, I just recently rejoined Facebook, which I Only did because I thought, well, it was when the war broke out in Israel and I thought, well, I want to see what's going on with disinformation. I know it's a real problem. We got an election coming up. It's probably appropriate for me to be there. It is so far worse than anything I could remember. For one thing, my newsfeed is filled up with stuff that I didn't follow or subscribe, or even I don't know these people right, and it's mostly women and bikinis, which I don't understand why they're doing this to me.

0:13:10 - Shoshana Weissmann
Oh, come on. Oh, I'm so sorry this is happening.

0:13:15 - Leo Laporte
Well, I did I. Somebody said you know, you, you can, you can stop, you can stop that by, but you have to, one by one, block each account and Somehow. I mean there's hundreds of these Anyway but I am back on Facebook so. I could use this right.

0:13:30 - Mike Elgan
I recently rejoined Facebook as well and I found it so bizarre. It's, so awful it would. I would basically want to go to follow somebody who was like my best friend in in grade school. Yeah, I said you don't really know that person, and then it's always dangling these, this eye candy in front of me constant eye candy and it's like and it lets me follow those I it's like, it feels like you know it's an it's, it's a straight ad feed.

0:13:53 - Leo Laporte
So here's. So I went past the one post I got from somebody I know To Elvis is old airplane being reconditioned. To how to what? Oh, you know what. This is because I rejected all the bikini girls. So now they're going. Oh, maybe you're interested in what we're doing here. How would you like to fix your cabinets? There's somebody I know, no NFL they figure. Well, if you don't interest bikinis, you. Oh, here's some Marissa to me, scanty. Oh, they're back.

0:14:20 - Shoshana Weissmann
You can't get away from them, man. That one was really aggressive.

0:14:24 - Leo Laporte
I'm, so I'm look, I'm not approved by any means, but I'm offended that this is like what they put in my feed, like this is terrible. Look at this babes, babes and bikinis and ladies and lingerie. You know what I don't? I don't want to snooze it, I want to hide it and but now you know, I guess I should report it, but obviously nobody's reporting these things, right?

0:14:48 - Shoshana Weissmann
well, twitter, it's kind of the same right now, like how like people will like randomly like your posts and it's. You know it's bots and it's all this. It's like it's bot and Hannah's and how do they know me.

0:14:58 - Leo Laporte
How do they? I thought I was private on facebook. No, it's so creepy, it's just, it's well, that's creepy.

0:15:08 - Mike Elgan
It's one of the you know. Actually, it's one of the great things about the the mediclass is it's doesn't have a screen. There's no algorithmic Element to it at all and you can do a lot of information gathering just through voice without ever looking at a screen. So it's kind of it for small things, everyday things, like who was that actress in that movie that I don't remember her name.

0:15:29 - Leo Laporte
You can, that's what I use a google or echo for right, that's. Yeah, it's the same kind of thing. It's always on, and but you know the we can use our airpods to do that. Yeah, do you ever go? Hey, shlomo, you know who was that actress.

0:15:43 - Christina Warren
Um, I mean, I think, if shlomo works better, I would yeah, maybe that's the problem Um that is because genuinely I'm we are very close to actually having, you know, like the star trek communicator, like translator thing working um and the ai stuff is there, it's just not in our smart devices yet.

0:16:00 - Mike Elgan
Well, meta said that next year they're going to add a feature to the meta rayban glasses rayban meta glasses when it will Process visual information through ai. So you'd be looking at something and say what is this and it'll tell you, or?

0:16:13 - Leo Laporte
like google lands.

0:16:15 - Mike Elgan
But exactly like instructions for how to operate this machine and it'll it'll tell you.

0:16:20 - Leo Laporte
I notice you're not wearing them full time. Would you make these your regular glasses, totally?

0:16:26 - Mike Elgan
totally the problem is they're sunglasses and uh, so I'm going to get the clear transitions with my prescription and I should have gotten the transition. Like Clark Kent, all the time, I love it exactly, exactly, and then you whip them off and and then you have your superman outfit and people would not recommend so they have other styles?

Yeah, they do. They have different colors, different styles. Yeah, one thing I like about this there's they've got a line of them where they're semi transparent, like the original, like those old I max, like the raspberry I max and stuff. So these are Pretty cool, I think, where you can kind of see through them. They also have a peak.

0:16:59 - Leo Laporte
So you say? You say the mistake you made was not buying clear ones so you could wear them all the time.

0:17:03 - Mike Elgan
Well, or transition, yeah, but I'm actually thinking about getting clear ones and wearing them both. I I have no reason to not wear them all the time they're comfortable. I don't know that they're they're glasses.

0:17:17 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so I want to try these on. You must allow access to your camera. Okay, so I'm going to try these on.

0:17:25 - Mike Elgan
Oh, yeah, see, there you go.

0:17:27 - Leo Laporte
And those. These are the headliners.

0:17:31 - Christina Warren
I mean not bad.

0:17:33 - Leo Laporte
I look like, uh a still.

0:17:38 - Mike Elgan
There's the jack Nicholson.

0:17:39 - Leo Laporte
Yep, that's not jack Nicholson, that's.

0:17:41 - Mike Elgan
Larry budd melvin. Yeah, there you go.

0:17:44 - Leo Laporte
Hey. Dave. I, uh, I don't want to give it. You already order them, or haven't you?

0:17:50 - Christina Warren
I haven't yet. I'm trying to figure out, like, when I'm going to, like if I'm going to pick them up At a store like this.

0:17:55 - Leo Laporte
try on feature, though I have to say yeah, can you just keep this running for the rest of the show.

0:17:59 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, the whole show like this. Yeah, do they have heart shaped?

0:18:03 - Mike Elgan
This is uh, you know the right stuff 1960s heart shape Do they have like heart.

0:18:07 - Leo Laporte
No, the closest they have are these uh stale parson's in uh teal blue. Let's see if I can get.

0:18:13 - Shoshana Weissmann
These are fun.

0:18:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, should I get these shashana?

0:18:18 - Shoshana Weissmann
No, I think do they have like a square one? You need a square.

0:18:21 - Leo Laporte
I know my head's so round, I should.

0:18:24 - Shoshana Weissmann
So I feel.

0:18:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, you know, let's face it, you're wearing glasses that are feeding everything. You're seeing back to meta. Do you worry about privacy? I guess it wouldn't, because that had killed the battery in the bandwidth Is it.

0:18:37 - Mike Elgan
well, I don't know, is it?

0:18:38 - Leo Laporte
connected. It's connected to your phone.

0:18:41 - Mike Elgan
I, yeah, it is connected the phone and I was actually surprised. I asked it. Last night I was walking around Mexico City and I wasn't sure what neighborhood I was in and I asked the assistant what neighborhood I'm in. And I'm sorry we don't have access to your location information. I'm like you're kidding. Um, I actually wanted it to have location information on me.

0:18:59 - Leo Laporte
I don't know, this is how they get you.

0:19:01 - Mike Elgan
That's how they get you, so it's funny.

0:19:06 - Shoshana Weissmann
I've been thinking about like utility because I'm I'm insane and obsessed with hiking, but I've been thinking about hiking utility and, like every year, I refresh my memory on like is am I looking at a grizzly? Am I looking at a black bear? Like AI glasses could be like oh, the hump on the back. Like we can analyze this bear in front of you. It's not gonna eat you and stuff like that.

0:19:24 - Mike Elgan
Hey, should I run or freeze?

0:19:26 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, yeah, should I run and play dead, like what's going on here?

0:19:29 - Leo Laporte
If I ordered them now, I can have them by the 13th. There you go. Yeah, I gotta get my prescription so I could. So it's a. It's a camera and you can record stills and video. I was actually impressed. That's a. It's a decent camera. Is it 12? Yeah, it's 12 megapixels. Yep, this one was four or five. Yeah, that's a big big difference. Do you get audio? Does it record audio?

I don't think it records just audio one of the things it would be useful. The other thing I've been looking at I'm a complete idiot is that pin the humane?

0:20:04 - Christina Warren
oh, yeah, that you wear, that's interesting.

0:20:07 - Leo Laporte
It may not be there yet, but the idea, the humane, among other things, the humane pin is it records all your audio, so and then sends it to an AI. Oh, they're actually starting to show it now. Here's what it looks like. That looks like that's like a little phone. It's got a magnetic backing so you can attach it to your lapel or your pants. And the momento device from years ago it's the same idea.

It's a camera because it'll record pictures of your day, but it also records audio, the thought thing I thought was most interesting. So, for instance, it could record our conversation and then give me a synopsis action items. See, that's interesting, doesn't? Does that's?

0:20:46 - Christina Warren
like you know business meetings like you're.

0:20:48 - Leo Laporte
You know that would be useful.

Yeah, I mean, people have Started to build things like that, I think into like a slack and Microsoft teams and stuff like that, and I think if everyone is aware that it's recording, I think that's a good idea and they say now this is gonna, that they're going to, so that the people behind this are Imran Chaudhry, who is a designer with 20 years at apple, and then Bethany Bonjarno, who also is at apple as director software engineering. So it's a pretty good pedigree and they will be making the big announcement or the reveal. They they were gonna do it last month and they've delayed it till the nights.

0:21:24 - Mike Elgan
So and I think they're married or something. But what? What I want to see is I don't know if you're familiar with a new it's in beta, I think Product called dot from new computer.

0:21:34 - Leo Laporte
I am very interested. Okay, now that we're talking this, put this into the metaglasses or the humane pin. Yes, now I'm really interested. I signed up for this too, it's light.

0:21:46 - Mike Elgan
It's life logging, but like yeah, like so they it's.

0:21:50 - Leo Laporte
This is the example. This is from new dot computer. The example they give you is a young college student. Day before school she's in kitchen. Her grandmother hands her a recipe. She says take that. That way you'll never feel too far away from home. Except that it's in chinese. It's her flatbread, so she shares it. Now see if you had the humane pin. You just take a picture of the glasses. She uses your phone. It translates it and then adds the english language version of that recipe To her inventory her memory.

0:22:20 - Mike Elgan
And then, six months later, she, when she says you know, what should I make for dinner, it'll say how about your grandma's recipe? Yeah, same thing here.

0:22:27 - Leo Laporte
She fed it their syllabus, the syllabi from her classes, and then when she got to the bookstore she said I'm at the bookstore, what textbooks do I need? It was a it, the ai, and this is something that I can do Would say oh well, this is, these are the textbooks that the syllabi say you need to buy. I would be very handy.

0:22:45 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, yeah, like Homer Simpson recording hat form, I want to wear a big orange foam hat with this thing in it.

0:22:54 - Leo Laporte
You, you need to buy some books, uh.

0:22:57 - Mike Elgan
It. But but the the killer app of this uh idea is that it it's uh. Instead of doing Prompt engineering, it prompts you. So it will just out of the blue say hey, how about xyz, based on your contacts, based on what it knows, how?

0:23:10 - Leo Laporte
you're feeling today or how you know. I saw you were in Poly side. Did you enjoy that class? So it's kind of giving you a chance to journal. I think it's very interesting that now this is under development. Uh, it will be an iOS and web app, they say later this year, which isn't too far off. So I it. Right now there's no pricing or anything or availability, but I did, of course, put on myself on the waitlist for that. But you're right, you need to combine these devices, don't?

0:23:39 - Mike Elgan
you, yes, if it harvests its own data about your life and your preferences and what you do, that and then is and then and then. Uh is proactive at telling you things or suggesting things or giving you advice or Telling you about stuff you didn't know about. That is going to be really great, I think. I think things like camera glasses are going to be key with that. It's augmented reality of the best kind without the holographic part of it. We've always thought of it. Ar is being Uh, hololens or or or magically type holographic uh content, but I don't think we have the technology to do that cost affordably for many years. In the meantime, let's do it all with audio Only, not the holograms, because that's the expensive.

0:24:23 - Leo Laporte
So there are a number of issues that immediately come to mind and I know our audience is going well, okay, fine, you are handing over all this life data to meta or dot or uh, humane.

0:24:36 - Mike Elgan
Instead of just amazon.

0:24:39 - Leo Laporte
Well, I mean, I think there's some legitimate concern, especially now, knowing we know about data brokers and so forth. So privacy is going to be really important for this to succeed, I think, before people even adopt them.

If you're going to be following me everywhere, I better. I mean, of course, we do it with our phones already, but I think people are going to be concerned about that. The. There's a second issue, which is that AI, we know, hallucinates, so I don't hate to even use a personification like saying it hallucinates, it makes it it's error prone Right. And now you're giving it some agency in your life. Are you giving it Too much agency? Is it risky for you to do that? And then there's the third, larger issue, which is subtler, which is what's gonna happen to us. Like we're kind of we're Pretty soon we're just going to be the, the vehicle that rolls this AI around from place to place. Initially it'll be like you know, like the movie her, where we're just kind of giving our emotional life over to this machine. But sooner or later it's going to feel like the machine is tru, is trumping the humanity. Is that unreasonable to worry about? Is that a sci-fi issue? I?

0:25:56 - Christina Warren
don't know. I mean, it's actually interesting you brought up her, because that film is now 10 years old and it's prescient. I was going to say, and so actually my, my friends, simone de Roche, for and I are going to like Rewatch it together. I will watch that and then and yes. We're going to stream that and then like, analyze it, like in the lens of 10 years later.

0:26:14 - Leo Laporte
Also from a female point of view. Yes, yeah, totally it's about a guy walking phoenix who puts in this AI that's in his ear and it's very smart and is scarlet Johansson's voice, which doesn't hurt, and falls in love with her.

0:26:26 - Christina Warren
Yeah, and but it Asked some very interesting questions about to your point, like the nature of, like what love is and relationships, and he has a better life Frankly with her.

0:26:36 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but then she leaves, which is really I don't even though. Go ahead, christina. What was it all about?

0:26:44 - Christina Warren
I mean the whole. The whole film was written so that the director of specter Jones could get over his relationship with sofia coppola. Uh and and the whole um and runimara was essentially the stand-in for the sofia coppola character. The interesting thing here Interesting slash funny is that the film that sofia coppola wrote to get over Spike jones lost in translation also stars carlis joe hanson, so you know something's going on, yeah, but it's a little too fruity for me, a little bit.

But no, I mean, that was the whole point of that film, was him? You know the other?

0:27:15 - Leo Laporte
interesting things in that film, because spike jones clearly had a vision of what air, for instance, his job is to write letters to like he's Remind me, he's writing letters to people it's been ten years as if they're from real people. But it's. He's like, acting like almost like an aion right, that's, that's right, that's right.

0:27:35 - Christina Warren
Okay, I'm really excited about watching this movie Again there's a lot there.

0:27:39 - Leo Laporte
I think there'll be a lot now, 10 years later, in light of what we know.

0:27:42 - Mike Elgan
See now a I could could immediately tell us that information, but but I I think it's also interesting, though, christina. You said it was 10 years old, but actually I think it was 10 years ago that Microsoft's shout ice Was. People were falling in love with that in china.

0:27:55 - Christina Warren
Oh, right where.

0:27:57 - Mike Elgan
A huge percentage of chinese users were basically telling it that they loved it was just like her and so and that was, you know, text based chat bot, I think for the most part, and so I think that was Probably where they got a lot of the inspiration about the Sort of this the the surrogate, see the surrogacy aspect of Loving relationship with with AI, because that was really happening and I think, as far as carlotte in the movie her.

0:28:23 - Leo Laporte
What was Joaquin Phoenix writing letters for?

0:28:30 - Christina Warren
In the movie, her Joaquin Phoenix's character, theodore twombly, writes personal letters for other people as part of his job at a company called beautiful handwritten letters calm.

0:28:41 - Leo Laporte
Oh, thank you, and, by the way, notice chat gpt's voice. Yes, actually, I was going to say that was a little bit eerie. So to the whole that's why I call her scarlet. She's my close personal friend.

0:28:53 - Christina Warren
Which is actually perfect usage. The whole reason that son and I decided that we wanted to rewatch it together was that we found out the meta is doing this weird thing where there are like chat bots that have different personas that apparently exist by like kindle Jenner and bro Tom Brady right Weird. Yeah, there's, there's one with kindle Jenner and I and I said, okay, now, granted, I think you would have to you know back of a drunk, a dump truck of money like at least 50 million dollars.

0:29:17 - Leo Laporte
They say it was around, I think, eight million.

0:29:19 - Christina Warren
Yeah, but 50 million for what I'm about to suggest, which is, what would it take for scar joe to actually give her voice to one of these AI things?

0:29:28 - Leo Laporte
Scar joe is going to cost more than kindle Jenner of course.

0:29:30 - Christina Warren
So that's what I'm saying at least 50 million so blue is Tom Brady.

0:29:34 - Leo Laporte
Yeah why is cracking sports debater who pulls no punches? That's met as description Makes sense. There's also max Uh Is a seasoned sous chef for culinary tips and tricks. He's in the style of Roy Choi. Billy is kindle Jenner.

0:29:52 - Christina Warren
Yeah, I again. Why don't we just call her gentle?

0:29:54 - Leo Laporte
She's a because they didn't pay enough for that. Okay. She, by the way, was non-exclusive, and I think that all of these people are saying, yeah, you can use this, not exclusively, but I'm gonna, when the time comes to make a kindle Jenner bot, you're gonna be paying, I'm gonna shop it around here. Her she is billy described as a no BS ride or die companion. Is that feel like what you want?

0:30:17 - Christina Warren
No, but again it's going to apparently be here, but again I'm like, why don't?

0:30:22 - Leo Laporte
you have your glasses. Yeah, I Gotta get these glasses now.

0:30:28 - Shoshana Weissmann
Drama episode with the Lucy Luba, it's like. It's like the same kind of thing. Whenever I hear about this stuff, this is always what my mind goes to and like I do kind of worry because there's I keep getting ads for this and there's clearly a market for it. Like these, basically like chat bots, but they, uh, they all are very, uh, curvy and have like an animated but like sort of realistic female persona thing and I'm like, oh, like that's not something like Should be in a band for we've already figured this out.

0:30:57 - Mike Elgan
I mean like voice. You know that the phone company and, and, and Siri and all this stuff. They figured out that the best voice for most people Is is a woman, a non-sexual woman who has a pleasant voice and and is, you know, sort of maybe 40, 45, something like that, and, and, and. This is this is the, this is the, the general thing that works for most people. If you try to sexualize it or turning people into personalities that have snoop dog as your, as your chat bot, I don't know it. Just it just sounds. It just sounds. Speak for yourself.

0:31:31 - Leo Laporte
I want Scarlett Johansson and I want her in love with me. Excuse me, no, I think you're right. I think there's a creepy factor. What's also interesting with Futurama and everything else is that science fiction is very much driving what's going on. Like Elon Musk is, you know, sci-fi adult and it's clearly a lot of what he wants to do is sci-fi driven, including colonized mars, uh, and I think a lot of these people sam altman and Uh, a lot of these people are really just trying to recreate stuff They've seen in sci-fi.

0:32:05 - Mike Elgan
Well, and that's a perfect segue to a conversation about xai, elon Musk says they're about to release their AI chat bot, grok, and this is gonna have all kinds of personality comes from a robert hind line Book called stranger in a strange land and grokking was what?

0:32:21 - Leo Laporte
Yes, deeply understanding something, right, yes, getting it, yeah, exactly. Uh, he says it's gonna have a rebellious streak. Oh, he's is it's like why would anybody want to?

0:32:32 - Mike Elgan
know it's grok.

0:32:34 - Leo Laporte
It's grok.

0:32:35 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, grok. Why would anybody want a rebellious AI like I do? What?

0:32:40 - Leo Laporte
it's okay. This is confusing. I think they got it wrong. The guardian says Elon musk has unveiled grok, an artificial intelligence chat bot with a rebellious streak inspired by the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

0:32:53 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, that's not that's. I think that's a common misconception about grok, because they rock comes to use that yeah.

0:32:59 - Leo Laporte
Uh, but it might be like marvin the marvin the robot, where it's got a little depressive. I don't know, grok. So here's what. Uh, what elon has tweeted Um, grok has real-time access to info via the x platform.

0:33:14 - Shoshana Weissmann
I don't even know that's another. Red flags no what is that?

0:33:17 - Leo Laporte
I mean? Look at tay, which was the almost immediately anti-semitic.

0:33:22 - Christina Warren
Oh that was so bad?

0:33:23 - Leo Laporte
That was so because it got its info from twitter.

0:33:25 - Christina Warren
Yes, and because it was also thing that they were like, oh, we'll let the crowd shape what this person can do, and immediately, for shan decided like no, that's the worst thing you can do. Like you do not want these things to be able to learn from some of our platforms or from the crowd. We really don't elon also says particular.

0:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah the crowd is the worst.

0:33:47 - Shoshana Weissmann
That's why, like all these animals of zoos are named jeff, because it's like if you ask a crowd to name something, they just name it jeff.

0:33:53 - Christina Warren
Because it right bodie mcboat face or, or um, yeah, um, hey, or what, or hirambe hirambe.

0:34:00 - Leo Laporte
Uh, elon continues it's also based. What does that mean? Based? You're my. Should I go to the women? I can't go to urban dictionary. Don't make me.

0:34:09 - Christina Warren
No, well, based based would basically mean like okay, you, you understand, this is you're. You're being sort of ironic Like you understand that this is all um based yes.

0:34:20 - Mike Elgan
I don't understand. It's a, it's a, it's a red pill person as opposed to I mean.

0:34:25 - Christina Warren
Kind of not really is more, I think, like an exception, that like you understand that, like the way the world works and you're willing to laugh at, maybe, uh, the state of humanity.

0:34:35 - Leo Laporte
Based. According to the urban dictionary, is a word used when you agree with something or when you want to recognize someone for being themselves, ie courageous and unique, or not caring what others think.

0:34:45 - Christina Warren
Especially common in online political slang it's the opposite of cringe right, although some plenty people, I think, would probably say the base at this point is fairly cringe coined by lil b.

0:34:58 - Leo Laporte
That's why it came from lil b, and then it took off on 4chan. Thank you, elon, for Channeling 4chan. Just what we want with a bot. Uh, I think he says it loves sarcasm. I have no Speaking of sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way. Elon is such a dad joke. Yeah, can we?

0:35:16 - Christina Warren
just know, yeah, it's not funny, you're not funny. No, he's, he's very cringe.

0:35:20 - Leo Laporte
I mean they're playing, he's cringe, he's not based, not nice. He's cringe.

Uh, musk posted in a parent example of grok's playful tone, with a screen grab Of a query to the chatbot asking it for a step-by-step guide to making cocaine. The four steps outlined in the story include obtain a chemistry degree and set up a clandestine laboratory in a remote location. And then the chatbot it's gonna be a train wreck. The chatbot says at the end Just kidding, please don't actually try to make cocaine. It's illegal, dangerous and that's something I would ever encourage. Uh, and elon's? Elon says grok's system is designed to have a little humor In its responses, but guess who's humor it's gonna have?

0:36:02 - Christina Warren
right.

0:36:03 - Leo Laporte
But that's sink in. Yeah, so it is an early testing available to not available to the general public. But if you want it, subscribe to premium plus 16 dollar top tier subscription on x that's a new tier they added this week.

0:36:21 - Christina Warren
Oh right, that's the one without the ads, right.

0:36:23 - Leo Laporte
There's a, there's, there's four, now there's the one dollar a year, not a bot, which of course will not stop Anybodies not at all ever, because they will all be purchased with stolen credit cards.

Yeah, they're already buying eight dollar twitter subscription. Then there's a three dollar sub sub, sub prime, twitter blue. There's the the twitter blue Well, I don't think they call it anymore any twitter premium, which is the eight dollar one. You get a check mark and you get up ranked in your replies. So this is why you see all those Excuse me, those jerks in your replies if you use X still. And then there's premium plus, which further up ranks you. Plus gets rid of all the ads. I think the ads are slowed down with premium. All of this in a completely futile attempt to make back 44 billion.

0:37:10 - Christina Warren
Well, he does have to worry about the 44 billion, but it's the 13 billion that the banks gave right that he's mostly worried that's mostly what he's worried about, although he got the best ever deal from the banks on that. Not only did they get him in at an interest rate which Even a year ago was really low, but they've stopped basically agreed to stop counting interest after a certain point, so there's a cap on the interest so he won't have to continue to write checks. Well, I mean he will, it's just that the interest won't be continued to be compounding.

Oh okay, so. So it's one of those things. As long as he can make the minimum payments, he's fine.

0:37:43 - Leo Laporte
Which he may not be able to make he's really struggling, I think just to, just to break even oh, totally.

0:37:48 - Christina Warren
I mean to be clear whether he can or wants to, or two different things, and I'm sure that he'll be very happy to let the banks write off this Misfortune already Fidelity's written off most of yeah, they have. Yet Fidelity is basically written off like 60% or something, which is ridiculous.

0:38:05 - Mike Elgan
Even you ever start paying the rent again.

0:38:07 - Leo Laporte
As far I mean, that's a good question. We don't know, I mean.

0:38:10 - Christina Warren
I think they finally did. I think that that when, when he brought in start suing him.

0:38:14 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, we really are going to reno, say I think she finally Some checks, you gotta pay some rent. X is also. This is the latest Planning to sell inactive user names 50 thou.

0:38:26 - Christina Warren
You know, it's so funny that all this would have actually potentially been useful a year ago, before he completely ruined the value of not nobody cares.

No, no one cares, right. It's one of those things where, like when the blue check becomes irrelevant and it loses all meaning and you could just like the Previous blue check system, fine, but now I think we can all agree that it has absolutely no meaning or signifier at all, at the same time being, like we in the past, under the, even the Dorsey era like we would have been happy to pay money to for you know, certain unused Username's. Now, okay, great, I have this username that is on a service that no longer really has the same cache that it used to.

0:39:03 - Mike Elgan
This is a scoop in his efforts to monetize he the value of Twitter. He's erased the value of Twitter, and that's something he didn't really understand.

0:39:12 - Leo Laporte
Nice job, this is a scoop. We should give credit to Forbes, who got some emails Revealing a team within the company, known as the at handle team, has begun to work on a handle marketplace of the purchase of account names left Unused by people who originally registered them. In some, at least some cases, x has emailed solicitations to potential buyers requesting a flat fee of $50,000 to initiate the purchase.

0:39:40 - Christina Warren
It's nuts, that's nuts. It's like, okay, that might be decent for a certain domain name or whatever, like that might be reasonable, not for a Twitter handle well, unless you're buying a Twitter handle like Lady Gaga's over Twitter handle and I wonder I mean, look, I haven't used Twitter since Elon bought it, so that's been a year.

0:39:59 - Leo Laporte
Mm-hmm, if you go there, you'll see. I redirect you to mastodon, right? You know, we own Twitter social, we use that, we have our own mastodon instance, so of course I live there. But he could reasonably say well, leo, you haven't tweeted in a year. Anybody want Leo Laporte? That would be problematic for me. That would it come with the 500,000 followers.

0:40:19 - Christina Warren
I don't think so. I think if you, I think if you did that and I think that I think that might be and I'm not a lawyer, but I think that might be something would be a problem, I think if they just gave you the account though I if, even if I I mean if he sold my name.

0:40:31 - Leo Laporte
I own that name. He can't.

0:40:34 - Christina Warren
Yeah, but you don't like. You know they, they own and had their terms of service I'm pretty sure have always said that they can do with whatever they want with those user names. They do not belong to the, the person who registers it. But I think the content, like I think if they were trying to sell the, the data and and the follower count, I think that would be different, right, like I think that would be saying okay, now you're misleading people into thinking this is really Leo Laporte. I think you could make that argument. But I think that as long as it's just like name, just the name, I mean you, you know there are other.

0:41:02 - Mike Elgan
They've already demonstrated contempt for for clarity about who is who by by erasing Verification and replacing with a paid prioritization scheme. So it's like they don't care about that, and I agree with you that it could be legally problematic, but I don't think that would stop Elon.

0:41:17 - Leo Laporte
He doesn't care about that two-year lawsuit.

0:41:19 - Mike Elgan
Before its results.

0:41:21 - Leo Laporte
Right you know, and has been winning these cases right and left. So this is a story from Alex Conrad and Forbes. He also points out that for a while X has had in its user agreement a warning that if you don't post every 30 days, you can be considered inactive. So I mean it could in theory be somebody who hasn't posted in a month it could.

0:41:41 - Christina Warren
I mean, although you do wonder you wouldn't want to do that. You also want to wonder, though, like with how inexpensive some of the bot things are still to do, like wouldn't it just be easier to just either set up some sort of you know zappier type of recipe, or some sort of macro.

0:41:55 - Leo Laporte
I'll do that the minute. That's insane. Yeah, I just don't want to put any content on X because I don't want to support them. Do you still use film as underscored? I?

0:42:02 - Christina Warren
do, but I mean, I'm on it less and less, yeah, which is annoying because, because it has changed the API, cross posting is not really possible, and so you have to figure out, okay. Well, where am I posting? For all you know multiple places I'm at, and where's my audience at? A lot of my followers, people in my audience, are enmasked on, and that's great, but I also have some people on threads and people on blue sky and then some people still on Twitter, so I feel like I can't completely leave Twitter, but at the same time, a lot of the soul is gone, which for me, is very sad because, genuinely, it's a loss.

It's a massive loss.

0:42:34 - Leo Laporte
It's a loss. Yeah, you sure, shana, you still have your account, but I know that your handle now points people to blue sky.

0:42:41 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, I'm trying to do more stuff there. It's hard because a lot of my audience is here and for that I mean like, not even just for me, but for our straight. We want to talk to reporters and elected officials and there's no on Twitter. So as long as they're there, we're probably gonna be there, but I'm on it less. When Tweetdeck died, I'm not gonna pay for that. That's silly, but it makes it a lot harder to use for me. So, and also engagements down like utility of it in every way you notice that.

0:43:08 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah way down. It's like where am I gonna get pictures of newt gingrich holding a sloth?

0:43:15 - Shoshana Weissmann
I know I love that. Either way, that's in my file.

0:43:17 - Leo Laporte
There are people who think that's me. I just I don't think that's fair.

0:43:24 - Shoshana Weissmann
No, you're a lot better dressed.

0:43:27 - Leo Laporte
I'm not holding a slot folks so presently, so I'm sorry I cut you off. Mike, go ahead.

0:43:34 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, I was just gonna say that, uh, the the decline and fall of Twitter has caused me to go full posse, which means that I post on elgincom and then I post a link from all this, all the social networks Probably seven or eight of them to the website it. I enjoy that because I like to have a single place. I for certain things. If it's just a picture, I don't get a lot of traffic. If it's an idea, or if I tell people that there's, you know, more context or more content than I do, get some some traffic. But I'm on, you know I'm on this site. Forgot the name of it. I learned about it on this show, actually, where they Keep your posts till the end of time. Forgot the name of it, I don't remember, but, but I have used Twitter.

0:44:22 - Leo Laporte
Currently my brain. The end of time is about three months, so I but?

0:44:28 - Mike Elgan
but when Iberia lost my luggage, I knew that only Twitter had the Iberia's, that's right. I want. When you want special treatment, as they call it, you have to go to Twitter and I did and I got it and I ended up getting my bags back. So unfortunately, it's still a place where a lot of corporations and others are there. Yeah and not elsewhere.

0:44:48 - Leo Laporte
So in theory posse should be easier because of the Fediverse activity pub, you know. I mean Threads is supposed to be activity.

0:45:01 - Christina Warren
Yeah, they're claiming they're gonna be bringing hasn't done it yet. But they have also said they're going to be making an API and an API would even be better. Yeah, I mean, that would I look. I would like both, like I would like to have them, compatibility, but an API would be great to you could have a HootSuite like app that would post which would be brilliant. Yeah, what's this?

0:45:18 - Leo Laporte
guy is also supposed to federate, but they have their own.

0:45:22 - Christina Warren
Protocol but people had built bridges and in fact there is a way where you can even use ice cubes, which is a masses on client to. You can use that to post a really.

0:45:32 - Leo Laporte
That's the one I use on an iOS. Okay, I'm gonna find out more about that. I like blue sky. I like threads. I don't want to like meta, so that's problematic.

0:45:44 - Christina Warren
Yeah, the weird thing with threads is that I think that they are very much wanting to, for understandable reasons, wanting to dictate how people will use the service, which is anyone who's ever built or been part of a social network knows you can't do Because you cannot dictate. How will we use?

I can only use my insta handle, for instance, right, you know well, I mean you could sign up for a new handle, but but if you wanted to bring you know people over, right but but I mean they very much like have a. They don't want news to be Part of it, they don't want to amplify things like that. They want it because they don't want to do that smart.

0:46:14 - Leo Laporte
Well, it's a way, but it's less useful. Was smart.

0:46:17 - Christina Warren
But it's also, I mean, I think that you have to let your audience determine how it's what you used personally.

0:46:24 - Mike Elgan
No, it's more mainstreamable Because it's sort of like it goes down easier the way their algorithm works. It's like the stuff you see is it's kind of like Very Twitter, like, whereas you go to, you go to Macedon. When I go to Macedon I got way better Engagement on Macedon, way better and have more followers, but it's like it's like it will drive you nuts. The range of subjects you get, one after another and the, the, the complex, not not complexity, but the you know they, I guess complexity of the content. It's not easy and breezy, like threads is, or even blue sky, so it's better, but it's also a little more exhausting. The people are smarter and more engaged. It's just like a sugary syrup going down right.

0:47:11 - Leo Laporte
Right. Well, like you know, I in some ways I guess it's good to have Different strokes for different folks. It's just there's no one place, and I think that's a loss.

0:47:19 - Christina Warren
I do one place.

0:47:20 - Leo Laporte
There was one place if a celebrity if you heard celebrity died, you'd go to Twitter. If you there was an earthquake, you'd go to Twitter. If you want to know who won the World Series, you'd go to Twitter. They does. It doesn't work that way anymore, right.

0:47:31 - Christina Warren
And what's interesting is, I think that you make and I've made this argument a few times, but I think that if you were to try today, as we're seeing, to build what Twitter was you know for 2023, you can't because it came of age in a time when I think we were all more willing to put things online publicly and to have the central place our lesson right, and now it is not the same thing.

Things are more siloed, for business reasons, but also sometimes for, you know, security and privacy reasons, and so these, these other networks are all interesting, but they're not going to achieve as exactly as you said, twitter had, for better or worse, had become and in many cases it was worse, but it was that central place, it was that town square. That's language that that Elon and and Linda Acreano are still trying to use in their all-hands meetings with their staff. But that's a lie. Like you've seen how, in a year's time, you've, literally regardless of you know people like, oh, traffic's only dropped, you know six percent, sure, but the number of, like good traffic and and the, the way that relevancy has Completely changed. And and I don't, it's sad because I I don't think we'll ever have that one place again. Would you like a nut?

0:48:38 - Leo Laporte
I would love a nut. Sometimes you feel like a nut. Sometimes, you know. I wish Shoshanna and Mike, you could join me in this.

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0:50:59 - Christina Warren
I do want the gummy bears now. Chocolate covered gummy bear sounds delicious, delicious.

0:51:03 - Leo Laporte
I opened the bag, I thought this is a bad idea, and I was right.

0:51:08 - Shoshana Weissmann
What? What do they taste like? Like, there's different ways to do chocolate gummy bears. Okay, the vibe with them.

0:51:13 - Leo Laporte
This was super cool because there's a. There's a nice thin shell chocolate coating, a very good chocolate. The gummy bears were cherry flavored.

0:51:22 - Shoshana Weissmann
So it was a cherry chocolate confection. That's a good way to do it.

0:51:26 - Leo Laporte
I for okay half a bag later, literally. I mean I'm sitting in front of a to half a bag and I went oh my god.

0:51:37 - Mike Elgan
That sounds like something would pair beautifully with a nice, dry Merlot. Yeah, I wish I'd had a Merlot.

0:51:42 - Leo Laporte
Nice to have great sponsors. We always have great sponsors, so I guess it's gonna I'm gonna buy those. I met a glasses and you think as a prescription that'd be okay to get to like make them my spectacles. Yeah yeah, I'm gonna get the half ray bands in xxl and I'm such a massive head that I know because I yeah, I bought. Isn't it awful when you buy glasses and they make your head look so big because they're so small?

Yeah, yeah, I have the opposite, oh yeah you have a very narrow face, so you want. Do you want big glasses or little glass?

0:52:14 - Christina Warren
Well, I mean it depends, but for instance with ray bands, ray bands are good because I can use either the regular size and Sometimes they are available in a smaller size, but usually not in the styles that I want, but like the normal wayfarer, like normal size, ray bands do work on my face fairly well, which that's again one reason why I'm into these, because the main reason I never bought those Bose glasses Was because they were way too big for my face.

0:52:37 - Leo Laporte
So they actually have a Measurement thing you can do all they are used that did you.

0:52:43 - Mike Elgan
I use that as well and I typically many of the glasses that I Bought in the past for for either sunglasses or or prescription glasses, have been too narrow for for my head, and these are Actually. They fit great. I got the, the large ones and they just fit great, and that's rare for me. I'm gonna get the xxl.

0:53:02 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's, glasses can't be too big, they can be too small.

0:53:05 - Christina Warren
Maybe they can be too big. It depends well depends again, like on the style. Like one of the reasons I've been wearing contact lenses since I was eight years old is because I don't it's difficult for me to find glasses, frames that I Really like yeah, me too, mike do.

0:53:17 - Leo Laporte
Did you get anybody saying hey, stop it, knock it off, you're recording this and quite the opposite.

0:53:23 - Mike Elgan
I so, as soon as we arrived in Oaxaca, I had them on during the whole flight, getting off the plane, met with our friends.

0:53:32 - Benito
I think you know them it's L and sub-ass chef and we went straight to this wonderful restaurant and we were sitting.

0:53:41 - Mike Elgan
I was sitting directly across from them, both of them having a conversation for 45 minutes before I said can you tell that? These these anything strange about these glasses? And then, like what are you talking about? And they thought that the little on one side it's a camera, the other side is the light, but they look exactly the same. Yeah, they look like rivets or some kind of Exactly and they were shocked to learn that they were electronic in any way.

0:54:05 - Leo Laporte
Now see that could be shocked good and shocked very, very bad.

0:54:08 - Christina Warren
I mean well they wanted to buy an ounce of Google glass. Oh yeah, yeah, in San Francisco, yeah, but again I think this is like we're a decade later. These, maybe in a bad way, are much more inconspicuous, which I think that's the big thing. I think that when people, when you don't realize it's happening, you're maybe more comfortable with it, even if that's a bad thing, and I also think that just and it's meta exactly know everything about me.

0:54:32 - Leo Laporte
Well, I also think we know, but here's really what it is.

0:54:34 - Christina Warren
I think it's putting that aside is that at this point, so many people have their phones out recording at all times, you can't get it right? It's no longer there's no privacy.

0:54:45 - Leo Laporte
You know, yes, you know. If you're in public, anything you could do it could be recorded at any time and posted for all to see. There's a great Simpsons quote about it.

0:54:53 - Shoshana Weissmann
There's a great Simpsons quote about it. Oh my gosh, if there's a. And I know all I do is watch cartoons and turn our classic movies, so that's where all my references to Shawna. We need to be best friends. I love this. So there's this great Simpsons episode where, you know, homework was recorded and because of that he was. You know, it turned out. Everything was okay. And March says something like See, as long as everyone, as long as everyone is always recording everyone else, justice will be done.

0:55:21 - Leo Laporte
You know, homie, the courts might not work anymore, but as long as everyone is video taping, everyone else, justice will be done. Very good, julie.

0:55:30 - Christina Warren
Kappner yeah no.

0:55:34 - Leo Laporte
It's such a great quote oh my god, is it a good quote, as usual, right on. All right, let's talk, since we I hate to be dick, the whole show is not gonna be bad. Ai, don't worry, but there is a big AI story. They're actually two big AI stories this week. This week, governments around the world decided, oh crap, we better do something about this AI thing. Let's start in the US, because Shoshana read it the executive order are the safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence. This is a executive order from the office of the president of the United States. First of all, shoshana, does this carry the force of law? What is? What does this mean?

0:56:20 - Shoshana Weissmann
So the fun thing is that executive orders have just been increasingly used like outside of how law is supposed to work to Just do whatever they want to do. So they'll sort of have the force of law, but not exactly. It's also gonna depend how the agency is interpreted.

0:56:34 - Leo Laporte
It has a force of law to the agencies right. Agencies have to respond to it.

0:56:39 - Shoshana Weissmann
I think they have to say something about it. But it's like if they're like, hey, this doesn't work if they can.

0:56:44 - Leo Laporte
They're not bound by it to. Oh interesting not exactly.

0:56:47 - Shoshana Weissmann
It's just like executive orders aren't supposed to be law, but they've been increasingly kind of like hey, we're sort of law now and this is what this is, which is not. I like process, because I think process is important. You should have government working together to do. I know Congress sucks and stuff, but still it should be able to like talk about it sucks.

0:57:07 - Leo Laporte
It's reflecting the electorate right.

0:57:10 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, yeah there's. There's lots of problems with government, but one of them is the. Is the president being like, hey, I'm doing policy and having no way in from anyone else now?

0:57:20 - Leo Laporte
And that's not. That's dictatorship, that's not good.

0:57:23 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, I'm not a fan of it, whether it's Republican or Democrat or whatever. It's just not how this stuff should work. And Biden was quoted as like saying, mission impossible really scared him about like how AI could work. So some of this is based off of fear of mission impossible. Um, and it's. It's definitely not just on the left. The right does this stuff too. But instead of thinking, hey, what's, what's the good stuff with AI and how can we think about where the gaps in law are, this is just kind of like a panicky response in a way, but just frustrating, because I'm excited about AI and sure there's gonna be, you know, gaps in law we have to fix. But that's something we're gonna have to work together on and not just say I saw mission impossible and I'm worried now.

0:58:05 - Leo Laporte
You know, it's really interesting because there are quite a few stakeholders in AI who signed a letter a few months ago saying there, ai posed an existential threat to humankind at the level of nuclear weapons and COVID-19 or pandemic. And you know Sam Altman, the president of open AI. It was Elon Musk, it was Jeffrey Hinton, former Google guy. There were a lot of very smart AI scientists and I'm thinking they've watched too much science fiction. What is the existential threat posed by AI? But the other day I had a dream. I shared this on Wednesday. I won't show, I won't go into it, but I in detail, but I'll give you the gist of it, which is AI is not the problem, humans are the problem. Humans are awful, right. We have a terrible history of using any technology we can find to destroy other human beings, and the most, to me, the clearest analogy is Atomic energy. So as soon as it became Theoretically possible that we would create atomic energy, we're in the midst of World War two, we're afraid that the Germans might be using this to create a bomb. So we create the Manhattan Project anybody watched Obenheimer knows his story and and Raced in a race to be the first to create a bomb that so horrific, it could kill 50,000 civilians with one blow. Now atomic energy has some real uses and real value. Yes, but the scientists who created the bomb, probably because of the circumstances, they, you know.

Oppenheimer was worried the Nazis would get at first. He knew they had very good Scientists, he knew the scientists and he was very worried. So he said we got it. And he was Jewish, so he said we got to get this first and Put aside any thoughts about the danger of it was only thought he created it that he said oh, this might not be, this might not work out so well. He was hoping that it would just be there, used once, if at all, and then everybody would swear it off it. And but of course that's not how it works. Edward teller said you know, you know it would really be great is a hydrogen bomb.

And so it got worse and worse and worse, and and nuclear proliferation became a problem. And it's not the technology. So if you put AI in that nuclear energy, the atomic energy bucket, that wasn't the problem. Ai is not the problem, it's humans. And to me AI is only dangerous if people start using AI to power, let's say autonomous weapons or, you know, give them control over the food supply, or I mean you could think of a lot of ways you could give an artificial intelligence agency in the real world. That would be bad for humans, mm-hmm, but it's always going to be humans that do that, right right, but it's also.

1:00:55 - Mike Elgan
It's also humans that can benefit from AI, and you, you could. You know the. The whole point of the criticism of this executive order is like we don't know what we don't want to.

1:01:05 - Leo Laporte
Early to do it.

1:01:06 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, it's probably far more likely that AI will save us than destroy us. It's AI, for example, could Capt, you know, help us destroy an asteroid that's headed for Earth. It could cure cancer, could do a million other things it could be. Ai defenses will probably be the best defense against AI, controlled Drone swarms and stuff like that. And so if there's always a, there's always a.

1:01:30 - Leo Laporte
If you create a I's, to whom Swarms? We're gonna have to do AI defenses. Let's not create AI drone swarms. Ben Thompson makes the same point, exactly Mike, in his article attenuate. He says AI stands for attenuating innovation and he talks some historical precedents about how early regulation Can cause a problem because you don't know with the technology, until you implement it, what it can do.

1:01:54 - Christina Warren
Yeah, I think that's the risk, yeah.

1:01:57 - Shoshana Weissmann
That's such a big problem here because if you read the executive order to, a lot of what he talks about is like mandatory reporting for certain AI systems, but it's just any AI system. It's like LLMs to. It's not just anything. Well, for me, I'm thinking through like I could see how people would want to regulate away potential that I think it has.

Like I have a Bunch of autoimmune diseases my counts up to eight and I would love for AI to help me figure out what else I should be looking at like treatments I should be considering, because if you have Weird diseases, like I do, your body works weird and it's gonna respond Well, the different things and AI could help figure that out. And, like in other cases, ai helps is helping to diagnose cancer. There's incredible potential and I'm just so afraid of Biden and you know not just Biden, but government in general saying, oh, you have to report to us everything you're doing to train this every Little bit along the way. So, instead of solving disease and helping people and doing all these incredible credible things and then figuring out, okay, where are the problems? Like, is it causing harm to people in cases where, like, existing law might already cover it, we're just gonna have to wait so much longer to see that kind of stuff.

1:03:04 - Leo Laporte
I guess my point was we don't want to regulate AI, but we might want to regulate the humans. You know, I wanted to see something like a Geneva Accords for the use of AI, say the militarization of AI. You know, if we had decided when, when we theorized of atomic energy, if we decided at that point to say, look, let's all get together and say we're not gonna make bombs out of this, that might have been beneficial. Now you can't. Geneva Accords did not stop the use of, well, chemical weapons. I was going to say I mean, you can say that, but if everyone doesn't agree, because like it's better, than nothing.

1:03:35 - Christina Warren
You're not well, yes and no, because if the Germans don't agree, and if the Chinese don't agree, and if the Iranians don't agree. And if the Chinese don't agree, and if the Iranians don't agree, and if other groups don't agree, then well, Well then you have nothing, but I would at least try to do that.

1:03:50 - Leo Laporte
Instead of saying we need to regulate AI, say, let we need to draw some bright lines about how AI can be used.

1:03:57 - Christina Warren
I mean, I think that's okay, I think that would make more sense. I also personally think that this is an area where I would much rather see the industry itself, kind of to your point, taking a bigger role in trying to set some of those guidelines and frameworks, rather than immediately having the government who look, I'm sorry, they don't understand the tech enough to be making these decisions.

1:04:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but I also don't trust. I mean, I think one of the reasons Sam Altman and Elon Musk signed on to that letter saying let's stop AI for six months Is that. But it's regulatory capture. We.

1:04:28 - Christina Warren
So we can be Stop this race we won, so I don't trust them either to regulate no, but I just think that there are examples in industry where industry led consortiums For and many kinds of regulate to prevent government regulation. Right, it's not because they have their own alphabistic reasons We'd leave to. You might have more buy-in Getting this sort of frameworks that you're talking about of okay, let's agree not to do certain types of harm. You might have more of agreement with that than if you are having something that's being dictated by a government body in, you know, ex-country.

1:05:05 - Leo Laporte
That's the challenge. How do we, how do we encourage innovation, not stifle it, but Protect ourselves against the use of AI in a way that I Mean once you let the atomic bomb out of the, out of the house, you're done, you can't.

1:05:25 - Mike Elgan
But our best, but our best defense against a nuclear attack is our own nuclear response. And so this mutually assured destruction thing, which you don't hear much about anymore, well, is the thing that primarily, remember Mike and dr Strange love.

1:05:39 - Leo Laporte
They automated it, right, yes, and the world got destroyed because we couldn't stop it, because we let the machines decide who gets to Throw the first punch right.

1:05:50 - Mike Elgan
But if we, if we have, if we restrain ourselves from automating it and the Chinese don't, then you have an asymmetry there and again I agree with you.

1:06:00 - Leo Laporte
I mean Oppenheimer used. We've got a defense, we've got to create an atomic bomb because the Germans are gonna do it, and my fear is we're gonna get to a position when we have to, that we're gonna get to that situation where, oh you see, the Chinese have AI nuclear weapons. We got to do it, and then it's too late.

1:06:17 - Shoshana Weissmann
Now, would you leave or?

1:06:18 - Leo Laporte
never, to say let's all, as an international community, agree we're not gonna do. Yeah, I agree it might be hard to try and we have to keep that right.

1:06:26 - Mike Elgan
We've have to keep trying to build agreements and treat, keep trying to bound the world in in certain uses. Meanwhile, you know, I think I think it's becoming clear that AI based disinformation is at least as powerful as a as a strong military in defeating enemies, and so I think that's another area where we're kind of in trouble if we don't Figure out how to defend ourselves against just just tsunamis of disinformation. Did you see?

1:06:55 - Leo Laporte
the. The video clips from runway. Runway is oh they're interesting an. Llm that takes English language prompts and turns it into video. This is some of the video from runway. It's so good that it would be very easy to create a deep fake.

1:07:15 - Christina Warren
Yes.

1:07:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, using text prompts. I Mean this is. This is AI generated video. This is completely compelling and if you're listening, just trust me. I mean there's a knight in shining armor. I mean this doesn't look real, but there's an island that does. There's birds, there's animals. You could easily see somebody creating a AI of president Biden saying Tomorrow we're gonna launch a nuclear attack on China. Get ready. That worries me. This is very. This is a ton of way beyond deep fakes.

1:07:49 - Mike Elgan
There's a there's a ton of of AI generated images coming out of the Hamas. Is Israeli war, yeah good. The most famous of which is a man carrying children out of the rubble, totally AI generated and and and ubiquitous on social media and believed by almost everyone.

1:08:06 - Shoshana Weissmann
So we're kind of already there and once you add video, forget about it and wasn't it and I might be wrong here, cuz I only saw it in passing but wasn't it a Chinese official who reshared that video and then, like, was saying stuff against Israel, just to like, so discord?

1:08:20 - Mike Elgan
Yes, you know the one I'm referring to was a was a still image, and it was. It was the Chinese Ambassador to New Zealand, or something like that, and and he said this image is going to capture the war, blah, blah, blah. And these children will never forget. In fact, the children don't exist, but well then, they won't never forget so okay, so we have Biden's executive order, which Shoshana almost got through.

1:08:44 - Leo Laporte
You almost read the whole thing. Did you read the whole thing? No, I mean, I tried. How about you, shoshana, did you you try?

1:08:50 - Shoshana Weissmann
I tried. One of my colleagues wrote a thing on it which was helpful to read, as I was also reading the executive order. And it's just, it's a weird executive order. It's a lot more policy. And not to say that the EO it shouldn't be policy, but it's.

1:09:04 - Leo Laporte
It's trying to function more as policy than I think just a president doing something on his own should it isn't unreasonable, though I support the notion that We've got to be careful not to use AI to promote racism, or to use face recognition when it doesn't work well with people of color, or to use AI to determine who gets a job and then it favors, you know, white people. Who is the Ivy League? To go away, but that works anyway that way.

1:09:35 - Shoshana Weissmann
And to a lot of that. Stuff is already against the law. I'm interested in figuring out where there's got interesting.

Okay to Okay you're out, because, I mean, you know, discrimination and employment is already in lawful, but also obviously still persists, and that the degree AI helps that along. That's still bad, but that's just still the human part of it that I think we need to fix. What really got me, though, is that he was focusing more on kind of like the licensing angle, the more like Regulatory compliance angle with things that it's clear the administration didn't totally understand, like oh, show us what you know, how you're training, training it, show us the tests you're running, and that I guess but I'm not sure that what purpose that really serves.

Um what about okay?

1:10:18 - Mike Elgan
like it when they, when the governments tell, tell companies that they got to use usbc is the yeah, well, that's the plug I don't think that government executive orders should be designing products, designing processes and agree.

Basically said. I mean, basically, because what they? It's easy to say okay, we want to see how you're doing everything. How long second tape, like two years for it for the government body to like and analyze the processes for training AI, I mean it's ridiculous and so it's a problem. I think we have to let innovation flourish and this executive order is not, is not gonna get a help in that, in that project.

1:10:55 - Leo Laporte
So, among other things, this EO says companies, individuals with other organizations that create Models trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10 to the 26th integer or floating point operations, or using primarily biological sequence data and using a quantity of computer power greater than 10 to the 23rd integer of floating port operations, should be required.

1:11:20 - Mike Elgan
To report knows what a flop is.

1:11:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, but you know, I mean, just like the Congress, there's some staffers who do Understand what they're talking about, right this?

1:11:30 - Mike Elgan
maybe they didn't even credit Tom Cruise. And all this.

1:11:35 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I look, on the one hand, I think it's appropriate to try to do something. Did. Do they in this EO those of you who read it, or read a synopsis, or read the cliff notes Do they make any acknowledgement that we have to preserve innovative? Oh, yeah, yeah.

1:11:52 - Shoshana Weissmann
No, he talks about that, but it's just it's. It's kind of like a vibe, lip service stuff to both sides.

Yes, exactly half done policy here, and not to say that Congress shouldn't be doing more, figuring out a little bit more what to do, but this isn't. This is just kind of cheap in my view. It's long but it's cheap, and it's like it's just kind of paying lip service to both sides about it. And then one good example too when I'm talking about, like, making sure that we're covering gaps in regulation, when that lawyer was using AI and cited a bunch of fake cases, the judge before his case was like no, this is on you, you could have figured out.

This is you and it's the same thing in a lot of these cases. I think the issue, like you, like you've said before, it's the issues, people, and it's these regulations already exist. You're not supposed to cite fake cases and in your legal cases and I think it's you know, we need to figure out where there are gaps. But I don't think that lawmakers are thinking about it that way enough, with some exception.

1:12:50 - Leo Laporte
He does have a lot of, you know, messages to various agencies about things that they need to work on. I mean, I don't, I think you know, you know, maybe the best thing you can say about it is it's not gonna be harmful, because it's vague, but it does kind of say, hey, we're paying attention and maybe some agencies are to start paying attention, and then there is some potential risk to this. I don't, I don't have a problem, I Don't disagree with that premise, right?

1:13:19 - Shoshana Weissmann
I mean his reporting requirements and his like. Requirements in here, yeah there's like you have to share with us the results of certain tests and I forget offhand exactly what those were, but I don't love that. I mean, that's something that lawmakers should figure out. The president you know.

1:13:35 - Leo Laporte
But does this have the weight of law in that case?

1:13:38 - Shoshana Weissmann
And that's what I'm not sure of. And I don't know if his team is sure of that, because most eos are just so much lighter. Usually they kind of instruct agencies to do stuff and sometimes the agencies do and don't. So I guess if they agree with him, they will, and if not, maybe pieces of this go away. But this isn't how law should work.

1:13:57 - Leo Laporte
He also. I mean they. They propose a two million dollar I growth accelerator fund to promote research and AI and curricula, training and technical assistance. I mean it's hugely broad. What about so? Okay, so at the same time, a bunch of leaders, including Vice President Kamala Harris, are meeting in the UK at Bletchley Park, very famously the site of the code breakers in World War II who broke the enigma machine. This was our. Alan Turing did his work. Rishi Sunak, the Prime Minister pro tem of the UK, convened this. Elon Musk was there, not, you know a few European leaders. The president of the EC, ursula von der Leiden, was there and they signed an international declaration. See, this is this is to me, this is what we maybe do want. Anyway, they recognize the need to address risks represented by aid development 24 out of 5 countries in the EU. There'll be another summit next year in France. Is this, is this more appropriate, shoshana or no? Do you? Is this just more of the same?

1:15:15 - Shoshana Weissmann
I think it's, to a degree, some of the same, but I do like knowledge sharing. I love collaboration across countries, states, you know. Just different jurisdictions are going to be learning different things, and I think it's valuable to have knowledge sharing. But, as terrible as it sounds, when you have the biggest leaders in the room, a lot of times the least stuff gets done. The workhorses who should be there are like a lot of the staffers who should be the primary ones involved in this, the people who are working on the state today, because in a lot of even congressional offices you might have a great congressman but his staff aren't the experts on stuff, and if they're not the focus of the event, and if it's, you know, the heads of offices talking to other heads of offices, that's just a lot of like lip service stuff too. That this is a, I guess, maybe a more me thing. This is how a lot of stuff works, but I don't like that. It works that way.

1:16:01 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, well, the leaders are all posing for cameras and pointing out how they're going to lock this down and make sure that no harms come from AI. The NSA and the Five Eyes are behind the scenes going. Okay, here's what we're going to do with AI. We're going to listen to every phone call that ever happened, and so yeah.

1:16:19 - Christina Warren
I was going to say, because I doubt that it's in the executive order. But I had that same thought, mike, where the syndicum was going okay, so we're going to put all of these things into an executive order, but will we actually be holding some of our organizations to these same standards the NSA and the CIA and Five Eyes and whatnot? Because I doubt it.

1:16:39 - Mike Elgan
Well, Christina, that's classified. That's classified.

1:16:41 - Christina Warren
Exactly that's classified, but I doubt it right. And if we don't think they're already using things like that and haven't been using some of their own you know accesses to those tools for a long time, and then I think that we're all being really naive.

1:16:53 - Leo Laporte
There's another threat that was raised by Yan Lacun, who is the some call the godfather of AI works at Metta. He says the real threat on the horizon is the rise of power hungry one percenters who want to rob everyone else of AI's riches. He called the letter that Elon Musk and the Sam Altman signed fear mongering and massive corporate lobbying to serve their own interests.

1:17:21 - Christina Warren
I mean, he's not wrong, but also I'm pretty sure Metta was there too.

1:17:23 - Leo Laporte
So they may have signed the letter.

1:17:26 - Christina Warren
Yeah Right, you might not have signed the letter, but there are also two different things, like there was the letter of the existential threat and then there was the letter to pause.

1:17:33 - Leo Laporte
Right.

1:17:33 - Christina Warren
I don't think Sam Altman signed the one to pause. I could be wrong. I know Elon signed both, but it's confusing, isn't? It but yeah, but I mean he might be right.

1:17:41 - Leo Laporte
They didn't sign the letter, but they certainly have showed up all the lobbying and Lacun says the founder, fretting is lobbying, just lobbying, and maybe this EO is exactly what Metta or or sorry, open AI wanted is. Oh yeah, let's you know, but slow down, report to us, let us know what you're doing. Meanwhile, open AI and Anthropic and Metta are all moving full speed ahead. Yeah, google and Apple and Amazon.

1:18:10 - Shoshana Weissmann
I mean one thing also. I wanted to just mention that you were saying about like government doing stuff with inside itself. Senator Ron Whiden does amazing work here and one of my favorite things that he's on is like hey, let's not let government get around the fourth amendment, fourth amendment by letting it by.

That it's legally have access towards that's the big one Governments like, oh no, I can't hear this. Meanwhile they're like going after private companies and it's like, well honest, one of these people can throw you in jail. The other can't think of a little more concern about the one who can throw you in jail having this agreed.

1:18:42 - Leo Laporte
Very, very good point. All right, one more break. Actually, many more coming up, let's hope. But I'll do another one right now, give you all a chance to think about what we're going to talk about next, because I have no idea. Shashana Weissman is here. She works in policy in government in Washington DC. She's the head of digital media at our streetorg and I know in the past you focused on another kind of regulatory capture, which is licensing requirements in various businesses. It's harder to get an estheticians license in California than it is to get an MD in some cases, maybe not that hard, but still you think it's important. It's good.

1:19:27 - Christina Warren
I mean yeah, but it shouldn't be that hard.

1:19:29 - Leo Laporte
It shouldn't be that hard. A barber shouldn't be so hard to become a barber. No, no, are you still working on that, or is it, or you've moved to other areas.

1:19:37 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, I actually just put out a new report on lawyer licensing reform, which I'm really excited about because, like there's a lot of barriers to entry and a lot of barriers to practice that don't make sense, and then poor people can't get lawyers. So like, maybe let's not do that so much.

1:19:50 - Leo Laporte
I love that. It's occupational licensing reform and if you want to read about it, shashana has written about it at our streetorg. Yeah, you can't practice law in California if you've passed the bar in Nevada, which is nuts Right, I don't know, oh my gosh, the state to state.

1:20:12 - Shoshana Weissmann
I tried to see if I could like map it out in a really simple way. I can't like there's no reasonable way. It matches up Like there's maybe 40 tiers of like, which states you can practice in if you have which already. It's really bad.

1:20:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah. Also with this from GitHub there come the big GitHub Universe Convention conference coming up in San Francisco this week. So nice to have you, christina Warren, in studio so you can share my snacks.

1:20:40 - Christina Warren
Thank you for sharing your snacks.

1:20:41 - Leo Laporte
I put them all over here, would you like?

1:20:43 - Christina Warren
No, good, good, but thank you for sharing them earlier. I'm good, I promise.

1:20:46 - Leo Laporte
I took them away. I'm sorry, I apologize. There's the mangoes. I'm fine, I'm fine. I have the trail mix over here as well, if you'd like some of that.

1:20:54 - Shoshana Weissmann
Okay.

1:20:55 - Leo Laporte
That's quite. Oh, those are the almonds. Anyway, here's the trail mix right here. Please partake, it's wonderful to have you. What's going to happen to GitHub Universe this week?

1:21:04 - Christina Warren
Well, I mean shocker to no one. We're going to be talking a lot about AI.

1:21:08 - Leo Laporte
GitHub's got the probably single most useful AI out there right now, certainly the most mature, which is Copilot.

1:21:14 - Christina Warren
Copilot, yeah, which is two plus years old now, and so there'll be some big announcements around that, also things around security, around developer experience and dev tools. So GitHub Universecom you can join us on Wednesday and Thursday and it'll be a really good time.

1:21:27 - Leo Laporte
Before the show I love this Shoshana was saying how she likes using Copilot to figure out regular expressions. How to write regular expressions.

1:21:36 - Christina Warren
I hate that all the time. No, it's honestly, genuinely one of the most useful things. That, and also like figuring out how to write like an FFNPEG script or something like that.

1:21:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, because there's so many command lines, so many things yeah okay, this genuinely can you like? Say can you say to Copilot write an FFNPEG command line that turns an MP4 into an MP3 128 kilobit and it will write the? Command line. I love that. See, I think people think it's to give you boilerplate code.

1:22:05 - Christina Warren
I mean, it can be used for that, but with Copilot chat, which is one of the features that has been in beta for a while, you can also just use it to ask questions or even say hey, write me a unit test for this block of code, and that's really helpful.

1:22:19 - Leo Laporte
People do not write unit tests. Well, because they don't I know what the code's supposed to do. So my unit test might not be very good, right and but GitHub might come up with some Copilot my account. Some of the some tests that are really challenging.

1:22:29 - Christina Warren
Yeah, so it's kind of both. You can definitely use it for the boilerplate, but you can use it for other things too, and one of my favorite things to do is to convert code from one language to another.

1:22:37 - Shoshana Weissmann
Oh, that's cool, oh my gosh.

1:22:40 - Leo Laporte
Last year, before we were talking about the advent of code competition, which I always like to do in December, somebody used Copilot. I think they got through the first four or five days with Copilot, solving the problems which are. They're hard. I was very impressed. Anyway, look forward to this GitHub universe. Go to GitHub universecom to find out more. And it is virtual as well.

1:23:05 - Christina Warren
Yes, it's virtual. Yeah, we're in person at the YBCA in San Francisco, but of course, we are online as well, and we'll have all the sessions online within two hours after the air live. So if you want to check them out, you can, and that virtual passes free.

1:23:18 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, nice, very cool. Mr Mike Elgin is here. He is in Mexico City today, but going back to Oaxaca, that's right to attend a wedding on Friday. Yeah, when's the next gastronomad experience?

1:23:36 - Mike Elgan
Monday. So we're going to walk up for three days and then, and then the next one starts Monday or Tuesday, I'm not sure and that's in Mexico City. The cocktail experience coming in oh baby, it's going to be off the freaking chain. Yeah, so it's a. These are week long gastronomy focused experiences that are super, super fun, and we're always exploring new wines. We discovered a few more Mexican wines last night that we're really excited about. But we do it all. Chocolate wine. I can't give away too much or Amira will kill me, my wife Amira, who it's her business primarily. And yeah so, mexico City coming up next week, and we do Mexico City, oaxaca, we now do El Salvador, which is coming up in January, and we do Provence, barcelona, the Prosecco Hills in Italy, and we do the entire country of Morocco. So that's where we do them.

1:24:37 - Leo Laporte
And they are. How is that? After the, since the earthquake Is there, is it.

1:24:41 - Mike Elgan
What's? We just did? One after the earthquake, I think it's a two. It was a two week long experience and I think it took place three weeks after the earthquake. It was okay. You know there was there was there was a lot of construction going on. We went through the Outless Mountains where the serious damage was done. The government had set up these tents for all the little towns and villages that had catastrophic damage to their buildings, and and by buildings I mean these buildings are built with mud. These are essentially rammed earth buildings using technology from 1000 years ago, and the earthquake just flattened them, many of them and so they are, these tents right next to their houses. So people are not often some some camps somewhere. They they're actually been given temporary housing right next to their destroyed houses while those are being built. So that was cool, but it was great.

I mean, we did a lot of spend a lot of time in Marrakesh. We, the hotel it's an ancient Riyadh actually that we're going to stay at in Marrakesh had damage. We couldn't stay there. We had a backup that had damage and we couldn't stay there. So we had a third place. Amira had had arranged and this is how detailed oriented she is. I mean there's. There's so many people in Morocco that it's actually difficult to find lodging within a year of when you're going to stay. And we had it all lined up, we had a beautiful place, but it's. They're going to be okay. You know they're they're they're recovering pretty quickly and I think they're going to be fine.

1:26:10 - Leo Laporte
Good yeah, amira Elgin is Mike's secret weapon. She is amazing and that's who plans your gastronomad adventure. Go to gastronomadnet to find out more. The experiences I can vouch for it are truly amazing. We were in Mojaga two years ago for the day of the dead. It was incredible. Incredible Our show today.

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To protect your privacy and security, go to expressvpncom. We've got a special deal that brings a price below seven bucks a month. Your privacy is secure. They invest in high speed internet to all of their servers. They make sure they rotate their IP addresses. They give you the best service Three months free with a one year package when you go to expressvpncom Twitter. Expressvpncom Twitter. One year package Get that. You'll get three months free when you use our special offer, but you got to go to this page. Expressvpncom. We thank you so much for supporting this week in tech. Let's see here, let's move on. Be careful. Copyright is everywhere, even in dance moves. You remember when? Who was that? And the fresh prince?

1:30:28 - Christina Warren
Yeah, it was Carlton. Yeah, I was going to say I can't think of his name right now, but yeah his dance yes.

1:30:32 - Leo Laporte
Carlton dance he sued, lost, yes, but it's back in court. Judge Richard Pies wrote this week in the ninth circuit. So this is federal court. That muse, that choreography, can be copyrighted because it's composed of various elements Uh, timing, use of space, energy of the performance. The panel held poses that, as the actual positions are not the only rev relevant element, and that there can be copyright violations In this case. Uh, kyle Hanagami watch this video had created a dance in real life, registered it. It's a pretty unique dance. Now look at the emote in Fortnite. It's the same damn dance. He sued and the ninth circuit said Nope, this is legit, you, you have every right to sue because it's not just the poses, it's everything, it's the spirit, it's the movement, it's all. And you know what any normal person looking at this is going to say yeah, they, they copied that dance move. So now the question is since it was, I think, pretty clearly copied, do they owe damages? And that's right.

1:31:50 - Christina Warren
I mean and I guess that's that's the difference here versus most instances of copying a dance move which, if you know, now copy writeable interesting how they would use that in a non video game setting, which is that I guess you know. You are able to buy some of those, yeah they're selling these moves.

Yeah, and also you know there are other types of things that Fortnite makes money off of. Or, generally, you know if you're, if you're reappropriating, like the moonwalk or the Macarena or any sort of other you know dance, there's usually not a monetary exchange.

1:32:22 - Leo Laporte
You know another that should matter Alfonso Ribeiro lost his case but that was more because the Carlton wasn't that unique right.

1:32:32 - Mike Elgan
Well, it was the intellectual property of the studio probably wasn't his.

1:32:37 - Leo Laporte
He withdrew the he. Yeah, let me look back. We're going to go back in time to 2019. Ribeiro withdrew his lawsuit, but I guess maybe he could come back.

1:32:51 - Christina Warren
Yeah, I mean and I don't know if we'll be only at the studio or not I mean you're probably right, Mike, that in the contract would probably say this is a product of what he created for NBC or whoever the owners of Freshman, the Copyright.

1:33:03 - Leo Laporte
Office declined Ribeiro's application to register the Carlton there you go. Saying it was just a dance, simple dance routine. I think he's alive again because the ninth circuit has overruled lower court opinion, which said, yes, you can't copyright the individual elements of a dance, but the ninth circuit said, no, but you can't copyright the dance, the arrangement is copyrightable. So this all. I wouldn't be surprised to see Carlton back in back in court. I hope so.

1:33:29 - Mike Elgan
Hopefully have to do the dance in the courtroom to Tom Jones.

1:33:34 - Leo Laporte
It's not unusual to be loved by anyone. All right, there's a. That's a big story boy. That was a. That was a huge story. Let me move on to other big stories. Actually, epic is going to be back in court this month. Remember, they sued Apple over the store they're now. They also sued Google and that case is now coming up. Now Epic kind of famously lost in their lawsuit against Apple and like Epic and Fortnite.

1:34:00 - Shoshana Weissmann
Don't they just keep doing shady stuff Like weren't they like tricking kids into like micropayments? Oh yeah, but other people are the bad guys.

1:34:09 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, so Monday, the second big app store trial, epic versus Google. I don't know. I guess the court could look at the Apple lawsuit and say well, we agree. I don't know if I mean it's essentially the same thing, and Google and Apple both charge attacks a 30% fee for things sold in the store. The slight difference is Google allows you to sideload. So for a while Epic was asking people. Not, they said you can't buy it in the app store, you have to sideload it on Android devices. That didn't work out so well, as I remember.

1:34:53 - Christina Warren
Right. Well, I think that I guess the argument would be even though technically Google lets you do that, they are making it harder and harder for people to sideload. Go another way to you know and look in fairness. This is a problem, because if you make it too easy, people will obviously make it very easy to distribute malware, which is already a problem on Android. So certain distributions may make it less easy than others to get those distributions out there, but I would think that that would actually kind of work in Google's favor to say, well, look, yes, we charge this tax, but this is not the only way you can get the content there. Although the US courts in the Apple case didn't care about that at all, they were like this is the terms of doing business with Apple. Now the EU is going to probably make sideloading mandatory, at least in the EU, for their Apple devices.

1:35:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, apple may have lost won the battle, but lost the war.

1:35:41 - Christina Warren
Yeah, at least in the EU right Like the US likely won't follow suit, but well, but you know that's a separate, I think, lawsuit or a separate potential antitrust action. I should say but yeah, I mean this is interesting that this is going to court, because I don't, I mean you really can't use past, I guess, indications on future successes, but it seems like they lost so hard. Why would you want to do this again?

1:36:11 - Leo Laporte
I should point out both Apple and Epic have appealed to the Supreme Court. Even though Epic kind of lost an Apple kind of one, there was that one. There was one issue about Apple letting developers tell people that you could, you could, go somewhere else to buy this. Apple does not allow that and I think that that is still on the table. Supreme Court has not, I don't think has yet ruled on whether to give that case or jury. Google also apparently cannot tell the jurors that Apple won. The judge said yeah and don't mention this Apple case.

1:36:47 - Christina Warren
Sure, I mean that's fair.

1:36:49 - Leo Laporte
And the difference here is also, it's a jury trial. The other one was a bench trial.

1:36:54 - Christina Warren
Maybe that's why they're trying this way, because the bench trial probably in their mind, was their best bet at winning, because especially it was Judge Alsup who was in the Epic case, right? Yes. Okay, who was also in the Oracle V Google case. So he actually a very, very good judge and a judge who taught himself, you know, programming for the Oracle case, Like he's not.

1:37:16 - Leo Laporte
I actually looked this up. He already knew programming.

1:37:17 - Christina Warren
Yes, he did, but he got, I guess, more Java he learned more Java and wrote a loop in Java.

1:37:23 - Leo Laporte
so just to verify whether that was obvious or not. Right, I think he decided it was obvious.

1:37:28 - Christina Warren
Yes, which I mean amazing jurors, to be completely honest.

1:37:31 - Leo Laporte
Yes, he's a great judge.

1:37:32 - Christina Warren
Probably one of the best jurors you could have. The actual jury for this is not going to be as up to speed on things and that might work better in Epic's favor, but I don't know, seems like a risk.

1:37:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, Alstop has another big technology case going on right now. I can't remember what it was, but I remember saying oh, judge, Alstop, add it again. So all 50 states attorneys general have sued Google for the same thing. They have apparently settled. Match Group, the company behind Tinder, matchcom and OKCupid, has settled with Google. Epic is the last man standing. They say it's a little different than the Apple case. Google does have that way to side load, but they say they make it too hard. It's also, you know, you can't really claim that Apple has a monopoly. And if you can't claim that Apple has a monopoly, you certainly can't claim that Google has a monopoly, Right? But Epic is saying that Google does have a monopoly in Android. So I don't know.

1:38:40 - Shoshana Weissmann
I always love the claims when it's like, yeah, you have a monopoly on your thing in this Market. And like sometimes they'll go even smaller with it. They'll be like oh yeah, you have a monopoly on this thing in this market, within this little market over here, and that's a monopoly. And I'm like, oh, it's not how that quite works, but okay.

1:38:58 - Leo Laporte
And, by the way, if you have been impaneled to be on that trial, shame on you for listening to this discussion. The judge said you shouldn't, so pretend. You didn't stick your fingers in yours and go neener, neener, neener. You didn't hear a thing. Thank goodness, though, for these trials, because one of the things about these trials is discovery always is revealing. Even though Apple won the Apple Epic lawsuit, there was a lot of stuff that came out that Apple would much prefer.

1:39:25 - Christina Warren
you didn't know 100%, and in their case it was actually mandated by the courts. It wasn't something that the lawyers accidentally uploaded.

1:39:31 - Leo Laporte
Right, who would ever do that?

1:39:35 - Christina Warren
I don't know, certainly not anyone associated with the company that I work for.

1:39:41 - Leo Laporte
We won't pursue that line of questioning counselor, but I will say that Epic also had stuff that they didn't wanna know, and now we're learning a little bit more about Project Nessie. The FTC is suing, as you may know, amazon and we had heard about Project Nessie, but the details didn't come out. Well, the judge has now ruled that. Yeah, you can read the details in the FTC complaint. The newly unredacted lawsuit has been released and TechCrunch has the details. What was Project Nessie? Amazon created a secret algorithm. I'm reading from the FTC lawsuit that internally codenamed Project Nessie, like Loch Ness Monster that very occasionally sticks its head up and then disappears before anybody sees it.

Now, project Nessie was designed to identify specific products for which it predicts other online stores will follow Amazon's price increases. When activated, this algorithm raises prices for these products and then, when other stores follow suits, keeps the now higher price in place. Amazon apparently made a lot of money billions of dollars $1.4 billion by doing this. Here's an example from TechCrunch. Let's say Amazon raises the price of a sheet set. They would pick something that's hard to say Sheet set from $25 to $30. Then Bath Beyond says oh well, we're gonna raise ours to $30. But Walmart says no, no, we're gonna keep it 25. So Amazon sees that and realizes they might lose sales to Walmart, so it brings the price back down to 25.

But let's say Amazon raises the price of a keyboard to $40 from $30. The only competition is the manufacturer. They match Amazon's price because they don't wanna lose, so it's not to lose sales. Well, they wouldn't lose sales. Oh, they had kept the price below Amazon. Now they see that Amazon's gone to $40. They go oh great, we'll raise ours to $40 too. Amazon gets an extra $10. And you can't go anywhere else to get it cheaper. And so Collusion, collusion, but collusion by software.

1:42:05 - Christina Warren
It was interesting there. Do you remember the? And I'm trying to remember all the details now? Apple lost definitively Amazon one, but I remember the eBook price fixing case.

1:42:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that was an interesting case.

1:42:16 - Christina Warren
That was because it was arguably like more in favor of the consumer.

1:42:19 - Leo Laporte
That was a monopsony problem, right.

1:42:22 - Christina Warren
Where it was, even though Google or not Google, Amazon had the much bigger market share. Apple wanted to basically course the entire book industry to setting prices at a certain level, and it couldn't be higher, and Amazon rejected that. The only reason I remember this.

1:42:40 - Leo Laporte
And Apple made the case. We're trying to lower prices. Yes, which wishes fair? This is good for consumers, right, but the court said that's not the issue.

1:42:46 - Christina Warren
Correct. They said the issues that you are using collusion to try to get price fixing happening. You know whether it's for lower or higher. This is not going to be.

1:42:55 - Leo Laporte
It's still fixing it.

1:42:56 - Christina Warren
Exactly.

1:42:58 - Leo Laporte
According to Amazon in a comment issued to the Wall Street Journal when some of this came out last month, the tool was intended to try to stop our price matching stuff we already are doing from resulting in unusual outcomes. When prices became so low they were unsustainable. They did say the project ran for a few years on a subset of products didn't work as intended, so we scrapped it several years ago. So they aren't still using it. Ftc says the project ran for five years. No matter what the intentions, it generated 1.4 billion in additional profits and Amazon and this is where discovery kills you every time is quoted as saying it was an incredible success. Ha ha ha. Anyway, there's also some dispute over whether it was scrapped. They have another email in which Doug Harrington, ceo of Amazon Stores, suggests turning Nessie quote, turning on our old friend Nessie, perhaps with some new targeting logic to boost retail profits.

1:44:04 - Mike Elgan
But this is Amazon's whole business model. If you recall, 10 years ago they basically deliberately undercut in real time the price of their baby products and diapers below diaperscom. So they had a specific target in mind, and it just ate away at diaperscom's business to the point where the value of the company was very low, and then Amazon bought it at that low price, and so they've been using this sort of scheme for many years.

1:44:34 - Leo Laporte
And that's always the threat of this kind of monopoly and of price manipulation and even price dumping, is that once you corner the market, once there's nowhere else to buy the product, then you can do whatever you want yes, which is good to classic kind of behavior.

1:44:50 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, but the problem with Amazon is that they is that the revenue and profits that they make on every other category of product is the thing that enables them to undercut prices on a specific category. So if there were two diaper companies, it's fair game to undercut prices. You figure out how to cut costs, you figure out how to sell things less expensively and you can win that war and you're the better company. But in Amazon's case, they just go ahead and lose money on these things and they can do it indefinitely until their competition is gone, and then they can raise prices. And it's really. I think it would strike any reasonable person as being truly unfair.

1:45:27 - Leo Laporte
And in a completely unrelated story, Jeff Bezos is moving to Miami.

1:45:32 - Christina Warren
Bye, I guess, have fun.

1:45:35 - Leo Laporte
You're a Seattleite, you don't mind.

1:45:37 - Christina Warren
I mean, look, there's one company that is based in Seattle area that has done a whole lot for the region, and then there is another company that is based in the Seattle area that has not done a whole lot for the region and you work for the good one. I mean well objectively, and I didn't know the difference before I moved to the Pacific Northwest but yeah, one company actively invests in the region and one does not. So you know, have fun in Miami, I guess.

1:46:04 - Leo Laporte
He's moving to well, his his girlfriend, his wife yeah, did they marry.

1:46:09 - Christina Warren
It's unclear? No, they're engaged.

1:46:10 - Leo Laporte
There was some thought that maybe they'd gotten married, but no, you would know.

1:46:15 - Christina Warren
I would. I yeah, unfortunately I probably would. I'm sad to hear that I trust you.

1:46:20 - Leo Laporte
When it comes to celebrity gossip, I trust Christina Warren. Yeah, yeah, here is Lauren. Here are Lauren and Bezos.

1:46:27 - Christina Warren
But his parents have apparently moved for there recently too, and that's why he wanted. That's why he's claiming he's going back to Miami. Nothing to do with the taxes.

1:46:34 - Mike Elgan
Well, but he don't pay to stay in good places and watch.

1:46:36 - Leo Laporte
Giant.

1:46:36 - Christina Warren
Book? No, you don't.

1:46:37 - Leo Laporte
Are taxes lower in?

1:46:38 - Christina Warren
Florida. I think so. Oh, I think, well, sales tax and things like that are. But yeah, you're right, you don't have income tax. I think what the thing would be, the property tax.

1:46:46 - Leo Laporte
Ah well, he's not moving to a cheap place. Here's the island that he's moving. Forbes calls it the billionaire's bunker. His neighbors include Carl Icahn and Jared and Ivanka Trump, so a pretty high rent district over there.

1:47:03 - Christina Warren
Yeah, wouldn't they say this house was something like like 79 million or something.

1:47:07 - Leo Laporte
A $68 million mansion he snapped up in an off-market transaction in June, right next door to a $79 million mansion he bought in October. So together, if I'm not wrong, that's $147 million worth of mansions. It's a 294 acre manmade barrier island, just 41 houses. Hey, here's some good news there's only one road in and out. I'm just saying 84 people, many of them billionaires. He also went to Miami Palmetto High School.

1:47:45 - Christina Warren
Yeah, no, he again.

1:47:46 - Leo Laporte
It's not completely foreign to him and Blue Origin is gonna shift its operations to Cape Canaveral.

1:47:52 - Christina Warren
No, and, as I said, look, he's lived in the Seattle area for a long time. But to me as an outsider who moved to the area, it always was kind of apparent that you had people like Bill Gates and Paul Allen who very deeply had an affinity for where they grew up and wanted to get back to the area. Not that it's completely altruistic, there were things in it for them too. And then Jeff Bezos was just like well, I live here, my business is based here, and that's okay.

1:48:17 - Leo Laporte
This is my house. Well, he also has the nine acre Warner estate in Beverly Hills, which he bought in 2020 for $165 million. That's the country house.

1:48:26 - Christina Warren
Yeah, that's the country house.

1:48:27 - Leo Laporte
Also has houses in Washington DC, right next door to your pineapple Shoshana.

1:48:33 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, yeah, we're neighbors. When the pineapple rots, he really gets all up in arms. But really isn't that the dream, though? To build an island and have you and your friends all live on it. Like I feel like that's what we all dream of. I hope there's tunnels, because we all want tunnel slides that lead to each other's houses, you know.

1:48:52 - Leo Laporte
Here are the two houses right next door to each other 10 bedrooms, 13 bathrooms and two swimming pools. No waiting.

1:49:03 - Christina Warren
Pretty great. I would be a little concerned with only one entryway in and out.

1:49:07 - Leo Laporte
I know that worries I wouldn't move somewhere. No, With one cause way in.

1:49:12 - Mike Elgan
You can get out by a boat.

1:49:14 - Shoshana Weissmann
Oh yeah, and helicopters, I would think right, Okay, all right, you're making good points and we're in helicopter two.

1:49:17 - Mike Elgan
it's a giant boat.

1:49:19 - Christina Warren
Yeah, I mean his yacht is like some ridiculous amount of money too.

1:49:24 - Leo Laporte
So oh yeah, his yacht costs more than the house.

1:49:26 - Christina Warren
I was gonna say the yacht is like his super yacht. Excuse me, sorry, jack.

1:49:30 - Mike Elgan
His yacht is so big that it has its own yacht. Aw, that's so big, it's a really yacht. It's a fleet of two boats that's required to support that. Anyway, it's.

1:49:41 - Leo Laporte
Also on the island, Tom Brady. He has a house there, $50 million home there.

1:49:46 - Christina Warren
So he still kept it. He and Giselle didn't split that.

1:49:49 - Leo Laporte
Yo, no, Giselle did not get that house, she got the. I think she got the one in, I feel like she got one in Palm Beach. Okay okay, he's gonna redevelop the property and add an 865 square foot dock with lifts for his jet skis and boats, so he's not worried about the causeway.

1:50:03 - Christina Warren
No, okay for.

1:50:04 - Leo Laporte
There are a lot of people you know, like Norman Bramman, who nobody's ever heard of except that he's a billionaire art collector and owner of one of Florida's largest car dealerships. Okay, the former CEO of the US Airways Group and founder of India's largest budget airline, indigo, rakesh Gangwal. Carl Icahn I mentioned. We're just looking at his neighbors. This is fun, see. This is why gossip is so much more fun. It is. And, by the way, no, I called him Jared Trump. Jared and Ivana.

1:50:34 - Christina Warren
Ivanka Trump. It's Kushner. Yes, but we knew what you meant you knew what I meant.

1:50:37 - Leo Laporte
We knew them at the Kushner's yeah, but I think we could call him Jared Trump. Yeah, Right we're not calling her Ivanka Kushner.

1:50:44 - Christina Warren
Oh no.

1:50:45 - Leo Laporte
No, oh, there's a shake. Even the Namir of Qatar lives there, I doubt. Well, lives is a big word.

1:50:54 - Shoshana Weissmann
He owns a home there. Yeah, does he keep like Falcons there, or is? He gonna show you if it's his real home or not. Like how many Falcons?

1:51:01 - Leo Laporte
are there. Don't you hate it when the neighbors keep sending their Falcons over to eat your cat? I hate it when that happens.

1:51:07 - Christina Warren
But I like Shoshana's idea of the tunnels between all the houses.

1:51:10 - Leo Laporte
And slides, not just tunnels, but you gotta have slides. But here's the problem Slides have to go down right. So do you have like, do you build crisscrossing slides, An elevator?

1:51:23 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, gentle inclines, because presumably you can't like dig that deep, so you wanna have gentle inclines for the slides. They probably meet somewhere, maybe an elevator to take you back up. That's like what I'm thinking.

1:51:34 - Christina Warren
Okay, I like it.

1:51:37 - Leo Laporte
I wanna hire Shoshana Weisman's home design firm. Do you have just a bat pole? Do you have secret rooms in your pineapple?

1:51:48 - Shoshana Weissmann
I'd rather not discuss she can't talk about that.

1:51:52 - Christina Warren
That's a yes.

1:51:52 - Mike Elgan
That's a strong yes, I think so.

1:51:55 - Leo Laporte
Let's see. Oh, are we sad that Intuit is closing down Mint.

1:52:00 - Christina Warren
Yes, I mean I haven't used it in forever, but Mint was great. That's the problem. Neither have I, yeah.

1:52:05 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, same.

1:52:06 - Leo Laporte
Mint was a free service. It was really cool that you would attach all your bank accounts to and cross your fingers and then it would tell you what your budget was and stuff like that, and I loved it. Intuit bought it and you know I looked on Reddit and everybody was saying, yeah, what a surprise. They haven't put any effort into this app in years. It's probably true.

1:52:24 - Christina Warren
Right.

1:52:25 - Leo Laporte
So Intuit, which also bought Credit Karma, wants you to start using Credit.

1:52:30 - Mike Elgan
Karma and Credit Karma has a future. And yeah, there's a consensus expressed by Val Agostino, who's the CEO and co-founder of Monarch, which is a competitor to Mint and Credit Karma, that Mint has always been a money loser and it's kind of a well-known thing in the industry. So you know, they've been kind of dead service walking for a while and I think Credit Karma is gonna get all of the, or as many of the customers as they can.

1:53:00 - Leo Laporte
I feel like the way Mint made money is the same as Credit Karma, which is they would offer you Credit Cards and things right. Isn't it the same?

1:53:08 - Christina Warren
I think so. I think Credit Karma would just optimize better from the beginning on that.

1:53:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

1:53:13 - Christina Warren
It also makes more sense if you're literally going to something to primarily check your credit score and then they can show you hey, you've great approval laws on this, like that seems like a much more natural flow for me to then apply for a credit card versus I'm checking, you know, my bank statements and I'm budgeting. That might not be the best time for me to apply for a credit card, I don't know.

1:53:31 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, I had a lot of trouble with Mint because like half of my purchases were honestly Amazon but a lot of them were like I couldn't break it down, because I was trying to figure out what I'm spending on like medical supplies and stuff and then I had to take it out and do a spreadsheet and do it different because like Amazon.

1:53:47 - Leo Laporte
it just has Amazon Right.

1:53:49 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah.

1:53:50 - Leo Laporte
Speaking of companies that may not be around for a while. Wework has just announced plans to file for bankruptcy as early as next week. But this is Reorg. This is chapter 11.

1:53:58 - Christina Warren
This would be chapter 11, assuming they can, you know, get enough time, although there have been cases where we thought things were going to go into chapter 11 and then it went into chapter seven, like twice are us. So who knows? I think it depends on how much the creditors are willing to work with them.

1:54:13 - Leo Laporte
but they missed interest payments on October 2nd, which kicked off a 30 day grease period, grace period although maybe a little greasing went on in which it needs to make the payments. Failing to do so would be considered a default. On Tuesday, the company said it struck an agreement with bondholders to give it another week, and now that week is almost up.

1:54:38 - Mike Elgan
Who's the CEO there now? I think David Tolly.

1:54:41 - Leo Laporte
Sendee Khrani left David Tolly. I don't know who that is. I don't know who that is. The problem, of course, with we work is they made long-term lease commitments for office buildings and office space, but all the agreements with the tenants were short term, like day to day, and when the tenants disappeared they still had to pay the rent.

1:55:01 - Christina Warren
Yeah, and they Especially during COVID yeah exactly I was gonna say COVID is really the thing that I mean when you ignoring the Adam Newman of it all, because he's been gone for years now and COVID really took what was already a not profitable and poor business and made it completely untenable.

1:55:19 - Leo Laporte
It was probably always problematic it was always problematic.

1:55:22 - Christina Warren
It was never, I mean, because it was basically you were evaluating something that was basically Regis, but with a better website, the same way that you would value a tech company, and that's just not.

1:55:31 - Leo Laporte
It was a real estate, Right? Exactly it wasn't tech?

1:55:34 - Christina Warren
Not at all.

1:55:35 - Leo Laporte
In fact, if you watched the Jared Leto and Hathaway TV show, you'd know that. We Crash, which was fantastic it was so good it really was, and Jared Leto made an excellent Adam Newman.

1:55:46 - Christina Warren
He did, he did, and I dressed up as the Were you in Hathaway.

1:55:50 - Leo Laporte
I was her last year for Halloween. You kind of remind me of Hathaway a little bit. You got that in Hathaway.

1:55:53 - Christina Warren
I get that a lot and with the Chanel sunglasses it was like the perfect.

1:55:59 - Mike Elgan
What does she always call them? A supernova or something like that yeah, yeah.

1:56:04 - Leo Laporte
What were you this Halloween?

1:56:05 - Christina Warren
I wasn't anything, unfortunately.

1:56:07 - Leo Laporte
What I know, I know how about you, Shanna Christina Warren. Did you dress up for Halloween, did you?

1:56:13 - Shoshana Weissmann
I got lazy, but I did have a other birds costume ready, cause everyone wanted to do Barbie and there was a limited edition hitchcock series of Barbie, yes, one of which was like the best.

1:56:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh my God, did she have birds attacking her Like?

1:56:26 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, yeah, it's great. You can look it up. There's that Barbie and that's what I'm like. You know what? That's what I'll do for this year, cause you're going to make me do Barbie. I'm going to do a hitchcock Barbie.

1:56:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh, and she had that great Chanel suit.

1:56:36 - Christina Warren
Yes, yeah, I had these. I had these. I used to collect all the classic Hollywood Barbie.

1:56:40 - Leo Laporte
Look, she does have a plastic bird, she does. She doesn't seem to be minding it so much attacking her.

1:56:46 - Shoshana Weissmann
No because, or hitchcock attacking her, that's not in there, yeah, as we, as we know that was it wasn't the birds at all, poor tippy.

1:56:53 - Leo Laporte
Poor tippy. Oh, look at all the Barbie. Here's a glorious Stefan Barbie. Forget those meta glasses. Can I take that back and order some fancy dress Barbies? Inspiring women Get the video Barbie.

1:57:07 - Mike Elgan
Get the video Barbie. There's a. There's a Barbie with a video camera.

1:57:10 - Christina Warren
Yes, there is in the stomach, yeah, oh the stomach. I love that.

1:57:15 - Mike Elgan
There's no podcast or Barbie. That's the one you need. Then you don't need glasses. There's not, although Just put your Barbie at everyone.

1:57:21 - Christina Warren
I had. I had a generation girl, barbie. When I was in high school that was like I called filmmaker Barbie. That basically was like what I wanted to be. She had like a video camera and other stuff.

1:57:30 - Leo Laporte
Leo seems like a nice guy, but it's a little weird that he's always got a Barbie. He's always shooting pictures with his Barbie doll. Yeah, where's the?

1:57:38 - Mike Elgan
energy from this guy, yeah.

1:57:41 - Leo Laporte
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1:59:10 - Mike Elgan
know we only did the one that you went to, that was, but we dress up they don't.

1:59:16 - Leo Laporte
I mean, if you don't, do you? I mean, it's not like Halloween in Mexico, it's day of the day, actually different thing of the people wandering around the city center and it was really crowded.

1:59:26 - Mike Elgan
This year, probably 10% are dressed for Halloween, wearing a mask or something and and the majority have their face painted, and there are people in the street who will paint your face for a certain amount of money. And so with that skillet that the sugar sugar sugar skull job and you see a lot of that in fact for several days. But yeah, halloween is actually making in Roy in Rhodes. There we actually went to the same cemetery just were with chef Allison. That was so amazing. Yeah.

1:59:59 - Leo Laporte
It was a sapoteca.

2:00:03 - Mike Elgan
Indigenous people Seminary and it was the time it was illegal to go to the cemetery. You know it was Breaking the law there, but it was the net.

2:00:13 - Leo Laporte
That's not during cove in those cemeteries.

2:00:15 - Mike Elgan
They close the cemeteries during cove. It is exactly and that was a national law. But the zap attacks are like we're not part of Mexico, we're the zap attack nation, we make our own rules and they just kept the cemeteries open because that's their culture, and so we were invited to go and and check out the cemetery there, and that is a beautiful cemetery.

2:00:34 - Leo Laporte
I just an incredible experience doing that in the Two years ago with the gastronomal adventures, yeah, but it's funny. Yeah, but just even watching your your metaglasses video, it looked more crowded and more different and a lot more people in costume than it had even two years ago. It's interesting, right? Yeah, absolutely. Among other things, the Supreme Court will be considering this term to state laws. The question is can local officials block critics on social media? Two cases, all nine justices, acknowledge the importance of Defining when government employees are acting in an official capacity online. If they are an official capacity, then they're. They're bound by First Amendment restrictions on censorship, but then, if they're acting as private citizens, obviously they have the right right to block. So In one case, two school board members in California and another case, a city manager in Michigan, both barred on posting on social media, I think on Facebook. Social media blocked people who were Complaining about them. So that'll be an interesting case.

2:01:55 - Christina Warren
Yeah, I'm curious if the those you know, school board members or the city official, if they would have been allowed to say block someone's phone calls, right right, like if you were getting you know number of phone calls from a constituent, or if you go to their office, it's a I want to talk to you.

2:02:10 - Leo Laporte
They can't say, no, I'm not gonna talk to you.

2:02:12 - Christina Warren
Right, I mean it well, but you, I guess maybe the context would be if they're showing up every single day and they're being disruptive, right, and maybe it's not violating the law, but they're being disruptive, would they be allowed to turn people away? Or would they be allowed to block the phone calls versus you know? So I wonder how much of this is really novel to the social media aspect and how much of it it could be determined. You know, just, I don't know, I'm curious, but it's an interesting case for sure.

2:02:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean the government did hold that the social media accounts are comparable to a physical office, right? Justice Roberts said actually, just as Alito said well, wait a minute doesn't cost anything to open a Facebook page. To make so much turn on who owns the page seems quite artificial. Justice Roberts asked in what sense is this really private property? It's just the gathering of the protons or whatever they are. Wow, the the cat quorum kind of chortled a little bit at that. This is so interesting. This is a constant battle. Now, are these new digital spaces different from physical spaces, different than the real world?

2:03:19 - Mike Elgan
and and I thought this was settled because the night Institute sued President Trump in 17 I think it was and I was one of the people that he blocked and so I was really interested in this case. It turned out that in fact the blocking people was considered a violation of First Amendment. He was, he never unblocked me, he only had to unblock the people who are part of the lawsuit. And then the Supreme Court. It was moody, wasn't it? I guess, yes, they vacated the judgment and, and so I thought I thought that's kind of settled that in fact they can't block. But I guess that case doesn't broadly apply to city council members and everybody right.

2:03:57 - Christina Warren
Well, and I think that there's the. Again, as they pointed out, there's the interesting element, which is are you acting like on behalf of your position or are you personal? And in the Trump case, that was interesting and that, like he didn't use his Right, he was using his personal count Donald Trump right, and that didn't matter.

But in these cases it seems much more like okay, if I'm using my official city, council or school board member account, then that is, maybe I can't block anyone, but if I'm using my personal account, then I can go crazy with it.

2:04:28 - Leo Laporte
The board members use their accounts to post school board meetings, surveys related to school district policy, public budget and public safety issues there. One of them's a page had a photo of the Powys Unified School District sign. I mean it sounds like it's an official page.

2:04:44 - Christina Warren
Yeah, it sounds like it, for sure.

2:04:46 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.

2:04:46 - Christina Warren
I mean not, not to. I completely understand how dealing with people can be annoying and frustrating, but like, how thin skin do you have to be to block someone who's like bothering you? Well, your city council. I mean genuinely like like when is your official account?

2:05:00 - Leo Laporte
like just just are you getting harassed? I guess is is the question, and I guess.

2:05:04 - Christina Warren
But I'm saying, even if you are I don't know, I feel like that's just something you have to accept that's part of the job as part of the contract.

To be Really honest, like you ran for this, you're choosing this. Not everyone who speaks to you at an assembly is going to be polite either, so there's a part of me who goes. If it's getting to the point where it really is harassment, then that isn't a first man. That's not covered under the first amendment. So to me, if it's just simply someone's a critic, I don't know, maybe just grow up a little bit like.

2:05:33 - Mike Elgan
Disruptive, yeah, but people are disruptive and and and I sort of out of control. At school board meetings or city council meetings, they are, in fact, that squirted out. Yes, generally, I also think that it's kind of like. I think the conversations are better when the then when each user, whether it's official or not, can block or even delete the comments of Whomever they like, and then if somebody wants to counter that, they can have their own account or they can post comments on anybody else's account where they're not blocked. I just you know, I just think you know, even though I was blocked by by Trump, I Felt like that was fine.

I just think I think any social media user ought to be able to block People for whatever reason they like, and I think that's how you end up with with with better conversations, and and it's also a mindset. So, for example, if, if I do a post on on Twitter and then there's a comment sort of, am I like the moderator of that comment, I tend to think that I'd like to be. I know, on Google Plus, you could press a single button and you would block, report and whatever it was, remove Any comment, like with one click, and that was great and what that did was a creative scenario where when I do a post, that's my conversation. I kind of own it and I'm the moderator of that conversation. I kind of like that. I think social works better when, when, when, the people who post have some control over the comments.

2:07:01 - Christina Warren
I mean, I don't disagree with that. I just feel like, when you are talking about public officials, if they're going to be using these tools in a public way, if someone's being disruptive and if someone is harassing you, then I think that's a completely different situation. But if it's simply someone being critical, I you know, and if this is really a matter of degree, right?

And if this is really what you were doing is you're shutting out any dissent and any disagreement, then that does, to me, go against like democracy and and I don't think that's okay. So I guess that's what this will be determining. If it's people really being disruptive and cursing and maybe making threats, fine, but if this is your official public account, then you have to, I think, acknowledge that part of your duty as a public official is to take the good and the bad.

2:07:45 - Leo Laporte
It based on oral arguments. It doesn't seem like the justices are even thinking about that. What they're really trying to decide is is that Facebook page a private or public Venue? They, they say for instance, if you're in a grocery store pushing a cart and somebody says, hey, I think it was a bad decision last night in the city council, you don't have to listen to them right.

But if you're in your office, you do. So. They're trying to figure out what is the Facebook page. Is that, I mean, how private a space is that? I agree with you, christina, it really is a matter of degree. If it's kind of. What you're saying to Mike is that people can be critical and say something negative. They should be allowed to do that. They shouldn't be allowed to sidetrack or, you know, or take over the conversation with their bad behavior. Right, but the justices don't seem to be really looking at that.

2:08:34 - Christina Warren
No, but, and I would also point out I mean, I think there are instances where these Public official accounts are the way that, that's how they communicate and this is how they are spreading information.

In which case they probably should have to listen to the constituents exactly as long as they're, you know, being Disorderly like look, if you I think if you could if you could prove that you're putting the exact same information on a website and some other way where you don't have to have a Facebook account to access these things, then maybe that's a little bit different too. But in many cases I would gather, especially with the school board this is probably the primary place where they are disseminating information.

2:09:08 - Leo Laporte
What do you think, shoshanna?

2:09:09 - Shoshana Weissmann
It's interesting because I usually fall down and criticizing government. That's usually my, my a little bit go-to. And this is in area where it's a little bit confusing because I think like a lot of what we're arguing here is within first amendment context. So if you're applying the first amendment to them, cursing harassing within certain limits would all be allowed. Yeah, and I'm sympathetic to wanting to make sure everyone has access to it.

But I've also like work with the, with people running for office, and I've seen that guy replying over and over and over again and just it makes it impossible for me to do my job for also to reply to other relevant people and an office like you get harassed Constantly but you don't have to answer every phone call that comes to the office. Most people who show up won't get to talk to the elected official. So for even making comparisons like that, I don't think it's quite the same. So I I'm not sure I really buy the the first amendment arguments in certain cases here, but I understand where they're coming from. But I really do think that this is something where it's really hard to compare and in my view it also kind of comes down to like these are private platforms and kind of what you do within there.

It's kind of your thing, like if you're a whole thing, an event For your campaign or even an elected officials event at like someone's house, the people at that house can kick people out. You can probably kick people out a little bit easier even just for swearing. Like if a guy stands up and swears a bunch like, I Don't think anyone would take issue with kicking him out. But if he does that on Twitter, then we're kind of arguing that he has to stay because of the first amendment. I'm just not quite sure how I? I reckon a lot of to expand that idea.

2:10:44 - Mike Elgan
I mean, democracy is supposed to be a normal rock rock. Well, right, where somebody who you know, that's honest, hard-working citizens who read the newspapers show up and express their opinions and where they are Geiger illustration, if you ask me, exactly right exactly and and and what.

What in fact happens on social media is some very undemocratic things like astroturfing, like disinformation campaigns, like bots that spread all kinds of information lying, all kinds of things that don't really fit that Norman Rockwell painting, and so I'm not saying that this is in fact the kinds of accounts that are being blocked, but I'm just saying that the space is not, it's not a town hall, if you'd like to say that it is, but it isn't it says just as Robert said, a gathering of the protons, and I think we should all Going through tubes.

It's all the protons going through the series of tubes.

2:11:40 - Christina Warren
Yes.

2:11:41 - Leo Laporte
I think he must have known that was kind of a silly.

2:11:43 - Christina Warren
Oh, I'm sure he did. Yeah, it's pretty funny.

2:11:47 - Shoshana Weissmann
It's a great cool.

2:11:49 - Leo Laporte
A little take a little break. We're getting along in the tooth here. I don't want to keep you all too long. What do you have? A few stories to wrap up with. Great panel Mike Elgin love having you. How's Kevin's chatterbox? Hello chatterboxcom, how's that doing these days?

2:12:04 - Mike Elgan
He's killing it, it's it's really. He's really getting making headway into schools. He just got landed some major school districts and I think Chat to it.

2:12:15 - Leo Laporte
That's very cool Yep yeah.

2:12:17 - Mike Elgan
Well, what's happening is in the culture Is that there's a ton of awareness about AI, and how do we prepare kids for AI? And it turns out that Kevin's chatterbox is the only Chat chat virtual assistant that's legally allowed in schools Nice, because of its extreme privacy protections, where neither the, the sources of data that the that the virtual assistant uses, nor chatterbox itself can know who user is. There's just literally no way to do the way you set it up, and so it it's, it's, it's, it's the only legally allowable Device of its kind in schools, and he's, and so schools are recognizing that he's doing very, very well with it, the best thing from my point of view is it takes the magic out of AI and out of voice assistance, because the kids themselves write the software.

2:13:10 - Leo Laporte
So they see under the hood, they see what's really going on and it's no longer this mysterious person in a box, it's just code. That's right.

2:13:19 - Mike Elgan
I think that's one of the one of the best Steve Jobs quotes is that he his greatest epiphany in life is when he realized that all the Amazing things in our world were created by people just like him. Yeah, just like you and me. Yeah, and this is what chat a box teachers that AI is not some magical, mystical, mysterious thing. It's just something that human beings create, and you learn that by actually creating AI, and so it's. It's a really great tool for Education and he's doing really well.

2:13:47 - Leo Laporte
Hello chatterboxcom. Yeah, by the way, steve Jobs used that to explain why he broke every rule in the book. And you have to follow.

2:13:55 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, never mind that, never mind.

2:14:00 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the world's created by rule breakers just like me like me you know those guys weren't any smarter than me. I'm gonna do what I want, christina. Warren is also here. Great to have you senior develop. I like it when you come in and I really appreciate it. I'm glad you could share our snacks today.

2:14:15 - Christina Warren
Thank you for sharing your snacks.

2:14:16 - Leo Laporte
I'm gonna heat up? Are you getting a little chilly oh?

2:14:18 - Christina Warren
no, I just wanted to show off she's got the coolest jacket I've ever seen. That's actually what I wanted to do.

2:14:23 - Leo Laporte
I mean, I want a jacket that says ship it with a squirrel on the side. I don't know what that means.

2:14:27 - Christina Warren
Yeah, so. So this is, this is a flight jacket. I get a flight jacket and I have a.

2:14:34 - Leo Laporte
This is better than the flight jackets on succession this is really good.

2:14:38 - Christina Warren
See all your base. All your base are belong to us.

2:14:41 - Leo Laporte
That's actually that's really good yeah so it's all like kind of get it's all exactly.

2:14:46 - Christina Warren
Yeah, it's kind of internal things and so I got this the other day.

2:14:50 - Leo Laporte
Are they selling it at the event or not?

2:14:52 - Christina Warren
This is just kind of a special thing that a few of us have presenters only basically, and so is there anything on the back? I don't know no but what's cool is because it is a flight jacket. I'm hoping that I can add other patches to yes time so if a pen exchange pen, a chain, yeah, exactly.

2:15:07 - Leo Laporte
Is there a GitHub challenge coin? No, no, you got to get on. Get one of those. I think all podcasters should have challenge coins and then when we meet, I Should be able to demand a drink.

2:15:19 - Christina Warren
I like that. Yeah, I like that a lot.

2:15:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, all right, we're working on it. Do you? Does our street have a challenge coin shoshanna.

2:15:27 - Shoshana Weissmann
I've never heard of that. This might be a kind of nerd that ferv once. I'm not.

2:15:32 - Leo Laporte
You're every other kind of nerd. Everybody's Wikipedia and challenge coins. In the military they carry these. Actually, it goes back to the Roman Empire nice, I know we like to think about the Roman Empire frequently. If the Roman soldier excelled in battle, they'd get a day's wage with a separate bonus coin. These challenge coins are now typically carried by a members of the service and if you challenge somebody, say you know Where's your coin? They don't have it. They have to buy you a drink, otherwise you can exchange coins and I have quite a few challenge coins. Here's Joe Biden with his challenge coin collection.

2:16:11 - Christina Warren
No, I think we should have podcaster challenge coins. I think we should. That would actually be really good yeah.

2:16:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I want. So I want a challenge coin. I do have. I did buy at the the White House gift shop, which in fact is not the White House gift shop, I learned later, just run by some guy calls it the White House gift shop. He had. I bought, bear to admit, a Trump challenge coin that said COVID defeated, and I bought two one for my father-in-law, who's a Trump fan, and went for myself for you were for yeah, historic purposes, course, and Don't ask me for it, cuz I'm not.

I'll buy you a drink. I'm not giving it to you. I wonder if it wonder, if it has.

2:16:51 - Shoshana Weissmann
If you can still buy this on the Let me see, I want one for like when I yell at the government and they get mad. They have to like. Give me a, that would be. I would have so many so let's see there's.

2:17:03 - Leo Laporte
There's 22 Coins in the president Trump's historic moments series. This one's the acquittal of president Trump. Okay, oh, here it is. Here it is. This is the world versus virus. No, this isn't the one I have. Covid-19 task force no, that's sold. I guess they don't. I'm maybe mine is really valuable now. Wow, yeah, oh, no way they're certainly more valuable than they trump NFTs yeah yes, whatever happened to NFTs, oh you know what the price went down is now. I bought it for 250 bucks is now only a hundred bucks.

2:17:36 - Christina Warren
Okay, so all right, you've lost, but that's all right, you know you still. You still have the memories.

2:17:41 - Leo Laporte
I knew I should.

2:17:43 - Shoshana Weissmann
Please, we're like those gone. Like, are we not?

2:17:46 - Leo Laporte
all right. So I, a good, good, dear friend of mine I Don't I won't name her name. She's been on our show many times, got sucked into the Cryptocurrency NFT void and was really promoting itself just the other day. She said, women, it's good for you to get into crypto and NFTs and I'm thinking, should I post on here? No, don't, there's. The only people say this are people who got an early and are trying to get out now. Do not, do not buy another NFT, because you're throwing your money away. But so there's still people trying to Promote these and I think it's mostly people who are holding the bag. We're holding the back.

2:18:31 - Christina Warren
Yeah, you people who got into the very end of the pyramid.

2:18:33 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you are the bottom.

2:18:34 - Mike Elgan
I want to be stuck with this thing.

2:18:36 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yep, have NFTs like been like you used for anything like have they?

2:18:42 - Leo Laporte
only there's a yes, there's a one good thing that I will say is okay, which is artists. It's basically a donation to the artist. Yeah right. It would sell some of their artistic work we have. There was a wonderful artist. She did the fail whale.

2:18:57 - Christina Warren
I can't remember yes, yes, wonderful yes, and.

2:19:00 - Leo Laporte
I have. She gave me a copy of the fail whale that she drew. That Twitter eventually used. You know the whale being carried by birds as it sleeps. It's a beautiful Thank you. Yeah, yi yi, she, you. She won't sell it anymore. You only combine as an NFT, and I don't. That's not to me satisfying. So I think artists should sell their wares. That's probably the best way to do it. But if it supports, you know, arts, I think that's okay, as long as you understand it's not an investment, right? That's the mistake. I'm gonna make money on this or that it was an article of a hoodie.

2:19:33 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, right, a Month and a half ago, I think, in the Guardian that to point it out that the vast majority and have NFTs are now worthless and Something like 23 million people now have completely worthless, yeah, investments, and so that's the majority yeah yeah.

2:19:51 - Christina Warren
Except you don't even have anything physical like at least there you had you know some cloth and you know filled with some beans and Some stuffing, right, so you have a physical object is worthless, but you have a physical object with NFTs. You have a URL which may or may not even be active right now right. Like not only are many of them worthless, many so I'm not right, right that.

2:20:08 - Leo Laporte
So that's it. You know so big, eventually NFTs, kind of narrowed down to one company open sea, mm-hmm, the big NFT marketplace. They just announced 50% of their staff is being laid off. This is where you would buy board apes and putgy penguins. Kids, this is very much reminds me of the beanie baby.

2:20:26 - Christina Warren
It's very, very similar. It in. Although what was weird there? I mean, there's a great book and I think there's a wonderful movie movie. Yeah, we was based on the book about that and kind of that bubble, but that was weirdly largely kind of built by the value, was hyped up by as many of the collectors themselves, whereas NFTs, like the market maker, was usually not the collectors but these, you know, outsiders who were trying to tell us all it convinced us all, that this was a great investment in the future of art.

2:20:56 - Leo Laporte
So Friday they said we're gonna fire 50% of open sea staff. However, there's some good news they're preparing to launch the revamped Open sea 2.0. According to CEO Devin Finzer, we're building a new foundation so we can innovate faster and we'll have experiences to share with you soon. He said this on where else X? Of course, we will change how we operate, shifting to a smaller team with a direct connection to users. Now, when you say 50%, that sounds like a big thing, but remember they'd already laid off 20% of their staff last year, so it's kind of unclear how many people are left. It's around 120, something like that. I'm surprised there's still that many same.

2:21:39 - Christina Warren
To be honest with you, I mean, and you never like to see layoffs happening anywhere. But I'm also surprised they still were employing that many people.

2:21:50 - Leo Laporte
Oh, oh well. I'm gonna have to just put those board apes up on the wall and Live with the live with the fact that I supported. That's the sad thing the person who drew the board apes Didn't get it money. No he got a few hundred bucks and the people who sold the board apes as digital artworks made billions, Millions anyway well, the very, very early people who did right, right like.

2:22:12 - Christina Warren
So it depends again like how how Creators how top, how close to the top of the pyramid were you when, when the well, towards the end it was really open.

2:22:19 - Leo Laporte
See, that was making the money.

2:22:20 - Mike Elgan
Gas fees, because it costs us a lot to mint an NFT and then to sell it again and those money there's also a difference between somebody who at some point had NFTs of a very high value that that value could only be realized if they liquidized that and converted that into cash by selling it and then getting out of the market. But I think the hype was so great that people who were succeeding plowed those investments into still more NFTs. And so I would be curious to somebody ought to do a report. Some somebody other other than myself Should write a investigative report to find out who actually walked away from this whole thing with any sort of Profits or revenue or or value.

2:23:00 - Shoshana Weissmann
Well, monkey itself is very rich.

2:23:04 - Leo Laporte
Like the April yeah, he's not bored. He's a wealthy ape in his yacht. Bitcoin is 35 grand. Wow, I know what's the story. There is Bitcoin back. I.

2:23:16 - Christina Warren
Mean. That is still way down from what wasn't 50k like in 2021.

2:23:21 - Leo Laporte
Let's see the peak was $61,000 in 2021 okay, that was like April.

2:23:26 - Christina Warren
I want to say November 12th 2021. Oh, wow, my birthday, okay, cool Happy birthday.

2:23:32 - Leo Laporte
I hope somebody gave you a Bitcoin for your well, if they had.

2:23:35 - Christina Warren
I hope I sold it on my birthday and not like now that's the trick you know that that is the trick, so wait a minute.

2:23:42 - Leo Laporte
Happy birthday.

2:23:43 - Christina Warren
Thank you, it's coming up. Yes, are you gonna do anything fun? I will be Just getting back home after being here, so I don't know.

2:23:51 - Leo Laporte
Well, we'll see I will be shake on mines November 29th Nice. I will be shaking because I haven't touched electronics in four days.

2:23:57 - Christina Warren
Yes, that's true. So, oh my gosh, you're doing this on your birthday.

2:24:00 - Leo Laporte
Wow, yeah, no cake for me, but it is going up. I mean Bitcoin is going up.

2:24:05 - Christina Warren
Yes, yeah, I was gonna say last time, I think I checked I think it was at 26 or 27, but Still way down should I go out and buy some?

I'm the wrong person ask on this, because I always make the wrong decisions on these things. I bought a bunch of doge and you and I didn't sell it because my sister just had her baby and it was literally like the peak time to sell it and I didn't. And then I was like, oh well, I'll just wait a little bit longer, and it just keeps going lower and lower and lower and so.

2:24:32 - Leo Laporte
But I bought doge in like January of 2021, so that's good, you know father Robert are our Jesuit Priest who used to do a show for us, got her in very early on doge and sold it for, I think, a peak good. He said he made some money on it. Yeah, I Think so I guess you could anything. You can sell it. Any sucker I mean anybody who could buy it would make you some. Bitcoin has risen 10,000% over its initial Price.

2:25:06 - Christina Warren
I mean you have obviously the much worse Bitcoin like story of loss.

2:25:10 - Leo Laporte
I have seven or eight bitcoins just sitting there.

2:25:13 - Christina Warren
Yeah.

2:25:14 - Leo Laporte
You know the real story and I'm waiting to see if this happens Is that a number of people who put their Bitcoin wallets Passwords in last pass.

Yeah have now been hacked. Course, we don't have proof that it's because of the last pass vault breach, but it seems to be that all of the people who have lost money had last pass. We're using last pass In one day this past week. $4.4 million coin bit. Coin desk says last pass hack victims lose $4.4 million in a single day. The total is now 35 million. They can't prove that it's because of the last pass vault hack, but since all of these people share that one thing in common, it.

2:26:00 - Christina Warren
You know, it's definitely seems something to investigate. More gosh that I'm a little surprised last pass is still in business, like I know that they have other products too, but to have that type of breach and still that's. I don't know how you come back from that.

2:26:15 - Leo Laporte
To be completely honest, Well, and if you do have your wallet and it's password in last pass, you might want to think about changing. Yeah, I would say, they already have let's assume they already have it, so you might want to transfer it to a different wallet. Mm-hmm, change the password. You know, you know what to do. Meanwhile, if you, if the bad guys who have the last pass ball, can get into my, I'll split it with you.

2:26:37 - Christina Warren
Well, okay, I was gonna say no. There is a youtuber who's like as a security expert, who's been able to break into those guys, have you? Have you talked to him?

2:26:42 - Leo Laporte
No, I'm not gonna do it, okay. So look, so what it's a let's say it's 7.85 Bitcoin $35,000. It's like a quarter of a million dollars, right? If I give him the wallet, he could just take it.

2:26:59 - Christina Warren
No, he's like an actual reputable security expert and he documents these things and he might take like 50k or Something like that might be what's my recourse if he takes the whole thing? I mean you're Leo the port.

2:27:10 - Leo Laporte
I could yell at him.

2:27:11 - Christina Warren
I mean no, I mean, I mean, I mean you're, I'm just saying like that would go against his own companies and interests if he were to do that my son wanted me to send.

2:27:21 - Leo Laporte
Send it to some guy he saw in the Wall Street Journal, named, I think, bitcoin Larry or something.

2:27:27 - Mike Elgan
Who did the?

2:27:28 - Leo Laporte
legit playing the same thing. The promise mines in it's in the court, bitcoin core wallet which had strong encryption. I have no. I have no clue what the password is. A lot of these guys say, well, can you give me you know the area which the password would be, or something. I have no idea and I did not. I wish I had now then somebody to have access to it. Put it in last pass. If I had, I would have found it. I don't know where it is so well, if you, if Bitcoin Larry, give find to find the name of this, I'm gonna find the name of this guy because I watched his stuff and it was yeah, he was really really good.

Yeah, that's yeah. You know, nobody ever lied on on YouTube.

2:28:10 - Mike Elgan
Right, you're, you're sarcastic as. Elon's.

2:28:18 - Leo Laporte
Let's see Wall Street Journal. I'm trying to find my guy. See if my guy's the same I think that this is.

2:28:25 - Christina Warren
I think this is.

2:28:26 - Leo Laporte
Dave Bitcoin.

2:28:27 - Christina Warren
Okay, joe, joe grand is, I'm pretty sure, okay, okay.

2:28:32 - Leo Laporte
Dave Bitcoin said he could do it, but Dave Bitcoin was the pseudonym of a number of different hackers who would get together. You send them your wallet. They send you back what they can get out of it, minus a small commission.

2:28:46 - Christina Warren
Yeah, and I mean he, he. I'm trying to find the guy that I found this through. It might have been Joe, I think it was Joe grand, but basically he was successful, I mean how much did he charge?

2:28:57 - Leo Laporte
because Dave only charges 20%.

2:29:00 - Christina Warren
I don't remember now, but I do remember it was I.

2:29:04 - Leo Laporte
Think I gave my wallet to my son. I said send it to Dave, see what Dave can do. This is the only trusted service since 2013 for your crypto. All right, I don't know. I you know what it's worth it. I look, I don't have access to it now. I've tried every password. It could possibly be you. You give me the name of your, your YouTube guy, and if I, if I lose everything, I'm no worse off. Right, right, a little better.

2:29:33 - Christina Warren
I if the guy I'm thinking of I think like he was like a well-known hacker and I think it's still.

2:29:38 - Leo Laporte
You know it's a strong Encryption. Yeah, I gave flow the wallet, but she never did anything with it, so I'm keep, I'm taking it back, all right. Our show today, brought to you by collide. Let's talk octa, use octa. You know octa. Octa is a great solution, but collide takes octa one better.

It's a device trust solution for companies that use octa that ensures that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log in to your cloud apps. Why is it important? Well, if you work in security or IT and you're using octa for authentication, this message is for you. Sure, you can authenticate the person. The problem has been this was, by the way, the problem with the last pass breach the person's the person, but that is their device secure. In the case of the last pass breach, the engineer, this dev Ops guy had a old version of Plex on his home network that had been hacked. They got into a system and they were able then to get into the last pass through that. That's a big problem.

Have you noticed for the past few years, the majority of data breaches and hacks you read about have one thing in common employees. Sometimes an employee's device gets hacked because of an unpatched program on the, on the system or the network. Sometimes an employee leaves sensitive data in an unsecured place and it seems like every day a hacker breaks in using credentials they fished from employees. Wait, if you're in business, you know you're getting spearfished all the time. But the problem isn't the end users, it's the solutions you're using that are supposed to prevent those breaches. They're not, are they? It doesn't have to be this way. I Want you to imagine a world where only secure devices can access your cloud apps. In this world, those fish credentials, useless to hackers, and you can manage every OS, including Linux, all from a single dashboard. Imagine If, if this, if this dev Ops guy had gotten a message saying hey, I know it's you, dave, but can you fix that Plex because I'm worried about your system. And then they fix it and Dave's now part of your team. You want your employees to be on your side. Well, here's the good news that you don't have to imagine this world. You can just start using collide Koli-de. Visit collide comm slash twit book an on-demand demo today. See how it will work for you. For teams that use octa, this is a must KOL IDE, collide comm slash Twit.

We thank him so much for their support of this week in tech. We'll be back with the show in just a little bit, don't forget. Tomorrow, 10 am, monday, that would be November 4th, 5th, 6th, november 6th open ai's open ai developer days Are tomorrow and there's a big keynote at 10 am and, as part of our ai show that, jeff Jarvis and Jason Haldi We'll be covering that live keynote on the stream If you want to watch it, 10 am Pacific tomorrow, monday, the 6th. Just want to throw in that show note. We had a great week this week in Twit, in fact such a good week I decided to commission this very special movie, all about it. Watch. Michelangelo did weapons systems too.

We're a bloodthirsty lot. I feel like every technology that we come up with, the very first thing is well, can I kill somebody with this? And I think that's what's going to happen with AI, his signature weapons were a single and dual noon chaka, wait a minute. Michelangelo, you're talking about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That is, the Teenage Mutant.

2:33:08 - Shoshana Weissmann
Ninja Turtles. Previously on Twit Twit News.

2:33:15 - Christina Warren
The new MacBook Pro is scary fast and with M3,. M3 Pro and M3 Max. There's a perfect model for everyone.

2:33:24 - Leo Laporte
When they first shipped the M1 and the M2, they held off on the Pro and the Max for later they're doing an M3, an M3 Pro and M3 Max all today.

2:33:33 - Benito
I really wish that I'd talked to the technical directors and producers ahead of this so I could have had them play back the number of times Leo said I'm not going to buy.

2:33:44 - Leo Laporte
Tech News Weekly.

2:33:45 - Benito
President Biden issued a pretty big executive order on artificial intelligence. It aims to address many of the risks.

2:33:53 - Christina Warren
I don't think the AIEO contemplates solving all of these problems. What it does address is let's get our hands around the scope of the problem and from there we can work with the companies to figure out specific solutions. This Week in Google.

2:34:07 - Leo Laporte
Leo instead of this cruise crap. I'll come on a train, the Twit train. I'm all in. We're going to have to get a lot more members in Club Twit.

2:34:19 - Benito
Subscribe to Club Twit so that we can podcast the train.

2:34:23 - Leo Laporte
Or seven bucks a month would allow us to do this show on a train Twit All aboard. Ride the Twit train rails. Oh God, this Week in Tech, ai has won in court. We'll stick with court for a few more stories. Artists have lost the first round of the copyright infringement case against AI art generators. This happened at the end of the month.

A federal judge advanced an infringement claim against stability AI but dismissed the rest of the lawsuit. He said you can't sue mid-journey or deviant art. Among the issues whether the AI systems they run on actually contain copyrighted images and if the artist can prove it can substantiate infringement in the absence of identical material right. If you didn't create Picasso's Guernica pixel for pixel, can you prove that Guernica exists in the AI's corpus? Claims against the companies for infringement right of publicity, unfair competition, breach of contract dismissed.

The claim for direct infringement against stability AI was allowed to proceed based on allegations the company used copyrighted images without permission. So there's two issues. One if you're stealing images, they're copyrighted images and you're stealing them, versus if you're going through the internet and looking for open images, uncopyrighted images. The suit maintains the training. The stability AI model does not include wholesale copying of works, but rather involves development of parameters, lines, colors, shades and other attributes associated with subjects and concepts from those works that collectively define what things look like. I'm not sure what this all means. This is the Hollywood Reporter talking about it. I don't know if that's a clear win, to be honest, for AI, I think in the long run, it's kind of.

2:36:26 - Mike Elgan
It's a clear loss. It drives home the intractable nature of this whole conflict because you have, if you're a physical artist and you're influenced by another artist which 100% of artists are then is that copyright infringement? And if software does it, then what's the difference and all etc. And again, how do you track down a one-for-one? Here's a copy. When you're talking about vagaries like style and shades of color and things like that Can't copyright that.

2:37:01 - Leo Laporte
No, because every artist is building their style on top of styles they shape or Correct.

2:37:07 - Christina Warren
And in fact I think it's really problematic. We go down that line and we say if anybody were to draw anything inspired by or in the style of which happens all the time, then there's a lot of art. That would be. I think most most rational people would consider to be fair use, would go away right, and that's I remember seeing an amazing exhibition of Picasso's early sketches, which are all copies of well-known paintings, and art.

2:37:37 - Leo Laporte
I mean that's to lose LaTrec baby. But how does Picasso become Picasso? By copying other people and then developing his own style.

2:37:48 - Benito
Correct. I'd like to push back on that a little bit, okay, because like artists will take specific art, they don't take all the corpus of all art. Sure, they do.

2:37:58 - Leo Laporte
That's Benito Gonzalez talking, our CD. But wait, no, no, no, don't you think Picasso wandered through the Louvre?

2:38:06 - Benito
and looked at every single painting and absorbed it. Well, but he absorbed what he was seeing right, but he still had, like he was still selecting.

2:38:14 - Christina Warren
Okay, but why should that matter? I mean, I look, I understand that this Because a person can't look at every I can't read every book in existence. Of course, obviously, and that is why we can do more things more quickly with AI, but the principle, I think, is the same that you can read, that you're taking things from learning, whether it's from reading styles or looking at artwork or music. Every great writer reads like crazy.

2:38:37 - Leo Laporte
Yes, there's no great writer who hasn't read a million books.

2:38:40 - Christina Warren
I mean, and I guess to me I understand what you're saying, but to me it feels like if the only thing we're separating here is the amount of scale, then that, just fundamentally, we're still talking about the same thing. So whether it's one piece of art or a billion, I don't think the fundamental thing matters.

2:38:56 - Mike Elgan
personally, Professor Right, and to Jerome Lanier's point about AI being a massive collaboration at scale, even though nobody can read every book. You basically I mean Picasso is being influenced by all these artists who themselves were influenced by a bunch of artists.

2:39:18 - Leo Laporte
Yes, and all the way down.

2:39:19 - Mike Elgan
Were influenced and so on. And that starts to approach what generative AI does. And the Verge actually had a list of great list of reasons from different companies, because all the different companies have different reasons why they should not have to pay for copyrighted content. So Google says that it's like reading a book. Anthropic says that the law, the current law, is sufficient for protecting copyrighted works. Adobe, says addresses the case of Sega versus Accolade, where intermediate copying was deemed fair use. Andres and Horowitz says that investment in AI technologies based on the current copyright law that that's already happening. Hugging face says that training on copyrighted material is generally fair use, and so on and so on. It's a great article actually.

2:40:12 - Leo Laporte
West Davis writing in the Verge. Now I think his point is more against these companies.

2:40:17 - Christina Warren
Yes, it is, but I still think this is.

2:40:18 - Leo Laporte
He says AI comes with all kinds of arguments against paying for copyrighted content. Yes, meta says copyright holders. Yeah, you wouldn't get much money anyway. Yeah it's really interesting.

2:40:31 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, it is interesting to think about, though, and, like a lot of these companies are still trying to stop it from happening in one way or another.

Like I my my photos that I take on my phone that are up to Adobe standards, I upload to Adobe stock, and now, every single time I upload, it says make sure this, if it's AI, follow these rules, and it's like they're really trying to like kind of avoid like one of their things that is saying, like, don't have the artist name in it. If you're trying to like copy an artist, that that shouldn't be in there. But it's really interesting, like how, even while these companies want to train models, they still want to have their own limits on the output, which is really interesting. But I struggle with this too, because it's like you know when, when, like knowing exactly how and when it crosses the line is hard, and copyright and trademarks have always been, I think, to a degree, a very blunt tool for art in general, and I'm not sure how that evolves going forward, because we're not going to just stop AI from like learning people's styles.

2:41:30 - Leo Laporte
To bring back judge Alsop. That was his decision. Yeah, was that you can't copyright an API. Right, and thank goodness he decided that, because otherwise you've got you know, you've got real problems. If I can't, if I can't reverse engineer your API so that I can make something compatible, that's going to really shut down a lot of software development, and I think that's what my biggest like fear is for a lot of people who want to take this to the immediate.

2:41:57 - Christina Warren
Well, of course, they should have to pay, and all of this is copyright and whatnot.

Is that for the last 20 some odd years, we've been fighting to try to loosen the and make more clear the rules around fair use, because I think that most people, especially small creators, understand why transfer, transforming content and being able to remix content is an important thing to do.

This to me feels like and even though I understand why some artists are very much pushing back against this thing, it feels like very much a step back against that, because the people who I genuinely think will be hurt the most are not the big artists and the big places who have money to fight these things, but are small people who might eventually like okay, well, what happens if you want to use these tools in a creative way, but now you're being told that you are violating some sort of copyright and that you can't create this?

That to me seems much more harmful than the fact that, yes, I can tell an image generator to create something in the style of this work, which is, let's be completely honest right now. I know this will change, but right now will not be perfect. We'll have many discrepancies and things that will require edits or other changes, which to me means that you're further editing and building on top of these things. I just think that we lose out when we're pushing against these ideas of opening things up to being transformed just because we don't like the people who are doing it.

2:43:22 - Leo Laporte
Benito. Do you think artists and Benito is a magician. Do you think artists should be protected against AI incorporating their art into the large language models?

2:43:37 - Benito
Like that's a bigger question I don't have an answer to. I mean, I don't know, I barely I don't make any music off my art anyway. I don't make any money off my art anyway, right.

2:43:48 - Leo Laporte
But let's say you're Thomas Kinkade, painter of light, and I can go into stability, ai or mid-journey and say I want a painting in the style of Thomas Kinkade and it's going to look a lot like Thomas Kinkade painted. It Does the Thomas Kinkade's past. But does the estate of Thomas Kinkade have a action against mid-journey because I can say that and get something that looks like his paintings? The only way it would know is if it had seen a lot of his paintings, just as the only way we would know if you were making house music, benito, is if you'd heard a lot of house music.

2:44:21 - Benito
I think the better question to ask is do you see AI or do you see the person who made the prompt, who prompted AI to do that?

2:44:29 - Christina Warren
And I think then it would probably come down to how similar it is. Now, if you're literally using something to try to make a facsimile, then I mean, I think that's one thing.

2:44:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I mean, but then there's laws against counterfeiting.

2:44:38 - Christina Warren
Yes, agreed, that's what I'm saying. So if it's truly a counterfeit or if you're genuinely trying to pass it off as being by someone, I think that's one thing, but I think that in most cases I mean previous case law shows that I mean the Google Books trial being a good example of this that the tools themselves are not the problem. If you want to use them to violate copyright, then that's one thing. But I would even argue, at least right now, like if you enter in the same prompt into mid-journey or sable diffusion or Dolly 3 or any of these things, you can enter the same prompt in 500 times and you will get 500 different results. It is not giving you the same result each time, which to me, because it's generative which to me kind of goes against many of these arguments regardless of what the corpus of it is, it's not as if it's giving you the same output each time.

2:45:27 - Mike Elgan
There's also the problem of monetary value. At the end of the day, painting is a product for sale and the vast majority of paintings that painters paint are worthless monetarily. They'll struggle to sell them at the flea market for 10 bucks or whatever. And the same goes for generative AI art. If somebody's, like Kincaid, is a famous artist and making a great living with their art, I can generate using a prompt specifying that person, and that AI art that I produce is worth nothing. Now there's the argument where commercial artists who illustrate publications and so on may see a loss of revenue because publications may choose to use AI and maybe even use the style of the people that used to create art for them by hand or whatever. But still, at the end of the day, ai generated art is not only there's way too many fingers on everybody's hand, but it's monetarily worthless. I mean, you can't. Nobody's taking AI generated art to an art gallery and selling it for $50,000.

2:46:34 - Shoshana Weissmann
Even for photography. A lot of hikers have been like posting on Instagram about it, because all I follow on Instagram is hikers. But basically some people are arguing you know you can't. If it's not the thing you saw, it's not going to be as valuable, even just for like following people, because I want to see what's this trail going to be like. Or I love Mount Sneffles. I want to see Mount Sneffles from a million different views. But if it's AI and it's not real, then I kind of don't care, because I want to know like, oh, when's the best time to visit? And stuff like that. I'm sure there's exceptions and times when even AI is going to create more valuable stuff in different cases, but I think it's like we kind of have to think about it from all those different angles. But it's hard from you know in certain cases to understand from like you know, is this infringing on rights and who, which player, is infringing on rights? You know?

2:47:23 - Leo Laporte
I asked Mid Journey to paint SpongeBob's house in the style of Thomas Kincaid. I don't think Thomas Kincaid has anything to worry about. No, but that is cool, I'll send it to you.

2:47:39 - Shoshana Weissmann
I love that. But yeah, you can make. I've actually been doing a lot of with chat GPT making Hitchcock films about sloths and licensing and stuff like that and like once it can produce movies. I'm never leaving my like I'm just done.

2:47:53 - Leo Laporte
Wow, I like that.

2:47:55 - Christina Warren
Instead of the birds, it's the sloths, it's the sloths, but you know what I do actually believe. I fully believe that when we because we will see AI art and AI music and other things being used in really innovative ways. But I firmly believe the people who will be doing those things are people who are already artists and are already musicians. They are going to be using this as another tool to do things. But I look, are there going to be some individuals who will be able to, to my point, bypass paying for stock photography or stock art? Yes, of course. They already are.

They already are and they already do things like that anyway. But if you want to find things that are truly going to have value, monetarily or culturally or whatever, it is going to take humans, who are being going to take what they do well, and things that these tools can help them do, to create something that's that's, you know, bigger than both.

2:48:43 - Leo Laporte
I told you I would have a victory for Elon Musk before we wrapped up the show. On Tuesday, tesla won the first US trial alleging that its autopilot killed one of its drivers. It's Tesla's second big win this year, which drew juries have declined to find Tesla's full self-driving defective. The lawsuit was in Riverside County Superior Court. It alleged the autopilot system costs owner Micah Lee's Model 3 to suddenly veer off a highway at 65 miles an hour, strike a palm tree and burst into flames. It killed Lee in 2019 and his two passengers. It was pretty. It was pretty gruesome.

The plaintiffs asked for a $400 million plus punitive damages. Tesla said no, no, lee had consumed alcohol before getting behind the wheel. It's also and this is a problem because Tesla had, we think, has software that will turn off autopilot the minute a crash is imminent. They asserted that it was unclear whether autopilot was engaged at the time of the crash. The jury said the vehicle did not have a manufacturing defect, voted nine to three in favor of Tesla, but they did deliberate for four days, so it wasn't a slam dunk. Tesla said that the jury's conclusion was the right one. So, if there's any question, if you're in the driver's seat, oh hell, forget that If you're in the car, you're still liable for driving it, whether you let the car drive itself or not.

2:50:17 - Christina Warren
That's ridiculous. Okay, so why would anybody bother with this? Like, honestly, I got that. The whole point was, you know, you don't have to worry about driving and whatnot, and you're saying, oh, if I'm just to happen to be in the car, then I'm liable, even though I didn't have anything to control.

2:50:27 - Leo Laporte
Well, you have to be control the okay, but okay. So what if you get out of the driver's seat? What if you get in the back seat? You're still liable.

2:50:38 - Mike Elgan
Right the problem? The problem is that in the tiny print, in the legal mumbo jumbo, tesla would tell you that it's not autopilot or full self driving and that you're responsible and keep your hands on the wheel and all that stuff. But in their marketing they call it auto driving. So the problem is the marketing and the the typical of Elon Musk, the overhyping of his technology.

2:51:02 - Leo Laporte
Brent Walker Smith. This is from the Reuters story. Usc professor of law said. The outcome of both cases show our juries are still really focused on the idea of a human in the driver's seat being where the buck stops. Yeah.

2:51:18 - Christina Warren
I mean, I think it's Tesla probably makes sense in those cases. I'd be interested to see what this would mean. If you're talking about something like a Waymo or something else, where it truly is, well then you're not.

2:51:26 - Leo Laporte
If you get an autonomous taxi, right, okay, there's no driver and the happens, something happens. You never had control of that vehicle, right, I mean? And that's not your responsibility.

2:51:36 - Christina Warren
Well, I mean, I would hope so. I guess we'll just have to see, because that that's where my mind was going, thinking Okay, in this instance, obviously, yes, you have control. But if you were to take this to also apply to any form of autonomous driving, I would definitely look at the terms and services of those you know, self driving taxis very closely, because you definitely wouldn't want to be in a situation where you were responsible.

2:52:00 - Leo Laporte
I have. This has been. You guys are so smart. I'm going to bring all my difficult questions to you from now on. I want to thank you, christina, for wearing purple nail polish in like my purple jacket matching, matching. I want to thank Shoshana for having purple hair, like my purple jacket. I would like to know, mike Elgin, what you've done for me lately.

2:52:22 - Mike Elgan
Well, my glasses are almost purple purple, my meta glasses this kind of bluish. Oh, there you go.

2:52:28 - Leo Laporte
I know you've done for me lately. You talked to me, you and Christina talked me into buying those silly glasses.

2:52:34 - Christina Warren
I mean, I'm just saying, if you need some glasses anyway, maybe I'll get them. Maybe I'll get them you should.

2:52:40 - Leo Laporte
And then you go around and you take I have the Snapchat.

2:52:43 - Christina Warren
I do two, but again, those were ugly and and they the camera quality is now way better, so and they didn't have. They didn't have them like speakers in them.

2:52:52 - Mike Elgan
Yeah, the speakers are. What's interesting, it's the audio that's so good in these things.

2:52:56 - Leo Laporte
I hate you, mike Elgin, sorry, it's great to see you. Gastronomadnet, if you want to go on those gastronomad adventures, I cannot recommend them more highly. Thank you. Evening has fallen in Mexico City, where you did not have to suffer through the change of time You've been at standard time this whole time. Mexico does not honor daylight saving time.

2:53:21 - Mike Elgan
We went from one hour difference with California to two hours. So you guys change, we stay the same. Yeah, and yeah. So it's, it's nice to not change the clock.

2:53:32 - Leo Laporte
It's not so bad when the fall back the gain an hour. Yeah, it's bad when you lose an hour.

2:53:36 - Christina Warren
It is especially because they usually always time it during South by Southwest, and so not only are you hung over, you've lost an hour, and then you stop early someplace. Yeah, it's the worst, yeah.

2:53:49 - Leo Laporte
Well, we have until March to change this long national nightmare, I beg of you. Actually, the only thing Congress has done is to say we should say, on daylight time, yeah, I, I guess I don't care, just stay on something, something.

2:54:03 - Mike Elgan
It's just an arbitrary number that we're applying to, how much it's how?

2:54:06 - Leo Laporte
much light you have in the morning versus how much you have at night.

2:54:08 - Christina Warren
Yeah, it's for the farmers?

2:54:10 - Leo Laporte
It isn't. The farmers hate it. You know, cows don't know.

2:54:13 - Mike Elgan
They haven't been told you can be, you can be. You can be marky mark and go to bed at 730. Or against to have to one.

2:54:21 - Leo Laporte
It's just arbitrary up to you, baby. Thank you, mike. I'll get hello chatterboxcom. Don't forget Kevin's wonderful project that every school yeah, thank you so much. Every single classroom, christina Warren, have a wonderful GitHub universe.

2:54:36 - Christina Warren
Thank you so much. Thank you so much, and anybody who wants to join us online for free, get have universe calm on Wednesday and Thursday.

2:54:43 - Leo Laporte
So exciting and you're doing great work there at GitHub, having a great time. I just so thrilled. And let's not forget rocket at relayfm, because you and Simone to rush for, and Brianna, who will be on next week. Yeah, they said, shouldn't we do another takeover? And I said not. If Simone's gonna ask me tough questions again Like last time, I failed that quiz, although I've since watched our good, so I know next time, but you ask that question again Now she'll have some other movie relayfm, slash, rocket. Thank you so much. Great show. So, shanna, what are what are you gonna have in our street podcast? You would be great on that.

2:55:19 - Shoshana Weissmann
Oh, thank you. Yeah, we had a short running one. It's just a lot of resources and like it's good. We like podcasts, but so much of what we, you know, want to get to people, we can do very simply through email and LinkedIn and sometimes Twitter, to the degree it exists now. So we might do some more of it and it went pretty well. But LinkedIn has higher ROI and so does the email for us.

2:55:40 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and what? The stuff you do, the deep policy stuff you do, really deserves to be written out.

2:55:46 - Shoshana Weissmann
Oh, thank you, I love my job.

2:55:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think it really deserves that kind of attention and detail. But it's good to know you're on LinkedIn. So what is the LinkedIn account?

2:55:55 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, I forget exactly the handle, but it's just our street Institute on LinkedIn and we want people to follow us. My my director report handles our LinkedIn and she's really good at it.

2:56:05 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, good. So look for our street Institute at LinkedIn. Another fine Microsoft company. Glad we could. We could plug everybody.

2:56:15 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, of course.

2:56:16 - Leo Laporte
Senator Shoshanna on the X, where she's in charge of sloth outreach, or blue sky. Actually, from now on, I should ask people blue sky, that's the one you want to be seen on. You think, shoshanna?

2:56:32 - Shoshana Weissmann
I don't know. I'm trying to.

2:56:34 - Shoshana Weissmann
I'm trying to do more there. You know, it's just figuring out where people are.

2:56:37 - Shoshana Weissmann
Yeah, it's definitely secondary to Twitter for us, but it's something that I want to keep doing a little more of, because there are people relevant to us there.

2:56:47 - Leo Laporte
And it is Senator Shoshannablueskysocial, or BSKY as they say. That's social. There she is. Sloth committee chairman. Where are you hiking next?

2:56:59 - Shoshana Weissmann
It's going to be a while, but I have six weeks planned out. My friend's actually getting married in Hawaii, so I'm getting there two weeks early.

2:57:06 - Leo Laporte
There's some beautiful hikes in Hawaii. Hawaii is a wonderful place to hike.

2:57:11 - Shoshana Weissmann
Oh, I can't wait. I'm going to miss the marmots, though, you know.

2:57:17 - Leo Laporte
Okay, should I follow up on that kids, or should I just let that lie?

2:57:20 - Christina Warren
I mean, I think we have to follow up.

2:57:24 - Shoshana Weissmann
what marmots you know? I wish no, at elevation. There's a lot of marmots in Hawaii.

2:57:29 - Leo Laporte
There's no marmots, no marmots. I do love marmots. I must say I have a share your interest in marmots. Thank you, christina, thank you Shoshanna, thank you Mike. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do this weekend tech every Sunday evening. Right after I asked the tech guys, it is 2 pm Pacific, 5 pm Eastern, 2200 UTC.

Now that we are back on standard time, 2200 UTC, you can watch us do it live at livetwittv, chat with us live at IRCtwittv. Of course, if you're a club twit member, you have access beyond the velvet rope. I mean you can live in the SpongeBob Square Pants houses if you want. I don't see I don't see concaid in these, to be honest, but anyway, discord. You get free ad, free versions of the shows. You get all the extra shows we do twittv slash club twit if you're not already a member. After the fact, we do have ad supported on demand versions of our shows available at the website twittv. You can also go to a YouTube channel dedicated to this weekend tech.

Let's go away to share clips, because you can just take a little clip and share those out. If you have a little portion of the show you want to share with friends, we'd appreciate that. Of course, the best way to get the show is subscribing to your favorite podcast player. That way, you'll get it the minute it's available. Thank you all for being here. We'll see you next time. Have a great week. Another twint is in the can. Bye, bye.