This Week in Tech 1001 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit this week in tech. Oh, I love it. This is going to be fun. Jennifer Patterson-Tui is here. We'll talk about home automation with her. Samuel Bull-Samet, our car guy, is here. We'll talk about Elon Musk's bold claims this week for Tesla An amazing feat for SpaceX. And if you're going to break up Google, how do you do it? Plus, have we finally learned the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto? It's all coming up. Next on TWIT Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, Episode 1001, recorded Sunday, October 13th 2024. The anti-force entruster. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we get together with some of the best minds in the business to talk about the week's tech news. And, of course, after the Tesla event this week, I had to bring in Sam Obulsamed, our car guy, host of Wheelbearings, the Wheelbearings podcast at wheelbearingsmedia. He also is an analyst for GuideHouse Insights, where he writes about automotive technology. Hello, Sam.
01:23 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Hello Leo, how are you today?
01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am well. It's great to have you on the show. Always good to be back, also with us, somebody who is new to the show. So let's, sam, let's consider that and be nice, okay, jennifer Patterson, toohey, you know her because, of course, she's on Tech News Weekly every month, but it's great to have her. She's the smart home mama at the verge dot com. Hi, jennifer, great to have you, hello hello, so so thrilled to be here.
01:52
Bucket list item well, I didn't know this. You mentioned that you'd been to the old studio, the brickhouse studio, and I and I just we didn't get to talk at the time, but no, I'm glad to have you on the show, welcome really thrilled to be here, excited to talk about elon musk.
02:04 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Glad to have you on the show. Welcome, really thrilled to be here, excited to talk about Elon Musk.
02:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you have covered automotive. We were talking about that before the show.
02:10 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I have. That was a long, long time ago, but yes, I did get to drive one of the first. When the Volvo first brought out its SUV, I went on a press trip to Monte Carlo and we got to drive the Grand Prix circuit which, leo, as you point out, is basically just the streets of Monte Carlo, but still really fun up into the mountains.
02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When we visited a few years ago we stayed at the Fairmont. That's on the hairpin turn and there's a little plaque there, and so now when I watch the race I know that's a very. You got to go down to basically nothing to get around that term. So did you watch? I didn't. I'm sure Sam did. Elon's Hollywood backlot. It was actually appropriate that it was on a backlot surrounded by fake buildings showing off what is essentially a fake robo-taxi, a fake drink-making robot. The whole thing was, uh, fake.
03:07 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yes oh, I mean leo, come on, I think you're being a little harsh on uh well, okay, so he showed this.
03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh low, this is two thirty thousand dollar two-seater cyber cab, did get in it and did drive off in it. The idea is, though, that this is an autonomous vehicle like a Waymo, right.
03:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
That is at least the story that they tell.
03:33 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
yes, there's a lot of storytelling.
03:37 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
And, to be clear, thursday night the event was supposed to start at 7 pm Pacific, which is 10 pm, my time here and my wife and I decided, you know, instead of watching that, let's go out to the lake and watch the Aurora Borealis.
03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that was much more fun, that was much more enjoyable.
03:55 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
And then I caught the super cut on the Verge on Friday morning, yeah.
03:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're like me, you just didn't want to give Elon all that time. No, this car can carry two occupants. Um, there you go, no steering wheel, because you're uh, you're a passive rider on these things, uh, and he says before 2027.
04:20 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
well, um, keep in mind that in October of 2015, he said that full autonomy was one at most two years away, and he's been saying that pretty much every six to 12 months ever since then. So, and they still don't have a system that is capable of safely operating without human supervision, safely operating without human supervision Right, yeah, I would be shocked if, well, I'd be shocked if we ever see this thing, at least in this form, and I don't foresee a robo-taxi business for Tesla any time in the foreseeable future.
05:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the robo-van which looks very sci, sci-fi, very cool um deco yeah, it's an art deco.
05:10 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, really art deco. I I this this was way cooler looking than the little crossover I thought yeah, the crossover just looks like the next generation tesla really yeah, I like the snazzy gold color, though that is kind of fun. But I mean, there are already people doing this, but they still don't think Tesla's still not going to be able to do this for two more years at best. It seems like they've really over-promised and under-delivered.
05:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would Elon do that? What's in it?
05:40 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
for him Tesla's share price. Their market valuation is greater than the next 15 largest automakers combined Combined.
05:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Combined GM Ford Stellantis, all of them mushed together, still are not worth as much as Tesla. Yeah.
06:00 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
On Friday, the day after the event, Tesla's market cap dropped by more than the market cap of Ford in one day 8%, but that was more than Ford was worth yeah, about $50 billion.
06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In other words, it didn't pay off. The market did not buy his for the first time, really did not buy his fabrication Right.
06:20 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And wasn't the idea meant to be that we were going to be able to use our Teslas as taxis?
06:26 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
And make money. That's what they said in 2019.
06:28 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, and, like Tesla's, really valued more like a tech company than a car company, right? I mean there's because of these types of promises, so I guess I mean so what? Yeah? Why did it drop? Why were people unhappy?
06:42 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
You know, a major, a major component of Tesla's valuation, you know when. When financial analysts on wall street you know come up with an estimate of where you know target price for a company share or shares, they're looking forward at what they think the revenue is going to be at some date in the future. And in Tesla's case, a major component of their valuation is based on the premise that they will be able to suddenly one day, turn on a new software version on all their vehicles and just magically, overnight, start generating billions of dollars in new revenue from robo-taxi services based on all the vehicles that they've sold roughly about 3 million vehicles in the US in total and however many overseas right now and that they will just flip a switch and all of a sudden they'll have this new revenue stream. There's some people, like Kathy Wood of ARK know, think it's going to be a trillion dollar business, a trillion dollars in revenue. You know which is just, it's insane. It's something that's not going to happen anytime in the foreseeable future, or at least anytime, and probably in the next decade, or at least any time, probably in the next decade. And I think what a lot of people overlook, what a lot of people not so familiar with the technology overlook is that this is actually a really hard problem to solve. Tesla has not solved it. No one has solved it fully yet Everyone that's doing this is still doing it on a very limited basis. Waymo is doing more than anyone in terms of commercializing it. They're running, they're doing over 100,000 paid driverless rides a week now in San Francisco, los Angeles and Phoenix, and they're supposed to add Austin before the end of the year and perhaps Houston as well. Well, but there's actually a lot doing.
08:48
This business is actually a lot more complicated than just flipping a switch, taking out the driver and, you know, magically profits appear, because when you do this, you actually end up adding a lot of new expenses, especially, you know, for a ride hailing company. You know, if you look at companies like Uber and Lyft, they don't own any of the vehicles. They don't own any of the vehicles or they don't own any of the physical assets, so they're relying on drivers to come and bring their vehicles to the platform. The drivers are there in the car when it comes to fueling the vehicle or cleaning it. If someone drops something or leaves something behind or gets sick in the car car, the driver's there to take care of it with a driverless vehicle.
09:31
You know, now you have to have systems in place. You have to have depots, you have to have systems in place to enable charging. They did show, or they talked about, wireless charging for this road taxi, which you know is actually not a new technology. It exists, it's out there today, but you also need to have either staff or robots to clean the vehicle. All of this adds new expenses that are replacing the expense of the driver and so far, no one has yet figured out a profitable business model for robot taxis.
10:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is it hype? Yes, it's totally. It's not even very credible hype. I mean, the stock market didn't buy it they didn't this time.
10:17 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Uh, they have consistently for the last decade, but they didn't this time.
10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, uh, I would love this, but, um, you can't love it, cry wolf. So many times you can only say, oh, this is going to happen next year. So many times before people go yeah, sure, elon, yeah, yeah, it's really. Elon's really complicated, it's very hard. And then of course, there are people in the chat who are saying immediately whoa, they're always slamming Elon.
10:48 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
He kind of puts himself in the way of that, you make yourself the bullseye and people are going to take shots at you.
10:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was talking yesterday about buying my Model X. I bought it. I put a pre-order down before it was available. I got one of the first Model Xs, went down to the factory to get it, lisa and I and I was kind of in tears as we rode around the factory because I was so inspired by the vision that Elon had expressed in the manifestos of a better world thanks to electronic vehicles, electric power, batteries and then later autonomous vehicles. But after a while you start thinking this is kind of not happening. My, we got rid of the Model X because it kept trying to kill my wife. She called it Christine Now, but I got okay, so I'm gonna give him some some credit, okay, uh, did you see the rocket launch and capture that he did. Spacex launched the super heavy starship on an unpiloted test and then use the chopsticks, uh, to cap, to catch.
12:04 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, this was kind of impressive. This was this morning right. Very impressive yeah.
12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
12:09 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Very, yeah, this morning.
12:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe that's one of the reasons we give him so much credibility, because he does do amazing things.
12:18 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well, his companies do.
12:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The people that work for him do amazing things?
12:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I mean he's running. Is he the brains at the top? Is he, is he the mastermind or is it I?
12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
mean no CEO is mastermind of anything. I mean you can't say Tim Cook invented the iPhone or the iPad or whatever you. I mean that's the CEO, but he made it happen.
12:37 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's like, it's like when my kids were little and they'd come home and say, mom, did you make this?
12:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And she said I made it happen.
12:47 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well, I want to see. I want self-driving cars, though, and that's why we still feel like, like that's what the promise has been of Tesla since they launched, and I've always. I have not bought an electric vehicle yet, but it's like next on my list and now it's great because there are a lot more options. But my neighbors have two Teslas and I constantly see the van that comes to pick it up and take it to the repair center.
13:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh well, every single Cybertruck got recalled because the backup cameras had lag, and that's really not good. If you're trying to back up in the camera, it's not showing you what you're supposed to see. What's actually happening.
13:25 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
But the rockets are great. That's really exciting. I got to go tour the Kennedy Space Center a couple years ago and they have the SpaceX facilities there and you know everyone was just talking about. You know that what SpaceX is doing is what's really pushing space exploration forward now, because you know NASA had been so far behind but obviously now they're catching up, there's some movement. But it is great that they've kind of kept that momentum, because space exploration is just so fascinating to me and I think you know it was a shame that we kind of fell so far behind for so long and great that a private company was able to kind of push the boundaries a bit more and bring us back to being sort of a power in this space.
14:07 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
But you know, I give SpaceX a lot of credit for being the first to do truly reusable rockets. I mean, they've actually made a lot of really significant technical progress but again, like his other companies, very problematic. They spew a lot of toxic materials into the environment around their base in Texas and it's where they have Starbase, where SpaceX is based down in South Texas of very delicate wetlands around there and every time they do a launch there's a huge amount of toxic materials that are spewed into that environment. And of course, I think, leo, you talked I can't remember if it was on here or on Twig a couple of weeks ago about Cards Against Humanity.
14:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Suing. They sued SpaceX.
15:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
They have a little piece of property next to SpaceX's property.
15:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which they originally bought in a crowdfunded attempt to thwart Donald Trump's Mexican wall. They brought up some property where the wall would be built, but it turned out they got kind of two for one, because then SpaceX started putting bulldozers and parts on it those, by the way, I've been told later, those property issues are complicated, complex and not always obvious. So but?
15:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
but there's a lot of other issues you know with with spacex. Um, you know a lot of labor issues. Um, you know a lot of harassment issues, which is something that is common to pretty much all of his companies. Uh, look at this chopstick catch.
15:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is pretty. This is the spacex heavy. The idea is to make this easier to reuse these. They, they catch it before it hits the ground. There's the chopsticks. I mean this thing that's like a circus trick, that's like circus, circus. So, soleil, look at that, wow, and the crowd goes wild is that real crowd noise as well?
16:14 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I don't know. This is on x, so anything's possible it could be a fake.
16:18 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It sounds really exciting broadcasting from I don't even think it's that.
16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That sounds like a stadium full of people watching the 49ers win the Super Bowl. It does not sound like it has anything to do with rockets.
16:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's a fascinating approach because catching it that way is probably. There's probably a lot less risk. It's probably a lot easier than you've got. I think the booster is about 200 feet tall, 150, somewhere between 150 and 200 feet tall, you know. So having something like that come down vertically and balance on a pad is really complicated.
16:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which they were doing on a barge in the ocean right.
16:55 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Right, I mean that was with the Falcon 9.
16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was amazing. Which is a smaller rocket.
17:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
But you know, with something as large as this, you this trying to bring it down vertically. You've seen how many times the Falcon 9s, the smaller ones, have come down and tipped over and been destroyed. So if you can catch it this way, it's probably a more reliable solution.
17:21 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well then, reusable, so being very environmentally friendly, especially, rather than spewing it all across the oceans.
17:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
He's literally changed the economics of spaceflight for every one of these launches and the CO2 that's being put out by that, as well as the methane that's leaking during the fueling process and during the extraction of methane from fracking, which they also want to do on their property. They want to do more fracking there to generate their own methane. The environmental impact of every one of those launches probably negates all of the benefits from all of the EVs that have been sold so far. Oh, wow.
18:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that an ironic kind of combination? Maybe I have to dry those tears that I shed in the Tesla factory. He's a good, he's a showman. In fact, ars Technica said, like PT Barnum said, what's there? That was Jonathan Gitlin's tagline for his article.
18:30 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, we need showmen. That's what gets this technology to move forward. That's what inspires people, sam.
18:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Altman is a showman for OpenAI. Steve Jobs was a showman. Steve Jobs absolutely was a showman. In fact, the best tech executives have a certain amount of razzle dazzle to them.
18:52 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Got to sell these ideas because sometimes you're going to be waiting a really long time for them. Well, that's the thing.
18:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean or ever? And Sam is on the record as saying he doesn't think we're going to ever get to level. Was it level four or level five?
19:05 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Level five. We're at level four now. I mean, that's what Waymo does, that's level four, so it's, it's completely self-driving in any circumstance.
19:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when?
19:12 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
we're not getting there, Sam, really to to level five not ever.
19:20 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't think in the next 10 to 15 years.
19:24 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Is it just the car? Is it also the infrastructure? Because I know that the infrastructure is so key to self-driving.
19:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
No, the infrastructure is actually less of an issue. Yeah, if you could have, for instance, inter-car communication.
19:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that helps. You come to a four-way stop and the cars can negotiate who goes? And it's much safer, much better than I mean. The problem is, when you have three out of the four vehicles are autonomous with intercar communication and the fourth is you or me driving, then the humans become the issue. Yeah, um, but we could figure that out if. But the problem is that I I don't think the car companies are. Are they working together to create intercar communication or are they all siloed?
20:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
yeah, no, no, the the industry. I mean there are standards for uh vehicle to everything communication, um, and originally the original plan was they were going to use uh 802 11p, which is a derivative of Wi-Fi communications. It was called DSRC, Dedicated Short Range Communications to do vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure, vehicle-to-pedestrian communications that later changed to cellular V2X, using cellular connections both to the network, to the cell networks, but also direct point-to-point communications using cellular technology for vehicles and vehicle to infrastructure, vehicle to pedestrians to communicate, send short messages about the position of whether it's a vehicle or pedestrian or cyclist, what direction they're moving, their velocity, and you know, for example, what direction they're moving their velocity. And you know, for example, with vehicles, you know if a vehicle hits a patch of ice and ABS or traction control activates it can broadcast out a message to other vehicles in the area.
21:14 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
See that all sounds so good. I want that. When do we get that?
21:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could see how valuable that would be. An emergency vehicle could say okay, everybody, move over, we're coming through.
21:24 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I mean it would change how cities are organized, it would change everything and that's another thing, Elon said that I'm really behind.
21:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really agree with, which is that we've ruined our cities by making room for all of these vehicles, so that every one of us has a personal vehicle cities are having parking lots. Now I part of it's the street, but I mean they literally you have to put parking in everywhere um there's.
21:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
There's eight parking spaces for every car in the united states.
21:52 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's crazy, yeah wow, that's an interesting crazy.
21:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So and he, so that's the thing elon's got the right idea, but everybody knows that.
22:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
But he's got that idea that's right that's not something a unique insight from him. There's a lot of people who have known that for a long time. Even before Elon got involved with Tesla in 2004, there was work being done on autonomous vehicles long before that. For these very reasons, the industry has understood this for a long time. But the problem is that the technology is a really hard problem to solve, because software does not work the same way our brains do and obviously humans make a lot of mistakes when we drive. We have a lot of crashes, a lot of fatalities, but you also need to look at it from a slightly different perspective. Yes, 40,000 people a year die. That is 40,000 too many, but we drive 3.2 trillion miles a year in the United States alone and we have about one fatality a little more than one fatality for every 100 million miles. We have a crash about one on average, once every half a million miles.
23:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, good, that's about. So I have a few hundred thousand miles left before I have a crash. That's good news. Are you on the Verge? Cast every week?
23:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, every now and then Go on whenever there's any big smart home news or to talk about matter I see you have all your smart home stuff.
23:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good, we're going to get to matter. Actually, come to think of it, we'll do a little matter because of, uh, mark german's piece today in bloomberg oh, I haven't caught it.
23:36 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
What?
23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happened. Yes, well, I'll get one during the next break, which is coming up now. Uh, you'll have a chance to look at it. He says Apple's really going to push on the smart home and their issue of course is working with existing hardware getting it all working and he says that's one of the reasons they were very active in Matter. I like HomeKit. I would use HomeKit everywhere if it supported everything.
23:58 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well, matter is basically home kit, right?
24:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I have a home assistant server over here oh, you do.
24:05 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
How long have you had?
24:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that the ha green ah, nice, yeah, a couple of months oh, so it's a new. I don't get anything new to you. Nothing works together at all, it doesn't I have dream of getting up in the morning saying good morning house, and the curtains go up and the bacon starts frying, and the coffee machine comes on, and all that Nothing.
24:28 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's my dream too.
24:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, everybody's home dream.
24:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
But now it's like autonomous vehicles Well, and there's a lot of correlation between the smart home and the smart city and the smart road and the smart car. There's so much that they can do for each other, especially the car, you know, with the home battery, backup the car. We've been seeing this quite recently actually, In fact, even during the storms.
24:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could do that with the Ford Lightning. You could plug it into your house.
24:55 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, your car can be your home battery backup Be your home battery, yeah. And people were doing that in.
24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
North Carolina.
25:00 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's amazing yeah.
25:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Keeping their power on.
25:03 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I was moderating a panel at the Move America conference in Austin about two, three weeks ago and I had somebody on the panel from Hertz. She was the VP of their electrification strategy and this was just a couple of days before Helene was due to hit. And one of the things that she mentioned they have a bunch of Chevy Silverado, evs and Lightnings in their fleet and what they were doing ahead of the storm was they were making sure to position those vehicles and have at least one of those at every one of their rental locations in the area that was likely to be hit by the storm, in part to power things like the gate so that cars could get in and out. Of. You know, so people could, you know, renting cars to get away would be able to to get out afterwards, you know if, if they lost power, so they could use the battery in the truck to power some of the systems at their rental locations Is there a name for this, so that we can look for this when we buy our next car?
26:11
Yeah, vehicle to load or vehicle to home or just bi-directional charging? Yeah, bi-directional charging.
26:18 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And there's a few and they have to have. There's approval processes right that they need to go through, so that's why it's kind of slow, but there are a few out there.
26:26 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
There's standards that are still sort of evolving as far as how it's implemented. On the hardware side it's fairly well standardized, but on the software side there's things about how the vehicle and other devices talk to each other that are still those standards are still being finalized. But you know, basically most new cars that are coming, most new EVs coming to market now are having at least some degree of bi-directional capability on them.
26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was some concern before the hurricanes both Helene and Milton that EVs would be a problem if they got salt water in storm surges, if they were submerged in salt water that they would cause fires. Did any of that happen?
27:11 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
There was one instance that was reported with a Tesla. It all depends on how well the battery is sealed. If the battery is, you know, if the battery pack is well manufactured and sealed up properly, it shouldn't be an issue. Okay, but it you know, as with anything, no more than an issue, would you know, for an internal combustion vehicle being submerged in saltwater, and actually probably less of an issue in in most cases yeah, but that wouldn't explode, would it?
27:43
um, no, it wouldn't explode, but it also, you know, would if you. You know if your engine is flooded by water salt water or fresh water, you know if it's under you know eight, ten feet of water. Um, you know the that water is going to get into the engine and the engine is just going to seize and you're not going to go anywhere.
28:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, or if the gas tank leaked and gasoline got into it.
28:05 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, if it gets into the gas tank, gas gets out. You know, that's not good it's going to float up on top of the water gets out. Now you know if there's a spark you have a potential fire hazard.
28:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that way, fire hazard that way. In general, it seems to me that the amount of energy you have to store in a vehicle to push it down the road for several hundred miles is a lot, and if it were to be released suddenly under any conditions, it would be a problem and the problem is putting it out, though my husband is a firefighter and has experienced this.
28:40 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Putting these batteries out when they're on fire is a lot harder than putting a gasoline car out because they create their own oxygen in the combustion.
28:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Plus there's toxic uh chemicals that come out of the combustion as well, right, and then they reignite too once right, you can't Right, you can't put them out, you can't put water on them.
28:58 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, the frequency of EV fires is less than 10% of the frequency of gas, but that's because there aren't many around, though I think as we get more Well, no, I mean as a percentage of the number of vehicles.
29:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Right, the percentage based on as a fraction of the number of vehicles. You're about 10 times as likely to have a fire with an internal with a gasoline vehicle as a battery vehicle. But, as you said, lynn, uh, jen the um, you know, once it does ignite, um, because of the nature of the, the chemicals in the battery, particularly cobalt oxide, it releases oxygen internally and so you can't smother staining.
29:36 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah yeah, iustaining. Yeah, yeah, I have. I test robot vacuums as one of the things I do. I'm a reviewer for the Verge and you have animals.
29:45
That's a good combination Of animals. Well, I'm hoping my new kitten will like riding the robot vacuums, because my old cat does not. I'm like I've already started training him young. It's a good video content. But video content. But I have a lot in my house at any one time and my husband is constantly worried that we're going to come home and they're all going to have exploded. He's like is there anything we can do to turn these off? He thinks they're such a fire hazard. Thankfully that has not happened. But lithium ion batteries, you know, are everywhere in our house and he's always so worried about it.
30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, we had that. Remember the hoverboard craze which basically, I think, got killed because of lithium ion fire.
30:21 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
He went to many fires on those in people's garages.
30:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They were made cheap Chinese manufacturers that didn't. Yeah, we have a friend who had significant home damage from a, from an exploding hoverboard. We had hoverboards. I mean I would always kind of have some trepidation. I'd plug it in the garage and just cross my fingers. That's all you can do. Just cross your fingers. But we need batteries. We're going to look. We're going to have Optimus robots making drinks for us in the near future.
30:51 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, right, robots, I've got more robots in my house than there were at that event. I know.
30:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon he can't. There's some sort of thing that happens to billionaires where they just can no longer tell the truth. He said oh yeah, we got 50 of these autonomous vehicles backstage. No, you don't what. And then these robots which, to be fair, they didn't exactly say this is autonomous. Here's Marques.
31:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Brownlee, the impression was there.
31:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trying to figure it out. Scoble and others took video. Scoble said I found the guy who was running the thing. Oops, that's not working. Let's not play that video.
31:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
He asked hey, optimusus, how much of you is ai? I can't disclose just how much. That's something you'll have to find out later it's clearly a guy talking to a microphone across the way really, I think they're people.
31:53 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I think they're the people in the robots.
31:54 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't know they're not just from from the structure of the robot.
31:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't I don't blame you, because the first time he showed that there was a guy in a suit it did not look believable here's from Second Breakfast Investing, which is, by the way, an excellent name for I'm still skeptical.
32:20 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Maybe they had a few real ones, but I don't know what.
32:24 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, I mean, you don't think there's a?
32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
human in there, because they that one's articulating that one. You can see a robot arm.
32:29 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, but the other guy you didn't see that the one outside, yeah, no, I mean they have a lot of these but I mean, these are not you know, mechanically not that different from you know an animatronic robot that they've been using at Disneyland.
32:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's at Disneyland. Yes, it's, mr.
32:44 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Lincoln yeah, but apparently they were the robots. The Optimus robots were being remotely operated, and you know somebody speaking Elon sounds a lot like Sam.
32:56 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Albin, not even as impressive as Disney.
32:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right, mr Lincoln, at least you know a four horse car and seven. Uh, elon said it's going to be a glorious future and I, and I think that's true we'll take a break like that in my house, though, and I don't, I don't want a robot walking my dogs.
33:14 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
that's why I have dogs, so I can walk my dogs.
33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Well, all right.
33:20 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I want a human looking after my kids.
33:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Elon is a mixed bag, I guess we have to say, of good and bad and bizarre, and I don't know. I don't know. It does scare me that he has so much power. By the way, I have Starlink here in case the comcast goes out, which is a pretty good, pretty safe bet. So it happens quite frequently I mean I I have given tesla a lot of money over and spacex over the years, um, and continue to do so. I just I feel like we give him a lot of leeway that maybe he doesn't deserve.
34:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I wanted the solar tiles on my roof Me too. The roof tiles that were solar panels. That never happened really did it. They did it in two places, and then that was it.
34:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had Tesla, solar City, solar panels and batteries, but then Tesla took it over, and so I guess it's Tesla now, but I love that idea that I can charge these batteries up. Uh, solar panels and batteries. But then tesla took it over, and so I guess it's tesla now, but I love that idea that I can charge these batteries up. If the power goes out, I can run off of batteries. We can continue to do the show. There's a lot to be said. I don't have you know. It's just I wish he would just well, the mistake is is he's talking too much.
34:35 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Just be quiet for a little while one of the interesting things that's being done and PG&E is testing this right now and so are a couple of other utilities is using vehicles, evs, with bi-directional charging. We know about what Ford and now GM offers with having the vehicle to home capabilities so you can run your home. Well, what they, you know those systems are designed to automatically switch over, you know, flip a transfer switch and switch over to running off your vehicle battery if you have a power outage. Yeah, right now is a system where you know for customers that opt in if their EVs are plugged in when the utility is getting near the maximum load on the grid, they can reach out to these customers and switch them over to running off of their battery, off the vehicle battery for half an hour an hour, two hours, until-.
35:38
Demand response Stabilized, yeah, doing a demand response thing and then avoiding having to do those rolling blackouts or brownouts that have been so common for the last decade, and that's a great solution. And for those that have home batteries, like you have, leo, then you could also use that even during the middle of the day, while you're still generating solar.
36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let us take a break. We've got a great panel Salmon Bull. Salmon is here, our car guy, and he is timely I wanted to get him on because of this Elon thing and Jennifer Toohey is here. She is an expert in everything, but especially these days on the verge in home automation. We'll talk a little bit about that. You did actually did a good piece about using the satellite messaging. I want to talk a little bit about that in just a second.
36:28
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40:50
I just want you to know. So you live in south carolina, dodged helene right didn't charleston?
40:57 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
yes, yes, I did. We had some strong winds, but we thankfully yeah, just a few trees down and power out briefly, but we've had a few pretty nasty ones here over the years, but it's the Gulf Coast that's been taking the hits in the last sort of four or five years. We've been quite lucky relatively, and then the Milton was very much off.
41:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It came in, much it came in.
41:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
We got yeah, yeah grazed a little from that one, but yeah, it's been. It's been a tough year, uh, for living in the southeast and it's, but it's been interesting that there has we've been seeing, like we mentioned, about evs helping people power their homes. You know, there have been some great technological advances that are helping people in the aftermath of disasters like this. And, as you mentioned earlier, leo, one of the pieces I wrote last week was about how to use the new satellite messaging feature on your iPhone, which apparently a lot of people in the North Carolina and Western South Carolina, which is just north of where I am, were able to use following the horrific flooding that affected them after Helene went through and were able to use to get in touch with their family and let them know that they were safe or, in some cases, you know where they were so that they could help and hopefully get some help, because the big problem there was infrastructure.
42:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know roads the roads were gone, um in a minute, well, and the cell sites were out, and that's a big deal I mean yeah, yeah, everything was down we all we kind of assumed that, well, I might lose power, uh, you know, I might get flooding, but I can use my phone to call for help, except if the power is out and the cell sites are out, you can't no, yeah, and this and I actually about was it?
42:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
two weeks ago Verizon had a huge outage, um, and wasn't working across like half the country, and I happened to be driving one to go and get my daughter and I was like, huh, why is my phone not working? And this little thing popped up, keep pointing at satellite. I was like what I was able to message my daughter using?
42:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it. Yeah, so that's one change. So when apple first announced this, it was very limited because they had so little bandwidth that you had to use canned messages that they would basically indicate with a few bits, but now it's full message, it's text messaging right, yeah, yeah, so there's.
43:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
There's two things. There's, um, there's sos messaging, which is what came out originally, and that's also on pixel 9. So if you were, if you had an iphone or a pixel 9 iphone 14 or newer or a pixel 9 any of that family the latest google pixel phone yes, you could sos message, which means you could contact 9-1-1, which obviously in these kinds of situations is very important, but also 911 overwhelmed.
43:40
So you still want to be able to get in touch with other people. The satellite messaging is specific to iPhones and you had to have iOS 18 and you had to have updated your phone to iOS 18 before you left Wi-Fi or cellular service. This wasn't something you could retroactively do, so I wrote this little kind of PSA how to, ahead of Milton and sort of like Floridians, make sure you got iOS 18, just in case if you have an iPhone 14 or newer. And so this was, and there was quite a lot of steps you had to go through to make sure it would work, but most of those were actually for iMessage. This works with iMessage fully like tap backs, it's just like a regular phone messages.
44:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's amazing. That means they've got enough bandwidth now to send text messages I mean real messages and then it does also work with RCS straightforward text messaging to anyone.
44:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So because with iMessage you had to have them in your contacts, so there was some like there was some hoops you had to jump through. But it's great that this existed and that this was something that people could use and lots of people after Helene were saying it really helped them get in touch with friends and family, because one of the worst things about the aftermath of a disaster like this is you're cut off, and I've been through a few of them so I've had some experience here. And you know, having no power and no internet, no idea what's going on. You know a radio with batteries is basically all you've got, but that's inward communication. You're not able to communicate out unless you have a ham radio, which I've not really ever gotten to. I have a ham.
45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know all about that. Yeah, Hams this is by the way amateur radio is huge in these kinds of disasters. And people forget that amateur radio exists. But they have groups that train, they practice, they know exactly how to reach emergency services.
45:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it doesn't mean you have to be a ham, but hams are vital in these times it is yeah, and I think, matt, but this is sort of the next step, you know, for the non-techie.
45:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, this is amazing, I'm waiting for the Apple ads saying you know, he was standing on his roof and the river was coming, and he got out because he was able to use his iPhone. Do read Jennifer's piece in the Verge, though, because there are a few steps you want to make sure you.
46:00 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's quite complicated.
46:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is including have friends and family have iOS 18 as well, so that you can message them.
46:06 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, is the Pixel 9 using the same satellite network as what iPhones are using, or is that the? I think there was a deal that was announced with T-Mobile. That's a separate thing, though, to use Starlink Starlink. That's a separate thing, though, to use Starlink Starlink. That's right.
46:20 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, so this is also so. The SOS messaging works with any cell phone, but the carrier sorry, but the text messaging is carrier-specific and you do have to have an active SIM card, so you can't just have a phone so that it does have you have to have to have. So we got verizon and um at&t confirmed that it works with them. We didn't hear back from t-mobile, but t-mobile did that same day announce that starlink and t-mobile had a text by satellite service available for florida following milton or for as as milton was. This was, this was a couple of days ago. So and this was this worked without any setup. So it is possible.
47:04
I'm not sure why the Apple process is so involved. I think, as I mentioned, it's more for if you want the iMessage capability, because Apple makes it very clear that this is not designed for emergencies. But obviously it's still useful to be able to tell people where you are or how you're doing, or because you know you're worried. You're worried about your friends and family in these, in these areas. And Stacey Higginbotham, friend of the show, texted me right after Helene saying Are you okay?
47:29 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Where are you? I know you're in South.
47:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Carolina and you know so. People want to know and reach out, and so being able to get in touch with someone just even without cellular data is crucial, and it's great that we're moving in this direction to be able to have this type of capability. Obviously, iphone 14 and newer does limit and especially Pixel 9 and newer limits the people who can be able to use this. But you know, while Apple intelligence might not be a big selling point for the new phones, I think this is actually a big selling point for people to upgrade their phones, because it's not just when a hurricane hits you.
48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's super cool.
48:06 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Like I said, my Verizon was down for what was it almost 24 hours and I could text Couldn't call anyone.
48:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Apple's using Global Star's low Earth orbit satellites Sam. I don't know what Pixel uses.
48:18 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I don't think they've. I know we've got some coverage on the verge. I'm not sure that they specifically um, maybe they haven't even mentioned.
48:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah in fact, global star, because of apple, has been able to say we want to upgrade and we want to do more. And so they got fcc approval to launch launch 26 new satellites to enhance that network. This is great. This is really good.
48:43 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
So is Global Star, a low Earth orbit system.
48:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're LEOs.
48:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah.
48:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, their first generation was 1,400 kilometers, so yeah, so the launch of the replacement satellites will be at some point next year. I will try to find out. I'm looking to see who Google uses for this, but I don't know if they've said that's a great thing. I know we'll see the ads, I know we will. It's really amazing, and I think people don't realize how they might have been aware of the initial SOS feature, which is very limited.
49:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I don't think they maybe realize how this just came out with iOS 18.
49:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
49:26 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
A couple weeks ago. Yeah, so you had to have updated. Yeah To iOS 18 when it came out of beta.
49:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really great, really good stuff. Speaking of Google, the United States Department of Justice has gone to the judge with some proposals. As you know, google lost in court anti-force entrusters, anti-trust enforcers, anti-trust and anti-force entrusters. I like that. I wonder who Sounds like something from Harry Potter.
49:58 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I'm using my anti-force entrusters. I like that Sounds like something from Harry Potter.
50:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I'm using my anti-force entruster to anti-trust, something out of Star Wars, excuse me.
50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As you get older, this thing happens more and more. There's spoonerisms, I guess, but anti-trust enforcers are trying to figure out how to judge. Ahmet Met uh is now getting uh documents from the department of justice about what they would like to see happen. Now he's going to have to choose, and there are a variety of things he could choose, including selling forcing, including forcing Google to sell off parts of their business, in other words, break up Google or provide access to Google's underlying search data and AI products to third parties. There are behavioral and structural remedies the Justice Department is considering that would prevent Google from using products like get ready for this, chrome Play and Android to advantage Google search. They could force them to divest Chrome, the Play Store and Android. They also are considering possibly having Google sell off YouTube, sell off search. This is a big deal. Now it's clear that this is going to go on for a while.
51:26 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Google won't peel it and it's going to be forever until we see any results.
51:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is forever? How long do you think this is going to go on? Decades, we're all going to be dead. Decades.
51:34 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Certainly at least five to eight years.
51:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the problem with this of course course it was the same thing with microsoft is the court cases move so slow and technology moves fast.
51:44 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Google may not be the search dominant search technology in five years well, no, that's what their argument already is right that look at um open ai and yeah, already or just you-inflicted wounds that Google is putting on itself with the way it's changed the search, your Honor.
52:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
our search is crap, now it is terrible. You're not dominant. It's so bad.
52:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Have you seen?
52:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
our search. Your Honor, the EU says divestiture is the only way. So the EU may push for a breakup. So that's interesting, interesting. These are pretty strong headwinds. Uh, over google.
52:24 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Um, a different case how do you break it up in a way that the various components that you split up have a potential to be self-sustaining, right, you know, if you were to well, youtube would be self-sustaining.
52:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Youtube would be self-sustaining. Youtube could be self-sustaining.
52:40 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
They could have their own ad platform and everything. Yeah, you know, but if you take everything else away from Google search, is Chrome a?
52:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
business by itself? Of course not. No, it's a free browser. There's no business unless you tie it to, as Google has.
53:00 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Or Android without the Play Store or without, you know, google ads. You know how to. You know android would have to fundamentally change from, you know, having a free, open source. You know, having the aosp that everyone can utilize to.
53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They would have to start charging everybody for it another thought is that google, which pays, I think, something like 40 billion dollars a year to other parties to be default the fault search, most notably Apple, 20 billion dollars Samsung to be the default search on those phones, could be forced to stop doing that. But that's not really a punishment. You know, you got a key that's 40 billion dollars. It's a punishment for Apple, which very much depends on that $20 billion for its services revenue.
53:44 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
But on the other hand, you know, if Apple is no longer getting that $20 billion, they're also no longer disincentivized from making their own, to create their own. But what would?
53:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they do. They've already Apple's already we've seen the documents have said internally we are not going to use Bing, that thing's crap. So what would they do?
54:03 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, they'd create their own. They've already got the Apple bot that they've used for Apple intelligence. You would have to tie. You would have go ahead.
54:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, Jennifer.
54:10 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well, there was. So there were documents. Weren't there documents at some point that revealed that the way that Apple and Google kind of communicated to keep their deal kosher for them was that Apple had to be careful about its spotlight search.
54:28
It couldn't be too good, because it might be, considered a competitor for Google, and with generative AI and with their movement, with their efforts in Apple intelligence, I mean it's a natural next step for them to create their own search engine. I mean they've moved out of creating a car, um, there there's. There's a lot they could do here. It's obviously a messy space to move into and perhaps not really in line with apple's kind of overall hardware. First, ecosystem.
54:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They had considered doing this, according to mark german at bloomberg, and decided not to. But then they you're right, they had because they first ecosystem they had considered doing this, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, and decided not to. But then, you're right, they had Google Because they were getting $20 billion.
55:05 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So I mean, and the money is there, clearly. I mean search is a very good business and there hadn't been a sort of chink in the armor of Google until the last five or six years where we've started to see that it is possible for there to be competition and Google has kind of shot itself in the foot by not being as good as it should be by becoming, by stuffing everything with ads. I mean, you have to go through like two pages to get to native search results. Now it's all sponsored results and it's just almost unusable and they put in charge of good right.
55:45 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I forget his name. Yeah, yeah, you know, that's a famous story yeah, he's broken it.
55:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Basically, I pay ten bucks a month to use a third-party search called Kagi, which is better it's, but I think they're using some Google data they use, like DuckDuckGo and others. They probably use Bing as well, but it's very good search. It certainly replaced Google for me without any pain, and imagine if Google were forced to give them their search index, right.
56:14 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And that's the interesting part of all of this, it's like what they could because, yeah, that's where we, that's why people like people would find it hard to give up google, because it does when it, when you get through all the ads, it does serve what you need and they've fine-tuned that search index. And if they could, if they had to share that, um, and then I love that piece, the thing in this piece here from bloomberg about how they mentioned that they would have they. One of the remedies was forcing Google to to pay for advertising campaign to explain to people how to use other search engines.
56:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know we're Google, but we like DuckDuckGo. Here's how to use it Wow because that's the thing I mean.
56:55 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
that's the monopoly they have is they're on every phone and you know most people I mean no one that I know that's not in the tech world has any idea what duck duck dough is they maybe know what bing is if they happen to have been forced to use it on their work.
57:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft computer, it's the judicial equipment, of making you wear a dunce equivalent of making you wear a dunce cap or a sign around your neck. I am bad. Go Go use something else. I think that's humiliating. I don't know if they should do. Anyway, Meta has till August of next year to decide what to do. The DOJ gave him one 32-page document and now they're apparently. That's not long enough. They're working on a fuller proposal for next month and there will be two-week remedy hearings in april and then he will have to decide in august and then come all the appeals and then the appeals, but years and years.
57:48
I'm going to channel some of our other hosts, chiefly alex lindsey, on mac break weekly. Why mess with google? People love it, why. How does how does this help people? Yeah, it's, it does seem.
57:58 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I mean there are a lot of other things that we feel like our federal it. Why? How does, how does this help people? Yeah, it's, it does seem. I mean there are a lot of other things that we feel like our federal government could be dealing with. Right, other problems for sure, but you know.
58:10
when it comes down to it, though, the internet has become so integral to every part of our life, and Google does have now very much sort of iron grip on every corner of our life because of, you know, not just Google search, but YouTube. I use YouTube TV there's, you know, google is in, has its fingers in everything.
58:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, but who gave them that power? We gave them that power, yeah.
58:36 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Because they did a good job.
58:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You buy YouTube TV instead of Comcast.
58:39 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Well, they did a good job for a long time, but they also paid to minimize the potential of others doing an equal.
58:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are a classic monopoly right. They're really the classic monopolists.
58:52 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
And that's, you know, that's always the trade off with, with antitrust, you know, is for a long time, antitrust was about making sure that you had competition, you know. And then, you know, is, for a long time, antitrust was about making sure that you had competition, you know. And then, you know, since the 80s, you know it was about, you know, consumer harm, you know, and the presumption was that free or cheaper products, you know, were not a harm to consumers. You know it was only if monopolists, you know, use that power to raise the cost to consumers, then it became a problem. Well, the problem with that is, if you let that go on, you get into the whole insurification thing that Cory Doctorow is talking about.
59:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're smarter than that. We know now that Amazon drops prices, drops prices until all the local retail businesses go out of business, and then they have a hundred percent market share and then they can raise prices arbitrarily I was earlier.
59:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
This we know that I was at a ces preview luncheon with gary shapiro don't mention those words.
59:50 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yet it's only october cbs there was.
59:56 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
there was some discussion of policy going on. There was a local member of Congress that was also at this lunch and you know they talked about. You know policy, you know antitrust policy and iRobot in particular and the fact that the FTC had prevented Amazon from buying iRobot, and he talked about makers of the Roomba vacuum has gotten.
01:00:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jennifer has all over her house.
01:00:21 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, Well, he mentioned that. You know, I robot has gotten hammered because of all these Chinese companies that have copied what they did and put those on the market. For I was visiting a friend who had a Yuffie. Yeah.
01:00:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Robo vac that looks just like a Roomba.
01:00:35 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, and you know. He said you know Amazon should have been allowed to buy iRobot to keep this American company alive. But what he didn't mention was that most of those Chinese robot vacuums are being bought by people on Amazon. Yeah, that's true. Amazon is the reason why iRobot is in trouble.
01:00:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a very good point.
01:00:57 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well, and the argument for not allowing Amazon to buy iRobot was that it would prevent competition on Amazon like sales that in theory Amazon might be able to promote its product above others. But the space for robot vacuums is huge. So it was kind of a false equivalency, because there are dozens of companies producing more than dozens of companies producing good robot vacuums comparable to iRobot's Roombas, and you know iRobot is struggling. It used to have a 50 to 60 percent market share and it's now down to like a 30 or 40%, so it's definitely seen a significant drop. And then we've had one other American robot vacuum manufacturer go out of business in the last few years. Nito was the other one, and they suffered from the too much competition argument. And then Roomba has been low in its prices because it used to be very expensive, and now they're coming out with less expensive models.
01:01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They got really screwed by the amazon deal falling through, though but do we want the government to get involved to the extent that they protect american companies over other countries?
01:02:10 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
well, this was.
01:02:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was that seems to me that seems to be a recipe for trade war. Plus then guaranteeing consumers are going to be spending more because there won't be competition from uh overseas companies. And, by the way, where were the roombas made? Most likely in somewhere china you'd be crazy to make them anywhere else yeah, yeah the reason probably there were so many chinese clones is because they knew how to make them, because they make them anyway yeah, I, you know, I think I think this.
01:02:42 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
You know I, I don't disagree that. You know someone should be allowed to buy iRobot. The question is, should it be Amazon and I? I suspect it should probably be somebody else somebody was there concern.
01:02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I was concerned, but but I was very concerned also that any robot vacuum maps the insides of your home, the internals of your home, and even potentially could map your home network and devices on your home network. And well, it could send a pretty comprehensive list of all the things you own to the home office. Is there any concern?
01:03:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
about that. Well, that was why Amazon wanted to buy Roomba. Oh yeah, there you go. I mean that was what I surmised in my opinion piece I wrote. So you know Amazon did not tell me that directly, but, yes, I had spoken many times to Colin Angle, the previous CEO of iRobot, who left right after this deal fell through about his smart home plans and he had designed this.
01:03:40
He had designed what sort of a home OS that used the robot and also the air purifiers that they manufactured to map your home.
01:03:49
It maps your Wi-Fi so it knows how strong Wi-Fi is in certain areas of your home, maps your home, knows the different rooms of your home and then the idea being, as you move into the smart home, it makes it much easier for you to set up new devices and you know your home would know where they were in the house without you having to, you know, add it to an app and say it's in my kitchen and this is what you know, it's connected to this Wi-Fi.
01:04:11
It could just do it all for you and I think that sort of home OS concept that Roomba had, or iRobot had, beyond being just a robot vacuum, was quite sort of ambitious and the kind of thing that Amazon, with its Alexa smart home platform, was interested in, and the data that you would get from understanding the insides of millions of homes in America, for from the perspective not so much the smart home perspective that you would know, okay. Well, this person has three bedrooms, so maybe I'm going to start serving them more ads for furniture when they move or they've just moved into their house. More beds, more mattresses.
01:04:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that moral panic or what you think that really was kind of possible and something that Amazon wanted to do?
01:05:01 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I think understanding the inside of America home Americans homes is definitely something Amazon would have been interested in Because it's valuable insight, valuable consumer research. I don't think they were interested in knowing specifically about your home. I think, that was more moral panic. Yeah, I don't think they were going to be looking and saying oh look, leo's got an old fridge, maybe we should serve up some ads for a new fridge, but I guess that's possible.
01:05:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why wouldn't they do that, though, come to think of it, that sounds like another bad idea, for I mean, look at Cox claims they can do. Do we listen into all the conversations and then know what people want, and so we can tell you, advertisers, what people are looking for ahead of ahead of time?
01:05:47 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
well, robots, robot vacuums have been in.
01:05:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The bad have been in a bit of a bad spot this week can you yell at your roomba?
01:05:56 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
you so, so actually Roombas do not have microphones, roombas have speakers. Some robot vacuums have microphones and speakers. Some have cameras, roombas have cameras. But Roombas were very iRobot's, very specific about the safety of your data, your maps stored on device.
01:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Only they don't set it up.
01:06:17 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
They can go to the cloud cloud, but you can turn that off. Like that, you're you have a lot of control over how your maps are managed, but this is not necessarily the case for all robot vacuums, and this week there was actually a news story um yesterday I think it was um, I think it was first reported last week about a Ecovacs robot. They manufactured D-bots a number of them that had been hacked and had been running around people's homes yelling at them. So it is a bit worrying. We haven't had a good IoT hack for a long time.
01:06:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a hell of a good one. Hackers took over RoboVacs to chase pets and yell slurs.
01:07:03 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, so this was pretty scary. And these do have microphones and speakers and cameras, because these have voice assistants built in the D-Bots, have it's called Yiko and you can say, okay, yiko, go vacuum the living room, or okay, yiko, come vacuum here.
01:07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So rather than having to use a voice, assistant like Amazon or Google Sure, who wouldn't want to talk to their vacuum? You?
01:07:26 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
can just talk directly to the robot and tell it where you want to go, but unfortunately this now means that someone else can also hear what you're saying. And well, in this case, else can also hear what you're saying. And well, in this case, anyway, they, they haven't. Ecovacs is saying that this was a stuffing attack, of like.
01:07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so Credential stuffing Somebody else? Yeah, of course, if you own a robot vac, you're going to use the same password for it that you use for everything else, because why wouldn't you? Yeah, nobody's going to hack your robot vac, but it happened to a lot of people.
01:07:58 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I tested this model and thankfully it was not in my house at the moment. But yeah, this was and this is definitely something people are worried about with robot vacuums because they are connected to the internet. They do see everywhere in your house, they have access to, you know, private areas I mean there was that unfortunate incident a while back with Roomba to private areas. I mean there was that unfortunate incident a while back with Roomba where hackers found photos of people on the toilet from their robots.
01:08:26 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh, I remember that.
01:08:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.
01:08:28 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I remember that.
01:08:29 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So it's something you're bringing into your home. That's a lot more a mobile camera and speaker and microphone, so it's something you do have to consider. There are models that do not have cameras, and there are models that do not have cameras, and there are models that do not have microphones, and I would probably recommend you get those if you are interested in the robot.
01:08:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a trend with all consumer goods. It's becoming clearer and clearer that Everybody wants more information about you. So, for instance, there's no device you can buy these days that doesn't have an app associated with it. My wife just got a Dyson hair curling thing and she said there's no instructions.
01:09:07
I said oh yeah, you have to scan the QR code and then download the app. Why did I have to have an app? Well, because that's how they can spy on you better. And she's going to return it because she says I don't want a hair curling iron that I can't use without an app is it the air wrap?
01:09:24 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
yeah get the air model the air straight oh, it's the air straight, because they just came out with the bluetooth version that uses an app, but the previous model does not, and it's very good. Don't return it, lisa.
01:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There it's awesome but this is the one that uses the app the air straight yeah, the new they just came out with the app.
01:09:40 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Um, you don't. The previous models don't have apps. This was the first time they had an app, but yeah, I don't think you need an app.
01:09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All of our female hosts love this, by the way, which is so good, we were talking about it a couple of weeks ago on the show um, but it's a trend where also, uh, companies say, oh no, we can let, we'll let you opt out of the data collection, and they know full well that most people will never opt out, we'll never even know there is an opt-out, and not because they don't care, because they just don't know. Yeah, and the tyranny of the default, and this is just a growing trend. This is another kind of a shitification, sam, where every device you own connects to the internet sends data back to the home office and you, oh yeah, well, oh no, no problem, just go to the settings and check a box and we won't do that well, and that's what I was just going to say.
01:10:30 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
You know it's hard to find stuff now, especially home appliances that don't have connectivity you know, in the last year and half we've bought a new stove and we bought a new washer and dryer a few months ago. They're searching to find one that had the features we wanted on it. You can't find one that is not Wi-Fi connected.
01:10:51 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Right, you don't have to turn on the Wi-Fi and that's what we did.
01:10:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I don't plug my TVs in.
01:10:58 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
What does Wi-Fi connectivity get me on this stove?
01:11:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
eventually, though, you can turn it on oh, my stove is wi-fi yeah, the kitchen to use the stove yeah, why would I want wi-fi so you could turn on the stove remotely?
01:11:09 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
preheat your oven when you're on your drive home. That seems a bad idea. The good there is there are benefits.
01:11:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does your husband, the fireman, approve preheating the oven when no?
01:11:21 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
one's home.
01:11:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't tell him you're doing that.
01:11:25 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't need an app to tell me when the dryer's done. I can hear the buzzer go off.
01:11:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love the jolly little tunes.
01:11:32 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
These men living in the Stone Age. Wi-fi connectivity in appliances definitely, definitely, to date, seems pointless. I agree. And there's lots of the fridge, the smart fridges, the butt of many IoT jokes. And, yes, I agree, it seems like why would I need it? But there are many. Well, I can tell you one reason you need it and I can tell you one reason why you might want in the future. The one for the future is home energy management having all of your home appliances with connectivity with each other, um so that they can communicate about energy management pro, you know steps for use for balancing your management load of your energy sure communicate with a home energy storage unit in your home.
01:12:19
When, when our homes become virtual, power plants be able to work, demand response to slightly adjust energy usage of certain appliances closely related to inter-car communication we were talking about yes, exactly so all these, semi-smart devices.
01:12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yes, and, by the way, Jennifer, I have to tell you that the chat room's consensus is your dog wants to go out.
01:12:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So my dog wants to go and play with the new kitten that is in the hallway.
01:12:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so chat room shut up. She knows what she's doing the dog is in there for a reason.
01:12:55
Now we really? Why are we talking about privacy? We're sitting here on camera with thousands of people watching us, telling us how our dog is behaving. I mean, you know, gus. Come here, gus. 1,350 people watching the show live today. Thank you, on our seven different platforms. Of course, our Club Twit members are in the Club Twit Discord watching. Keep up the good work. We appreciate your support. There's also youtubecom slash twit slash live. There's twitchtv slash twit linkedin, facebook, xcom kick and I think there's probably a few others. There's seven different streams now and we like it when you watch live, but we also encourage you, if you do watch live, to also subscribe to the show. So when you download a copy, that's when we, that's when the money starts flowing, if only, but do download it if you can. We appreciate that.
01:13:45
We're gonna take a little break. Great panel, this is fun. You know, benito was worried we didn't have a fourth panelist and I said, you know, sometimes three people is the best because we can, all you know, have some room to talk. Jennifer Patterson Toohey is here. You see her every month on Tech News Weekly and, of course, at the Verge and on the Verge podcast. She covers smart home, but she's also covered other technology and has a dog named Gus.
01:14:11 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, Gus is our fourth member.
01:14:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I love Gus. Yeah, Gus can chime in. If he's got anything to say, just let him speak up. Gus, what do you think of the Google breakup? Is there a remedy you prefer? He seems to have some ideas. He says I just want the kitten Samable Samet also here, our car guy from Wheelbearings. The podcast and of course he is an analyst covers of the tech and car industry, for it's not on the lower third. I can't read it. Guide house insights. It's got to be in my brain somewhere. I'm looking, I'm searching through. Anyway, thank you, sam, thank you jennifer. We appreciate your being here. Thanks to all of you for watching, especially those of you watching live. I love having the live audience chime in and say you know, jennifer, the dog really wants to go out.
01:15:04 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I'll get my husband to take him out.
01:15:06 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
By the way, aggregate all the different chats in one place.
01:15:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I do. I don't know if you can, but I do In fact, bite for Bite in our Discord, says Jennifer. Your article on which devices work with matter and threat has been a godsend. So, thank you for that.
01:15:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Isn't that great. It's a pain in the ass, but I'm glad it's been helpful.
01:15:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you keep it up to date?
01:15:27 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I try Holy cow. Yeah, it's a little out of date right now because I just went to IFA and there were tons of new things at Aoife that I need to add. But yeah, I think the last update was a couple weeks, three or four weeks ago, it's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.
01:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're never done.
01:15:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, but you know, hopefully one day it'll be too much to manage. And then we know, matters finally, finally made it.
01:15:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now we have a poll saying should Gus play with the cat, yes or no? The cat's like this. Big no, gus should not. Big no, trust the cat mama to know what to do. Okay, I'm just saying hey, let's talk a little bit about a great sponsor of the show, one that we know very well and love having on Lookout. You know, times are tough right now.
01:16:13
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01:17:52
So here's a little oopsie. You never, when you redact stuff from a court filing okay, really pay attention. Don't use, maybe, some sort of pdf redaction tool. You might want to get a magic marker uh, you know that more than a dozen or a knife, I don't know. More than a dozen states and the district of columbia have decided last week to sue tiktok, saying it harms kids and is designed to addict them. California and new york the lead plaintiffs, 13 states in the district of columbia. They're uh seeking to force tiktok to change product features they say are manipulative and harm teens. Now I have to say my friend Mike Masnick at TechDirt wrote this headline a bunch of states filed garbage grandstanding lawsuits against TikTok, with the main complaint being kids like it. I don't know.
01:18:57 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I think Mike is a little too subtle with his he's a little myth.
01:19:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Open up and a little long, people know what he really thinks he's a little, but he probably didn't realize and it was a kentucky uh npr station that figures this out that the redaction in the filings weren't really fully redacted. They were able to cut and paste the text, the blacked out text, into another document and read it. And what did they find? Well, apparently these state attorneys general have tick tock documents that show that they knew TikTok, documents that show that they knew they knew that from their own research that some of what they were doing on TikTok was harmful to kids and kind of ignored it. That's kind of a smoking gun. Now the judge, when he found out that the redaction didn't didn't work right, uh, he pulled all the documents back so we can't read them anymore. I don't know how they redacted. Yeah, they set the background color to black mask guy. That's exactly that's exactly what they did. Uh, still, I think maybe the case is better um than we realized.
01:20:15
Tiktok executives knew about the app's effect on teens, according to the lawsuit in this. Now that the stuff that was redacted that we know, I can see kentucky public radio published excerpts of the redacted material and then the state judge sealed it up back up saying but npr reviewed portions of the suit that were redacted. They highlight tiktok executives speaking. I'm reading from the npr story speaking candidly about a host of dangers for children. The material mostly summaries of internal studies and communications show some remedial measures like time management tools would have a negligible effect, a negligible reduction in screen time. The company went ahead and decided to release and tout the features. Are your kids, jennifer, old enough to use TikTok?
01:21:08 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, I'm right in the middle of all of this, right now. Yeah, my daughter just turned 13. Oh, and my son just turned 16.
01:21:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Prime TikTok ages. Yes, they are 13. Oh, my son just turned 16. Prime TikTok ages. By the way, tiktok, these state's attorney generals want privacy by default for minors under 16. So your daughter would be protected, your son would not. Yeah, do you think?
01:21:33 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
your kids are addicted your kids are addicted, so I do think it's addictive. I don't think that mine I mean my daughter has only just started using TikTok in the last month and very limited I have her on. They do have a restricted mode account and she had a very strong argument for it, but I'm quite likely to rescind it again. It's been a brief, a brief sojourn we were thinking about a TikTok account for the new kitten.
01:22:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, I was thinking if I could get her to do something creative with it.
01:22:08 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Exactly Right.
01:22:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's an antidote is not to be a passive consumer.
01:22:13 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Right. Use it as a tool and she's very creative and really enjoys doing things that you know she does. She can do cat-cut videos in like seconds. I have no idea what she's doing, so I mean, when she creates them, she creates all sorts of great graphics and I was thinking it would be.
01:22:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was the only reason we decided Let her do that.
01:22:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That was the thing I like. My son is more of the scroller. He doesn't ever post anything on it, but he does he. But the thing I like about it is he will come down and tell me about news and say, mom, did you hear about what happened at the us senate?
01:22:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is one of. By the way, one of the arguments in defense of google is that kids your son's age are using tiktok for search, not for news yeah, that's where they get their news, true?
01:22:55 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
not that my son never uses a computer, it's all on the smart device yeah, that's where they get their news. Very true, my son never uses a computer. It's all on a smart device. Yeah, yeah, I mean, I take that back. He uses a computer for gaming all the time, for real purpose yes, yes, it's very specific one use case device.
01:23:11
Yes, and the phone is everything else, and I held off smartphones for my kids as long as I could, and the schools are what ended up making me need to get them phones for various reasons. Like, he played on a varsity tennis team when he was in seventh grade, so he was playing with high school kids and that was the only way they communicated was text messaging.
01:23:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You would have been left out, yeah.
01:23:32 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So, yeah, there were, but I, you know, put all the lockdowns on that I could. I did try using the TikTok, what was one of the filters that they talked about. It's like a reminds you that you've been watching too long, and then stops.
01:23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it annoys me so much. I'm lying in bed I've been watching TikToks for two hours and then some guy comes on and says hey man, you've been doing a lot of TikTok, you ought to put the phone down. And I just go screw you, buddy. And I go on to the next video.
01:24:00 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It pisses me off, it's none of your business, weird person. What I'm interested in this is so when the whole TikTok US government issue sort of blew up, there was the vote where the Senate I think had seen had all gone into a room and seen some amazing evidence that had kind of blown their minds, which they never revealed. That no one has ever told us about, and Matt's like I want to know what that is. Is this what that is?
01:24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We can't judge it until we know the information. I know and I got to tell you I find TikTok very entertaining, and the fact that Instagram went out and copied TikTok, so it's a virtual clone. I have a feeling these senators are saying well, we just don't want this Chinese company to get all the money, we want to give it to Meta, and I don't think that that's caring about the kids, that's just jingoism. Now, jennifer, you probably-.
01:24:56 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I would never let my daughter have an Instagram account ever.
01:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there you go. Why not? Why is Instagram worse?
01:25:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Because it's so much more the perfection idea. No, it's also, whereas TikTok, I mean there are people in their pajamas and like no makeup and like there's no kind of like. It's not the filter and maybe it's just who I see feels so much more.
01:25:22
Yeah, stay, I mean, tiktok is staged, but it definitely feels like and I I've had that experience myself with with instagram, and instagram is basically what facebook was initially like sharing friend, you know, sharing photos of you in great scenarios, making it look like your life is wonderful. Facebook no longer does that. I mean Facebook. I don't know what's happened. Whenever I open Facebook, I'm just like in a whole new world, facebook's for people my age.
01:25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not for normal young people, it's for old folks like me, so I can post my dad jokes and my memes.
01:25:57 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's very true. It's where my dad is.
01:25:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I'm speaking the truth here, kentucky authorities said, while this may be, seems substantial-.
01:26:07 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I love the accent. Keep it up, yeah, I'll keep doing it, okay. I think you're in Texas, though I'm Texas, I should go more.
01:26:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kentucky More. I need some bourbon and mint juleps While this may seem substantial.
01:26:20
TikTok videos can be as short as eight seconds and are played for viewers in rapid-fire succession automatically. The investigators wrote Thus this is the line that gets me In. Under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform. It's worse than fentanyl, but the whole idea in 35 minutes they're gonna become addicted. Now I want to tell you a little story. Jennifer, you don't know the story Sam does.
01:26:54
My boy, my son, who is now 30, when he was 16, like your boy, watched a lot of YouTube videos. He particularly liked cooking videos. He liked extreme food videos, like they'd make a pizza out of 300 McDonald's hamburgers, that kind of thing. He loved that stuff. I thought you're wasting your time, kid. You're wasting your time. Then he went to college, CU Boulder, got a degree in broadcast journalism and again I thought you're wasting your time, kid. You're wasting your time, kid. A few years ago he came to me he said Dad, I've been making videos on TikTok, doing some cooking on TikTok. I got about 20,000, 30,000 followers. You think I should keep doing it. I said well, that's pretty good, I think you should keep doing it. He now has two and a half million tick tock followers, one and a half million instagram followers. His new cookbook, salt hank a five napkin situation, is number seven on the new york times bestseller list and last week was the best-selling cookbook in the entire world. So let your son watch his stupid tick tock videos.
01:27:57
That's all I'm saying well, my so, and encourage your daughter to be a maker, because that's what really got henry go up. That's amazing.
01:28:05 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, isn't that, and it's true I mean, it's my husband is so my husband every time I see it prohibitively against I get hungry my husband hates the fact that my kids have, even just have, any kind of computers.
01:28:18
He's a real outdoorsman and he hates it. And we argue about this all the time and he's like they're just, you know, they're addicted, it's just rotting their brains and I'm like this is what our parents said about no, this is what our parents' parents said about rock music. This is what our parents said about TV yes, and it's like, yes, there are downsides, yes. So my son has spent a lot of time playing on his PC, which he built, or with help from his mother, on Christmas Day, aww, and he has spent many hours. And my husband was very upset, like I want him to come hunting with me, okay, and now the last thing we bought him was one of those yokes for the Microsoft Flight.
01:28:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Simulator. Is that what he does? You know what he wants to do now?
01:29:00 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
He is working very hard to get good grades so that he can be a US fighter pilot, isn't that?
01:29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
awesome.
01:29:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So you know, I mean can be detrimental because they're losing out on skills and potential benefits and connections too. I mean the world is online now and there's a lot you can find from online connections.
01:29:30
I mean my daughter during the pandemic was a really difficult time for her because she was eight or nine, your poor kids, kids, they went right through the middle of that and she made you know she was able to reconnect with some friends who had moved away over using facebook messenger when they rolled out their kind of kid friendly version right around that time and it was a lifeline for her. I mean, we've had some difficulties taking her away from the online community and like in under 35 minutes the average user is likely to become addicted to the platform so, yes, well, it giveth and it taketh away. Yes, there's a balance, but it's uh, it's something it's the modern world.
01:30:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you're exactly right, jennifer. And look at the tennis team. I mean, that's a. That was a.
01:30:14
He would be isolated without having that access yeah yeah, um, I I think that this is the modern world and if it's, it's risky to put kids out into the real world with no experience at, if nothing else, at least the experience of knowing. Oh, you got to put down the tick tock after 34 minutes because otherwise you're going to be addicted. I mean, even that is something right, it's better than nothing. I don't't think. I think they would be.
01:30:39 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
So if you put it, if you stop after 34 minutes, does it reset the addiction counter?
01:30:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, apparently, yeah, tiktok, this is all from the poorly redacted. See, that's what happens.
01:30:53
You see the attorney's parents probably never showed him how to use Adobe Creator or whatever. And so he thought oh, just, you know, it says redacted and put it out. No, tiktok's own research says quote compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative they knew this with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills. Health effects like loss of analytical skills. So that explains the American electorate memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depths, empathy and increased anxiety. In addition, the documents show Tick Tock was aware that compulsive uses also interferes with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work responsibilities, school responsibilities and connected with loved ones. But you know, I want to show the senate this fine cookbook salt hank, a five napkin situation available in bookstores 40 off right now at target. Get one for your family, get this would be the best christmas gift or hanukkah or kwanzaa gift for the entire family. Salt hank. Thanks to tiktok, I don't have to support my 30 year old son anymore, don't forget your disclaimer about being an investor.
01:32:07
Oh, so jennifer doesn't know this either you, for I have to point out tiktok, with two and a half million followers on tiktok, I don't think he's ever made a penny from TikTok, right? In fact, when he puts an ad, he just did a. These advertisers love influencers. He just did an ad for State Farm Insurance where he said I just got a tweet from Jake at State Farm who said are you going to make me a chicken parm sandwich?
01:32:35 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
And Hank says, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there and he makes going to make me a chicken parm sandwich and Hank says I saw that one Like a good neighbor, state Farm is there and he makes a sandwich and that's the whole ad.
01:32:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Except in Florida, except in Florida. Oh, you can't do that, state Farm, yeah, because it's sinking. No insurance in Florida? No insurance. Sorry, State Farm is not there. I'm sure he got 10 times what we get for an ad for doing that.
01:33:01 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And that the arguments here about TikTok and the addiction capabilities can really be applied to many things on the internet.
01:33:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Many things in life yeah Well that's true I can't stop watching Below Deck on Bravo.
01:33:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't stop 35 minutes on Bravo. I can't stop 35 minutes in and I got to know is the Chief Stew going to get fired? It's all bad. Life is addictive right?
01:33:28 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't know.
01:33:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can cancel cable. I did it. Now I watch YouTube TV. Thank you, Google.
01:33:34 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That was so good. I wish I could have got it when it was $35, though.
01:33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so expensive 75 bucks and I, foolishly, last Olympics, that was six, eight years ago. Eight years ago Now, I they offered a 4k deal and I went for it and I forget, I keep forgetting to turn it off.
01:33:52 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
You're paying a lot, I pay a lot, all right, let's take a break.
01:33:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Break, um, I yeah, I look, I don't know. I understand. Certainly social media can be problematic for some children. Ultimately, I think it's the parent. That's ultimately right. Jennifer, you don't want legislation to take away your parental responsibility you want to decide for your kids.
01:34:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think education for parents is important about these platforms let's spend the money doing that people don't know what potential.
01:34:25
What the potential is that? I mean, I'm sort of the de facto tech advisor for my group of of mums and they're always coming to me and asking you know about different platforms. I get a lot of questions from my friends who have younger kids about Roblox. You know, is it a good Did your kids do Roblox? My daughter does Roblox. She loves Roblox. It's okay, right? This is where a lot of her creativity has come from, like she creates characters to play in Roblox. And I have all the safety guards turned on. Roblox has very, um, strong safety guards for children. I mean, it's designed for. It's a platform that's designed for children. Tiktok is not a platform that's designed for children, although it sounds like it maybe has been designed by tiktok for children, um, to get them early. Um, you know the the cigarette, uh, industry's sort of angle early, but tiktok doesn't cause cancer.
01:35:18
I mean, come on right but get them young and you've got them for life, yeah apple.
01:35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was apple strategy too. That's why there's an apple 2 in every classroom. Right, that was.
01:35:27 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's how it works well, google's got them now with the chrome. Yeah, you can't fault all they. Chromebooks everywhere right, yeah, but no, I think I think education for the parents is very important, because I think a lot of parents have no idea how to manage any of this stuff. I use a program called Bark which monitors their online activity and sends alerts. It also monitors text messages, like I'm not going to sit and read through my daughter's text messages because have you read a 13-year-old's text messages?
01:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it's like reading your diary too. I mean, there's a certain….
01:36:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well, and when she got the phone, it was always clear this is not your personal device, like we are allowed to use it.
01:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's smart.
01:36:09 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Like to take it from you and to look at what's on it.
01:36:12
She's always known that Because, yeah, if that, because yeah, there's, if she want. You know, privacy, especially as they become teenagers, becomes much more important, and with my son, we've definitely stepped back a lot more as he's turned 16. But, yeah, it's important to be able to um know, though, what they're getting fed, and this is the problem with the algorithms. It's the same with youtube, it's, you know, tiktok, facebook, instagram, all of them, um, even just google search, I mean you, you don't know what they're going to come across. And I also have blockers on my internet that's supposed to restrict adult sites and such like that. This is great.
01:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you know what you're doing and we've got to let other parents know how to do it. None of my friends.
01:36:51 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, so I'm always the one helping them set all this stuff up. But you know most parents don't have those resources.
01:36:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe always the one helping them set all this stuff up. But you know most parents don't have those resources. Maybe the government should spend more energy doing that? Educating, educating. Agree, because ultimately it's got to be parents and every parent has different standards. Yeah, even within your family, you and your husband have different standards, but that's but it's your responsibility to work that out. I don't't think putting TikTok out of business seems like a pretty big hammer to solve this much more easily solved.
01:37:24 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well then, something else will pop up in its place.
01:37:26 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's not going to go away, meta will be there, I mean you know my kids are about the same age as yours, leo, you know 29, and my older daughter's going to be 33 on Thursday. Happy birthday, sophie.
01:37:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Happy birthday. You won't hear this. Happy birthday.
01:37:44 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
But when they were growing up, when they were younger, we did the same sort of thing, jen. They actually did have PCs in their rooms, which both of them helped to build. I built them with them and walked them through the process of building their own PCs and installing Windows and everything. But it made it clear that we would be checking in on what they were doing, and I installed firewalls and various other software to do some tracking. I wasn't checking it every day, but from time to time I would just pop in and just see what sites they were hitting and made sure that they understood what was allowed and what wasn't and that we would from time to time be checking in on them.
01:38:37 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's gotten a lot harder to check in on everything these days, though.
01:38:41 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh yeah, so much Now that they have multiple devices and you know they're carrying them with them. I mean, I can't imagine what it would be like, you know, if I had kids your age, your kids' age, right now.
01:38:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it would be so much harder it's a challenge parenting and I will never criticize any parent for doing what they think is best and what they need to do. This is the job, and we don't get much training on parenting either, by the way. We're just kind of thrown in the deep end and good luck. Finished this the sentence? I should disclaim the fact that I am an investor in my son's salt company. He has a company called the salt lovers club where he sells fantastic flavored salts of all kinds at salt lovers club clubcom. I love the truffle salt, the truffle salt.
01:39:30 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I can't wait to try some salt. I buy it, by the case I put it on everything.
01:39:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, who doesn't? He's salt hank for a reason, but he's also getting into pickles now and he said, dad, I need a lot of capital to get into the pickle biz. I said, son, let me write you a check, but I want 10% of the company. So I am now proud owner of 10% of the Salt Hank pickle business and you know what you want to support your kids doing it. It's like you know, it's like if, if suddenly they decided that the colored pencils were bad for kids and tried to take them away because I don't know, there's something in the colored pencils is bad for them.
01:40:10
Kids are creative and what these are creative tools for them and encouraging them to be creative and it's it seems like that's a good thing. And I just look at hank and what he's done with these tools and I'm blown away. It's just really great that he had the opportunity to do that. Um, and I think if your son becomes a fighter pilot, god bless him. That's great. So the game he plays is flight flight simulator yeah, mike, I think the microsoft flight simulator is incredible and it's amazing like he'll.
01:40:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So I. I travel a lot for work, so he'll, he'll like fly there with me ahead of time. Look on the path and I always send him my flight numbers so he can check and like he has, like apps where he sees where the planes are and Flight radar. Yeah, yeah, he loves it.
01:40:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh see, isn't this great? Look at that. He's totally into it right Now. You don't know, I don't know, I didn't know what Hank was going to end up doing. But you give them all these options and you'll never know what's going to click. But when something clicks and it really speaks to them, that's wonderful, and then they can make a living doing it and I just think it's wonderful. I. I mean, it could be he could be doing Call of Duty. There's a lot of other things he could be doing that would not be as productive as flight.
01:41:26 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
He does really like what's the really awful one GTA.
01:41:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh great like that for a while, does it?
01:41:32 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
and now he's a huge car head. Like he loves car see motorcycles and it's just a for kids.
01:41:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We watched, we watched. I dream of genie or gilligan's island or whatever it was. We watched. I mean we ruined our brains too. I mean this is what you do. It's just what you do.
01:41:48 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I was very I'm very cautious with the gta stuff. I like I was not keen on that one at all. Um, that just started a little while ago, like a year or so ago, but he was like yeah, no, mom, I only do the like. There's like mods that you can do. Oh, yeah, that's cool, and it's just with the really cool cars.
01:42:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds like a smart, sounds like a cool smart kid I did do.
01:42:09 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
When he was really young, I gave him one tale about an internet an awful thing that happened to someone on the internet which we don't need to repeat here and he's like mom, that stuck with me. Yeah, I've I never. You know, the whole thing for me was no online chats when he was young. Like I don't want you talking to people you don't know. You have to know them in real life and you and appropriately scared him. That's a very good parenting scare it keeps them safe.
01:42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you are watching this in Tech, our tech news roundtable. We do this every Sunday, episode 1001. So when I say we do this every Sunday, we do it every Sunday for the last 20 years. Sam Abul-Samad is our car guy, jennifer Patterson-Tui is now officially our home automation expert and aviation and tennis and parenting.
01:43:03 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I can definitely do tennis.
01:43:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know about parenting. It sounds like you're doing pretty darn good Right, sam, doesn't it? Sounds like she's doing exactly the right thing I would say they don't give you a manual. They don't. Yeah, no.
01:43:17 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
At least you don't have to sign up for an app.
01:43:18 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I might go a little lighter on the smart home stuff, but you know.
01:43:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So would my kids. They're not fans.
01:43:25 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
My wife is not either. The only thing that we actually have running connected is a couple of light strips in the living room and the garage door opener.
01:43:37 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's a good one.
01:43:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I can control through Google Assistant.
01:43:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's nice, I do that yeah.
01:43:41 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, well, because you know I drive different cars every week and so you know being able to, and you know I have my phone plugged in with Android Auto, so being able to open the garage door, tell me tell me you've programmed your Google Assistant to open the garage door.
01:43:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When you say to the bat cave, robin, tell me please. I have not done that yet, please, all right let's take a little break.
01:44:04 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I will just for you.
01:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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01:48:29
Nobel prizes have been awarded, and in two different categories, to AI scientists. Jeffrey Hinton, who is one of the AI doomers and the father of neural networks, won a Nobel Prize in physics. Jeffrey Hinton, along with his partner, john Hopfield, created neural networks. This goes back to the 80s. The work they did in the 80s. They will share a a 1.1 million dollar award from the royal swedish academy of sciences. They created neural networks and studied neural networks in the 80s, it says, setting the stage for the current boom in artificial intelligence. It's funny they did it in the 80s, but it wasn't until more recently that we had enough computing power that it really started to take off For foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks. Ironically, jeffrey Hinton's one of the guys who says the machines are going to eat us. And watch out, here they come, frankenstein's monster hey.
01:49:36
Yeah, I will talk about Jan LeCun's response to that in just a second. There was a good article about him in the Wall Street Journal. Sorry, sam.
01:49:43 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, I was just going to say most of the Nobel Prizes usually aren't awarded until many years or decades after the work that was done To see what was the actual impact of it. I think that's one of the things that they look at which usually means winners are in their 70s or 80s.
01:50:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was an exception in the nobel prize for chemistry this year demis hasibis, who is the founder of deep mind and not that old I think he's a younger guy. He was a chess prodigy, uh, and DeMine to play chess, but he also taught it to do protein folding. John Jumper, another research scientist, both at Google, won Nobel Prizes for physics for their research I'm sorry for chemistry for their research into proteins and protein folding and protein folding. The Nobel Committee says Hassibis and Jumper developed an AI model to solve a 50-year-old problem predicting proteins' complex structures from their amino acid sequences. They share it with David Baker, a professor at the University of Washington, who used that technology to build entirely new kinds of proteins.
01:50:56
Something the Academy said was quote an almost impossible feat. So a Nobel Prize in chemistry to, I don't think Demis Hasebis is, I don't think he's even over 40. So this is a rare one to some young people, but this was that. In a way, it's notable because it was such an amazing breakthrough. This protein folding Do you remember? Do you guys remember when you used to folding at home? You would. It was like a screensaver you'd put on your computer and then you and everybody in the world would be doing protein folding in their spare cycles.
01:51:31 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah. That went away On on game consoles, computers and all kinds of devices.
01:51:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That went away because of this, I'm sorry. Hasibis is 48.
01:51:41 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So he's still young relative. Yeah, that's yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm 47, so I'm going.
01:51:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very young, it's so young spring chicken you don't look 47 at all, by the way I that shocks me. You look like you're 28.
01:51:56 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
how do you zoom?
01:51:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
has good filters oh, it's a zoom thing. Okay, can I get? Can I get one of them zoom filters for myself? Uh, he was a chess prodigy. Actually, there's a great picture of him, um, with, uh, the former, uh women's world champion, judith polgar, who's wonderful, uh, celebrating his nobel prize with, I think, hashtag chess rules or something like that. It's really cool. He co-founded DeepMind in London in 2010. He's a fellow country person of yours, jennifer. Google acquired them in 2014. Deepmind developed, of course, deep. Was it DeepBlue that beat Kasparov? And then Deep? And then what was it? Alpha Zero, which defeated one of the best players of Go, which was long thought to be unsolvable, with Alpha Fold. So Alpha Fold is the protein folding. Anyway, that's quite cool. I don't know where Haseebis stands on AI doomerism.
01:53:00 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's interesting to see that the AI sort of the recognition coming now right at this sort of crucial point where, yes, it's sort of shown its potential, but now what is that potential going to turn into? And some of this stuff. Obviously, you know it's creating the ability to unlock secrets that we thought were going to be impossible in terms of, you know, in the world of science and you know, being able to the compute, combined with compute power and LLMs, being able to solve problems that we've never thought we could solve. You know, ultimately, ai could have a huge positive impact on humanity, but there's always also the dark side, as we say. It's like TikTok, by the way, I stand corrected Deep.
01:53:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Blue was IBM, that's right. Deep fakes, deep fakes. Deep Blue was IBM. And then it was AlphaGo and then AlphaZero, which I think is even better than Deep Blue. So well, this is interesting because it's clear that there are valuable things that AI is already doing. I mean, that's what the Nobel Committee thinks, and I think the protein folding is a very good example. Jan LeCun, who is one of the, along with Hinton and Hassibis, is one of the great AI people. He's chief scientist, chief scientist at meta, professor at NYU. He says, according to the Wall Street Journal this week, ai's dumber than a cat, which, if I were you, jennifer, I'd be a little bit uh my cats are very smart yeah yeah maybe dumber than a dog, I mean well, that's a good point.
01:54:37
I don't know d dumber or smarter. After all, who do we wait hand and foot on? The dog or the cat or the cat? I know, maybe they're a little smarter.
01:54:47 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I think I mean this is an interesting area, sort of understanding the reasoning behind AI right. Is that that's what this is about?
01:54:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
correct. Yeah, they're all talking about how AI is reasoning. Now, in fact, uh, lacoon says uh, the tech, the fears about technologies, the technology's existential peril, are BS. He says excuse my French, but I don't think BS is French. But okay, uh, he's a friend of Jeffrey Hinton, um, but he says today's AI models, while useful, are far from rivaling the intelligence of our pets, let alone us. When I ask whether this is the Wall Street Journal reporter, christopher Mims, when I ask whether we should be afraid that AIs will soon grow so powerful they pose a hazard to us, he quips have to pardon my french, but that's complete ps. Um, I actually like jan lacoon. I think he's probably closer to the truth. We're talking a lot these days about these reasoning ais, but at the same time, when you look at the so-called reasoning they're you, they doing it's not all that impressive. Let me see if I can.
01:56:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, yeah, we had a reporter at the Verge, Kylie. Kylie Robinson wrote a really interesting article today about this, not today. Last week, october 10th. What day is it? Yes, and you know, understanding, you know. So we're talking about agents and how the agents, you know, is sort of the future. It's what AI companies are sort of moving towards now and then, but understanding that the reasoning, the idea behind reasoning, is causing a lot of these failures. Like you know, what we hear so much about AI today is what it gets wrong. You know, there's so much publicity around the fails and the problems that we're seeing with AI, not so much publicity around what AI is actually achieving, like things that these Nobel Prizes are.
01:56:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is definitely doing some good things, but I think it's important to understand the limits of it, right?
01:57:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, and this is.
01:57:04 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh, go ahead Jen.
01:57:05 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, no, no.
01:57:06 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I was just going to say and this is one of the big challenges around automated driving is a lot of companies have shifted to a more and more AI-centric approach to that software, away from rules-based solutions, and that has some problems, especially from a safety perspective, in terms of trying to understand how the system is working and validating is it actually going to do what I want it to do?
01:57:36
Because it starts to become less and less predictable when you do that. And a great example a few weeks ago, a company called AMCI that does a lot of testing in the automotive industry. They do work for a bunch of different companies as well as their own independent testing. They did a thousand mile test with the Tesla Model 3 with the latest generation of their FSD software, and they did four different types of driving city streets, highway driving, rural, two lane roads and mountain roads and what they found was a lot of the time, the system worked really, really well, but it also um for, for no apparent reason in you know, repeating the exact same scenario on the same roads and the same conditions would do completely the wrong thing. And they found that over the course of a thousand miles of driving, um the they it did things that were so wrong it required a significant human intervention, on average about every 13 miles See that's the problem.
01:58:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If it drives 12 miles, perfectly, but the last mile it drives you off a cliff. That's kind of a problem. Yeah, just a small one, a little problem, but a problem.
01:58:59 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Hallucinating cars kind of a problem and yeah, just a small, one little problem, but a problem, you know, and you know.
01:59:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It also makes me wonder about the scalability of what people like elon musk are talking about. Fsd's full self-driving. If a human has to, it's one thing if there's a driver, which there is in current teslas, but when you get to these driverless autonomous vehicles, does that mean that there has to be a human at the home office that intervenes every 13 miles?
01:59:20 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
well, we're seeing this this week. The reasoning I find fascinating because this is something ai generative, ai is becoming big in the smart home right. This is what's going to bring the smart home to the next level, to make it so that everyone, even the grumpy old men, love everyone, even the grumpy old men, love home automation.
01:59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, are you? Are you talking to me or sam?
01:59:41 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
because I've got the buttons because it's got it's going to make it easy and it's going to hopefully bring a lot more value, um, to home automation in the smart home and but but the you know what we've seen with hallucinations from ai and from you know things like the 13 miles is a great example, because your home is a similar issue. You cannot have one thing go wrong.
02:00:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That could it's okay if the Roomba doesn't eat the pet nine out of 10 times.
02:00:11 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Right.
02:00:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or the cat litter robot?
02:00:14 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
yeah, doesn't slice the cat's head off when it turns over, which unfortunately happened. Well, and isn't robot? Yeah, doesn't like slice the cat's head off when it turns over, which unfortunately happened.
02:00:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and isn't there a problem with these robots with cat poop on the ground, Like don't they just smear it across the floor?
02:00:26 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Oh, the robot vacuums, yeah, so now they're using AI to identify.
02:00:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that looks like poop.
02:00:33 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Pet accidents and go around them.
02:00:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It took.
02:00:36 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
AI to do that Well, computer vision. So yeah, they have cameras and they use.
02:00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe this is what your colleague was writing about. Apple came out with a white paper this week that was very interesting Understanding the limitations of mathematical reasoning in large language models and get this. They gave us some examples. What happens with these large language models is they're highly distractible. They can't really determine what's important and what's not important. So they gave them some tasks that you would probably find fairly easy to solve, but they found that these AIs just got completely confused by them. Let me see if I can.
02:01:26
Here's an example 01 Mini and LLAMA38B failed at this. Now don't look at the answer, kids. Let's see if you can answer this, oliver, I hate these types of problems. See, now don't look at the answer, kids. Let's see if you can answer this. Oliver picks-. I hate these types of problems. No, this is, but here's the point.
02:01:41
It sounds hard. It's not. It's only hard for an AI. Oliver picks Kiwis over three days as follows Friday he picks 44 Kiwis. Saturday he picks 58 Kiwis Kiwis are fruit, by the way, we're not talking about New Zealanders.
02:01:58 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Sunday who knows?
02:02:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He could have been picking up New Zealanders.
02:02:02 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Okay, we don't know. It's Sunday, it's ambiguous.
02:02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He picks up double the number he picked on Friday, which was 44, right, so it's 44 plus 58 plus 88. Double 44 is for the total number of Kiwis. But here's the thing that the AI could solve. But if you add one sentence, however, on Sunday five of these Kiwis were smaller than average. The AI goes oh, that changes everything. The AI goes oh, that changes everything and actually subtracts the five from the total to give the wrong answer. Both 01, mini, the strawberry, the reasoning one, and Llama38B did the same thing and took out those five kiwis that were smaller than average.
02:02:59
This is an isolated example. They have many, many examples of this in the paper, where it seems that these so-called reasoning LLMs don't really know what's important and what's not important. And actually he says this exposes a critical flaw in llm this is from the paper in llm's ability to genuinely understand mathematical concepts and discern relevant information from problem solving. Adding seemingly seemingly relevant but ultimately inconsequential information to the logical reasoning of the problem led to performance drops of up to 65% across all state-of-the-art models. They all fell for it and that's the problem right there. It might even be the problem with that self-driving car or the Roomba that ate the cat.
02:03:50 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, roombas have eaten cats, by the way. I'm just going to put that in there. Sorry, just litter robots.
02:04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really a very We'll talk about it on MacBreakWeekly because it's Apple research and it's very interesting.
02:04:07 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I think this highlights what the limitations that are really going to make this.
02:04:12 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, and this is something that is you know should be. You're just parsing a word problem which we all learn to do in grade school.
02:04:21 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, but that's the, you know. This is what's going to save us, though, isn't it Right? We're always going to be one step ahead, because we can always be smarter than the AI is the hope here, but, you know, we want to get the benefits out of the AI and what it can do, and take taking out some of the well, some of the AI and what it can do, and taking out some of the well, some of the grind that we haven't. You know, we don't want to do every day. Some of you know being able to help us.
02:04:45
You know, summarize emails those kinds of things, I think, are fun, going to be useful, but ultimately, applying AI to like significant problems in the world and create finding solutions, is going to be better than bringing AI to our daily lives. I feel like, do we really need this huge compute power to summarize our emails or to make our home smarter? I mean, it's gonna be cool, it's gonna be fun, but we do need to think quite carefully. I think about it before we move forward too quickly, and it feels like a lot of companies are just rushing in.
02:05:21
Well, there's money all guns blazing, yeah, and you know how much of this is really going to benefit us in the long run? Um, I think and this is where legislation needs to come in I do think we need some legislation around what, what is happening to come in.
02:05:38 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I do think we need some legislation around what?
02:05:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what is happening? Sure of that way more selective.
02:05:41 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I think we need to be smart. The legislation who's we? That's the problem.
02:05:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, first of, all consumers of ai. Okay, so when we are, and we as journalists, when we talk about ai, the thing that confuses it is there are some genuinely useful things that I can do right, yes, just and yeah, people, people make this projection that well, if it this good now, it's going to be this good in a year and this good in two years.
02:06:04
And it doesn't work that way. And so they're making projections about the capabilities. This is another paragraph from the authors of that. We found no evidence of formal reasoning in language models. We found no evidence of formal reasoning and language models. We found no evidence of formal reasoning and language models. Their behavior is better explained by sophisticated pattern imagining. Matching so fragile in fact, the changing names can alter results by 10. It's important, that's you don't need the state of california to write a law telling you that you need to know it, that's all. And we, as journalists, need to tell people that and lower expectations. And the problem is you've got people like Elon Musk and Sam Altman saying, well, the good news is there'll be no poverty in 10 years, when that's complete BS.
02:06:54 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's not true, I feel feel like, though, there's, there's, it's the use cases right, there are so many things that we could be using generative AI for, and I feel like we need to be very. That's where there needs to be some oversight, like let's not go down the roads that could lead us to.
02:07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think, the California state legislature is smart enough to say well, use it for that, but don't use it for that. Well, someone has to be smart, yeah but I don't think it's the California state legislature or the Congress of the United States. No, that's not their job and it shouldn't be their job. The scientists I mean. Maybe if you had some sort of liability law saying, hey, if your AI is used and does something really terrible, then guess who's? Responsible, not the AI.
02:07:41 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah. You and that's the thing and that's got to be made very clear. I think and that's already started, but it needs to be clear that this is not a human. Computers just like cars. They're not responsible for what they do. There is someone behind the wheel, whether they're actually behind the wheel or not. That is responsible.
02:08:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Whoever created it needs to be liable for whatever it does wrong. Yeah, and certainly in my sector, in automotive, this has been one of the issues around assisted and automated driving systems. If you're going to automate something and you're going to take it out of the hands of a human driver, you know, traditionally the human driver is the one that's liable when they make a mistake. If the software is now making those mistakes, the company that created that software and that put it on the road, they have to be liable for it.
02:08:35
And this is one the things I was asked by a reporter before the Tesla event on Thursday. What are the questions that we should be looking for answers to from this event? And one that I specifically said and that was not answered during the event was is Tesla finally going to accept responsibility for, you know, for their self-driving system?
02:09:01
you know when it does, when it does something wrong and it does it pretty frequently, you know will Tesla be liable when that system causes the vehicle to crash? Or are they trying to get out of that? And they, well, they've never. They've never acknowledged it, they've never specifically stated, you know, one of the only companies that has said that they will be. Actually, most automakers have said that if they put automated driving systems on the road, they will be responsible for it, and Waymo, for example, they're liable if they get.
02:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tesla has in past court cases blamed the drivers Right.
02:09:38 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
But because it's not for self-driving too?
02:09:40 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
They specifically call it an assist system in all of their language, not in the marketing language, just in the legal language. Yeah, In the disclaimer when you first engage it, it you, the driver, are responsible if anything goes wrong. And so you know by that definition, if the human is responsible, it's not a self-driving system, right.
02:10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to be clear. I'm bullish on AI. I'm excited about what AI. I think you are too, jennifer. I'm excited about what AI can do. I think it's really important we understand its limits and we don't over-hype it. And this new study I think it's really, really important because it underscores what's really going on.
02:10:27 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's not reasoning it's pattern matching Right and that really does make it quite. I mean so it simplifies it so nicely. I mean AI, generative AI and understanding all of this is very deep and complicated, but this that really does, because I think there's this real fear amongst people that and it's been overhyped the fear has been overhyped specifically that it is that AI is going to take over the world and remove humanity. I mean, this is what I mean. Hinton has very much.
02:10:57
Oh, he thinks we're going to have killer robots or something he thinks the AI is going to destroy humanity, and so that's a big thing to put out there and that's what you hear on the nightly news. You know that's what most people are getting, the sort of feedback of, not what the benefits are and what the benefits could be. So there's this just a real balance that needs to be done, and I'm not sure the companies are necessarily going to manage to do that well. I mean, elon Musk has already demonstrated the overhyping of what his vehicles are gonna be capable of, so we just, I feel like there needs to be the guardrails, need to be there, and where those are gonna come from. Right now it's hard to see Some companies are doing a good job of it and others aren't, and OpenAI in particular is an interesting you know, starting out as a nonprofit and now, oh, we've suddenly realized that this might be better if we make some money out of it.
02:11:50
A lot of money Because look what we're going to make.
02:11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We raise $167 billion out of it.
02:11:55 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
And you know the companies that deploy AI need to be careful about this, and I'll credit my own employer here.
02:12:04
When a lot of this stuff started coming out last year, they sent out a notification to everybody.
02:12:19
They said hey look, you're not allowed to use any of this stuff, any of these AI tools, for your work for the time being, because we're going to go through and evaluate.
02:12:23
You know what does this do, how does it work and where can we use it responsibly. And you know there's still some pretty severe limits on what we're allowed to do with any AI stuff. A lot of that is based on making sure that any data that goes into it is protected because of the clients that we have. We don't want proprietary data or private data to be shared, but also just understanding which of these systems can work, because they know that they will ultimately be responsible if we use AI tools and they give the wrong results for the work that we're doing. And I think every company needs to be much more circumspect in how they roll out AI and not just throw Gen AI into everything they do, but to be very careful about how you do it and really test it hard and make sure that it's actually providing a benefit and that it's not causing more problems than it's solving.
02:13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think it's our responsibility as journalists who cover AI to help the American people, the world's people, understand what AI can and cannot do, the things it's useful for, the things it shouldn't be used for, and it's up to all the citizens of the world to learn this and not fall for the hype. It's too bad we have these hype monsters like sam altman and elon musk out there, um, promoting this stuff, and it really is self-serving for people like jeffrey hinton nobel laureate now jeffrey hinton to say, oh, there's ai, they're good because it's. It kind of promotes the work they've done, but it it promotes it beyond what it's going to be doing or capable of doing. I think it's really important that we spread that word, and I think I've been hesitant to do that only because I haven't understood it enough. This is so new, we're still trying to grapple with it, but I think papers like this Gary Marcus wrote a very good piece on Substack LLMs don't do formal reasoning and that's a huge problem.
02:14:39
That talks about this Apple piece. I think we need to take this to heart and understand it and start to put it into our work, because this is our job to tell people about this stuff. Incidentally, we're going to be reading a really interesting book for Stacy's Book Club a week from Friday. It's called Service Model by an author named Tchaikovsky, who reads it, by the way, on Audible and does a great job. It's about service robots and it's fascinating. It's told through the point of view of the service robot and it's really about the service robots humans trusting the service robots so much that they allowed them to destroy civilization.
02:15:27 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's a very good book. That sounds good.
02:15:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very interesting.
02:15:32 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Have you read Clara and the Sun?
02:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love Clara and the Sun. What a beautiful book. That was another Stacey's Book Club pick.
02:15:38 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Oh was it, yeah, have you watched Sunny on Apple TV Plus. I can't watch that with my husband because he will just say I told you so.
02:15:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
How dare he be?
02:15:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right. What's the point of Sunny? I don't know that one.
02:15:55 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It's set in Japan. It's about robots yeah, it involves robots and AI, and AI.
02:16:04 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Like an Alexa that comes to life in your home.
02:16:06 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
The husband of the main character is played by Rashida Jones. Oh, I love her yeah. He dies in the first episode but the rest of the series is about her trying to find out what happened and you know Is it good. I'm not going to tell the whole story. But basically, you know AI is involved and you know robots, you know, and basically trying to create service robots, create a service robot, Wow, and things go badly.
02:16:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Clearly, I have to watch this before we do the book club on the 25th, because this is relevant to service model. So read the book and join us in the book club. If you're a member of Club Twit, we'll be doing it live. I would like to extend an invitation to you, jennifer, if you want to join us and talk about Stacey.
02:16:57 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I'd love to spend any time I get. To spend with Stacey is a good time.
02:17:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I agree. All right, Well, I'll send you the information if you can do it.
02:17:04 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Unfortunately, October 25 is my husband's birthday, though.
02:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, the hell with him. He thinks robots are bad. That's probably you should do. Yeah, it's the priorities, yeah.
02:17:17 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
But if it's a different day, for sure.
02:17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I almost want to move it just just to make that work. Rashida Jones is pretty amazing. Quincy Jones' daughter, great actor, but also a great director and producer. She's quite an impressive person. Yeah, really neat. I will be watching Sonny later today.
02:17:35 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Was it good though, sam.
02:17:37 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it's not perfect, you know there's some flaws, but overall I thought it was really interesting and it's an interesting look at what's going on with AI and robotics and people and people's. Really, the core of it is humans' relationship with AI and robots and what that ultimately means and what the potential effects of that are.
02:18:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Light stuff. Let's take a little break. You're watching this Week in Tech with Sam Abulsamit, our car guy, and Jennifer Toohey, who is now our everything person and our AI person, and now I have a cat. And has a cat. What the dog turned into a cat Got replaced.
02:18:26 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
How did that?
02:18:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happen, but that's not the cat that he wanted to eat.
02:18:30 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Gus wanted to eat. This is a different cat. This is my first cat.
02:18:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, who now has a?
02:18:34 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
new baby brother. This is Smokey.
02:18:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hi, smokey Perfect name for a Smokey cat. Yes, okay, smokey. Our show today brought to you. So we have Jennifer, sam and Smokey. Okay, our show today brought to you by Zip Recruiter. We use this product. We love this product.
02:18:53
Zip Recruiter is the smartest way to hire. According to research, a major challenge that many employers face is urgency, the pressure to hire quickly. That's hard, but I understand why it's there. It's always urgent for us. If somebody gives us their two weeks notice, we know we've got to replace that person fast because otherwise we have to do the work right. The problem is it's very time-consuming to search for great candidates, to sort through applications. So now you almost have two jobs. You have this urgent need to fill this position, plus you've got the job of doing the work. That's why you really need a tool like ZipRecruiter. If you can relate to this, I have to ask you have you ever tried ZipRecruiter? Fantastic, they have figured out the way to solve this exact problem.
02:19:41
Turns out, when you put your posting on Zip Recruiter, a few things happen. First of all, they posted immediately to 100 plus job sites, plus social media. So you're casting instantly, with one click of the mouse, of a huge wide net, which is great, because the perfect person for that job probably is out there, but you don't know what job site they're on, what they're looking at. So this way, by casting that huge net, you're reaching out to more people. But then you may say, well, lee, but that's not good, because now my inbox is going to fill with applications. I'm going to get all these voice messages no, no, no. That's the beauty of it.
02:20:18
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02:21:25
According to G2, ziprecruiter is the hiring site employers prefer the most, and I'll back that up. How fast does ZipRecruiter's smart technology start showing your job to qualified candidates, can you say instantly? I mean it happens right away and very quickly. They start saying hey, this person be good. Now you invite them. By the way, I should say you don't have to. They're not offering them a job, you are. So they say here's five great candidates. You look at those. You say you know I like these two. By the way, there's a certain magic that happens. When you reach out to them, invite them to apply, they get all excited Wow, this company really wants me to work for them. So you jump ahead of all the other competition for the best candidates.
02:22:07
It's another great thing about ZipRecruiter. I want you to try it. Relax, let ZipRecruiter speed up your hiring. See for yourself. Just go to ZipRecruitercom slash tweet. You could try it for free right now. That's the same price as a genuine smile from a stranger, a picture-perfect sunset or a cute dog running up to you and licking your hand. That's ZipRecruitercom slash twit. They must have known Gus was going to be on the show today. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. Ziprecruiter is the smartest way to hire. And there's Sam with his two cute Pembroke Corgis over his shoulder. Aww, I want a dog so badly. Jennifer, did you have the dog first or the cats first?
02:22:55 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
At dogs first. So I had two dogs. I have Gus, who was a wirehead pointing griffon, and then I also have griffon.
02:23:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That sounds. Is he in griffinder? That sounds very british.
02:23:10 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's actually dutch, a dutch griffon a dutch griffon, and then we also had a border terrier, little border terrier called rinsy and I had cats. When I met my husband and and he said I'm allergic to cats. And then when we got married, I was like I want to bring my cats over from England and he's like, oh, it'd be really hard for them and we live in Idaho, they get eaten by eagles.
02:23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So he talked to me about it, but he was really fighting the hard fight. He did not want those. I'm allergic. They're going to get eaten by eagles. They I'm allergic. They're going to get eaten by eagles. They're going to suck the breath out of the babies. It's not good.
02:23:44 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yep. And then we got dog, lovely dog, our first griffin, an amazing breed, highly recommend.
02:23:51 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I'm going to look into this now.
02:23:52 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
He was a hunting dog, which was why? Because my husband hunted like upland bird, like pheasant and quail.
02:23:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they're pointers. Pointers there's a pointer and a retriever, that's. They were designed as the ultimate hunting dog by a gentleman.
02:24:08 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
They point and retrieve, oh, and they're so cute, very cute, oh good, and they're the best family dog. So when we moved to Charleston, unfortunately our first dog passed away and we got the same breed again because they're just wonderful. And then a little bit later, my hat, my children really wanted a cat and my husband was like, no, I'm allergic, I'm allergic, can't get one. And we're like, well, we'll get one, that's an outdoor cat. And guess whose favorite person in the house is the cat?
02:24:34 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh, your husband? Is he still allergic and guess?
02:24:36 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
who went and had allergy tests and guess who's not allergic to cats?
02:24:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a story and guess what?
02:24:41 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
he not allergic to cats it was a story what he is allergic to griffins, so it's like karma, dude. And now we went and got another cat which he did not want. I actually literally sent my dog my sorry. I sent my son to the pet store to buy pet food for the cat and he came home with a kitten your household sounds like a lot of fun I have to say chickens.
02:25:07 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
You have chickens, chickens oh wow, yeah we used to have some backyard chickens and our old, our older, our two generations ago, uh, corgi, um, really coexisted very well with the hens in the backyard. Oh, nice.
02:25:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't want the chickens, but I do want the eggs. I guess you have to have the chicken. That's why we had the chickens was for the eggs, but the chickens were actually a lot of fun.
02:25:32 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
The thing we had to watch out for was the hawks, because um the hawks will get the chickens.
02:25:37 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
They don't tend to get the cats.
02:25:39 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
That was a bit of a myth, but they will. They will go after the chickens and they did go after our our hands on more than one occasion yeah, um, but didn't? The hawks never got any of them, but a raccoon did so I know that happened to us too.
02:25:51 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I now have a smart chicken coop, though, and it has an ai powered camera that sends me alerts when it spots, raccoons or, and it's tax deductible we'll get back to more with mutual of omaha's wild kingdom spot skunks yeah, it does, it's, it's you know what very impressive you don't need to spot skunks.
02:26:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can smell them a mile away, sam, haven't you noticed?
02:26:17 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
yeah, but by the time you smell them it's too late you want to spot them before you can smell them.
02:26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The hard-working, wired, haired pointing griffin, renowned as the supreme gun dog. It would be ironic if I, a non-hunter, non-gun owner, had the supreme gun dog is known for the best family dogs, though well, I like this harsh low shedding coat because they're right and they are at hyper allergenic, so that's they don't share.
02:26:45 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
My husband has managed to survive in a house with him. Corgi shed like mofos.
02:26:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was rubbing up against this corgi yesterday and my black fleece was covered.
02:26:56 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, there's clouds of fur around the house constantly, so the griffins are no hair, so like human hair.
02:27:03 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So, yeah, they don't shed really at all. And if you're allergic to dogs, they don't have that same I want one.
02:27:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The AKC says they're known for an extremely harsh and bristly coat that gives them a natural unkempt appearance. Yeah, they have that kind of you can't brush them.
02:27:21 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
You have to use a special brush, but you don't really need to. They're great dogs and they have, like, beard and mustache.
02:27:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, it says a lavish mustache and eyebrows frame, large rounded eyes that gleam with a keen intelligence. Very smart.
02:27:38 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Not as smart as the cat, though.
02:27:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, dog is as smart as a cat. We know that. So did you either of you watch the HBO documentary that came out a week ago on Bitcoin? I did not. And they unmasked. They claimed to have unmasked Satoshi Nakamoto. You did not. Did you watch it? I did not.
02:28:01 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I just cancelled HBO because I was trying to cost cut and then my daughter said but that means I can't watch John Oliver, so we just renewed. John Oliver is educational.
02:28:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He is, he's a little adult. Very adult, but he has a posh English accent, so that's good. So it comes off fine.
02:28:21 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So no, but I will be watching this now that I have resubscribed, because this is very interesting. I did read the Wired story a little bit of it.
02:28:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it was quite interesting. By the way, do you have a received accent. It seems like you do. Did you go to a public school?
02:28:38 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, you mean an English public school, as in a private school in America. Yeah, you're right, yes, yes you mean an english public school, as in a private school in america? Yeah, you're right.
02:28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I did. I went to a private school that's public although not. You have received. You have the received, quite posh received accent.
02:28:52 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I have. I have the queen's english you do? You speak the queen's english by 20 years in my people america oh no, the american hasn't seeped through at all. No, I won't try my southern accent on you then. It's not as good as yours.
02:29:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I come to my people at a time of great trouble. So Satoshi Nakamoto is the probable pseudonym of the person who created bitcoin, person or persons. We don't know who created bitcoin, and there is a lot of interest in who it is. And there are bitcoin people who will say, well, it doesn't matter who, why do you need to know who invented it? It doesn't matter because bitcoin is bitcoin and it's you know, it's the technology and all that stuff. It does matter a little bit because it is thought that the person or persons who are satoshi nakamoto control more than one million bitcoin, which, at today's prices, is more than 60 billion dollars, and if bitcoin goes to a million dollars, as many of these bitcoin bros say it will, he would be a trillionaire quite, and one of the wealthiest person in the world and should he cash this bitcoin in, it would collapse the economy of bitcoin.
02:30:09
So I think it is kind of important who did quite important did you ever find your bitcoin password leo? Oh, you know about that everybody knows about that feel I feel it's a forced savings account, but I have to say if.
02:30:24
Bitcoin does get to a million dollars, those 7.85 Bitcoin are going to be very itchy in there. I'm going to really want to open that wallet bad. I'm going to work on it. I am going to work on it. But the thing is, if I had had access to it, I would have sold it like when Bitcoin was $1,000. I would have said I've got $8,000. I'm wealthy, and I wouldn't have held it all this time. I only held it because I had no choice. What's quantum Quantum computing? Oh yeah, no, look, I figure it's a retirement plan.
02:30:59 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
By the time I need it- You'll figure out how to get it. There'll be a way to crack it.
02:31:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean, it's just RSA encryption. It's not, you know, impermeable. So they say, and, by the way, the guy who did this, I think successfully unmasked Q of the QAnon conspiracy.
02:31:17 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That documentary, I did watch that was very interesting.
02:31:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was good. Don't watch. That was very interesting, it was good. Don't you feel like he got to the, the root of it felt like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, this is, in my opinion, very similar, um, and it's done in a similar way. The the Colin Hoback, who is the documentary and who did this? Uh ends the piece. Can I spoil it for you, or should I for?
02:31:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
me I don't know about. We can ask everyone else.
02:31:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Spoiler alert it ends in. So he there's. He talks about all the possibilities. Right, he ends talking to somebody who is a pretty unlikely candidate. His name is peter todd. He was a precocious high school student, I know. Maybe he was a little older than he was a precocious high school student. Oh no, maybe he was a little older than that. Well, he was a precocious high school student when he first became known to the Bitcoin community and would have been 22 when the Bitcoin paper was written. Claims not to know C++. Of course Bitcoin code originally was C++, but there's some circumstantial evidence that makes if you watch, watch it makes one think it might be him. And then what he does this Colin Hoback is. It has is a very nice style. He got the two people who I would say are the most likely candidates together in a deserted factory in Chechya factory in Chechya.
02:32:44
And they're standing on a platform and he's down there looking at them and accuses him, peter Todd, of being Satoshi, which makes Peter Todd pretty squirrely. You know there's no, the evidence isn't conclusive, but I think, jennifer, as a astute observer of human foibles, you might be able to watch this and go guilty. I'm thinking, yeah, I'd be very curious what your thoughts are. Yeah, because I thought, oh, he nailed the guy. Furthermore, there was another guy, adam back, standing right behind him, who is widely considered to be the only person who really knows for sure who satoshi nakamoto is, because he had early conversations with him. Adam back also created something right before Bitcoin called Hashcoin, which was an early implementation of a digital cryptocurrency, and is the only person named in the Bitcoin paper. It specifically refers to Adam Back and Hashcoin, and Adam is standing there going.
02:33:46 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Not a good poker face then?
02:33:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think I'm watching this and I think the two of them actually are satoshi that they did it hand in hand. Yeah, because it needed adam back's kind of old. He mentored peter todd, although peter todd says I mentored adam back, peter. Okay, and this is the problem. The bitcoin community hates Peter Todd because he's kind of a troll, just like the QAnon guy was kind of a troll, right, and I think Colin might have nailed it.
02:34:14 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Might have got it. That's very. Yeah, I'm excited. I will watch this. Probably more interested in watching this than Sonny.
02:34:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can get my husband to watch this. Yeah, get him to watch. It's actually if he's interested in Bitcoin. It's a pretty good primer in Bitcoin. It doesn't really focus on the negatives, just the you know the potential. It doesn't really talk about the fact that it's going to cause climate change and you know that it's being used by ransomware artists and Ponzi schemers, et cetera, et cetera, ponzi schemers, et cetera, et cetera. But you know, it's a good kind of synopsis of what's going on with Bitcoin.
02:34:44 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I love a good mystery too.
02:34:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I'm very curious because you can't say definitively oh yeah, that's it, no, but there's circumstantial evidence and he sure looked squirrely and Adam Back's just really like yep, there have been many who have claimed to have unmasked satoshi. There there is a real risk.
02:35:07
I feel like this story's come up a few times in the past many times remember but uh, peter top points out there's a real risk to him if he is satoshi nakamoto, because, uh, kidnappers would love to get a hold of him and extort the bitcoin. So he kind of has implied that he's destroyed it. Here's some more interesting evidence there are. You could I could destroy my wallet by just throwing it out. Steve gibson destroyed 50 bitcoin by erasing the hard drive.
02:35:38
So there are ways to do it, but they're no, he just dumbly threw it out, but anyway, he regrets it now. That's 50 times 60,000. You do the math? But there is also an official way to burn Bitcoin in public, in a way on the blockchain. So people would know, oh, that Bitcoin is no longer usable, which, if Satoshi Nakamoto really cared about the Bitcoin economy and was willing to give up trillions of a trillion dollars, he would do right, because that would reassure everybody. Oh, those original mind coins are no longer in play stabilize it stabilizes the system.
02:36:19
Yeah, uh, peter Todd claims to have burned a lot of Bitcoin, but we don't know how much and we don't know, and he didn't do it in public. So all of Satoshi's coin are theoretically still in play. If I were Peter Todd, I would immediately burn it in public, because otherwise the kidnappers are going after you. He's kind of disappeared. Plus, some of those original coin have moved lately. As soon as this story uh, before the documentary came out, but as soon as the, the promotional materials came out saying we've, we got, we've, we've nailed it, some of those coins moved. So I don't know, the plot thickens I like the story.
02:37:01 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I don't know I keep plot thickens.
02:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like the story. I don't know. I keep bringing it up and nobody has anything to say because who knows, who knows, your former nation could destroy the io domain.
02:37:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
This is quite sad, isn't it?
02:37:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you know about this?
02:37:21 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I caught this. They sold or they divested them. The British government divested itself of ownership of an island that I didn't know it owned. We had lots of them, apparently.
02:37:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the one last legacy of colonialism, one little last legacy. So apparently, since 1814, the United Kingdom.
02:37:44 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Is it Chagos, chagos?
02:37:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chagos I don't know how you say it Chagos, chagos, I don't know the Chagos Islands, which are a territory in the Indian Ocean. They've controlled it. It's been a colony. Is that a colony? I guess it is. Since 1814, mauritius, the island of Mauritius, disputes this. They say you stole it. As usual, you stole it from us.
02:38:06
There's a lot of that in our history sadly it was settled by the French in the 1700s, so it's probably Chagos, the Chagos Islands. The French gave the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Oh sorry and I'm sorry. The French gave Mauritius and the Chagos Islands to the British in 1814.
02:38:25 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Mauritius is a great place, is it? Have you been to Mauritius? Good vacation spot? No, but my friends go there all the time I want to go to Mauritius.
02:38:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like the idea. Are there monkeys? I don't know. I think there are monkeys.
02:38:37 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Sounds like a place that could have monkeys.
02:38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, it's in the Indian Ocean the? Io have monkeys anyway. It's in the indian ocean dot io. The dot? Io domain is indian ocean dot io and it's uh associated with the chagos islands, which are not part of mauritius. They are part of the great britain except. In 1965 the uk granted mauritius its sovereignty but they kept the chagos islands, making it the british ind Territory io. Now, in a striking example of colonialism, they removed the Chagossian people so the US could build a military base, see it's your fault. It's our fault.
02:39:18 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's your fault.
02:39:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we're just good friends across the ocean. You know it's hands across the ocean. More than 1500 native chagossians were displaced. By the way, the dot io code is worth a lot of money. For instance, anguilla, which has the dot ai, is projected to make between 25 and $30 million a year from websites with the ai domain. I bet io is worth more than that, right.
02:39:51 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So what happens to it?
02:39:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
now.
02:39:52 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's a pretty common domain now.
02:39:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's the question. Yeah, companies like Googleio, itchio, greenhouseio, opensea. The NFT market is open. C dot IO. Many, many are dot.
02:40:09 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
IO destroy the internet. Who it's done over?
02:40:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it could break the internet, the folks who assign all this. He used to be, I can. It's now IANA the Internet Signed Numbers Authority has a process for retiring country codes within five years. For instance, su was the old Soviet Union. Because a lot of scammers started to use SU, they retired it. Same with YU. For Yugoslavia, they retired it. Right, it remained operational for a while, but after about five yearsavia, they retired it. Right. Uh, it remained operational for a while, but after about five years they retire it. So, uh, we don't know what's gonna. According to the verge, have you heard of them? According to the verge, it's too, you know. By the way, I should give you guys credit, because about 90 of the stories we do are from the Verge.
02:41:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
We're pretty good, I'd say that.
02:41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pretty good, I must say.
02:41:07 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
The Verge says. I mean, the competition is, you know. Unfortunately, Dying People are dying off.
02:41:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean they're all. Anon Tech went away. Imore just went away. I feel so bad.
02:41:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So sad.
02:41:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there's something about Vox they're able to keep the verge alive and well Anyway.
02:41:24 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I have no idea how. I have nothing to do with that side.
02:41:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The checks don't bounce right.
02:41:29 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Right.
02:41:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, that's all you care about.
02:41:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah.
02:41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Although I'm not sure I'd want to be in the tech journalism business right now. Wait a minute, I am Hang on.
02:41:39 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And it's your fault. I'm in this too.
02:41:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's my fault. You were covering cars. You thought this was a good move.
02:41:48 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I wasn't actually covering cars, I just managed to get on that press trip. But, Volvo wanted to go with the lifestyle with that car. That was their kind of set and I was working for a lifestyle magazine at the time. But yes, tech journalism is a tough world but it's a fascinating world.
02:42:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't it? We're talking about important stuff.
02:42:06 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Look at everything we've covered this evening.
02:42:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like I mean it's I think to me it's always been. It's the toy store, but it's important, yeah, so it's like the best of both worlds. You could do sports, which is the toy store, but not important. Or you could do technology, which is the toy store, but it is important, like this ai thing is important, yeah, yeah. I don't know about this dot io thing, I don't know. The verge says for now it's still too early to tell what will become of the dot io demand, whether we'll go through a transitional period like dot yu, or if ayan will let the chagossians the poor old chagossians who are now on some other island keep it.
02:42:40 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I think they should let them keep it probably keep that country going for a long time. Yeah, um, it is interesting how fragile the foundations of this, isn't it?
02:42:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's all held yes all right, let's take a one last break and then a couple more stories, and then we will uh, we will let you go because, it's god, it's almost three hours. They warned you, right, jennifer?
02:43:07 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
not well, no, but that's fine. I've listened to lots of twits. Nobody told you you thought you'd be home in time for tea, but no I put a chicken in the oven and my, my family's eating that, so not one of my chickens was it sally or jennifer?
02:43:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
which do you?
02:43:26 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
name your chickens. I don't, because they're. We have the same breed, so they all look the same.
02:43:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I tried plus, it's hard to eat something once you name it I don't. We don't eat ours, though, oh you know, just the eggs, just the eggs yes, yeah, you don't.
02:43:39 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
You don't want to eat laying chickens they're not designed for that either.
02:43:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, they don't taste, they're a little stringy and yeah, they don't want to eat laying chickens.
02:43:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not designed for that either. No, they don't taste good. They're a little stringy. Yeah, they don't have a whole lot of meat on them. Yeah, we have wild turkeys and I learned that. But maybe if I get this griffin hunting dog Did you catch? A wild turkey, I could try to catch them.
02:43:57 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
You need to shoot those.
02:43:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you have to shoot them first. You, those? Oh, you have to shoot them first.
02:44:06 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Oh wow, you have to shoot the turkeys. Yeah, I have to get a gun and then get a griffin. You should get a griffin, but you can skip the hunting part. It's not mandatory.
02:44:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will they feel sad like they're not living up to their full potential.
02:44:14 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So our Gus that we have here, so the one we had in Idaho hunted, but there's nothing you can't hunt really in South Carolinaolina unless and they certainly can't retrieve in the water. No, the people do, but it's different kind of hunting, not the type that this dog was bred for. It's kind of hunting you can go to jail for.
02:44:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what you're saying?
02:44:32 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
no, just it's like all private land and it's a very different from out west the hunting. In the southeast you have quail don't you and things like that in some areas, but not in the low country, and you can't and these deer hunting there is deer hunting, but you don't deer hunt with dogs, not this type of dog and there are people that hunt with, but that's a whole different um no, these are bird dogs you need exactly so we need water and you can't go in the water here because we have alligators will eat a Griffin like that yes, so it's not.
02:45:06
yeah, so he doesn't hunt and he's never hunted and he's one.
02:45:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's never hunted, no, and he's perfectly content. He doesn't even know what he's missing.
02:45:13 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
He sits on the couch. He's a real lap dog. Um so yeah, he's the best.
02:45:18 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, he's gone away. We don't have any sheep or cattle for our corgis to herd, but they're yeah, they're fine.
02:45:28 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Do you think they'd hunt scrub jays? Because I hate those damn scrub jays. I would.
02:45:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He hunts the moles he hunts the moles in our backyard.
02:45:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's good get rid of the moles don't like them either. So he digs and finds them and smokey grabs them, because smokey's much quicker than gus. Oh, it's teamwork, it's teamwork. It's great to watch when Smokey will start trying to dig with his tiny little paws and then Gus will come in and just Hysterical.
02:45:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Daisy, our late Torgy. She caught at least three rabbits in our backyard that I'm aware of.
02:45:56 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Oh, I have a rabbit too. I didn't mention that today.
02:45:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What is going on in the Toohey household? I?
02:46:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
know I always wanted a little farm, so I've just kind of created.
02:46:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We had a rabbit and then we moved to the country and I thought, oh, fly free rabbit. So I let him out of the cage and the next morning all I found was a little puffy tail. Oh no, there was nothing left. They got him. I don't know what got him, but oh, I'm sad. That's so sad he wasn't prepared for the country life. He was a city rabbit.
02:46:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Oh.
02:46:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know.
02:46:34 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Little. Johnny Wallet was his name, dogs would have probably finished him off.
02:46:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who knows? Who knows Could have been. I think it was a hawk. We have a lot of hawks around here. Most likely, yeah, yeah, our show today brought to you. Thank you for being here, folks. We hope you enjoy this discursive presentation. Jennifer, you know, sometimes when there's only two people it's more discursive because it's like it's just fun. We're just hanging out chatting.
02:47:09 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's so good to have you, jennifer pattison tooey.
02:47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, is the two-e the fireman or the pattison the fireman? The two-e is my husband's name, patrick is my medicine's your main.
02:47:15 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Are you any relation to robert pattison? I wish no. He's got an n in his he's patinson, he's patt Pattison. We do think we might be related to the two E's from the blind side though. Oh those guys, yes, who aren't very popular, right now yes. Not so popular anymore. No, no, but distantly related, because it's unusual spelling.
02:47:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is an unusual name. It's O-U, not U- spelling.
02:47:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It is unusual time it's O, u, not U, and is he from that area?
02:47:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cause they were from Mississippi, right.
02:47:47 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
He's from. He's from Nevada originally, but his family, his father, is from Canada, burlington kind of area.
02:47:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know. I know he's from Nevada, because you pronounce it properly, which is probably very difficult for you as a British type of person. That has been drummed into my head.
02:48:09 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Nevada.
02:48:10 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Not.
02:48:10 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Nevada, don't say Nevada, nevada. Yes, I can. It's great to have you, jennifer, and it's great to have you.
02:48:16 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Sam, I'm very, very happy to be here.
02:48:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, oddly enough you seem to be, which is not normally what happens. So good, I'm glad you're here.
02:48:24 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Oh, everybody's always happy to be here.
02:48:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not in the third hour. Usually that's when the teeth grinding begins. Our show today last ad.
02:48:32 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So that's a good sign by the fourth hour. I'll have a different cat here. Yeah, no.
02:48:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You might have new cats, dogs, new chickens, everything new Our show today, brought to you by mint mobile, do I have to say, as a mint mobile customer, I am a big fan and I often wonder why more people don't use mint mobile. I think probably because they don't believe it's as good, could possibly be as good a deal as it is. Or maybe they think, oh, I've got to jump through a lot of hoops, there's a lot of bs. I mean, I thought so when mint mobile said you can get wireless for 15 a month when you buy a three month plan, I said no, what, you know, there's got to be a catch. There's some, you know, upsell on this. No, really, it's true, it really is that easy to get wireless for 15 a month. You know, you can even bring your phone number.
02:49:23
That might be the hardest part is getting the, the old company, the one that's charging you 10 times more, to to leave you alone. I'm moving, I want to break up. You can move your phone number. It's required by the fcc so you port your number over. They will send mint mobile, send you a sim so you can use your existing phone, which means you have to change anything, or you can get a phone from Mint Mobile. That's what I did. I got a very nice iPhone SE for 15 bucks a month and then I got the service for 15 bucks a month. What do you get for 15 bucks a month? Unlimited nationwide talk and text plus 5G data on the nation's best 5G network. So if you have T-Mobile coverage where you are and you're paying 90, 100 bucks a month for T-Mobile, get the same exact service for $15 a month and, by the way, right now, as an introductory plan, all of their data plans, including the unlimited plan, are $15 a month. For the first three months you get high-speed data, unlimited talk and text on the nation's largest 5g network. Bring your own phone, they will. They will send you the sim for free, or you could do an e sim. They use these sims as well. Make it the thing instant. Find out how easy it is to switch to the best, most affordable coverage there is in the country mint mobile three months of premium Wireless service for 15 a month.
02:50:50
Now, to get this new customer offer and your new three month premium Wireless plan for 15 bucks a month, you go to mintmobilecom slash twit, mintmobilecom slash twit, cut your. I know it's hard to believe. It seems like to me. It seems like if everybody knew that you only have to pay 15 bucks a month for your cell phone, why would you do anything else? Cut your wireless bill to 15 bucks a month. At mintmobilecom slash twit $45 upfront payment required. That's $15 per month for three months. New customers on the first three month plan only. Speeds are slower above 40 gigabytes on the unlimited plan. But you know that's a lot of data. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions do apply. Look, the best thing to do go to mint mobile and find out more. Mintmobilecomcom slash twit. We love them. I have to say I love it and I think everybody should use it. Mintmobilecom slash twit. Are we done? We could be. Oh well, do you like your Nintendo alarm clock? You did a story on that, jennifer. Is it really cool?
02:52:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I didn't get to do the story, unfortunately because it was in New York, but my colleague Chris got to go check it out. The Alarmo. Well, I was excited about this because when a few months, a few weeks ago, it's so cute.
02:52:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, look at that, and a big snooze button. That's what I like.
02:52:25 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I don't think that actually is the snooze button. That's what I like. I don't think that actually is the snooze button. I think it should be, but from yes it wakes you up with all different.
02:52:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, that's not a good way to wake up.
02:52:33 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No um there's lots of nintendo themed uh, alarm sounds so like zelda and all sorts of um. You can choose from a huge array, but what's interesting about it and what caught our eye before this launched, actually was it leaked, the FCC specs for the device leaked and it has a UWB radio oh, that is not UWB millimeter wave, sorry. I'm jumping forward to my millimeter wave sensor, which in the smart home, is really fascinating, interesting technology. So it's a radar, basically.
02:53:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why would you need that?
02:53:10 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I know so that was like what is? Nintendo making. We were so excited that it was coming out with something really cool, and then it was like an alarm clock, it's a me, it's a me, an alarm clock, it's me, it's me, an alarm clock. Hey, wake up, I'm here. Everybody have a mushroom. Oh, look, it's a peach. It's so cute. I mean. Smart alarm clocks are pretty fun, though, and Google has one that will track your sleep, so this one will also.
02:53:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the UWB that's what the millimeter wave is Millimeter wave To see your movements. Sorry, it's late yes. I know I'm torturing it, it is. But wait a minute, that giant button. What does it do?
02:53:50 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It apparently is not a snooze button, that's just bad design, but it looks like it should be.
02:53:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it does colors.
02:53:57 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, the snooze. Um well, the idea is that you, the uh millimeter wave sensor, will detect when you move, so you just wave your hand to snooze it, which is also what you can do with. That's better than a button right, so wave your hand and then it will know when you've got out of bed and turn off. So do you remember?
02:54:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have to touch it it should be really hard. It should be really hard, yeah brick on the top.
02:54:24 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, it's super cute, though you could definitely see this in a lot of stockings this christmas. There was an alarm clock.
02:54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should get this benito dick d bartolo talked about on the gizwiz. That would run away from you so so you would it would go off and it would roll off the table and roll around the room, so you'd have to chase it to get it to stop ringing.
02:54:47 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
That's a good alarm clock we're starting to see a lot more use of millimeter wave radar for, for a lot of stuff, including. Is that the thing?
02:54:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they use at the airport. So that, uh, no, oh, I thought that was a millimeter wave scanner.
02:55:02 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I don't I don't think so, uh, but um, there's. There's a bunch of vehicles out now that have millimeter wave radars on the in the cabin of the vehicle to detect if someone is still in the vehicle when you get out, when driver gets out of the vehicle and closes the door, right this is a big issue.
02:55:19 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
has the sienna minivan just came out with this tech? Yeah, the new Toyota Sienna. And also Because people will leave children in the backseat and forget For children, because a millimeter wave is so Children or animals.
02:55:29 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah.
02:55:30 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And it's so precise that it could even detect a sleeping baby from the chest. Rise Under a blanket Under a blanket, yeah, it's so-. And this is why I was like come on, nintendo, you've got to come up with something a little more exciting.
02:55:46 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Hyundai was actually the first one to do it, starting in 2020 on the Genesis, gv70. And now they have it on a bunch of their vehicles. So if you leave somebody behind in the car, or leave your pet in the car, it will send you an alert, um, you know. Or first, when you close the door, after a couple of seconds, it will, um, it'll honk the horn, uh, to let you know, hey, you've left somebody behind. After about 30 seconds, it'll send a text message to your phone, um and uh, eventually it can get. The toyota system will eventually give you an automated call. And when I first saw it demoed a couple of years ago by Toyota, they also had it hooked up to Alexa.
02:56:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know it could put alerts up on your Fire TV in your house if you left somebody behind in the car. This must be a big problem, they're solving right.
02:56:49 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
People must do this a lot. Yeah, You's what what they call uh hot child syndrome.
02:56:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not there's been dozens of fatalities where a child is left, because when you know when?
02:56:54 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
a car is sitting in the sun. It's like a greenhouse, oh yeah and it's really hot even even if the ambient temperature is only, you know, in the 70s.
02:57:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It can that's it can easily get up over 100 degrees inside Tesla. Have a dog mode that air conditions while your dog's in it and then it puts up on the screen. It's okay, the dog is good, there's air conditioning, the dog is fine.
02:57:12 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
That's one of the things you can do now with EVs is you can use that to automatically turn on the air conditioning if you haven't turned it on Right. I have that, I do that. If you haven't turned it on Right, I have that, I do that.
02:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I also have a smartphone and an Aqara smart lock and I can walk up to the lock and it will unlock the door for me.
02:57:30 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Is that what Samsung is doing?
02:57:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
with UWB. That's UWB, isn't it?
02:57:34 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Well, that will be.
02:57:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Samsung doesn't have it yet, but Apple's had this for a while, right, yes, and this is the same tech that's been used in cars. So the smart home and the smart car is. I love my Apple car key, yes, and my BMW, so that's UWB. The only problem is that if I park the BMW near the garage door, every time I walk by it goes beep, beep. It sees me and says you want to go, you want to go somewhere, and that's a little annoying. Let, let's go, let's go for a drive, let's go, let's go for a drive so yeah, so what's happening?
02:58:06 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
what's happened here which is really interesting, um is well in my space is that, uh, samsung, so apple, has had home key for years now, which is nfc tap to unlock so it's nfc, it's not uwb not uwb yet, um nfC. Tap to unlock. So your phone has an NFC radio in and your door lock, your Aqara door lock, has NFC Right and you can tap and you can do your watch too and it will unlock the door. I love that.
02:58:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's so easy. I love that. It's a great feature of the smart door lock. Should I worry about that?
02:58:38 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, because it's just local connection. You have to touch, so yeah, you have to be right there, you have to have, and so you can have it set so that you have to put a passcode into your phone or bio recognition.
02:58:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's face, yeah, right Fingerprint.
02:58:52 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Or you can turn that off if you want to be quicker but slightly less safe.
02:58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, it's a me. Mario open the door, can I do that?
02:59:00 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That's coming. I would love that Voice recognition will be here sooner than you expect, really.
02:59:07
Yes, that I would kind of worry about, because there is a facial one right now, too, that scans your face, but this was happened, so Apple's had this for a while, but you can only use it with an iPhone and you also have to have like an Apple Home Hub in your house for it to work. Well, it gets complicated, but you need an iPhone. Android has not had any sort of similar capability, and Samsung announced at its developers conference a week and a half ago that it is going to be compatible with a new standard called Aliro, which is like Matter, but for smart door locks, which matter is the new smart home wait a minute, don't smart door locks have matter?
02:59:50
yes, but this is so we need a new standard so it's access control, so it's for everything. So cars, doors, doors to your apartment, doors to your office, um, you could use it for apartments, like apartment buildings, so it's a l-i-r-o which means um access in esperanto you know I have to say that's.
03:00:14 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
One thing I feel is missing from my life is more more protocols I just want everything in esperanto of course you remember the old line about you know, when there's 15 standards and a bunch of engineers get together to create one uniform standard. You end up with 16 standards. 16 standards, yes. X, k, c, d.
03:00:32 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
The X T C C comic yes, but this will basically mean that Galaxy smartphones next year will have the same capability, similar to HomeKey, which is where you can tap your phone or watch to a door lock and it will unlock, and so this is becoming much broader because, as we said, it's been limited to home key and nfc, and alero is creating a new standard that will involve both nfc, bluetooth and uwb, and this is the technology that is in your BMW, leo, and it's really precise location.
03:01:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it. It's really amazing so. I had it. I had something that was supposed to be like it in my uh, my Ford Mustang Mach-E and it was terrible.
03:01:18 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
It was I was using Bluetooth LE. Yeah, and it was not good.
03:01:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Bluetooth bad in smart home, sorry just bad Bluetooth.
03:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bad Bluetooth is good for like a very simple like are we talking Esperanto. Now UWB, uwb is taking it up a notch.
03:01:34 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
You won't even have to tap. It will automatically unlock your door for you just as you walk it but no, if you're headed its way, it will know exactly because it's directional.
03:01:44
It will. So if you're walking around inside your house, it's not going to unlock your door. It's only as you walk towards your house with your smartphone or smartwatch and it will be able to unlock your door for you automatically. Unfortunately, there are no door locks that are compatible with this standard yet, but apple, amazon sorry, apple samsung and google are all working on a lero, just in the same way. They were all working on matter, along with all the major lock manufacturers. So, like abloy, um, you know, schlage, all of car and the uh chip manufacturers as well.
03:02:18
So, um, this is, this will be the future of how we I would love for my house to be as easy to get into as my car and it will be everywhere
03:02:27 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
walk up to the door, it just opens up and like that leo, do you remember ces 2020 when, uh, we visited the ces or the? Uh, the nxp booth oh yeah, is one of the companies that makes uwb yeah, yeah, yeah the, the guy we we met with there, uh, that we filmed the video. We remember he was walking around the booth this crowded booth and we could see exactly where he was on the screen. We were tracking him and as he walked up to us, you could see him on the screen.
03:02:56 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It has very precise and it's going to be really interesting.
03:03:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's kind of radar, right, is it like?
03:03:01 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
radar? No, it's not, it's radio frequency, but it's, it's kind of radar, right? Is it like radar? No, it's not, it's radio frequency, but it's a wide band, ultra wide band.
03:03:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's about typically between five and six gigahertz, I think, is the frequency, so it's like a microwave oven. It's a short distance.
03:03:17 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's a very short distance, short local, so again, in terms of security, you have to be there and yeah, so it's going to be. It will replace, in theory and it could go beyond phones and watches, you know any electronic wearable device, so say headphones or smart glasses, you know, could eventually be the key to your house, your car, your office, any place, you know, your gym even. I mean this is very much in the future, once the access control companies kind of get on board, but that's what it's moving towards. So it's going to be quite interesting. But the short term, samsung Galaxy smartphone users will soon have an Apple Home Key-like way of using smart door locks.
03:04:05
And, as you say, leo, you've used it and it's a great experience, I think being able to do that, rather than even just getting your key out or even a PIN code.
03:04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who does a fingerprint? And I have a PIN code.
03:04:16 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Fingerprint is the other option.
03:04:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's all sorts of ways to do it. Who's the best door lock? Do you have an opinion? I do.
03:04:22 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I published a very extensive ways to do it, but I who's the best door lock? Do you have an opinion? I do Um. I published a very extensive guide on this recently. The door locks, smart door lock space is very interesting. There's a lot happening with a Lero and also it's one of the sort of fastest growing spaces in the smart home. Because, you know, it's a use case that everyone can kind of understand, like everyone's lost their keys, everyone has been locked out of their house at some point or wants to let you know someone in to feed their cat. Um, and it's. You know it's a lot of access. Access control, being able to control your smart front door, is something that you don't necessarily need to have a whole smart home to do or to want to do Um, but it's very useful. So Yale is one of the um.
03:05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a podcast you did recently. Oh, no, not recently.
03:05:07 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No, that was 2022.
03:05:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Two years ago, oh, it'd be fun to listen to that and see how we've come along, how it's changed. I did do a.
03:05:13 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Verge cast with about a week ago all about smart locks. Sorry, I should have dropped that link in, but Yale has some really good options. They have all the different. There's so many different ways you can get into your door Fingerprint, homekey, z-wave connectivity. They also have Auto Unlock currently, which isn't UWB. It uses a different technology that's not as reliable, but it's still pretty magical when it works. Because they bought August. Do you remember August?
03:05:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Smart Lock, yeah, august.
03:05:44 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, so Yale and August are the same company essentially now, and so they took that technology, that auto unlock technology, so you can again. It uses Bluetooth, gps and Wi-Fi and an app. So you know many potential fail points, as opposed to one direct radio communication, which is what we're going to get with UWB. But it does work if you have good cell service Wi-Fi and GPS at your home, which I don't, so it doesn't work for me. Oh, but so Yale has the Yale Shirt 2.
03:06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How are we talking to you then?
03:06:15 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I have good Wi-Fi in my house.
03:06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you mean outside.
03:06:18 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Walking up to the yes, that's the. You see, the smart home has not really extended outside yet.
03:06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point. Most of the time, your Wi-Fi is enclosed in your house.
03:06:28 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, as soon as you get out of the house, you lose.
03:06:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it doesn't go through the walls very well.
03:06:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, and I don't. We don't have good cell service where I am because there's a soccer field and they wanted to put a cell tower in and all the soccer parents complained, so Not my backfield no siree.
03:06:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is that why UWB is a good solution, because it doesn't require Wi-Fi.
03:06:47 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Right and it doesn't require any external radios. Gps.
03:06:51 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Yeah, it's just direct.
03:06:54 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And then there's a lot the Acara locks I really like. They're much less expensive. They're a good sort of entry-level smart lock, but also that's what I'm using really interesting smart home connections. Do you know that you could have? If you, if you've got the acara video doorbell and the video door lock as you approach your house, you could have your home, your doorbell, sing like a theme song for you.
03:07:19 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I need a theme song that you I need a theme song.
03:07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be great.
03:07:23 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
That would be kind of fun.
03:07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like maybe.
03:07:27 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
And then Lisa can have her own.
03:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have a very crazy front door because I have a Ring Elite doorbell and a Kara Lock and a Ubiquiti AI camera.
03:07:41 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Wow, yeah, they don them talk to each other and none of them ever will.
03:07:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry it's a bad design and plus it makes thieves go. We should, we should break in here. This is good, so look at all this juice it probably has a lot of cool stuff in the juicy in here the verge cast podcast you just did, october 1. Your front door is the key.
03:08:03 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Key to the smart home.
03:08:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To the smart home Key, yes being the key word.
03:08:09 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
I must say we were listening to that in the car. My wife was in the car with me and nothing that was said in there convinced her that she wanted anything to do with any smart home stuff. She's smart.
03:08:23 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Oh, I'm sorry, I think she's smart.
03:08:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think the smart home seems like a great idea. I always think of stacy's husband, andrew, and the trials and tribulations he goes through just to turn on a light or to raise the blinds. It's a nightmare it's.
03:08:41 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's not in a great space right now, but there is a lot of potential to get there I have high hope.
03:08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have caseta switches, lutron caseta switches everywhere I mean, I literally have more than 100 wi-fi devices on my network yeah, that's not good so that's what?
03:09:02 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
well, that's the problem. When you have all of those devices on one network, it causes the problem, like lag, and Caseta, though, uses its own bridge, which you probably have.
03:09:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have those bridges all over the place.
03:09:12 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
No issues with your but, yeah, the smart home is disjointed right now. But this is, you know, this is all changing with with matter and with Apple and, as I think we we were going to briefly mention, Mark Gurman had a piece.
03:09:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I forgot about it. Did you read it?
03:09:31 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I did In the break. I said but it's all. He's bringing it all together. He says Apple's very interested in this space. Very, very. The problem is that when they got rid of this, their standard smartKit right.
03:09:45
Yeah, so they got rid of the smart car and they're now moving to the smart home is basically what I've heard, like all the engineers, everyone that was working on the car. Now all the resources are going to the home, which could eventually lead back to the car, as we've discussed, because it all works together or should do at some point. But yes, they have HomeKit, which is proprietary and only works on Apple devices and was very limited for the types of devices you could use because they have very strict privacy and security requirements that they did loosen up over the years, but it has meant that there are just not that many compatible Apple Home devices.
03:10:23
It's now Apple Home. Homekit is sort of the infrastructure, but Apple Home is the ecosystem. They've kind of rebranded it and they're moving towards a new Home OS, which is what Goeman was reporting today.
03:10:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what was interesting, yeah, yeah.
03:10:37 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
The TV OS and because right now there isn't a Home OS tvOS and because right now there isn't a home OS, your home pods and any devices you use in your smart home for Apple are on tvOS. It's kind of or home pod OS. It's sort of odd. So the idea is it's all going to come together as to one new Apple home operating system, which and then they're going to release, finally, hopefully, a smart display, which we've been waiting for for a long time, and that's what he's talked about, and I've written a piece, um about the many different uh, I'll drop it in the chat the many different rumors around what they're going to come out with, including a robot rotating arm, um, that will have a screen that's going to cost over a thousand dollars and it's just too, and I will buy four of them because I am a complete idiot.
03:11:26
But what's interesting is that Apple is helping push forward the smart home to be interoperable and universal for their own reasons, which is to have more devices that work with HomeKit, with Apple Home. But they basically donated the infrastructure and the way that you know, their whole HomeKit ecosystem to Matter and that's essentially what Matter was built on with input from the other companies. No-transcript, very cool devices on your front door that all do really interesting things but do not talk to each other. And if they all talk to each other, eventually you could have a point where Ring has just come out with this video history search, where you can search for specific activities, like I could search for my cat if he's gone missing.
03:12:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can say you used your Ring doorbell to find your cat.
03:12:59 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Right, and if you had the point where you have that type of intelligence in your doorbell, it could say, oh look, here's a amazon delivery driver, um, and it could unlock the door for right the delivery driver and they have a system for that, now amazon
03:13:15
I use the amazon key feature and they go into my garage but that's all using the cloud and this could all be local and this is one of the great things about matter is that it's all a completely local protocol edge in your home and not cloud dependent as we've seen from earlier stories in this episode like robots that connect to the cloud. There are some downsides to having your house connected to the internet.
03:13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No kidding, that's where Apple really shines is they are very privacy focused.
03:14:00 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
So and this should bring a lot more, and it already has a lot more devices. Work with Apple Home through Matter. Oh, I hope so. Now we've seen more and more every day, and smart door locks will be the next one with Aliro, I can open my. What is that?
03:14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that cool. This is a.
03:14:19 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Oh, those are your, hunter Douglas blinds.
03:14:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you recognized it.
03:14:24 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, itouglas blinds. Oh, you recognized it.
03:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, once it turned over I'm opening the windows right now and, very nice, the sun's shining. Jennifer pattison I just found out too he is esperano for smart. Thank you so much for being here. Really great, I want to have you back and talk more about, uh, the home automation stuff.
03:14:41
I think this is really interesting because really it feels like the companies have no incentive to work together. They like being a silo and they want you to have to buy all apple or all samsung or all whatever yes, but you're not, so now they need to make.
03:14:54 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It doesn't work. It's the way to do it. Yeah, it's a tower babble.
03:14:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody's going and nothing works with anything yeah, good good well.
03:15:00 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
I could talk about it with you for a long time, I noticed, so anytime happy to come back.
03:15:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're marvelous. Thank you, jennifer, so glad you were here. You can read her stuff in the Verge. I bet you're glad that you don't work for Wirecutter. Now that Prime Days are twice a year, oh my God. Our hearts and thoughts and prayers go out to all of the poor tech bloggers who had to cover the Amazon Prime days on the 8th and 9th. I know that's a miserable time. You can just relax now with your 18 different animals. Enjoy and enjoy what's left of the chicken now that your teenagers have.
03:15:42 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's probably gone.
03:15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ripped into it. That's right, mr Sam Abul-Samad. Always a pleasure, sam. I'm so glad you could be here with your corgis. You can listen to Sam's podcast at wheelbaringsmedia, and he's also, of course, an analyst for GuideHouse Insights. So if you're not yet a subscriber, if you want to know the latest, that's where to go. Thank you.
03:16:04 - Sam Abuelsamid (Guest)
Sam, my pleasure Always. Good to be here with you, leo, and great to meet you, jen and. I've got some time chatting with you today.
03:16:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it was a perfect show today because I think sometimes three people, if it's three, smart two smart and one and me. Yeah, it's good. It's good, I like it. It works out very well. We do Twitch Sundays 2 to 5 pm, roughly 2 to 5.36.
03:16:28 - Jennifer Tuohy (Guest)
It's 6.30. That's 8.30 in Charleston.
03:16:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I am so sorry. We do Twitch every Sunday afternoon from 2 pm till. That's what they do at the bars right pm till. That's what they do at the bars right till. Dot, dot dot. Uh, you can. That's 2 pm. Pacific, 5 pm eastern 2100, utc. You can watch us on seven different streams.
03:16:50
Of course, our club members get special access. Behind the velvet rope in our club twit discord, lots of great stuff in the club coming up. We're going to do a coffee show on friday. Stacy's book club. A week from friday, uh, the uh micah's creative corner is coming up where you can create something fun. Do your lego or your knitting or your crocheting or whatever you like to do uh your pottery while uh with micah. Uh, the club is a big way that we keep uh survive on the air. Seven bucks, a Add free versions of all the shows, access to the Discord, access to those special events, and it really helps us out. So if you're not yet a club member, twittv slash, club twit We'd love to have you in the club. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show, of course, available at the website twittv slash. Well, it's a long url. Just go to twittertv and click the.
03:17:43
This week in tech. That's probably the easiest thing to do. When you're there, you will see a link to the youtube channel. That is all the this week in tech video shows all not all 1001, because we weren't always video, but a good number. Uh, you can also subscribe. That way you'll get it automatically. It's nice to have it, you know, for your monday morning commute. Uh, just look in your favorite podcast climate for this week in tech and subscribe. We love it when you do that. Thanks for being here, everybody. We made it to 1001 1002 next week. Thank you, jennifer, thank you sam. We'll see y'all next week on twit. Another twit is in the can. Bye.
