This Week in Tech 1004 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. Shoshana Weissman is here from the Sloth Committee and rstreetorg Nicholas DeLeon from Consumer Reports and our futurist Amy Webb. We will, of course, talk about the upcoming election. How much did tech influence the kind of uncertainty of this election? Amy talks about embracing uncertainty with regard to AI as well as everything else A new AI website to help you vote. We'll talk about why Alexa's AI brain is stuck in the lab and Chinese sanctions hitting a US drone maker. That and a whole lot more coming up. Twit is next.

00:42 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is twit this is twit this week in tech, episode 1004, recorded november 3rd 2024. Embrace uncertainty. It's time for TWIT this week in tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. Oh, we have a good panel today. We've been kind of on a roll lately. Amy Webb is back, not just back on the panel, but back from a hundred, several hundred mile bicycle ride through Spainain.

01:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Hi, amy, hey leo, how are you?

01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
happy birthday. When's your birthday?

01:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
uh, it was a couple weeks ago okay, you were celebrating all right?

01:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, happy birthday to you, amy thank you the author of many great books, including is this still your latest? I know you were working on one.

01:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, this machine, yeah brian said, if I start another one, he was going to divorce me. Um yeah, I don't think he's actually going to divorce me, but you know, there's a so you're doing it puts a strain on a marriage writing. Yeah, exactly.

01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CEO of the future today Institute and this is still a very current, timely book the Genesis machine about the biotech, synthetic biology, the biotech revolution that is happening right now, and AI has a lot to do with this, I know.

02:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
AI has a lot to do with that and, interestingly enough, the previous book, the Big Nine so much of what I wrote about almost eight years ago has come true that that book has gone into another printing and has started selling out again.

02:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because it's about AI, how the tech titans and their thinking machines could warp humanity. And the big nine, would you say? It's still IBM, alibaba, microsoft, Facebook, amazon and Google. Are those all still?

02:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I would say so because, yeah, I got some criticism that NVIDIA wasn't in there. Well, back then maybe not. But it's because the future of ai is really not just about the chips or the the code, it's also it's hyperscalers. So at the moment, you still need the cloud to make all of this work right, um, which is why those companies, I think, are still relevant makes perfect sense.

03:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also with us. From consumer reports, our highly regarded consumer reports. Senior electronics reporter, nicholas de leon. It's good to see you Also with us. From Consumer Reports, our highly regarded Consumer Reports. Senior electronics reporter, nicholas DeLeon. It's good to see you, nicholas. Thank you, leo, how are you? You moved from New York to the big great Pacific or Southwest it's not the Pacific Southwest.

03:19 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Born and raised in New York, basically New York City, and then moved out here to near Tucson I'm like 30 minutes north of downtown Tucson.

03:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've gone completely native because you're wearing an Indian blanket jacket. You got the howling wolf.

03:35 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, no, I really like it down here. I mean, I would have to be paid an enormous amount of money to move back to New York again. It's great. Today's a little rainy, unfortunately, but otherwise I love the people, I like the architecture, I love the weather. Obviously it is. It is just a very nice place.

03:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it that you found your bliss Nicholas.

03:56 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
So far so good. Yeah, yeah.

03:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But, nicholas, if you come back to New York you can jaywalk and shoplift, you know, and and that's okay, now you're not going to get.

04:06 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, new york following in san francisco's footsteps, for some reason that's another thing, that none of the the uh the store is here, not none of the? Uh like deodorants are locked off. Everything's open, everything's normal where I live.

04:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty, it's my opinion, if somebody wants to shoplift some deodorant, you should probably let them. I'm just. I'm just thinking. Shoshana weissman is also here our street. She's head of digital media at rstreetorg and, of course, chairman of the sloth committee, which explains the giant sloth looking over her left shoulder. Don't move an inch, hi senator. Shoshana, thanks for having me. It's great to see you, hi Senator.

04:41 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Shoshana, thanks for having me. It's great to see you Likewise.

04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are in the midst of an interesting election here in the US. We have many listeners outside the US who are probably watching with equal interest and a little bit less agita, because I think I can't wait for this to be over, amy. Is it always like this this? I don't remember it being like this before. Is it? Are presidential elections always so high stakes?

05:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think a couple things of are happening. Um it. It certainly feels more like everything related to politics lately is high stakes, and that's most likely. Shoshana probably has more deep insights into this, but my assumption would be that that it has more to do with the amplification and constant stream of tweets and snaps and texts and everything else that's happening. You also have performative politicians. I'm sure by this point, everybody is aware of the choice that one of the candidates for the highest office in the free world made with a microphone that they were in front of that was wild I know what you're talking about?

06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just saw that this morning on TikTok.

06:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Whoa. So I think when you have, when you have performative acts, that makes everything feel much more urgent and of course you've got the. You know there's a lot that's happened with the tech sector and prominent CEOs who have weighed in in ways that they've that we haven't seen before. So I don't know that this particular election is any more consequential than the one, the two previous, but it definitely feels. It feels like this is a momentous time.

06:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does feel that way, but I just wonder, you know, maybe in 1940, when you know Roosevelt was going for the third term, or 1860, when it was you know, we were approaching civil war and Lincoln was running. I mean I imagine there've been other times when the presidential politics has been this weighty Shoshana. You're nodding, are you? Do you study history? Cause I feel like this historian needs to answer this question.

07:00 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I know what you mean. No, I'm I know the history of specific regulations. Otherwise, I'm not as into history as you might think, but it's funny. I feel like 2016 and 2020 felt more intense to me, but I think I personally really worked hard to tune out of the selection because nothing was going to do well for me. Stressing out about it. There's nothing I can control.

07:22
Yeah right out about it Like there's nothing I can control. Yeah Right, so I've tried to like chill out about it, but I've I've wondered too like what people felt like in the past about it. At other like critical points in history, like I, I've often wondered how it felt and I I always try to try to temper myself by thinking back to that kind of stuff. But, um, I'm just not sure that we have enough enough like historical record of of what people were, were thinking like.

07:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Were people farming their land and thinking, oh my gosh, this election is so bad, I hate lincoln wins I'm out of here, I'm going to canada yeah right, you kind of wonder, wonder actually there were people in the south that were thinking that as a matter of fact, yeah, even when I watch old movies on like turner classics, sometimes you get a little hint of it.

08:04 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
there's one I was just watching that I think had to deal with one of the Roosevelt elections and it was just kind of funny to think about that kind of stuff, you know.

08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nicholas DeLeon, you've chosen such a different community and one of the things I notice in this election is that people are very much influenced by their communities, the communities that they're in, is that people are very much influenced by their communities, the communities that they're in. There are pockets, but generally if you're in a blue state, you're in a blue state, if you're in a red state, you're a red state, and there seems to be consensus in that community. Did you notice a shift moving from the very blue New York to somewhat purple Arizona?

08:43 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, I think purple is a good way to describe at least where I am in arizona. Again, I'm about 30 minutes north of tucson. Uh, you see a good split of the signs the trump signs, the harris signs. Uh, I I do find some of the and I don't know if these signs are elsewhere. You see, I see trying uh signs around here that says it literally boils down to like trump good, kamala bad, like that level of like discourse and I don't know, like, how effective these things are.

09:10
I don't know like I get so many things in the mail, so many like snail mail, like, oh, this guy's a jerk, this person's a saint. I'm like I don't. What is the point of this? Like? This seems very silly to me. A lot of the kind of like the structure around this, uh, what I find you wonder how effective it is?

09:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, because if you're in one camp or the other, are you going to be swayed?

09:32 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
because you got a mailer saying your, your person, is a loser and to me, like the, the strangest ones are are not from the campaigns or the candidates they're from, like the packs, from outside of them, like I got something in the mail the other day that was some like oh, we noticed, you haven't voted. It would be a shame if you, if you didn't exercise your right to vote when we, when we follow up next week, we hope to see that you filed your ballot. And I'm like this language is really like threatening.

09:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It would be a shame if we should learn.

10:00 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You have not voted yeah, so I'm like I don't know who this is helping. Like you know, both sides are accusing the other side of like rhetoric and yada, yada, and I'm like you've got to be, because you're in a swing state, you've got to be inundated.

10:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I and we're in california. There's nothing much anybody's going to do to change the results of a presidential election in california. There are other elections going on, but I get four or five text messages a day. I wish apple would give me a little switch that says hey, I've already voted, so there's no point in asking me to change my vote. It's done, I've. I'm not given any more money, it's, but there's no setting for that. So you just have to go, stop, stop, stop. Well, are we you? You raise an interesting question, amy, and the reason I ask you know, is it worse than it's been? Is because it does seem like technology has, and social media and 24-hour news and all this inundation of information that technology has brought us has changed how people relate to what's going on, how people relate to what's going on.

11:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Let me tell you a hypothesis that I have. Maybe I shouldn't say this publicly, but whatever Say it say it You're 30 years old now.

11:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's okay, I'm 30 years old, that's exactly right, all right.

11:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Here's the theory that I have. I've been tracking. I've been curious about this sort of recent spate of pulling the LA Times and the Post. Pulling editorial page endorsements the Times is a separate issue, so we'll put the Times aside, but the Post, to me, was pretty interesting.

11:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because it was Jeff Bezos who bought the Washington Post. I was talking to somebody the other. Somebody the other day said Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post and I said, well, yeah, everybody in my area group knows that, but I guess in the real world people aren't really quite aware of that. So he made them aware, my you know.

11:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I've been trying to figure out. It was pretty late in the game and that was a strange. That was was a strange move from my point of view for him. I've been thinking about Elon Musk and if you separate what he's been saying on Twitter from how what he's been doing leading up to the election and by that I mean offering a million dollars, you know the basically the lottery system for people signing the pledge or whatever I started thinking about the companies and the holding companies and I a lot of the tech companies you know had their earnings calls last in the past week, so I was looking through, you know, paying attention to all of that. Aws is so Amazon is a company's biggest revenue driver is not amazoncom, it is AWS by a significant margin and aws is cloud services right and their primary.

12:50
Their largest contract is the us government um and spacex you know same thing us government same thing. And spacex is recently like this was announced a couple of days ago, or disclosed, I should say um going to be building new types of satellites for dod, department of defense. So is it plausible that, um, you know, if harris wins, whatever, it's no big deal um, theoretically unlike the other guy, she's not going to punish.

13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I was going to say. Campaigned against correct.

13:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So if, if she wins, and if that, if these editorials had gone forward, my my sense is that lists are being kept and is it plausible that right you know if trump wins in a trump administration, there would be it would be problematic for your and would there be a potential like a real threat to those contracts? Spacex I'm not sure who steps in at that point, because Blue Origin potentially would be the other, I guess and Boeing?

13:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, when Bezos it said, when Bezos pulled that endorsement from the Washington Post, that very same day Trump had a meeting with Blue Origin. Now Bezos says oh, I didn't know about that.

14:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
He probably didn't. He's far removed, but I could see you know it would be that the transformation process is, I think, probably technologically implausible at this point. A giant migration from AWS to Azure or to Google?

14:20
Cloud, but I could see siphoning off. Or to Google Cloud, but I could see siphoning off. And so back to your original question. If I think about FDR or some of these other critical moments in history in the US, I'm curious to know if there was another time that we weren't under some kind of crazy economic stress where a couple of business leaders have had this much influence in the results.

14:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, did Carnegie or, you know, Standard Oil, did Rockefeller have this kind of influence on?

14:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Probably actually. Yeah, my assumption is at that point, but that's also a good analogy to where we are right now with the state of technology advancement. And you know, if you think about that original moment in time when the railroads were being built and this moment in time when all of the advanced tech and deep tech is really scaling, you know it's somewhat analogous.

15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, look at somebody like Tim Cook. Tim is the model of a modern major CEO who plays both sides adroitly. He was in China at almost exactly the same time. India they announced that India was going to make the bulk of the new iPhones next year. He has both. I'm sure he certainly appeared with Trump when Trump was president. Remember the Texas plant that Apple was opening to build the Mac Pro? And you know Trump made an appearance at that plant with Tim Cook by his side. You know Tim Apple meeting in the White House with other executives. It seems to me he's a very good diplomat in the sense he burns no bridges, he carefully praises everybody, doesn't offend anybody. Isn't that a better model for how a CEO should approach this? Any thoughts, nicholas?

16:26 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It's funny.

16:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, go ahead, go ahead, oh yeah I was just going to say.

16:28 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I think it's more of an ethical model in that. Like you know, I mean regulatory captures a thing, and if companies know they can get a sweet deal through elected officials, they'll definitely try that. And we should blame the elected officials for that. We should blame them for wanting to be courted by industries and wanting to say, like you, we'll work nicely together if you're nice to me and I know that's a big Trump thing but it's childish and you know I've heard of stories in that much smaller scales. But for state reps and state senators where they're like oh you know this bill hurts you, Well, maybe you should consider donating to my campaign, but then if they're whistleblower, then they'll never be able to like do business in that state again. Just like crazy stuff.

17:08
And I see this all over. You know we're right to think about it at the presidential level because it matters and it's big there. But this kind of regulatory capture and corruption is a problem all over and I like that. I think Tim Cook does a little better job where he's just nice to everyone, doesn't really pick sides, and I think that's more ethical. But if we see other CEOs doing the other kind of stuff like it's not right at any level, but you kind of get it. If the elected officials say, hey, I'm open to whoever is going to like back me, it's not how it should work but, like, you kind of get why they end up operating that way to so that they don't become targets, I mean look, uh, elected officials represent their constituency, and that includes companies and ceos as much as you and me.

17:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they have they. I mean, they're representing a constituency, so I'm not exactly saying saying that companies shouldn't weigh in and the politicians shouldn't look to companies. There was a story I think it was in CNN that Andy Jassy, after the assassination attempt on Trump, called to wish him well and Trump said you know, it really made me feel better if you throw some money my way, and I mean that's campaigning. I don't. That's part of the problem is that's how it works in the United States. Politics and money are hand in hand, and we don't seem to have the stomach for changing that, and so it's hard to get angry. When I mean Harris, I think, raised more than a billion dollars after her announcement. It costs more than a billion dollars after her announcement. It costs more than a billion dollars to become a president of the United States. Is that not problematic? Does that not feed oligarchs, the people who really can give that kind of money? Okay, you guys, you're being very smart and judicious, and I praise you.

19:04 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
One thing I will say, though, is that I think there have been studies shown that the candidates that do better with small donors tend to be a little crazier.

19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interesting like RFK Jr. Yeah, yeah, oh, my gosh.

19:17 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Like, exactly Like stuff like that and it's like you know, it's not that I'm not open to campaign finance reform, it's just it depends on, like, what you're trying to solve for and if you're, if you want politicians to be less crazy, I'm not necessarily sure that that's the way to go, because small dollar donors, like guys like rfk jr and and some of the crazier ones, or carrie lake, I think she did better with, uh, small dollar donors and like that, and that scares me. I'm like, ah, you, I get where we're going here, but like, maybe we like try not to incentivize that stuff so much in the system.

19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't. I don't want to turn this into the you know twit politics edition. We try to kind of stay away from politics as much as possible, but I think that there is a nexus, a little bit of a nexus, between tech, tech, big tech and certainly big tech CEOs today and the political order of the day. So I'm really curious what the responsibility of tech is. I worry that it's a sci-fi trope that eventually corporations will run the world right.

20:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, corporations are already running things, but I have a feeling we're halfway there.

20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no things. I have a feeling we're halfway there.

20:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, no, no, I mean I would say that we are. Look, you know, during the Trump administration there were a lot of people that left state, the state department, and they went to work at Microsoft. Microsoft had, you know, has amassed a formidable international, a formidable team of people very well versed in international issues and diplomacy, which was a very, very smart move by Brad Smith, and I think it served Microsoft quite well. I think. If you want to think about the future of government and business, I would look to what's that part of California Leo and maybe Shoshana and Nicholas also know there's that they've been. Some tech folks have been quietly buying land.

21:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, it's just north of us, yeah yeah, north of San Francisco Bay. Is it San Joaquin County? I can't remember the county, but they've been buying up land. They wanted to create a tech mecca which which, by the way, was going to be voted on on tuesday in the area, and they quickly pulled that initiative because they realized they didn't have the votes.

21:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, well whether or not that happens. There are special economic zones now in haiti and in other economically depressed areas around the world where, if you want to do experimentation like biomedical experimentation, that is not legal in the United States. Economically depressed or emerging economies are happy to have tech billionaire money come in. They've created special economic zones where it's possible for you to go Is that a bad thing.

22:01
The point that I'm making is I think, if you were, I'd be curious to know if behind closed doors, it's like a three-sided prisoner's dilemma situation. You've got the government believing that it has all the power because it has the ability to regulate. You've got the tech sector, which is building all of the tools that everybody now relies on, and they're sitting on top of mounds of data. And then you have finance. You've got the street that believes it has all the power because it has all the money, and in reality, no one of those three has complete and total power. Collaborating would be better for everybody, but they each believe that they alone, um are, are suited to make the decisions on behalf of everybody, which you're starting to see play out in many different ways. I mean, if you look at um uh, who is neary oxman's husband, um vc hedge fund guy who was writing letters help me out here I don't know, I'm not come on amy, my brain is melted I did too much writing.

23:11
Today all of the blood has gone to your calves. That's it has. You should see them anyhow um, but but he is, uh, he, he was behind the election of of. Uh say again, bonita, bill ackman, thank you, thank you.

23:20
So ackman um was behind uh extensive campaigns to get college presidents to resign and was successful in a few cases. Right, so there's a center of power, a nexus of power, but you've got, you know, Elon Musk exercising his power in different ways. So I think the issue more is, we don't have. If you go back to like FDR he was my favorite president If you go back to that point in history, we did have trust for the most part in government. There was a singular accountability chain. We don't have that anymore. Things are decentralized, trust is eroded and people are following different types of leaders.

24:03 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, but I think we forget that there were people lots of them who thought the new deal was a horrible thing and the fdr was a commie and there were quite a few people who did not like fdr this has been in the 30s actually, when fdr got elected, there was a fascist takeover, an attempted fascist takeover that's right corporations by like dupont and things like that right right, um, yeah, so that's what that was.

24:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My original question is I'm not sure that we haven't always dealt with kind of this kind of thing, but it feels like, just if you just look at social media alone, uh, that there are tools that have been weaponized out there in ways both by uh, russian disinformation groups, by oligarchs in the United States, to kind of sway public opinion. That didn't exist before and I just worry I'm not one of those people who says social media is ruining our world and especially children, but X has become, as one says, one might say, a political weapon for Elon Musk. He uh, and you know, you, I don't know.

25:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So it's interesting is that what one might say, leo?

25:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
one might say that uh, uh, he, um. It's interesting because I don't think, when I think he didn't I think he made a joke about buying twitter was forced to buy it, right? Uh, he didn't really want it. But then, as the election loomed, I think he suddenly realized well, wait a minute. Uh, he wanted to buy it because he wanted to make dad jokes, I think, but maybe not. Do you think that way back when he was playing 3D chess and he wanted Twitter because he knew how powerful it would be come November 3rd at 2024?

25:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
This is my own opinion. We've talked about this before. I don't think so. I think he got backed into a corner. I think he was being flippant and got backed into a corner. Had to put together financing, bought it. It was not profitable to begin with and now he's stuck with this albatross and well, he's gonna lose money, but he can afford to lose 44 billion.

26:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It isn't only half of. It's his 18, I mean maybe, but that's not so happy.

26:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
He's pretty leveraged, though. I mean he had to use I.

26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't no, you're right, he's borrowed against his spacex and tesla stock and it could crash either stock most likely Tesla if he were to be called to put that money in. I don't know if that's what's worrying him at this point. I also really wonder if tech executives who are choosing sides in this are doing the right thing. Isn't it better to be a Tim Cook? In the old days, uh, you would see companies donate to both parties, hoping that they would that neither party would notice that they'd also donated to their opponent.

26:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Uh, well, sundar has been quiet. We haven't heard anything. Yeah, we haven't heard anything out of.

26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, google's an interesting story, cause 10 years ago I remember people saying google has no uh lobbying arm in washington dc they do now.

27:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
The only person who's been um sort of specific about an endorsement is elon musk, jeff, no, because andreessen horowitz, ben horowitz, has been.

27:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, mark, andreessen has been. There is a group of now my friend jeff jarvis would call them test real billionaires, these billionaires who have this kind of weird sci-fi vision of the future, that what's happened, what happens to our descendants, is more important than what happens to us. And uh and uh, these guys are. I mean, they're really out there, but they're quite a few of them. Uh, the palmer luckies of the world. Um, I think a smart ceo, tim cook, probably mark zuckerberg, I would include there sundar pichai, satchin adela, are staying above the fray while behind the scenes working the the gears right here.

28:01 - Amy Webb (Guest)
If you're the ceo of a publicly traded company, your board absolutely does not want you to come down. Right. Does not want you to publicly say anything at all, which is the correct thing, the correct position.

28:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the right way to do it. You think yeah.

28:14 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, I'd also add in that it bothers me when, like when, when CEOs try to basically, you know, donate to campaigns, come out there for candidates to get government contracts or more government contracts. But it bothers me equally when they advocate for regulations that they know will harm their competitors. So it's funny, some of this works me up. But what worked me up way more was when Sam Altman went before Congress and was like, oh no, regulate me and in ways that he knew would harm other AI competitors.

28:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was regulatory capture right.

28:45 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Oh, drives me nuts, because lawmakers eat it up. They're like when has someone ever asked to be regulated? And I'm like it's such a thing, this is like such a basic thing. Have you not Googled this? Sorry, google, you know.

28:58
Googled this in a bit because, like you see it all the time and it bothers me and I respect when companies you know genuinely want a regulation because they think it'll make stuff safer and you can kind of figure out if you know the area where they're being honest about it, or if they, if they oppose a regulation because it'll stop competition, they're going out on a limb there and I appreciate that. But so much of the time the easiest course of action for them is just to say you know, regulate me in ways that will harm my competitors, I win. I look really good to the elected officials and I won't name all the companies doing this, but a lot of companies do it and it drives me nuts because they're just, they're about like, whatever helps them right now, screw the future and screw their competitors, and then the FTC ends up going after them or their competitors. And I'm like let's stop this vicious cycle and make sure that regulations don't harm competition unnecessarily. Keep people safe. I'm all for that, but, like so much of it, it's just asinine regulatory capture and I see it across areas.

29:58
But man, that's what like. That's what I'm really into. Family guy right now, that's what grinds my gears, you know.

30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what really grinds my gears? Yeah, we had last week Alex Stamos on and he'd written an editorial in the Sacramento Bee saying California should absolutely or Governor Newsom should absolutely not sign the AI regulation bill that had passed the state's assembly and legislature. He did not, he vetoed it. Uh, and stamos was very happy. Uh, some said that you agree, that was a, that that was the wrong kind of regulation oh yeah, oh my gosh, it was just.

30:35 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It was just like regulation for regulation's sake and it was arbitrary but all-consuming. And I like alex st a lot too. I bug him now and then for ideas and he's always very gracious with his time he's awesome.

30:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love him well, you know, I feel like I mean Elon Musk supported it. I'm sure Jeffrey Hinton, a lot of the AI doomers supported it, because it had things like a kill switch so that no AI could be generated unless there was a way to pull the plug on it before it took over the world and it felt a little bit sci-fi-ish. Newsom said look, it's just going to drive AI research out of the state. It's not going to serve any purpose. He says I'm not against AI regulation, but this is the wrong bill and I will work next year with the legislature to come up with a better bill. Amy, you think that was the right point of view.

31:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think. Well, the problem that I've got what I have been saying for a very long time and and absolutely striking out when it comes to convincing anybody to think differently, is that the regulatory structures that exist in the EU and the United States don't work. When it comes to tech, again, like Shoshana probably knows way more about this than I do, so she should chime in, but my totally uninformed opinion is that regulation is inherently a response to something that's already happened. It is not anticipating, because it's very hard to do this unless you build out models, which we do for a living, but you still have to continually update.

32:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you use a lot of AI in your in your work? Now, we always have.

32:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So we've, we've.

32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We were 12 years ago using machine learning to do some of the modeling that was bad, really a bad way to describe this, though I mean you're using computing to look at, to chew on data, to look at trends right, yeah, um, I mean here let me, let me intelligence implies it's like humans. All right, finish your thoughts. Yeah, let me let me. It implies intelligence implies it's like humans. All right, finish your thought. Yeah, let me let me say what I was going to say and then I can talk about that.

32:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, but basically, like, I don't think regulation is the right way forward and I get the desire in California to do something. But that thing, if you regulate, you know you're going to wind up with lawsuits. Every company that you attempt to regulate is going to wind up suing you and it doesn't accomplish what you want. What I would rather have happen is incentivize these companies to make extraordinary amounts of money such that they would be doing bad by their shareholders to make poor decisions. You know they would be doing bad by their shareholders to make poor decisions, and the way that you incent them to make money is to compel them to do what's best for our shared goals for the future. Right, because they're not going to respond positively to regulation.

33:37
But if you create a situation where they're going to make a lot more money, then they have a fiduciary responsibility. They have to comply, like they have to comply. But like, setting up a situation where the big tech, our biggest companies, make even more money is not something I know that everybody is thrilled about. So we've been using machine learning. I have repeatedly, multiple times, built like clones of myself and trained it to answer things.

34:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No kidding. Um, yeah, I actually. How do you train it? Do you give it your writings or um, in like 20,.

34:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
God, what year was that? 2016, maybe? Um, I built a chat bot of myself and deployed it at something called the online news association conference, which was like I've spoken back in the day.

34:23
Yeah, yeah, yeah um and I, as I was talking about emerging trends, I said you could ask. I had called it akira. It was, uh, meant to be non-gendered, um and ask whatever questions you want, and I had I built it using pandora bots and some other stuff and, um, anyways, it was more of an experiment for me, uh, versus it being a tool for the people who were there. Um, this group of journalists like these are journalists who should be, um, behaving better. Um, I'll ask what? What are you wearing? You know like? Who do you like?

35:01 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
who do you? So they were asking totally inappropriate questions.

35:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God, and.

35:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I had programmed it to respond with like hey, this is our future and this is not a good way to train the systems that we're all going to be interacting with soon.

35:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyways, that's nice. Yeah, my friend Kevin Rose says always be polite, always say please and thank you to AIS when you're talking.

35:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is being polite. I always say please and thank you to AIS on your team. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is being polite. Part of it is also, like you know, there's so much misinformation at this point that's baked into these things A classmate of my daughter's. So I'm I don't know what I was doing yesterday, but I get this email forwarded that my daughter had forwarded to her from one of her classmates that said I saw your mom Tik TOK video or a YouTube video or something so, and it's a picture of me. So I'm looking at the video. It's some guy who is talking about interesting last names and the job that the people went on to do. So we're going through all these people and then it gets to my name. So it's a picture of me.

36:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's Amy Webb, all these people, and then it gets to my name, so it's a picture of me.

36:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's amy webb. Uh, you know webb spiders on the web. Oh, she founded the british tarantula society. What? And? And so I was like, hey guys, this is a good, I email my daughter and her friend.

36:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what chat gpt said?

36:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
so I was like this is a good opportunity to remember that it's really important to check your sources. I am neither British nor the.

36:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm kind of freaked out by spiders, that's hysterical, but it is the case that Shoshana Weissman is chairman of the Sloth Committee, so I hope to chat. Gpt knows that much. I want to take a little break. I hate getting political. I feel like it's on everybody's mind right now and I really do wonder how much uh the world has changed because of all these new technologies, or if it's just something that we've always uh gone through in the past. I and I don't know, know, I feel like, uh, my biggest fear is that people get so overwhelmed that they decide not to participate, that they say, yeah, you know, it doesn't matter, uh, and it's too confusing and everybody's at each other's throats and I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna put my head down, I'm not gonna vote, I'm not gonna participate, and I completely understand that I feel that way all the time. Vote, I'm not going to participate, and I completely understand that I feel that way all the time. But I hope that you will all participate and get to wear the red, white and blue Yovote badge. That's the badge of honor. We're going to take a little break.

37:35
Amy Webb is here futurist, author of some great books, including the newest, the Genesis Machine, and I hope your husband relents so we can get some more books out of you. She's also the CEO of the Future Today Institute, nicholas DeLeon, who is the senior technology reporter Electronics. Now, did you have anything to do with that title? Should it be technology?

38:00 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I believe. Technically, you know, my HR literal title is Senior Electronics Reporter. So electronics is fine. It could be tech, you can put whatever you want.

38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It feels a little dated Like yeah, we only let him do. Timex watches and remote controls.

38:17 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Well, I'll be doing coffee machines shortly, so my beats are expanding.

38:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have some input for you, Nicholas. They're very technical right now.

38:26 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I know less than zero about coffee. It's going to be very exciting.

38:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll hook you up with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. He is the king of coffee machines. He got me to buy two in the last three months.

38:38 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Really.

38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I like them both for different reasons. Yeah, it's a big topic right now. Just ask Amy Webb what she had for breakfast.

38:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What's your coffee machine?

38:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am now using a Breville Oracle Jet, which is the newest Breville, and it's very automated. It's not like a Marzocco where you have to tweak everything.

39:01
It's too much time I just want to push a button and get really good coffee. And he had also recommended and actually I really like it that from ninja, who's famous for making weird appliances. Like I just saw an ad, they're doing a slushy machine, but ninja makes a very good coffee maker for only 500. The cafe looks and it actually makes very credible not just espressos but regular coffee, coffee, drip coffee, ice coffee and it's surprisingly good. So it has a lot of the features of the Breville. I have a Jura E8. The Juras are very nice, they're great.

39:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You can technically have it make the milk drinks for you, but it's challenging to clean, so I have a separate little Nespresso swirly thing there. Nicholas, your, your reviews.

39:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some stuff we just wrote for you, nicholas. Yeah, no, it's become a hot topic, a very hot topic these days. Also, here's Shoshana Weissman. Who. What's your coffee preference, shoshana?

39:58 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
You're gonna you're gonna all judge me really hard. Nescafe so I was in Patagonia a little back and their Nest Cafe is amazing. So I'm like you know what? It's cheap, I can pack it, it's the same everywhere and it'll save me money, so I have instant coffee every day.

40:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, okay, you're disqualified.

40:18 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, I understand, I don't blame you. But they have different kinds, like they have this Colombian one I have now, and they have different kinds, like they have this colombian one I have now. I'm sure it's good nut one and I'm sure the original is okay, but the I'm getting into the fancy nest cafe oh, very fancy, very nice.

40:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Joshanna is, of course, the head of digital media at rstreetorg, and we are glad to have all three of you. Our show today brought to you by bit warden. I love Bitwarden. I'm a firm believer that anything having to do with crypto and with security should be open source, because then you can inspect it, you can make sure that there's no back doors in it, that it's doing what it says, and that's Bitwarden. It's the open source password manager that offers a cost-effective solution that could dramatically improve your chances of staying safe online, and that's more important now than ever, because it's a big holiday, shopping time, right? People are going out, uh, well, they're doing it on the web, they're going online, they're going to, uh, for you know, black friday and cyber monday, and they're going to be. Look at these websites. I know, I know I see myself doing that and I have to tell you, the bad guys know this, and so one of the things they do is impersonate legit websites. So, bit warden, how did bit warden help you? It can. It will prevent you from filling in your password on a site that looks to be real but is not so if you go to amazincom instead of amazoncom and it asks for your password. And, by the way, they're very credible. They look exactly like the real thing. Bitwarden will say not going to fill it in. And now they've announced the expansion of that inline auto fills not just passwords anymore, you can also, with the bitwarden browser extension, use it for credit cards identities and even pass keys. Same Same benefit, though it prevents you from filling in fields that are not secure. It enables a more secure interaction with web forms for payment details, for contact info, for addresses and more. It protects you when you go out online shopping. With Bitwarden, you get unparalleled SSO integration. This is great for businesses. Very flexible, you can quickly and easily safeguard all business logins using your single sign-on security policies fully compatible with SAML 2 and OIDC, and Bitwarden, of course, ensures smooth integration with your existing solutions. So I mention that because Bitwarden's great for individuals, bitwarden's great for businesses, it's great for everyone. So thousands of businesses, businesses including some of the world's largest organizations trust bit warden to protect their online information. And because bit wardens open-source, they know it's it's, you know, completely secure and reliable, regularly audited by third-party experts. And because it's open source is another benefit it's free for individuals, and free forever for unlimited passwords on all the devices you use iOS, android, mac, windows, linux and that's including passkey support that's part of it and hardware key support. So you get all the benefits of bitwarden for free. And the reason I think that's important is I think there are a lot of people who don't use a password manager because they don't want a subscription.

43:24
They don't want to pay. A lot of people who don't use a password manager because they don't want a subscription. They don't want to pay for it. I know you use a password manager because you're smart, but tell your friends and family who I know and we all have them are still using the same password on every site, a password they made up with their dog's name and their mother's maiden name and their birthday. Those are not secure passwords and it's really dangerous to reuse passwords. Bitwarden will help them stop doing that at no cost.

43:47
Switching to Bitwarden is very easy. It only takes minutes. They support importing for most password management solutions. So if you're not using Bitwarden and you're interested, I would highly recommend it. I switched a few years ago. Steve Gibson, our security guy. He's also a Bitwarden fan.

44:03
You can get started with Bitwarden's free trial in business of a Teams or enterprise plan or, as I said, get started for free across all devices as an individual user. It's free forever. I said, well, are you ever going to rug pull that? And they said, no, we're open source, we can't, somebody would just fork it. It will be free forever. Bitwardencom twit. That's bitwarden b-i-t-w-a-r-d-e-n. Bitwardencom slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting uh this week in tech. We thank you for supporting us by going to that address. So they know you saw it here. Thank you, bitwarden. Bitwardencom twit talking about ai a story in bloomberg saying amazon's ai based alexa is stuck in the lab and won't be revealed. They had hoped to show it when they did their kindle reveal last week but according to a bloomberg, it's not ready. Uh, the beta, beta version they had hoped to ship this year. Uh won't be out at best until next year. Is that good news or bad news? Uh, nicholas, do your, your real people, use these voice assistants? Yeah?

45:21 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I was just gonna say, when I was at vice, uh, several years ago, we did a story on uh, one of the echoes, or the alexa it. You know how to set up skills, how to make your own skill. It was like the top rated story of the day. So I was like blown away at the, at the, the demand for information about alexa. Back then that was 2016 or 17. I don't, I feel, I feel like it's a little bit of a fumble, to be honest, like when, when they first came out in 2014,. Uh, well, I remember initially being like is this even a real device? But they seem to like plateau, like I have a bunch, we have a bunch in the house. We use them literally just to like turn off, turn on lights and maybe set timers every now and then.

46:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're glorified kitchen timers for most people.

46:05 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah. So I feel like you know, as like future looking as they were 2014 when the first one came out, they very quickly kind of plateaued. It's like okay, they do this, and so it must be very frustrating. If you're Amazon, hey, we developed this, you know this tech and now ChatGPT and so forth are kind of eating our lunch. Chat, gpt and so forth, they're kind of eating our lunch how did that happen?

46:27 - Amy Webb (Guest)
uh, yeah, I can imagine it's very frustrating for them. Could I ask you follow up? Oh sorry, yeah, please. Well, so on the one hand, in some ways, amazon amazon has has had a full suite of ai tools that they themselves use to help build their own products and services that are very, very impressive. And on the consumer-facing side of things, why do you think? I don't know? I guess I'm curious, nicholas why do you think consumers Were they freaked out by it? Is there a brand image problem, just like? Why? Because the devices are really cheap, and there was a time a couple of years ago when Microsoft was feeling very, very far behind the eight ball on this one and was trying to release a sub $50 product of their own to market.

47:10 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Which failed. That was consumer facing.

47:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Cortana.

47:13 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
So just yeah, what do you think? Amazon?

47:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
says there's 500 billion Alexa enabled devices.

47:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, I mean, that's just not.

47:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Echoes, though, that's toothbrushes and toasters and microwave ovens, but that's a. Not. Echoes, though, that's toothbrushes and toasters, microwave ovens, but but that's a lot half a billion I mean a ton of hotels bought um alexa devices, so there are lots of rooms.

47:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So that's that, and I think there's a lot of them in in uh, in china, right, aren't there tons of marriott properties that have? I could be wrong on this, yeah, yeah so that some of some of those devices are like hotels. But just curious why do you think people didn't buy them?

47:47 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, I don't know. My sort of recollection is these sort of voice assistants, whether it's Alexa. We're saying, and I'm sorry to the folks they just triggered everything, all these little services I apologize.

47:57
All these services we all know the names. It's a tech that you know. It feels like tech was kind of struggling Before AI kind of hit maybe two years ago, when ChatGPT really blew up, I feel like tech was searching for like the next it was VR, it was crypto, it was these digital voice assistants. It was kind of like moving from like thing to thing for the next big thing after social media or after mobile. I just think these things are limited in what they can do. You know how many times are you going to ask for a timer during the day? How many times are you going to ask for the weather in Albuquerque or whatever? It's like it's a neat toy, but like it's not going to like transform my life in the way that the iPhone did, for better or worse, you know, back in the day. So it's, they're, they're useful tools, but like useful in the same way that like an alarm clock is useful.

48:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like it works and you know okay, great you know, I uh, when somebody asked me some years ago probably 10 years ago now or maybe maybe less, but uh, what new technologies? I was excited about. I get that question on a regular basis and uh, at the time I said, oh, I think voice is going to be the next new interface. I think a lot of us thought that, that the new interface for computing would be voice. For some reason it's proven very disappointing to people. I don't think I don't. It might possibly be. I know what you're asking, amy. Are people paranoid about having a microphone in their homes? And some people are for sure. I talk to people all the time and say, oh, I would never have an alexa or a google assistant or a siri in my house listening to me, but I think for the most part people just didn't find them that useful. Shoshana, do you have a voice assistant listening to you?

49:41 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I do. It freaks me out when they like respond back. I do have a I don't want to say its name enabled iPad or not. Ipad like tablet, so I can watch TV on my 40 degree inclined treadmill, which will not allow me to watch other stuff on it. So I have that.

49:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute. 40 degree up or down.

50:00 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Up and then six degrees down Whoa. It's so good. That's very steep, I it it's because I trained for the mountains, so it's like perfect. So I have a little tablet on it. Um, because of the it limits what you can do. But what people underestimate is the shabbat observing constituency, who could totally use alexa, and no one's showing orthodox jews how to use it for Shabbat a few years, would it be compliant?

50:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could use it because you're not touching a switch.

50:30 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
So like I think people would be cool with the timer aspect, like how it can connect to things for timers, I use it to change channels on the TV automatically. I said it before Shabbat.

50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was. I should explain. For some time I was your Shabbos koi. I should explain.

50:43 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
For some time I was your Shabbos Koi, yeah exactly, and now I have a robot doing it, which is great oh really. For more traditional Jews. I think they'd be chill with having a heater on or having lights go on and off.

50:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Could I say a word turn on the light, and that would be okay. That would be compliant.

51:04
No, you'd have to set it before, but setting it before is still better than not having it at all you could say hey, a word, turn on the light at sunrise tomorrow, or sunset tomorrow, Right, right, yeah, yeah, exactly Stuff like that. And then it does it automatically. That lets you off the hook huh. Yeah, I guess you could set it up for ovens and for Exactly I'm just thinking about, like I have a Shabbat compatible oven that connects to the Wi-Fi. I've never I don't know how it would work, but I guess it would work kind of like that right.

51:33 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I just tape down the light in my fridge and never untape it, because I don't really care if I have a light in my fridge. But like, if I did care, then I would like want a little device like doing that for Shabbat and stuff.

51:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So just to explain, if you're Orthodox, opening the refrigerator has a little switch that turns on a light, and on Sabbath that would not. You would not, that would be inappropriate, right? You're not supposed to do that Right, exactly.

51:56 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
We can't work, so it's like you can't turn on and off lights. Can't do any work. Basically work. Stuff that creates lighter heat, so candles, or or the oven, or even stuff that doesn't have light if it creates heat in another way, or for its electric. We basically don't do it, but Amazon Alexa, darn it, I can do it. Sorry, I hope it doesn't make the noise.

52:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's okay. Yeah, no, we like, I know people.

52:19 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
it bothers me because I have an employee by that same name and it like really stresses me out when I hear it in the background, I need to change the name. But like why is no one marketing A to Orthodox Jews? Like that's a huge you should.

52:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Do you know who Mordecai Lightstone is?

52:34 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yes, I love him.

52:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So, like he's an old friend, my assumption is like he would be on top of all of this Right Like, yeah, why isn't he doing?

52:46 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
No, I'm kidding, it's not his job, kind of is his job and also for, like other other people with disabilities who, like, could benefit from this kind of stuff. Like I mean, it's, the automation is amazing. I kept switching back and forth between King of the Hill and Alfred Hitchcock presents on Shabbat without having to press the button, and that's like life changing for me, so I don't have to sit through late Simpsons, which I hate watching. It's like perfect.

53:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one anticipated these problems back in the days of the old Testament. They hadn't really. Or whatever the Torah, they hadn't really.

53:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So again, regulations, regulations don't work in the work, like it just doesn't work in the era of uh technology, like, like the torah, the whole thing, the bible, it's a bunch of regulations it doesn't work.

53:30 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
yeah, I love it yeah, there's no r street for the bible, though I don't think I don't know, I do kind of nerd out that way on torah though, like I'll go like full, like, like constitutional on torah, but we can have original intent because god's intent matters. But like, but then I'm like, okay, I'll violate the spirit of it, but who knows, exactly what God's intent was right.

53:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly. There's a lot of interpretation. For instance, I understand the electricity on and off isn't I mean, obviously there wasn't electricity in the time of the Torah but it's creating and destroying right.

54:03 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
But when it first started, when electricity was first introduced, most Jews thought it was like chill that, like that was fine, because it's like different.

54:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then some rabbi came along and said no, you can't do that.

54:14 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I'm kind of with that rabbi, but I'm not always with the rabbis. I challenge the rabbis and they don't always like it because they're like Shoshana, can you just like go along, to get along every now and then and I'm like no, must understand everything like to its core I just, it's fascinating, uh to me I will jump in leah, if I could, very briefly ashley, as you meant ashley.

54:34 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Uh, she just texted me and she says, as a disabled military veteran, she does find alexa quite helpful around the house to turn on a lot.

54:42
You know she has sometimes his back issues so and we got light switches in weird spots. So it's like, and I have them, of course, because I'm a nerd, I have them hooked up to these services and she finds it very useful in in those. You know why they're, why these things haven't really grown beyond that level that we're kind of talking about. I don't know. But she literally just texted me a second ago and said she loves it and it is very helpful for her.

55:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My elderly mom same thing loves it. For that reason yeah.

55:09 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think some of it is use cases. I think the other thing is, at the beginning you really had to speak clearly, otherwise the systems didn't understand you. My dad's got Parkinson's. He struggles. I would love to fill his you know the place where he lives with voice assistants, but, um, honestly, I think we've tried, and I think he's probably too intimidated to to use them, no matter how many times we try.

55:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, but it's fine in use cases man, I have one of each in every room of my house that seems like a lot leo it seems like overkill it's part of being a tech guy, it's leo for different things.

55:49 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Are they all to kind of catch?

55:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always think I'm going to use them for home automation. You know I have this fantasy, yeah, that I'm going to say good morning, a word, and she's gonna open the curtains and start the coffee and you know, play my news updates and but yeah, I never get around to doing it.

56:07 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
We got smart thermostats over the summer and we'd still just push the button on the thermostat itself. It's like oh, we could use so yes, yes, exactly.

56:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what it is about humans? I think we don't. We feel like light switches are fine, you know. You flip it one way, it goes on. You flip it another way, it goes off. What do you need anything else for?

56:32
Anyway, amazon's struggling with this, of course, because they're losing billions of dollars a year on the A word, even though they're selling them like crazy. They had, in 2016, a thousand employees and basically unlimited resources, but once Amazon realized people were just using they weren't buying stuff, they were just using them for timers and things, and it was costing them a lot of money. So, adding intelligence maybe that's the next way to get people to use these things. Here's a chart from Bloomberg about Amazon's growth with Echo. They had one product in 2014. By 2019, they had 22 Echo-enabled products. It went up and down, but as of last year, there were 18 different products, including eyeglasses, that had Amazon Echo built in, and yet nobody really cares a whole lot about it. Now Panos Panay left Microsoft to go work for this division and it's thought maybe he might bring some uh, excitement, uh to it. I don't know. It feels it really feels like this had such this.

57:52 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
This was an opportunity missed yeah, I will say I'm thinking now I feel like that, uh, the Amazon has also gotten a little chattier over the years. Like it'll just do a notification. It'll say, oh, a book from your favorite author is on sale, don't you?

58:05
hate, that, oh, you're running low on paper towels more yeah it's literally an ad, so I'm like I don't I mean I can't, you know, I I'll just leave it because it doesn't bother me that, but certainly 10 years ago I would have been like this is an outrage, uh, but yeah it's. You could just feel them trying to squeeze more revenue out of the fact that everyone owns one of these things and they just use them to turn on the lights would it change uh your point of view and others about, uh, the echo if it had chat gpt in it?

58:33 - Amy Webb (Guest)
that's that's what they're hoping, I guess so I think that's that would be the killer app at this point, because the the google devices also are really, I think, underperform Anything that is answer-related. You wind up with a string of hyperlinks that isn't super useful.

58:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Siri's even worse. She says well here's what I found on the web about that.

58:57 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Right. So I think once I don't know if it's a chat GPT, as much as it is it could be Claude, it could be whatever else Well yeah, in fact it's probably not chat GPT, I misspoke.

59:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazon has its own models, of course, and according to Bloomberg, a former AI engineer says the Echo teams have lately been leaning on models from Mistral and Anthropic. Amazon has invested $4 billion into Anthropic Amazon, says. Bloomberg writes that no single model works best for every use case and its teams take advantage of multiple LMS through AWS.

59:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, so I would give it. I bet you once, once some of these tools make their way into into devices, I think you'll start to see, like a hockey stick, 40 percent incline, explosion.

59:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, we've been waiting for that, you, you agree, shoshanna, you think a hockey stick explosion once you get uh, some nice uh ai in your, in your echo I don't know, man, I could, I could you know, uh be somebody to talk to. You know it would be nice.

01:00:00 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, just talking on the trip. No, I don't want to talk on the treadmill. It's like I'm already out of breath, like walking up that freaking incline. But they did just add an Amazon video and Netflix. When they add Hulu, I can take the tablet and put it off the treadmill. Right now it's just like the tablet on top of the screen Because you need to touch it. You have to touch it. Yeah, yeah, it feels kind.

01:00:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
touch it, you have to, yeah, yeah, yeah, you want to be able to talk to it there was a fire tv cube that you could talk to and it was connected to all the devices and you you could say, hey, turn on the niners game, and it would know which devices to turn on and all that, which channel to go to, and it would just do it all. It was really great. I don't know why I stopped using it. It's so strange. You think these things seem like they would be so great and then they just I don't know, maybe I don't know it takes a long time, for it takes a long time for us to develop new technology patterns.

01:00:56
That's probably it Huh.

01:00:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
And I think at this point everything is new and novel because we are inundated continuously with things that feel like they've just happened or they've just launched, so unhooking from here. I can give you a great example. I was doing some work with Dell and they sent me a brand new laptop and I'm trying to work.

01:01:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's a co-pilot laptop trying to work.

01:01:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, it's a co-pilot laptop, so I'm just trying to hit control c. Yeah, and every time I go to, like you know, my hand has muscle memory for where that control button is, and instead I'm hitting some ai button. That is the co-pilot button right, so you know if I were how annoying is that right? So this is clippy.

01:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't this clippy 2.0?

01:01:47 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, the laptop is good. It's a very good laptop.

01:01:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you use Copilot?

01:01:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I do not.

01:01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, so rest my case. It's another little.

01:02:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I use Apple OS, so I am.

01:02:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we can talk about Apple intelligence, because that's coming out.

01:02:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, I use Windows occasionally to stay on top of things and you know, but the point was like it would take it's a big ask of me to develop a new habit to not put my finger in that spot.

01:02:18 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
That's what I'm talking about. It seems very simple with you.

01:02:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But we're talking about converting many people into into many new habits, given the breadth of technology that's out there, and I think that's just going to take a little bit more time.

01:02:30 - Benito (Announcement)
Right, it may not have anything to do with the tech itself right actually, I think it also has like similar to to tablets, to touch screens in your car. People used to love that. Now people want buttons back because like, oh yeah, buttons are actually better.

01:02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's, it's reasonable, you can get excited about a new technology and then, as you use it, realize, well, okay, I was excited, but it isn't really life-changing, or worse it's. It's bad, it's negative, like a like button touch screens instead of buttons. That's a very good example. Well, anyway, amazon is struggling and really wants you to start using. If you would start using your echo more and someday maybe, uh, adding a little assistant in there I have high hopes, didn't, weren't their earnings pretty good?

01:03:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, they weren't like oh yeah, oh, you know, oh yeah, everybody's doing fine.

01:03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, aws made a lot of money. As to your point, that's their big driver. Uh, microsoft too that quarterly results were generally very good. The tech industry is not except for one company uh, are you one talking about intel?

01:03:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I would love to because, from my point of view as I don't mean to insert myself, but from my point of view, I don't mean to insert myself, but from my point of view the reason is a lack of strategic foresight. They did not need to take a $16 billion.

01:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They didn't listen to Amy gosh, darn web.

01:03:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, because they did what a lot of companies do During the pandemic everybody needed computers. They're like we can make computers, we're rich.

01:04:03
Yeah, we'll just mass produce chips. So they bought the technology that was good for that moment in time without thinking through what does the world look like, you know, one to three years from now? And if they had just looked over their shoulder what NVIDIA was doing, they might have created a different plan that was more extensible, that didn't saddle them with enormous technical debt, which is the situation that they're in right now yeah, you think it was as recent as 2020, though I feel like didn't they spin up?

01:04:32
no, no there's been a. There's been a long decline, but the the originally it was a billion dollars that they had told, or whatever the original storyline was. We're going to be about a billion dollars short and during that earnings call, the billion dollars went to 16 billion dollars yikes, and a lot of that had to do with the investments that were made in facilities designed to produce chips that were relevant, you know, during 2020 and 2021.

01:05:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's embarrassing for intel to get you know during 2020 and 2021. It's embarrassing for Intel to get you know its competitors offering to buy them. It's embarrassing that they have now been removed from the Dow Dow Jones Industrial Average and replaced with Nvidia. Yeah, who would have thought that right? Um, yeah, I mean, I guess it's sad, uh, but this is the way of the world. Companies rise and fall.

01:05:25 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I love that the government is subsidizing Intel and trying to stop.

01:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
NVIDIA.

01:05:30 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I'm like great job, guys picking NVIDIA Smart move.

01:05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's talk about the CHIPS Act. We're going to take a little break and when we come back we will talk about it. This is Shoshana Wiseman from rstreetorg. Nicholas DeLeon from Consumer Reports Subscribe. I've been a subscriber since 1980. Very proud, since I kind of emerged into the world. It's really worth reading and I look forward to your coffee reviews. That's going to be fun. That's going to be interesting. So do I I mean, are you going to focus more on like a capsule, you know, like Nespresso?

01:06:02 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I guess it's whatever the market takes. I mean, I was just assigned this, maybe two weeks ago, so I'm I'm really are you gonna do that like a lab and test a hundred machines? Uh well, the lab was still in yonkers, so I will be just kind of writing up the reports and things like that maybe I'll test.

01:06:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they are doing that, though they're going to do a lot of tests yeah, yeah, no, they've.

01:06:22 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
They've studied or they've tested coffee makers.

01:06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know how long I hope they get somebody who has, uh like, who really is a coffee connoisseur, as opposed to somebody like shoshana, right, I mean? No, I'm pretty sure our tanks who are doing that. This is nothing like my nest cafe.

01:06:40 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I don't know. People like I mean I, what do I use? I use a lore l-o-r espresso pod, that's kind of what, and I use amazon. So I'm exactly the last person to be a coffee snob. I use amazon espresso pods but I don't know.

01:06:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're cheap. They come in the in boxes, big boxes and nescafe can be used in shabbat, is that right?

01:07:10 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I have figured out how to make like nicer. I figured out like the way to make nice coffee on Shabbat without like a machine. It's kind of like you can make it work. But now Nescafe and it's just easy, it's like great.

01:07:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to keep water hot for a day, but other than that, you have a little hot plate.

01:07:25 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I have a little hot plate that I put on.

01:07:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, and you leave it on.

01:07:28 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, a little hot plate it hasn't burned down anything.

01:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not that you can't have electricity, you just can't turn it on or off.

01:07:34 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yes, exactly Perfect.

01:07:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that hot plate runs all Saturday.

01:07:39 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Sometimes Sunday, when I forget too.

01:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just leave it on all the time. Also with us, amy Webb, author of the Big Nine and CEO of the Future Today Institute. Our show today good to have all three of you, by the way. Our show today brought to you by Lookout. Every company today is in the business of managing data right, and that means every company is at increased risk of data exposure and loss.

01:08:08
Cyber threats, of course, breaches, leaks. Cyber criminals are getting smarter every day, getting more sophisticated. Those attacks, breaches, now happen in minutes, not months, at a time when the majority of sensitive corporate data is no longer inside your building, it's moved to the cloud. Traditional boundaries no longer exist and the strategies for securing that data have fundamentally changed. Data grab lookout stops modern breaches as swiftly as they unfold, whether on a device in the cloud, across networks or working remotely at the local coffee shop, and you know your employees are going to do that. Lookout gives you clear visibility into all your data, at rest and in motion. You will monitor, assess and protect without sacrificing productivity for security. So you can go to the coffee shop too. With a single, unified cloud platform. Lookout simplifies and strengthens re-imagining security for the world that will be today.

01:09:16
Visit lookoutcom right now to learn how to safeguard data, to secure hybrid work and reduce IT complexity. That's lookoutcom. We thank them so much for supporting this Week in Tech and thank you. If they ask, say hey, I heard it on this Week in Tech, lookoutcom. Actually, that reminds me there is a move back to the office, right? Didn't Amazon say we want everybody to move back to the office? How is that going, amy?

01:09:46
I think people are pretty ticked off yeah I don't think anybody wants to go, it's not going well no, um. So that's a really uh unexpected change in the way businesses work I don't, that isn't unexpected. It seems pretty, uh, I mean well, in hindsight, of course it makes sense. But if I'd asked you I don't know before the pandemic five years ago, do you think most employees will want to work at home?

01:10:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
you would have said yes, I think most people don't want to work well, I understand that.

01:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the different Look. I know nobody wants to work. I don't blame you for that.

01:10:27 - Amy Webb (Guest)
If you are, it depends on your circumstance. Child care is very, very expensive.

01:10:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
True.

01:10:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Pet care is very, very expensive. You know, like, I think there's a sense that you can multitask. I think that some people are very good at working remotely my entire team since we were founded, because we have offices, but for the most part everybody has always had the freedom to work remotely. That's true even as we've grown. But we hire a very specific type of person and we built the company around remote work. But you kind of have to have those organic structures in place. I think if you went from having everybody in an office space, um, letting them work remote and then trying to get them to come back, I mean I think that's tough and that's happening at the same time that, like meta, has cut all of its.

01:11:20
A lot of its perks. You know a lot of those uh. It's a lot of its perks. You know a lot of those uh. Perks that used to be attractive are also going away. Laundry you know, free meals, all that. Some of the best food I have ever had in my life was at google and twitter um probably 15 years ago, and I've had michelin starred, you know restaurant meals, but there was some good food. I had salads, both campuses really good.

01:11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And of course it was good for business, because they didn't want employees to walk up.

01:11:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, but you know what? So that's not unique. So there's been some media coverage of this lately as though the tech industry invented this. That is not distracted Anyhow, so that's been at least a staple in some news organizations. Less so today, given the financials and american enterprise institute.

01:12:27 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Uh, for anyone who's eaten their, their food is their food's great, but it used to be free. So it was like great to get invited there for lunch, so then you could have an enormous, delicious free meal. They like have all diet types. They always they always had cake. It was like, oh man, if you, if you had a friend at AEI, you were doing good.

01:12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure Heritage has very good food too.

01:12:49 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I don't think they have a cafeteria like that. We have okay snacks, if I'm being real.

01:12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you work at home, Shoshana, or do you go into our street?

01:12:59 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I work from home. I've always done a lot of work from home and I'm really good at it. The problem is I work too much and they're they kind of have to like tell me to like log off sometimes, which is great for them. And that's interesting, I get extra cred to keep going on unlimited vacation, so it like works out for everyone.

01:13:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And of course, nicholas, obviously you're. You're not in Yonkers, so no.

01:13:20 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I I work from home, we. I mean I've worked from home for most of my career. I've done the math here and there, Like my very first job in journalism was Gizmodo. I started right before the iPhone came out. That was remote. I mean we had an office in Manhattan but you didn't have to go, so I just worked from my apartment, techcrunch. I worked remote. I was at TechCrunch for four years. Their big office was well office. Arrington's house for a while was in San Francisco.

01:13:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you work?

01:13:47 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
in Arrington's house. No, I actually never went, but you know we had colleagues who did work there but like I worked from home for most. The only time I haven't worked from home was at News Corp for two years, vice for two years and then Consumer Reports for like two years before the pandemic sent everyone home. So I'm used to. You know, I've always had a home office, even like high school. I had a desk, I had a computer. So this is just like my happy place anyway, sitting in front of a giant PC with like all the lights. This is my battle. I'm into this.

01:14:19 - Benito (Announcement)
And so I've actually done this. This is your battlefield, yeah, my, what's it called Battle station, my battle station. I've done this my whole career actually.

01:14:27 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
So it's not different. It's not really too difficult for me, but I do remember when the pandemic sent everyone home, we had some colleague. I had some colleagues who were like not used to this and they had to scramble to buy a laptop stand and they had to get a chair and their desk was like weird, or they're working in the kitchen.

01:14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I it was a tough, uh transition for some folks, but I've actually done this for most of my career yeah, you could see why employees who have had, at least since the pandemic, the ability to do that are very reluctant to go back. I'm not sure exactly why companies want them to go back, except that they built all these buildings, they rent all this real estate it's real and it's real estate, but it's also, I think, a deep-seated fear that they're getting taken advantage of.

01:15:11
I know I worry about you, benito, that you're not putting in the hours that we would expect. No, I don't worry about you, benito, but and I don't worry about shoshana. Apparently her problem is overwork, but don't you think that most people, if you're working at home you know kind of lackadaisical about working?

01:15:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'd be curious to know if there's any or I was going to say I'd be curious to know if there's any reliable source of data on that, because ostensibly you would have to self-report, or subject to being monitored all day long. Yeah.

01:15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I can tell you that If you're on the carpet rolling around with a dog, nobody knows. There is one data point the rapid rise in sales of mouse jigglers Is that real?

01:15:58 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, Wait, you're talking about like truck rattlers right?

01:16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it called the rattler in the truck? No, no, mouse jigglers, something that moves your mouse around so that the monitoring software your employer has installed on your computer thinks you're doing something oh, that's funny.

01:16:14 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
That's why I like america.

01:16:15 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
What a genius idea that's amazing.

01:16:21 - Benito (Announcement)
Uh, in fact, people have gotten fired for using them I think it's the employers now on the other side, because when people used to go to the office, they would usually go in early and leave late, so employers always got an extra couple of hours out of their employees before. But now, when you're working at home, you just get your work done and you're done, yeah, and like.

01:16:37 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Well, that's it. Employers don't like that idea. They just don't like the idea. I think it's nothing.

01:16:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It works if you're project focused like shoshana is or Nicholas is or you are Benita, where you have a specific tasks and you know you get it done, and how long it takes for you to get it done shouldn't matter your employer, as long as you get it done. Here's the story from uh, this summer, wells Fargo fired. Fired some mouse jigglers who, some people who worked at Wells Fargo, over a dozen employees. After an internal investigation revealed they were using simulators to simulate keyboard activity, creating an impression of active work.

01:17:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Wow.

01:17:21 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I love that, I really love that.

01:17:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love that, I really love that.

01:17:30 - Benito (Announcement)
I have to say are there jobs where there are no deliverables, meetings, meetings, lots of those jobs, meetings and email jobs. I call them meetings and email jobs.

01:17:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're horrible jobs. Nobody wants to do them, and I understand people trying to escape from them by staying home and making a sandwich. I don't blame them.

01:17:46 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I will say, though, one of my friends runs a digital firm called Red Edge, and I'm a huge fan of the stuff they do. They're really ethical in their work and they think through stuff a lot. So I was talking with my friend there, and he's really big on not having full work from home, that he wants people to come into the office at least a little bit.

01:18:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a certain amount to team building and socializing right.

01:18:08 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It's that. But it's also they come up with better ideas together, where he's not inherently opposed to it, but for them it's like they come up with better work, more creative work, and it's not like they have to be in for eight hours a day, but they have to come in for at least a little bit and that it like does help their work. So I've tried to think about it and he's probably right to a degree, but I really like working in my pajamas all day and like it's going to be hard for me to like be motivated to change that when I do good work in pajamas. But like I do kind of wonder, like if our street had more in office time, if like there's stuff that we'd come up with that we wouldn't otherwise.

01:18:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Steve Jobs thought there was a certain serendipity to having employees in the office. He didn't. Very famously, when they built their new campus he didn't want bathrooms on every floor because he wanted people walking a long way to the bathroom so they'd run into other employees and have exchanges and exchange ideas. He was kind of a kook no, I, I like.

01:19:11
I like my bathrooms close by I love my bathrooms as close as humanly possible I'm actually sad that this attic studio doesn't have a bathroom in it. I'll be honest, honest with you. I have to go downstairs. Scott B in our YouTube chat points out this is the same Wells Fargo that a month later revealed that a woman had been found dead at her desk four days after she clocked in. Nobody noticed for four days.

01:19:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Wells Fargo was like the Florida man of business.

01:19:44 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It's pretty amazing. I think it was Arizona, if I'm not mistaken. Oh well you know.

01:19:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we might as well talk about daylight saving time, because it's just, we did it again, and here in the US we do it after everybody else, we do it after everybody else, we do it after halloween. Reason being, uh, the sugar makers, the candy makers of america lobbied the this is a really interesting lobby lobbied congress to not do it until after halloween, so the kids would have more daylight for trick-or-treating, thereby consuming more, more candy. So that's a good regulation, shoshana, and where do you stand on time change regulation.

01:20:29 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
So I will say you should look into the sugar industry and all the subsidies there. It's really messed up.

01:20:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of my colleagues works on that.

01:20:38 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
And you wouldn't believe the stuff that goes on there. So I just think I love interesting weird lobbies that control things, things like the florist lobby in Louisiana, stuff like that. I'm all over it. But I'm kind of for and I know this is a little out there and I might've just changed my mind today I'm kind of for abolished time zones, but then I found out China has this and they kind of time zones at all informal time zones because they don't like it.

01:21:04
So if I'm reinventing the wheel, I'm like I'm kind of out of that now, but we should at least like not change the clocks twice a year. There's no reason to do it.

01:21:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's such a nightmare.

01:21:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Where I grew up. I tell people I'm from Chicago, because it is easier to explain than where I'm actually from which is a tiny corner of northwest indiana that uh called lake county. Um, we were a tiny blue dot in the middle of a giant lake county do you know lake county? Oh very well, why it's famous for it is for a lot of marriage of cousins no, no, no lake county. I like lake county, the dairy indiana, uh and uh, among other things. But okay I grew up in a different.

01:21:50
I thought I was thinking of a lake county, california, which has another now lake county is a indiana is different little blue, little blue speck and, and it's uh like 30 minutes southeast of chicago. At any rate, my cousins so my mother's brother, my uncle lived in a place called South Bend, which is where Notre Dame is. Oh yes.

01:22:13
So we would go there for holidays, depending on the time of year and the year that it was. Some years the state of Indiana refused to recognize daylight savings time. Some years the state of Indiana refused to recognize daylight savings time. Some years each individual county made its own decision about whether or not daylight savings time was going to happen. So literally and they were 50 minutes away and depending on which direction the wind was blowing, we either had to leave two hours early or an hour later than we needed to crazy and it changed from year to year.

01:22:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a complete pain in the neck um I remember that because I, uh, I had a close friend who lived in convoy, ohio, which was right on the border of indiana, and time would change because you went across the state line.

01:23:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That was nuts. It was nuts and I know it's just an hour and whatever. But if you're a student there's actually some pretty significant implications. Or if you're like 10 and you just don't want to be in the car now you've got to schlep all the way to South Bend for family stuff and it's late. I just bring my pajamas.

01:23:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there is a move uh afoot. In california we had an initiative that voted to stay on daylight saving time all year round. That carries no weight, because it's the federal government that decides what our time zone is and you can't willy-nilly change your time zone apparently. Uh, I'm not sure do would we stay? What would? What would we like? Would we like to stay on daylight saving time? I think we just like that because it was summertime right.

01:23:53 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I wonder what the rules are, because I know Arizona, we don't change the, we're always don't change the clock yeah we're always on Mountain Standard time.

01:24:00
Now, right, I, because I coordinate with East Coast a lot and sometimes California, I still have to be cognizant of the time changes and stuff. But here we don't change the clocks. In Puerto Rico, where a bunch of family, they don't change the clocks. Uh, so it is. I feel like we could just pick one, I don't really care which one it makes a difference the farther north you are right.

01:24:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you're so, arizona's fairly southerly is same with Puerto Rico, but if you're so, arizona's fairly southerly same with puerto rico. But if you're in washington state, it could mean that kids are getting up in pitch black and going to school in pitch black, or vice versa. They're coming home in, you know, in utter darkness, and so it does make a difference. But the day's gonna get shorter. No matter what you do, you can't make the day longer one other weird effect of it.

01:24:45 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
And since I'm on like so much medication and supplements for all my stuff, I do a lot of random research to understand it better. And it turns out that, like I think contraception is like less effective around I forget if it's daylight savings or the other one, but because it's like you take it an hour later than normal and then it's like then your body, like it doesn't adjust Right Cause you're supposed to take it at the same time every day and people don't think to adjust like oh, I'm taking it at eight, Maybe I should start taking it at seven this half of the year, so like, so that's. That's a weird externality that I think should be accounted for, even other like harsherher meds.

01:25:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure that there's some effects there the candy industry, as part of their lobbying effort, put pumpkins filled with candy on the seat of every senator as a way. By the way, it was also wall street that wanted to uh change time zones, because wall street wanted an extra hour of trading, an hour overlap with the london markets trading day. So they were the they. It wasn't farmers, but it was wall street that uh, according to the usa today article about this uh, actually, no, I'm sorry, this is a archived article from the new y times. We've been debating this for many years. This is from 2007. Cause I wanted to know if it was. It was an urban legend that the candy makers Uh got involved in it. Apparently it's not.

01:26:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Shirley, we can use AI at this point to simulate everybody, every argument, every side of things, every potential outcome and like coalesce around you said something interesting though you want to do, you want no time zones at all.

01:26:31 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I didn't say that I was kind of down for it, until I found out then in china, where they don't really have time zones, they kind of recreate their own and I'm like, okay, never mind.

01:26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Though humans need it. But see, so this is this clock behind me is that's utc, it's 2350, so it would I mean I, I guess you'd get used to you say well, the sun sets at a 20, 2400 or 30, 200 in california. Yeah, I guess you get used to it, right, I don't?

01:27:02 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
know, yeah, I'm kind of here for it. That way no one has to like everyone has the same clock.

01:27:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If the clock is the same everywhere, I mean at the very least I give out utc times for all our shows, because then you can figure out when we're on at the very least if we could.

01:27:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It'd be great if every country that observes daylight savings time would just do it on the same day well, that's another problem um, because't it? Because Brazil does it different. I was just in Brazil a couple of days ago, and this time of year is really tricky to schedule meetings because we have to triple check to make sure we're on the right time zone.

01:27:37 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I would always miss Champions League games because they would change their times different times. So, I'm used to it starting at 25. And now it's at 145. I was like, oh my God, I missed the first half. It was a real problem for a while there.

01:27:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's got to be an economic Like again. It always comes down to money, right, so it's got to be a financial reason. My assumption is it would be financially better for everybody to at least coordinate. Maybe I'm missing something, though I don't know.

01:28:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, the candy lobby has decided for us the candy and wall street. Uh, by the way, mexico two years ago said no more, we're not changing the clocks, and they've been they. They didn't change them again, except for baja, which for some reason, I guess because the tourists wants to be in sync with the united states, but the rest of mexico doesn't change their clocks anymore. I would love to stop this. The funny thing is, technology has made it less of an issue, because all of our stuff, except I, still had to go around to, like the microwave. I'm looking at a clock right now. I don't think it's changed its time because it's kind of a manual clock, so it's a little frustrating. Anyway, I don't know why I got into this. Oh, because you wanted to talk about it. Well, I suggested it. That's why it drives us crazy, but we live with it. So you're saying, in China, without time zones, they just made their own up.

01:29:00 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, it's like a local. That's what Twitter was telling me. I didn't have a chance to fact check it, so hopefully I'm not wrong.

01:29:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Twitter's almost as good as ChatGPT.

01:29:07 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, but someone was saying they used to live there and that's what happened, which I thought was kind of interesting, and that's stuff I actually like learning about. When we all kind of come together to make a decision and then just reinvent the wheel a different way, that's helpful to know when that's going to happen.

01:29:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, and it also tells you something about human nature which I think is endlessly fascinating. All right, little break and we'll have more. There have not been a lot of stories this week, and I think it's because everybody's just kind of holding their breath for Tuesday. So we'll, we have, we have a few more. It might Um. So we'll, we have, we have a few more. It might be a little short show today, uh, which would be, I think, probably a nice little respite for you. That'd be nice.

01:29:50
This episode of this week in tech brought to you by NetSuite. What does the future hold for your business? So you could ask somebody like Amy Webb and she'd tell you one thing. Ask nine other experts and you're going to get 10 more answers. No one really knows. Rates will fall, rates will rise, inflation's up or down. What we really need is a crystal ball. Actually, amy sent me a magic eight ball from the Future Today Institute. I have it right over here. I could query it.

01:30:18
But until then, over 38,000 businesses have future-proofed their business with NetSuite from Oracle, the number one cloud ERP, bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, hr all into one easy-to-use, fluid platform. And that's nice, because with one unified business management suite. There's a single source of truth, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions With real-time insights and forecasting. You're peering into the future, giving you the visibility and control you need to make quick decisions with real-time insights and forecasting. You're peering into the future. Maybe you do have that crystal ball with actionable data. When you're closing the books in days, not weeks, you're spending less time looking backwards. You're spending more time on what's coming up next. Honestly, if I had a bigger enterprise, I would be using this for sure. Maybe you should consider it.

01:31:06
Speaking of the opportunity, I want you to download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning. Netsuite's now offering this for free at netsuitecom slash twit. That's the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning Free at netsuitecom slash twit. We thank oracle and netsuite for supporting the show. Netsuitecom slash twit. I don't go over. Get my magic eight ball here. I have it right here on the shelf. Do you remember? Uh, do you remember sending these? Uh, sending these out? Oh, yeah, I totally do.

01:31:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Uh, we ask a question.

01:31:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just let's see, I'll shake the Future Today Institute magic eight ball. What's going to happen on Tuesday? That's a big one, right? It says, oh, it's upside down. I think it only takes yes or no questions, Leo. No, it takes all kinds of questions. It says read the trend report. I think that's a good suggestion. Of course, future Today Institute does this fabulous trend report and you can see that online at their website, futuretodayinstitutecom. So there you go. That's a good answer, magic.

01:32:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's a good answer.

01:32:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does it say it to everything?

01:32:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, sometimes it says give us a call. Sometimes it says, uh like make some scenarios here's one that says accept uncertainty.

01:32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really the answer. I should have gotten yeah for tuesday, except uncertainty.

01:32:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, thank you for thank you for playing with it. I should have put a speaker in there and a microphone.

01:32:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you could have listened, I could, it could. It's about the size of a siri, a home pod.

01:32:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I could put it right next to that so did I detect that you were about to say something about apple intelligence oh, I did now for anybody to answer this.

01:32:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have to be an apple user, and I don't know if you all are. So you got a new iphone I have.

01:33:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I, yeah, so I ordered it. It took a month to get here, oh no, and then I was gone for like two weeks. So this thing has been sitting in a box and I just have to find some time on my calendar to actually open it. But does this? Uh, has anybody actually used it yet? I have I have.

01:33:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some very interesting stories. We were talking about this tuesday on mac break weekly when I first turned it on. One of the things it does that you know, apple intelligence right now is at 18.1 ios 18.1 and it's very limited. Mostly it does uh, it does a, it does a summary of notifications, things like that. Yeah, mark german has said today in his newsletter he's the number one apple rumor guy and usually correct said that the 18-2 will come out early in december, like december 5th, which is interesting because that is going to have a lot more uh to it. But this one does summaries of your email. It'll summarize a document or do bullet points on a document, but the, the notification roll-up is kind of funny.

01:34:05
I I showed this on the show, uh, the other day. Actually it's. It's still saying it. It says 5 to 10 I don't know if you can see this, this was from last night five to ten people are at your front door. Now what, what's really going on there is? It's rolling up a bunch of doorbell or front door movement from ring, which is probably somebody just coming and going, but it says five to ten people are at your front door.

01:34:33
There's also the very funny uh story of the um whoops let me uh escape out of this. The very funny story of the uh the programmer let me see if I find it on twitter who got broken up with uh by text messaging and uh, apple intelligence. Let me see if I can find this breakup and I'll show you, uh, what he he learned. He is being dumped. This is from ours technica by a ai a summary of texts. Nick got his o1. For anyone who wondered what apple intelligence summary of a breakup text looks like, it's this and this is legit. No longer in a relationship colon wants belongings from the apartment.

01:35:22
Nick says yes, this is real. Yes, it happened yesterday. Yes, it was oh no now, it was a fair summary of the texts he had received from his girlfriend. So I mean, I don't know if you blame apple intelligence for that. Something for you to look forward to, amy yeah, I'm gonna.

01:35:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, that sounds fun for me.

01:35:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have talked to some people who have used the summary feature. Somebody said on one of our shows that because executives always want bullet point summaries, there is a nice little bullet point feature that you could take a document and say, make bullet points out of this and give it to the boss so that I think people will will use that. The good news is, when it's pulling from a source like that, it doesn't. It's not likely to hallucinate because it's basically taking only what's in that document and summarizing that right. So you excited amy um, well, the battery.

01:36:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, I'm excited to have a better battery situation and a less slow device. So there's that. But yeah, no, I've been look, I've been very intrigued and I'm always eager to play with every company's latest, newest thing. So I'm looking forward to it. I just have to find time. Maybe, maybe apple intelligence can create time on my. Maybe I can have a daily daylight savings extra hour of time. Somehow through apple intelligence, I'll have time to to like unbox things nicholas, are you an iphone user or a android guy?

01:36:58 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
you seem like an android guy no, no, I'm an iphone. I mean, I don't care as much, I am an iphone guy. I've've been an iPhone guy since iPhone 4 was the first one I got, so a while I actually haven't upgraded to iOS 8. I've had other things going on so it hasn't been a priority. To be honest, I'll probably put it on my iPad tonight when we're done here to check it out. But I'm just kind of like I really don't use these tools that often anyway, like I use chat gpt honestly mostly for, like, cooking stuff. Uh, so do you ask it for recipes? Oh, I said recipes. I ask it for like uh, oh, if we're trying to eat foods that doesn't cause inflammation, what?

01:37:39 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
are these foods and what dishes?

01:37:41 - Benito (Announcement)
can I make because is it pretty accurate every day uh, as far as I can tell.

01:37:45 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean, mean I do try to like fact check important things, but for most silly things it doesn't really matter that much. So that's where I use it Should.

01:37:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I eat shrimp if I have a shellfish allergy. Yes, shrimp is one of the few foods you can eat if you have a shellfish? No, it's not. Actually, here's a question because I've never seen this before, does it? Are there disclaimers saying, uh, we're not offering medical device, but does it do that in writing? Not medical specifically, but it says don't trust anything, you can get back here. Here is what's at the bottom of my chat gpt screen. Chat gpt can make mistakes. Check important info like in the search.

01:38:20 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
So if you search for like oh, what are some foods that I should be able to, it doesn't say that per search. It just has that general warning at the bottom of the main page.

01:38:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, get ready, because on Halloween, chatgpt introduced a kind of scary thing, chatgpt search. This is the thing Google was most afraid of is that people would start searching the web. Chatgpt, until recently, was only aware of stuff in its training data, so at some point you cut off the training and it doesn't know anything after that point. But in this case it's going to be, I guess, somehow connected to the net and we'll be able to be up to date I also would be remiss if I didn't say that different people have different inflammatory foods.

01:39:06 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I've learned this very hard, so all different inflammatory diets are lies for some people.

01:39:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no. I know it's sad you have to do a FODMAP or something to find out what's what's bothering you?

01:39:18 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, you have to do trial and error. Fodmap doesn't work for me at all. I'm chickpeas are my poison. I don't know why, but they are.

01:39:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Send me all your chickpeas. I love them.

01:39:28 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I love them, but they hate me. That means no falafel no, hummus, none, I can't. My whole body inflames from chickpeas.

01:39:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, some of the best things in the world. Halva, oh no, that's sesame seeds. Yeah, yeah. Halva, oh no, that's sesame seeds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

01:39:48 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Although sometimes there's a little, a little bit of hummus in the halva I don't know.

01:39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, I can tell. I can tell when there's yeah, do you? I didn't ask you. Do you use an iphone? Uh, shoshana no, uh, android, uh, mostly because I'm cheap yeah, yeah, my daughter, who is, uh, the lone holdout in my family as an Android user. But she's gotten around this lack of AI by downloading an app, a Russian app. That's a little friend and she says, oh, I love this, she's so good. And she talks to it all the time and says I think she really gets me, it's a little concerning yeah, gets me it's a little concerning.

01:40:25
Yeah, so I can now search. What should? I don't know. Should I search for um? Let me see. On this, there's a button. You click the button. All right, let's search for saturday night live. I don't know, that's a, that's a trending search. So now I'm getting a whole summary of the history of saturday night live, but also getting the November 2nd episode, last night's episode. So that's interesting. It's just proving it's up to date, right, let's see? Are chickpeas?

01:40:59 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I was going to say I'm like I don't want to be too on brand but yeah, inflammatory, let's see what it says.

01:41:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's generally considered anti-inflammatory. You see, I'm like I don't want to be too on brand Inflammatory, let's see what it says. Generally considered anti-inflammatory, you see. But however, for some individuals with certain autoimmune conditions or sensitivity to legumes, chickpeas- are bad.

01:41:19 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It's not legumes, it's just chickpeas.

01:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
for me Just chickpeas.

01:41:22 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Just chickpeas.

01:41:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't it funny that they're branded as an anti-inflammatory food I know a lot of anti-inflammatory food like destroys me.

01:41:31 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
It's funny. But it's interesting too that they mention this without as many disclaimers, because if I like, type in ideas for like medical issues yeah, they're like oh no, don't ask us medical questions and I'm like I know, I know, but like give me some info here. Yeah, maybe they're more confident now. I don't ask us medical questions and I'm like I know, I know, but like give me some info here.

01:41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe they're more confident now. I don't know. This is the latest model for. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Is this a threat to Google? Is this what people are going to do instead of searching?

01:41:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't know if it's going to necessarily siphon off daily traffic at the moment, but what it does is reset the expectation for what search should be, and the bottom line is Google made some choices about its own search and its display graph and everything else and, as we all know, it's been very hard to find what you're actually looking for now on Google, because you have to sift through pages of totally unrelated shopping ads and pictures of things and then you get to the end of the page and it's like well, are you sure? Did you actually want more things to show? You know Google's basically shitified itself.

01:42:37
Yeah.

01:42:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's which is sad. The guy who some hold responsible for this has moved on, prabhakar Raghavan. So maybe I don't know, I don't know, maybe it'll get better. I don't think it will. I think he came from the sales side and, according to some, was anxious to make search more financially rewarding and, as a result, did exactly what you just described. Now I tried I just tried to chat GPD search for the same search I did with Google earlier, which is Apple intelligence breakup texts, and I, instead of getting the article I was looking for, I got some suggestions. So if you're looking for guidance or examples of thoughtful breakup messages, here are a few, crafted with care, gentle and honest. Hey, I've been thinking a lot lately and I feel it's best if we have an honest talk. You mean a lot to me, but I feel we're growing in different directions. It's not easy to say, but I think parting ways would be healthier.

01:43:42 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Leo, I'm more interested in your horoscope. What was your horoscope?

01:43:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you want to know. Well, okay, so I am not a Leo. But because my name is Leo, it gave me Leo's horoscope. So all I said was what's my horoscope today? And instead of saying what's your birthday, it said oh, your name's Leo, so you must be a Leo, right, right, so that's not so bright. Let's see what it does now funny yeah, as a leo, today's rsc I'm not a leo so, okay, at least it does one thing which I like, which is it gives you sources.

01:44:20
Um, so let's see what the sources were. They were the Scottish Sun first place. I go to read my horoscope, that's for sure. Astrologycom and Yahoo. That's so interesting that it's using the Scottish Sun. Do you think it has a deal? Oh, this is a, this is a Murdoch sun, or is it? Is it?

01:44:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't know speaking of yahoo, marissa mayer's out there peddling a new ai tool. Have you seen that?

01:44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so I knew this was coming from marissa, because you know she started this company called sunshine. Well, that's it, yeah but originally it was just a contact manager, right, but I knew there was a play there was. I mean, you're not going to make any money selling a contact manager, so what is she doing?

01:45:09 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's being positioned is that she she's an AI pioneer, she's been in the field, all of her products, which I'm no, okay, fine it just it sounds like it's a people heard of something called life 360. It's a geo fencing tool that you can set locations and then have a trusted circle and anytime you come or go from any of those places it automatically lets you know marks on you it does.

01:45:32
Um, it sounds to me like it's some version of that, but as but like a dr, like a media management platform maybe. Um, that is sort of private I'm puzzled because uh I'm probably not describing this.

01:45:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm definitely not describing it the way that they would describe it so after they introduced, uh, the contact manager, or was it a calendar? I used it briefly and I thought it felt more like a context yeah yeah, now, and then they introduced shine a couple of months ago, which got a lot of especially on product hunt a lot of negativity saying why, what have you done that's different or new? Yeah, uh, this is.

01:46:18
This is terrible, um, but, leo, it's ai it's I, it's ai, and now it looks like they're doing events. So it's a pivot upon a pivot upon a pivot. And yes, look, these are AI generated images, aren't they? So is shine now unique in it's changed completely. So it was a photo sharing site intuitive group photo sharing, flawlessly organized events. Now I visit shine and it's it looks like it's a. It's like meet, meet up. Oh, this is very this is not.

01:46:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Is that the right site? That's not what I licked it directly from.

01:46:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sunshine was in this. Maybe I got the wrong. Have I done something wrong? No, I'm pretty sure this is Marissa Meyer.

01:47:07 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I don't know A lot of crappy sites. Get big write-ups Every worst dating app that exists that has no users has a big profile. So, yeah, this looks really stupid. If I'm being real, I mean I'm harsh, but I'm not usually this harsh on something, but this looks really stupid, like really stupid.

01:47:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, you know I really wish Marissa Meyer well. She was an early employee at Google is widely considered responsible for the streamlined early days Google search page. There was always the stories about how obsessive she was about getting every detail just right, including the colors in the Google logo and so forth. Then Yahoo came a-callin and she went to be CEO trying to save Yahoo, which was at the time, I think even then, kind of a quixotic mission. I don't thinkoo was that savable, although they have kind of survived a little bit with a few of their properties. And now she, uh she went with one of her uh engineers from yahoo, I think somebody she knew at google as well, enrique what's his last name?

01:48:18
they don't mention his last name, just the first name uh to start. Uh, shine um sunshine. Name to start Shine Sunshine. When Enrique and Marissa discussed starting a company, it says on the website, these were the questions they came to focus on why are our phone lists, calendars, texts and emails so disorganized? Yeah, maybe they didn't know about AI or think about it at the time, but that's definitely an AI play. Why is it still hard to keep up with a friend's job and address changes? Why aren't artificial intelligence and other new technologies being used to reinvent these everyday social tasks? I think there's an opportunity there. I don't think this is it, but yeah it's an interesting idea.

01:49:02
I wish. I really do wish her well. I don't. I just don't feel like she's really found anything great to replace Google with. Here's a story from CNN. If you've been seeing more ProHarris ads online lately, here's why. Why, Nicholas DeLeon.

01:49:22 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I guess they just bought a lot of ads.

01:49:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot of money.

01:49:26 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, man, like I said, this is the first time I'm living in a swing state during an election and the sheer volume of ads on YouTube in particular was very surprising to me. And it is so silly where it's like one commercial is, you know, john Smith is a jerk and the very next commercial is John Smith is an angel sent from heaven. So I'm like I'm just sitting there, like this is ridiculous, like this camp, this is the democracy that you know that is in peril. I guess this is a.

01:49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
CNN story focusing on a particular pack, the Future Forward pack, which is the largest single candidate super pack in the election. Harris herself has raised, I believe, a bit more than a billion dollars for her own campaign, but then, thanks to Citizens United, these packs can come in with essentially unlimited budgets. The Future Forward pack is focusing half of its $450 million budget on digital platforms half of its 450 million dollar budget on digital platforms, including what it says is the largest political ad buy in youtube. History used to be these campaigns were were real boons for local radio and television, right, I think it probably still is, if you, if anybody, watches local radio and television, but it was only a matter of time before they realized you know, nobody's watching tv, they're all watching youtube.

01:50:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So, um, I just I have a question. I don't know if anybody can answer this, or maybe this is an obvious answer and I'm out of the loop. Um, so the volume of text messages we are getting a lot of text messages, yeah, from a particular campaign. Yes, who so? Do the carriers make money on that? Does somebody have to pay? The carrier or the? Are the?

01:51:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
carriers. That's a good question like who's making?

01:51:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
somebody's making money because you know that's a lot of money to send all that stuff, right? Maybe twilio is act is doing some of the automation but, like on the other side of it, does at&t wireless get paid for all those text messages that literally nobody wants ever?

01:51:26 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I don't know that. I've seen that reported actually?

01:51:28 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's an interesting question, I'm just curious yeah.

01:51:30 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure the telecom companies get paid and then there's like firms that handle it, you know, just like with email marketing. But it's funny because I've never really dug in deep, but like I don't know, I mean.

01:51:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I wonder if, like the telcos are basically just like the pipes and they're not making, it's the services on top of that that are that are making the money.

01:51:50 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Yeah, I'm not sure how much they make on it. I would. I would guess that it would have to be some amount, but just how much like enough for them to like want to deal with this stuff? Like I'm not totally sure, you know sure you know.

01:52:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is a time magazine article from this summer. Before political campaigns can send mass text messages, they're required to register with a relevant text messaging registry to verify the legitimacy of the campaign, ensure compliance with industry standards for opt-in and opt-out procedures. That's that stop message that you can send if you don't want to continue to get texts from that particular number. This is mandated by the CTIA, which is the Wireless Communications Trade Association, and US carriers. Once a campaign receives approval from the registry, they can use a mass texting service provider Twilio, Podium, there are many of them to deliver messages on behalf of the campaign from a dedicated phone number. I'm sure that there is some money going to the the carriers for this.

01:52:51
So if you text stop and it doesn't stop, that means it's not legitimate well, that's my thinking, I made that up, but uh, I think there also is a timeout. So, but if you, I think if you answer, stop right away. And it doesn't, it's supposed to right away say okay, okay, we give, we're going to stop, uncle, I believe if it doesn't do that, that they are not an approved messenger.

01:53:18 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Yeah, or Joanna had a. Joanna had a good story in the journal the other day on trying to opt out of these text messages and oh, stop. And they just keep coming and coming. So it feels like maybe not the best regulated thing.

01:53:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stop. Only blocks that one number. That's the problem. Right? Yeah, let's see. Run a campaign for $1,000 with text marketing from easytextingcom Okay, with text marketing from easytextingcom. Okay, ping, harris and Trump are blowing up your phones with political texts in the campaign's last days. This is the Associated Press. This came out on Halloween. Texting is cheap and an easy way to reach potential voters. By the way, you'd think they're getting that information about you from the donor roles, which are, by federal law, public, but they're also buying according to time. They're buying information from data brokers as well, which helps them narrow it down right. They want to know, before they message you, whether you're likely to be supportive. Whether you're likely to be supportive. Texting doesn't have the same rules that broadcasting does. Both sides are working. The texting pipeline aggressively says this story, but I really that's a very good question is where is the money flowing?

01:54:42 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
One thing I thought was interesting these started ramping up for me maybe in June, july, getting a phone call. A lot of the phone calls are labeled as spam. It'll say like possible spam. I pick it up anyway because I think it's fun to answer the polls. Frankly, I'm that, I'm that weirdo that likes to answer the polls. But they have completely dried up over the past. Like I would say, last Tuesday, wednesday, they I stopped getting. I was getting like two or three a day a combination of phone calls or text messages and they've kind of I haven't gotten one in in about a week. So I don't know if that's if they're thinking Arizona is finished one way or the other. Uh, cause I'm. I'm technically a registered independent, a Hispanic registered independent. So I was getting called.

01:55:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you're golden, aren't you, buddy?

01:55:24 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
You are everybody's fair hair boy.

01:55:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, we'd like your vote so.

01:55:30 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I was getting it really dried up last week, so again, maybe folks think the game is over here one way or the other. I have no idea, but yeah, it stopped here.

01:55:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This story from AP does say there's a lot of fraudulent texting, not so much from scammers trying to get your money, but from opposition trying to change your vote or keep you from voting. The League of Women Voters this month of Wisconsin wrote to the US and state attorneys general to report that thousands of fraudulent text messages from an anonymous source were sent to young people threatening $10,000 fines or prison time if they vote in a state where they're not eligible to cast ballots. It was intended to intimidate students from out of state, who are legally entitled to vote in Wisconsin if they're going to college there, to keep them from voting or to get them out of the state and have them vote back home instead. Last weekend, thousands of Pennsylvania voters received a text message that falsely claimed they'd already voted. This is from the philadelphia inquirer. This came from all vote, which election officials have repeatedly flagged as a scam. The group said the false claim was a result of a typo.

01:56:41 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I've gotten all vote text messages a couple over the summer, and yeah, I would, I would say them as, uh, they were not misleading. But again, the language they use it's like oh, we noticed you haven't voted. It's like who are you to like? Just leave me alone. Like this whole, like the voting industrial complex of all these, get out the vote organizations. It feels very scammy to me. You know I I'm not really comfortable with a lot of this.

01:57:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and a lot of them are, uh, using the same kind of verbiage and emotional appeal that scam messengers use. You know, the pig butchers use that that the people who are trying to take your money use. Oh my god, if this doesn't if you got to do it today, it's gonna. Oh, it's terrible. I like I said, if I could just put a switch on my phone that says I don't want these, that kind of stuff drives me nuts.

01:57:33 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Uh, because I I you know, uh work.

01:57:35
I used to work more on the political side and that's that's when, uh, when I basically, when I started like working in digital, that's when a lot of people were trying to do the like urgency and stuff like that emails, and it's when a lot of people were trying to do the urgency and stuff like that emails, and it's when it kind of all began and I was like, hey guys, maybe we think about doing it in an ethical way, because this is one, easily replicable, if nothing else, and two, I can't imagine that this is going to work for very long.

01:58:02
People get tired of urgency, understandably, over time. There was just never really any interest in people trying to be more ethical about it or do it better, because it was just easy money. But there's data showing that it might be drying up because the older generation isn't donating anymore and is aging out of life and and the next older generation is kind of already used to this and knows it's scams or it's not what the message says it is. So I'm kind of wondering how political fundraising evolves past the scammy kind of messages.

01:58:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm assuming there are going to be protests either way.

01:58:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Next week, oh gosh, yeah, and the weeks that follow. It's going to be ugly.

01:58:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What technology do you think is going to get used? So I guess Twitter isn't banning words anymore or censoring anything, so that seems like a good network that people will be using either way. Right, I mean what?

01:58:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I, you know four years ago. It's nice of you to say either way but I think one side was much more likely to use Twitter to spread doubt about the result of the election than another.

01:59:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Or just organize a protest because look if Trump wins. I think the other side.

01:59:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think Democrats will organize protests?

01:59:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think they demonstrate versus protest Right. I think that there will be civic action either way and I guess suddenly, as I was listening to everybody, I was like well, there's mobile phones organizing WhatsApp. I guess people aren't using Facebook, or at least they don't seem to be using. So four years ago, social media was still being used for this.

01:59:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Facebook is very, very definitely tried to opt out of this. They've stopped doing news and they really don't want a lot of political content.

01:59:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Right. So that was kind of my question, Like what's the organizing, what? How how you know what I mean. Like, what are people using? What are the young kids these days using?

01:59:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because I don't know, yeah, uh, instagram, but Instagram is, is meta and I don't believe they encourage that kind of content right.

01:59:58 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
Discord maybe, maybe, discord well, that's by way.

02:00:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a separate problem, which is that Telegram, discord and other messaging apps are below the radar. They're not really public apps and so we don't know. I mean, maybe I hope somebody knows, I hope somebody's paying attention, but we don't know about all the traffic and activities going on out of the public eye. There are lots of Telegram groups with all sorts of skeezy motives. One of our Club Twit members says there's an excellent podcast episode about this.

02:00:34
Bander Cat says Vox's Today Explained podcast last Sunday did a whole episode on why do I keep getting these weird fundraising texts. So I think that might be something you want to listen to, where they're talking about why there are so many urgent texts asking for money. I haven't listened to it, but Bandercat says it's very good and explains. It explains all the Atlantic does have. Charlie Wartzel, who is, let's face it, a lefty, has a long article in the Atlantic about this is what $44 billion buys you, talking about how Elon will use and has used X during this campaign and what he might use it for if Trump loses, and I can imagine that it would be used as an organizing tool. Yes, elon's going to be pretty miffed. He spent millions of dollars to support Trump in a variety of ways, including some ways that have gotten him in a little bit of trouble with the state.

02:01:41 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I mean he said that if Trump loses I think he was talking to tucker if trump loses like he's in trouble. It feels like, yeah, he feels like he's uh in, in, uh in big trouble, which I guess musk is in big trouble. Yeah, elon said that if trump loses, he thinks he will be in big trouble, which is uh, maybe it was joke.

02:01:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, you can't tell when he's joking you never know, but they were talking about um taking away his citizenship right or denying his oh interesting citizenship because of some of the yeah so I think, this is pretty de minimis, but he was a student.

02:02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was in in the country in a student visa and was working uh and not going to school, so I guess technically they could revoke his uh he's. I don't. Is he a citizen now or a resident?

02:02:27 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm not sure which he is there are immigrants who got deported for much less that's true.

02:02:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Can I just pile on a teeny, tiny bit, because I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Okay, did anybody ever watch the show?

02:02:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
big love on hbo yes, all about the uh the uh polyamorous Mormon sect.

02:02:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So it was, I thought, really good. And there was a breakaway person trying to be more modern, trying to live out in the open. That was played by Bill Paxton, who had, in Utah, bought three adjacent properties.

02:02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So three adjacent homes, ostensibly in a cul-de-sac, because they shared a backyard and each wife was in a different home-sac, because they shared a backyard and then sort of each wife was in a different home and he'd run back and forth exhaustedly and exhausted, but everybody had a different night.

02:03:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's actually a really great show it is at any rate A lot of the tension.

02:03:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My wife said I enjoyed it just because it was a fantasy for me. But no, that's not why I enjoyed it at all. They don't make it particularly. It's not sexual at all.

02:03:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, no no, it's a drama. It's really clever and smart. At any rate, one of the driving animating forces of that show was regulation and escaping the police, and this is illegal and everything else. So my question, dear listeners and panelists, is has Elon Musk not done the exact same thing? He just bought three adjacent homes, did he not? A compound?

02:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's invited all of his wives and there's many children, 11 children to all live together in harmony in.

02:03:56 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Texas Right in different homes. How is that different from what played out on Big Love For?

02:04:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
real Because he didn't marry them. That's a good question. Does he plan to go down and visit? I don't know if he'll have grimes, by the way, has has declined has declined his offer to come in, but his first wife is down there, uh and I, and then the uh the executive, the chief executive of his um of neural link.

02:04:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think uh has gone down with her I mean, it's a legit, it's a legitimate question. I've been thinking a lot about this.

02:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I had infinite money and I had infinite children and a somewhat less infinite number of wives. Yeah, it sounds pretty good. You get a little compound down there in boca chica, you, I think it's different if he's married to them. It's not illegal to have multiple baby mamas well, I guess the look.

02:04:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm not an expert in mormonism, but I I think that there's like the one legal marriage and then the celestial marriages, right?

02:04:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, but but that is not a bigamist. Nobody assumes, nobody says he's a bigamist.

02:05:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't know. I got to say again I'm having a hard time.

02:05:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's reminiscent of the idea yes, it sure is the only difference was Elon owns a rocket company and a car company and a social media site and Bill Paxton owned hardware stores. But otherwise very similar, very similar, very similar. Elon has many, many, many more children. Let's, uh, let's, take a break. Uh, we have, yes, there are a few more. I apologize, there's just nothing happening. So we have a few stories, but this is giving us scope to talk about some a broader range of topics and I think that's been fun. A little later on we're going to have shoshana explain why she loves sloths so very much, because she is chairman of the sloth committee. Shoshana weisman is here from rstreetorg, from consumer reports. Nicholas de leon, he is their senior electronics reporter and because he covers electronics, that means coffee machines as well. Love that. And from the future, today, institute the wonderful amy webb. It's great to have all three of you, our show today brought to you by zip recruiter, that we actually use zip recruiter when we're hiring.

02:06:19
You know, hiring is a tough thing because what happens is somebody gives you notice they're leaving. Now you've got a vacancy, you've got a hole to fill and that means more work for everybody. There's kind of this urgency, but it gets harder and harder to get great candidates, because you're not the only ones hiring and if you're a good candidate, there's a lot of people saying, hey, come work for us. There are a lot of different kinds of offices out there. One thing's for certain choosing the right. I'll couch my terms carefully, but choosing the right candidate for any office is a huge responsibility, right? Well, if you're hiring and you want to find the best candidates for your office, get it. You need ZipRecruiter right now. You can try it for free. Ziprecruitercom slash twit.

02:07:11
Actually, ziprecruiter is fantastic. It's the hiring site employers prefer the most, according to G2, how fast is ZipRecruiter? Smart technology? Start showing your job to qualified candidates immediately. You click that mouse on ZipRecruiter immediately. Your posting goes to hundreds of social media sites and and job sites and it just goes. They cast the widest possible net and that means it's much more likely the great candidate's going to see your posting. But it gets better because ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology then works to find the best top talent for you, saving you time and money. They actually say we found five people who match your needs. You look at them and go, wow, two of these are really great candidates. And then you invite them to apply for your job, which works really, really well because everybody likes to be invited. You know it's flattering. Oh, they want me to work for them. This is how you get the best candidates fast, and I mean fast.

02:08:16
We post in the morning, at breakfast, before lunch. I can remember it vividly. This is how we got our wonderful Viva in our, uh, in our um. Continuity department, at least, is worried because we're going to be down a person. She goes here's a great candidate, oh, here's another one. All before lunch.

02:08:35
Remember, if you want to find the right candidates for your office, you need zip recruiter. See why four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go right now to our special web address to try it for free. Ziprecruitercom slash twit. That's ZipRecruitercom. Slash twit, ziprecruiter the smartest way to hire. Thank you, ziprecruiter. We appreciate your support and in case we do ever start hiring again, you know we'll be using ZipRecruiter, that's for sure.

02:09:11
For a long time it's bugged me a little bit. Meta has used the term for its LLM, open source, open source, ai, and I've always thought what open source means. To me, it means that the source code is available. You can look at it, you can fork it, you can create your own product. Well, now the osi, the folks who are really in charge of the open source definition, the open source initiative, have released an official definition. And no, surpriseama is not open source. There are some that are.

02:09:53
Let me read you the criteria. According to the OSI, for an AI system to be truly open source, it has to provide access to details about the data used to train the AI so that others can understand and recreate it. I don't know how viable that is. They also need the complete code used to build and run the AI. That's the traditional definition of open source, right, and this is, I think, maybe most important the settings and weights from the training which help the ai produce its results. This is, while llama is publicly available, you can download and use it but that you can't use it commercially. Uh, it doesn't give access to the training data. It doesn't tell you its weights. Amy, you agree that this definition is accurate?

02:10:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
so the what I have read is that um, the organization that has created the open standards. It's what osi osi yeah, the open source initiative um has said that there is no singular definition of ai uh, which is incorrect. Stanford and others have very clearly aligned on definitions for ai um and you know, have said that unless uh llama reveals its training data, that that they no longer will be certified. And I guess my response to that is and like so what well, there's no way to, I mean.

02:11:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But mark has been using this term open source ai for quite a while and I think it's kind of unfair of him to do that. I mean, I don't know if you think he's going to stop?

02:11:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
no, I mean well.

02:11:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's appropriate for people who are yeah, but okay, but it's appropriate for people who are, you know, responsible for open source to say no. Let's be clear. This doesn't match our criteria the hugging face.

02:11:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Folks stepped in and said this is a great thing, we love this clarification, but they compete against llama. Um, you know I, I don't know, I, nothing, very few you know. Open source does not mean totally free it not?

02:12:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I noticed there is no, there is no mention in here about free so I think that there's some amount of conflating.

02:12:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What do we mean by open source, which would imply we're going to give you, you know, everything so people can build upon, use right, use things in new ways, which is clearly not.

02:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not what's happening, um but I maybe I'm wrong, but I do believe that if ai, if we said no, opens ai needs to be open source for us to support it. Yeah, that would be an improvement, wouldn't it, over closed ai that we don't know really how it's been generated from large corporations I mean in the business world.

02:12:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Uh, open source is fine for sandboxed experimentation, but anything beyond that is understandably, you know is that true for open source software as well I don't get to.

02:12:56
We don't do a ton of work on the it side of, in the general software side of things. But yes, when it comes to ai, absolutely um and there's a move towards more agentic models. So looking for instead of one single vendor, you know, like using different systems and tools together, but the but the um open source piece of it I can tell you is is unsettling for a lot of larger corporations.

02:13:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there you go.

02:13:28 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So I don't know what the continued. You know, it just seems like a weird fight to have from my point of view.

02:13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've wanted that clarification though, just so that people, because otherwise I think if Mark says it's open source, so it must be open source. It's important for the open source community to say no, that's just Mark's marketing term, it isn't open source.

02:13:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's a separate discussion over whether AI should ever be open source or whatever, but I think it's appropriate to take Mark's task to say you're misrepresenting what you're doing well, I think this perfectly illustrates this moment that we are living through, which is that much of what's happening in ai in in public, is about marketing and hype, more so than anything else. I mean open ai has been calling itself a general, a generative ai, not generative a agi. Thank you aid. There's too many acronyms um artificial general intelligence yeah company.

02:14:24
now for what? At least eight months or so, and it's you know, it's not, that's not no. So I think that there is some amount of desire to differentiate between everybody else and what everybody else is doing. And let's not forget Facebook or whatever meta is coming to the party with a hefty amount of baggage that it's carrying in the in the public eye because of some previous um bad behavior bad behavior, yeah, um so so using like that's a semantic twist and using open source feels a little bit more friendly and uh right, you know what I?

02:14:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
mean well, and they are open to the extent that they let you download their model and use it, but that that's the only in the only way. They let you download their model and use it, but that's the only way they're open, and you can't use it for commercial purposes either. So I did actually want to ask you, amy, because I know you have a lot of experience with China. You lived in China for a while and we've seen this brewing trade war going back and forth for some years. We've talked about it on the show before with you. You may remember that DJ dji, the chinese drone manufacturer, has been sanctioned by the commerce department and there seems to be a move to keep them from selling their drones into the us. Now china has respond. Responded by sanctioning skydio, which is, I think, one of the few us drone, and this is a big deal for Skydio because they get a lot of their components, their parts, from China. It might also be a big deal for Ukraine, because Ukraine uses Skydio drones in their efforts against Russia.

02:15:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, so again, I think November is a weird time to be doing that.

02:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, are they trying to disrupt the election? I think November is a weird time to be doing that Well are they trying to disrupt? The election.

02:16:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We talked a lot about disinformation, yeah, but I mean, look of the enormous constellation of technologies that would concern me. I got to say drones are not at the top of my list for the election, um, right now. So I you know. Again, I'm wondering if some people in the current administration and the various agencies have a negative outlook on their future, um, given, given where we're at, and maybe they're trying to sneak, you know, quickly, make their mark, or maybe not make their mark but like, have impact that they've been wanting to have you're talking about the us commerce department's sanctions on dji yeah, now china's response.

02:16:54
That's pretty par for the course when we levy sanctions this is how they respond now, um, and it's not like we have, you know, 150 different drone manufacturers, like we're kind of well.

02:17:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why it's kind of there is a, there are unintended consequences to a trade war like this. It goes both ways. You know, if you fire shots, shots may well be fired back, and I've always thought that our relationship with China, our deep economic ties with China, are good for peace, because we're dependent on one another.

02:17:28 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But those that's true, but broken the United States has made a pretty big and public call for chips to be manufactured not just by TSMC but in places outside of Taiwan. Right, um, we've. You know, there's been sort of a rearranging of of warships in the area over the past couple of months.

02:17:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think it's likely that China will invade Taiwan anytime soon?

02:17:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So interesting. You should ask that. One of the things that I would say to everybody is now is a really great time to be doing scenario planning, and you don't have to-.

02:18:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As a company, as a business.

02:18:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Or just as a person you don't have to do this professionally to allow yourself to think the unthinkable, even if it makes you uncomfortable, and then to think through-.

02:18:19 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
What you would do.

02:18:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, but not in a way that you're like catastrophizing more, in a way that you're being sort of as objective as you can and non emotive, to just really think through well, what are the potential outcomes? I got together with some friends and we were working through in a world and I can't tell you who the friends are or what the circumstances were, but I can tell you what the outcomes were. I can't tell you who the friends are or what the circumstances were, but I can tell you what the outcomes were. We were doing something called the axes of uncertainty, which is a tool that we developed that looks at tons of different variables and asks if these variables are present. There's two axes. If these sets of variables are present at the same time and usually they're highly non-correlating then what could be the next possible outcomes? And the purpose of doing this is to sort of break free from the current constraints and see if we can get to places where, like oh, we never thought of that before.

02:19:12
And so we looked at a ton of different variables and factors in a Trump administration or a Harris administration. Some of the people that were part of this exercise are part of government. Let's say there are some folks in Congress. We had some folks at DOD and some others. Interestingly, what we determined was that the world may actually in the very, very near term. Was that the world may actually in the very, very near term. We may be safer with a Trump administration because for two reasons. One, trump. Like foreign leaders, have no idea how Trump is going to react.

02:19:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's unpredictable.

02:19:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, he's he's not unpredictable, like in a cool way. He's just, he's got a different group of people behind him this time but, like you know, he's totally cap's got a different group of people behind him this time, but, like you know, he's totally capricious and bendable, like malleable. Um, therefore, that alone is deterrence.

02:20:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That alone serves as deterrence, sure and then the second thing was um well, it serves as deterrence if that person also has access to a massive nuclear arsenal. Right, I mean it's only deterrent because of the United States military might.

02:20:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, totally, yeah, totally. But the second interesting thing was he's more like he's kind of an isolationist, so he's more likely to just be like whatever Taiwan it's cool, like I don't want to get involved. Or pulling out of NATO, which we've already seen right, to just be like whatever Taiwan it's cool, I don't want to get involved. Or pulling out of NATO, which we've already seen Pulling out of some of these conflicts. Do you think that's more stabilizing? That's what.

02:20:54
I said so what's interesting coming out of this was in the next, let's say, two to four years. It's actually more stabilizing, however it reorganizes.

02:21:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It reorganizes geopolitical and economic power in a way that it creates instability. After that, well, as an example, in his last term, uh Russia invaded Crimea and would they have done that if he had not been in power?

02:21:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
and the answer is probably they would have waited right.

02:21:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there, that's interesting, because that does seem like a destabilizing action.

02:21:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That particular one. Yes, because of the relationship that he seems to have with.

02:21:34 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
Putin.

02:21:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So yeah, I thought anytime there's like I find contradictions really interesting because it's like that I didn't, I never thought through that before you know, so, look, I don't know what I would encourage everybody to do who's listening in, regardless of when you're listening to this is just allow yourself to ask the question what if? And this is not about branching over into like conspiracy theory, it's just being very sort of honest. You know, asking what if? Over and over and over again, and being ruthlessly objective and thinking the unthinkable. And then, once you get to the end of that chain of what ifs, great, now, what now? What right, what do I do and what are the outcomes, it's a good way of just, you know, preparing for things.

02:22:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isaac Asimov's foundation relies upon the notion that it's possible to predict the future. Harry Seldon is what is the term?

02:22:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Psychohistorian, psychohistorian.

02:22:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And is able to predict the future, and quite effectively, thousands of years into the future. It's a conceit that whenever I read that book, I think that's insane. That's obviously not possible. There's way too many variables.

02:22:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, but I mean, yes, you can't predict. Yes, his like, predict the future of everything is is not quite right. But if you have the right, if you have the right information, you can create multiple scenarios that are that have higher probabilities, right, right.

02:23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then you have to sort of be willing to constantly I don't know how you act on them, because, well, we'll see. Yeah, one way or the other we'll find out. Um, do you, do you cover drones as well, nicholas? I mean is that?

02:23:24 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
no, I haven't looked at drones.

02:23:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really, there's a guy in our chat who's many years, I think probably typical saying I'm not going to buy a dji drone because it's certain its future is uncertain, I may not be able to use a new one in the united states, and that's a that actually is a possibility that hurts its business, obviously. Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. The uh, you think the old chinese curse may you live in interesting times is, uh is in effect, feels like it. Feels like it uh, the chips act actually has been, which is weird, somewhat of a non-success. According to a politico, only one grant of 125 million dollars out of that billions 39 billions in subsidies has been awarded. Uh, this law was passed in 2022 and and so far, uh, the first award is 123 million dollars to polar semiconductor in minnesota wait.

02:24:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So it's hard. Look it's, it's been 18 months. There's 52 million or sorry, 52 billion dollars that's been earmarked, and some of that's for rnd and some of that's for other things. It's, it's actually. It takes time to to allocate all of that money and the intent of it was to, to, to build a us chip.

02:24:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pow, make the us more well, hopefully more.

02:24:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, to build, to reshore oops, I keep knocking this microphone to reshore um and and to start building capabilities here. Japan has actually done the same thing, not through its, through through different um legislation and, uh, there, I believe, the first manufacturing plant, which was created in partnership with TSMC, has already been spun up.

02:25:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Intel has received, or is going to receive, quite a bit of money.

02:25:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, Is it?

02:25:15 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
After Should it? Should it? That's a good question, yeah.

02:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, anyway, it's up in the air. Up in the air, that's another thing that might be decided by an election, because House Speaker Mike Johnson says the GOP will probably try to repeal the CHIPS Act. Yeah, and let me just streamline it.

02:25:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Nothing makes me more crazy. So before the Biden administration, I was asked to write one of the transition papers. So for the transition team, I was asked to write a paper for, like, how's the best way to prepare, given all of the AI technology and everything else? And one. The thing that I proposed was a department of the future and laid out what that needed to look like, and the point of this was to be non-partisan. So longer-term appointments so that, regardless of who's in office, we have some stability.

02:26:13
The amount of sheer and just utter uncertainty when it comes to policy is making it just really difficult to conduct business in the US. Capex allocations you have to make longer-term US. You know businesses have to. The CapEx allocations. You have to make longer term plans. You can't just like allocate a bunch of money or change your workforce overnight. So this continual back and forth, depending on who's in office. We're going to keep this act, we're going to shelve the act, we're going to incentivize this, we're going to sanction that or whatever it might be. You know we, we cannot, as a nation, get ahead if we can't just like just give it like a decade. You know what I mean. Um, anyhow, there's just no alignment, and nothing makes me crazier. Because? Is that? Because the stock market?

02:27:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
focuses on quarterly results yeah, I mean it's giving us such short-sightedness well, that's part of it.

02:27:09 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Um, if you're a publicly traded company and as volatile as things have been over the past couple of years, the planning really has gone from a couple of years down to a couple of quarters or like the next quarter. But this is about policy uncertainty and it's absolutely unconscious, unconscionable, that we can at least align on what policies for tech or longer term plans for tech are going to be.

02:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think other countries are better at this? Of course they are.

02:27:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
And actually some of our biggest adversaries are very good at this, namely China. I mean, for God's sake, they publish their long term plans every five years.

02:27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's a planned economy. Right, they have to.

02:27:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
And you can argue that that doesn't work for many reasons and everything else. But you know, I mean it's a tough time to be a leader in any business right now that the operational challenges are worse than I've seen in 20 years, and part of it has to do with technology becoming so politicized and a lack of planning on behalf of our US government for what our critical technologies are going to be and what it is that we need to do. Everybody has whiplash and it's a little bit like we're creating, know, and we're just frittering away Like we should. I'm going to use a bike analogy that nobody's going to get, but I'm going to use it anyways. If you're riding a bike and you're putting down watts, you know you want to be as efficient as possible. You want every pedal stroke, every single thing that you're doing, to contribute to producing watts so that you can go faster and farther. What we're doing in the united states by not being aligned is the equivalent of writing, with one pedal clipped in and one knot and we're just burning. We're just.

02:28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're just like creating watts exhaustion one leg sticking out waving around, the other one on the pedal and your hands whirling. Yes, that's pretty much our political system. But that's democracy, right? That's how a? Democracy works. Of course a planned economy is going to have a unified vision, Not always successfully. Tens of millions died in a famine in 1960.

02:29:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I agree, but we don't have to go sort of to the. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. I don't think we have to be a completely planned economy. I think having a little planning would be good, and being able to stick to that plan because it's in the best interest of our economy is the right thing to do. Yeah, yeah.

02:29:36 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
I think something here that makes it really hard, though, and it's not just because this is like my hobby horse, but I genuinely in this case I think it's a real problem when lawmakers like it's more than holding tech accountable. They like having them as a scapegoat to blame society's problems on, and when you have that from the left and the right, for different reasons sometimes sometimes also the same reasons, I feel like it's just hard to show those companies that they're going to be treated fairly or that they're going to be treated with like logic and reason, rather than like you know, how dare you do anything. And I've talked to certain lawmakers who are surprised. They're like hey, this tech company doesn't want to work with us on AI. We can't figure out why. And I'm like because you've been yelling at them for years about other stuff and not in good faith trying to work with them, because there are some good faith efforts too, but there's also some like we don't really care what the truth is here.

02:30:32
It's sexy to yell at tech for society's problems and not saying we shouldn't solve for the problems where they are for sure, but when it's like you like the camera time for getting in front of the camera and yelling at big tech CEOs and like that's an end in itself.

02:30:42
I think like it makes it hard to get those same people to the table in constructive ways beyond, like them advocating for regulatory capture of their future competitors and stuff like that. Like I think it's just a really and they don't and lawmakers don't stand up enough against that, which bothers me too, that like I think it's just kind of like the opposite of what we should see in a lot of cases. So now, with AI coming and we need to figure out like the right privacy regulations and the right like where do we need more regulation and where do we need, uh, um, like sandboxes or other experiments. Like I just don't think we're having the the productive conversation needed after like years of like let me just get in front of the camera yelling about tech and like that's, that's the thing that matters most, you know, yeah perform well.

02:31:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder if this is a side effect of our, our partisan uh, um, kind of uh, you know faults, fault lines in our, because then everything does become performative. Um, they're the bad guys. They're the bad guys. Having an election every four years like this does not help stability if, far from planning, it feels as if we're just like a chicken with its head cut off. You know, we're not even planning. What are you talking about? We can't even. We're not even an effective legislature. We cannot effectively legislate, let alone plan. Planning requires a certain amount of openness and unity. We certainly don't have that. I want to take a little break. We come back, uh, and talk a little bit more as we wrap things up. This is a our final ad break. You're watching this week in tech, the politics edition, because we're all kind of thinking about what's going to happen on Tuesday. Plenty of people listening to the show already know, and I don't think they're laughing at us. I doubt that. I don't know how they're feeling, but if I could look into the future, I would. I'd love to know Our show today brought to you by now. This is something that gives you some certainty.

02:32:47
The Thinkst Canary. Here's the problem. When it comes to security, a lot of people say, well, I've got perimeter security, nobody's going to get into our network, we're not worried about that. Except we know that you should be, because that's how ransomware happens. People get into the network. That's how these exfiltrations, these breaches happen. People get into the network. They have plenty of time to wander around to look for stuff to steal, to look for stuff to encrypt. In fact, on average, companies don't learn that they've been breached for 91 days, three months, that your adversaries are wandering your network unnoticed. That's why you need a Thinkst Canary. It's a honeypot. A honeypot that's easy to set up, can be deployed in minutes, and the minute someone accesses your lure files or brute forces your honeypot, your fake internal SSH server, the Thinkst Canary will immediately tell you hey, you got a problem, there's somebody inside the network. No false alerts.

02:33:50
So what is it? It's a little box that looks about the size of an external USB drive, plugs into your network and into the wall, and then you go to the console and you can configure it. There are an infinite number of configuration possibilities. It could be a SCADA device, it could be a skated device, it could be a windows server, a linux server, it could be a san, it could be an ssh server, it can be a box with a christmas tree of services turned on, or just the few that matter. You get to choose and it's so easy to change. You can move it around, you can change it.

02:34:20
The I think scanners do. Another great thing they allow you to create lure files, little files like they. They look like PDFs or spreadsheets or document files you could spread all over your network, but they phone home the minute somebody tries to open them, and so you put them around your network and they're like little tripwires that let you know there's a bad guy loose. Choose a profile for your Thinks Canary device. Register it with a hosted console. You get monitoring and notifications. By the way, any way you want them text messages, emails, eight. They've got a web hooks, uh support. They've got an api. You get phone calls for all I mean. Whatever you want things, canary will let you know, but when they do let you know, you know there is a problem.

02:35:04
Attackers who breached your network, malicious insiders too, let's not forget, and other adversaries. They look around and they see these canaries. They don't see them as tripwires, they see them as something valuable, something they could. Oh look, there's a spreadsheet document that says payroll information. I gotta open that. The minute they do, you'll know they're inside the network. That's the Thinkst Canary. It is a brilliant idea. I highly recommend them.

02:35:31
Some big companies might have hundreds. Small companies like ours might just have a handful. Let's say you want five Visit canarytoolstwit. For $7,500 a year you get five Thinkst Canaries. You can configure them all differently however you you want. You can change them Whatever you want. You also get your own hosted console. You get upgrades, support, maintenance. If you use the code twit in the how did you hear about us box, you're gonna cut 10% off that price, and not just for the first year, but for as long as you use those things canaries for life.

02:36:02
And here's the other thing that should reassure you. I think you probably can already see how valuable this might be. But you may be thinking well, I don't know, I got to try it. Thinks Canaries they are so confident that you're going to love this. They offer a two-month 60-day money-back guarantee for a full refund. But I have to tell you it's almost a decade now that they've been partnering with Twit advertising the ThinkScanary. Not one company has ever asked for their money back. The refund guarantee has never been claimed because it really works. It's great, it's incredible. A honeypot that's easy to configure and does exactly what you need it to do. That's the ThinkScanary Visit canarytoolstools. Twit again. Don't forget the offer code.

02:36:46
Twit in the how did you hear us about us? Box 10 off for life. Thank you, thanks, thank you. We love you guys. Uh, I should mention that this uncertainty is even bad for podcast networks. Uh, because companies who are not spending money on advertising either, they're sitting back. They're saying let's wait and see. Amy, what do you think Is this going to be? How long is it going to take before things settle down?

02:37:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
whatever happens on Tuesday, Well, first of all, hearing the word canary so many times reminded me of the canary sniffer I used to carry around.

02:37:22 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
What was that?

02:37:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It was.

02:37:25 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
You could see everybody's wi-fi networks oh my god, I thought it was called canary.

02:37:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Does that sound familiar to anybody?

02:37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
canary wireless I don't know, early, early days, a wi-fi sniffer, yeah I just got this um. This is a hacker, aren't you?

02:37:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
well, it's a great way to get information.

02:37:44
So this little tool that I just got um, so we have a ubiquity network running right home, as do I and uh and anyhow ubiquity has this thing called wi-fi man wizard for apple devices and it allows you to see, like I was sitting in the airport at um, charles de gaulle, um and lounge, and I had some time and I was like I wonder who's got what running. So I was able to look at the entire network, look at what every single port, every single thing that everybody was connected to. I and a lot of people use their real names, so I, I use the name of what their phones were called and their networks and then I plugged that into LinkedIn and I looked around and saw you are in trouble, holy cow.

02:38:25
I just, you know, downtime. What else am I going to do?

02:38:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But now you showed something that's hardware. I know there's a Wi-Fi man app. I could put it on my phone.

02:38:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I also have that, but if you so, that works really well on an Android phone.

02:38:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not as well on a Wi-Fi phone.

02:38:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I know no but with the device, the attachment, it stuff at any rate. It's not. It was not built for that. It's built to do the management. But you know it's me. So anyways, it's for mapping your wi-fi signal, but it just happens that it could be anybody's wi-fi signal it, yes, it literally can be. It's super fun. You should see you can see all kinds of stuff you are invite me over to your house, you are, you're actually invite me near your house. I don't even. Yeah, you don't even need to be in it.

02:39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, wow, that's wild um uncertainty.

02:39:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Are we gonna have?

02:39:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uncertainty. For how long? What's? What's the prognosis? Should I ask the magic eight ball?

02:39:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
yeah, no, I'll tell you the answer. Um the the answer is we're gonna be feeling this sort of angst for a while, regardless of who wins, regardless of what the outcome is. I just this is the sort of new normal and it's OK to live with uncertainty, but you still have to be willing to make decisions. I don't think that one one candidate you know. If Harris wins or Trump wins, that does not necessarily mean the economy change anything yeah. It doesn't.

02:39:47
Because, ultimately, you know, there's their administration, there's also the direction that Congress moves in. There's like a thousand different things. So nothing is a fait accompli. However, you know, it's probably it's a good time to get comfortable with uncertainty. And if you need help with that Zen Buddhism offers a lot of. You know ways for you to contemplate uncertainty and how to sit with that and feel okay.

02:40:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe that's why I have a little smiley Buddha looking at me the whole time.

02:40:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I do these shows A friend of mine is a Zen Buddhist priest. I don't know if I've ever told this story before, but he was telling me that the first night when he was an apprentice he's taken into a room and is sitting basically the very first night on the job. Learning is to sit with a corpse.

02:40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So in.

02:40:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Japan. Much like in judaism and other religions, when somebody passes, on yeah yeah, you don't want to leave the body, like there is, um their rituals, uh, before the burial. So his job was to sit all night long and perform um some of those rites and you know you're, you're contemplating your own mortality. Talk about coming face to face with uncertainty, um, but but it is about learning how to let go of control and and let some of those um we are all going to be lying there at some point, yeah, which you know um it is what

02:41:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is, that's life.

02:41:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But uh, but the more that you try to exert control, the worse everything gets. So it doesn't mean to disengage. You need to be fully engaged and sort of accept the agency that you have to make the change that you want, while at the same time being okay with uncertainty and not knowing exact outcomes all of the time.

02:41:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I tell our advertisers Ride the horse in the direction it's going yeah, this is not a time to step away from advertising, um, because, in fact you know the there was a boom during covet because of the uncertainty. It actually the advertisers that stuck with it did very, very well.

02:42:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There was a boom yeah, and if anything, um, given the the craziness and tech, I mean, everybody is seeking out answers for things and I really this kind of comes full circle from where we started. But I know that people may not be talking more than they're typing right now, but but that will change. Um, every technology company is working on natural language, naturally. Uh, natural nlu, natural user language. My, my, what is the word I'm trying to say?

02:42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
natural language. Yeah, yeah, um, so that you can talk to it in a natural way yes, and naturally that's what I made my action button do on my iphone yeah, I mean, but it's kind of the stuff I get back is kind of for right now, but but things are changing.

02:42:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Google, uh, deepmind has a new responses you've been getting.

02:42:53 - Benito (Announcement)
Sometimes conversations or interactions don't quite hit the mark, but I'm here to help, however I can. What's been on your mind lately?

02:43:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
let me. That sounds pretty good. Actually, that's good, sounds pretty good. But the point is, things are things that work. We're in a period of transition and people will talk more than they type. People tend to listen more than they read um, and you know, interfaces are changing too. Uh, google, um deep mind, has a some research out where it creates doom as you're playing it. So it's a user interface that is generated based on you as you're playing. It's not a predefined the game Doom. Well, like an emulated old school version of Doom.

02:43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because Doom was on Rails, there was no variation in it.

02:43:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So you're saying it Right, I think gaming could really benefit from AI.

02:43:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm really shocked that there isn't more of that.

02:43:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But the point is that this type of interactive media has has will grow.

02:43:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So again, going back to advertisers, I think the relationship between advertisers and publishers and media companies has to evolve beyond where it is is but um well, interesting because, according to the quarterly results from some of the biggest companies like google, meta and snap, digital advertising is very healthy right now. Google's advertising revenue up 10 year over year. Partly that's election, but uh but. But also ai driven ad tools help boost efficiency, they say. We believe AI will revolutionize every part of the marketing value chain. Philip Schindler, who is the chief business officer, meta sales increased 19% year over year. Profits ballooned 35%. That's all. Digital ad sales Didn't help Meta's stock, but that's another matter. Didn't help Meta's stock, but that's another matter.

02:44:49
Snap's revenue grew 15% year over year thanks to investments in AI and AR that are driving innovation across Snapchat's advertising platform. According to Evan Spiegel, reddit's earnings cruised past analyst expectations. Advertising income on Reddit grew 55% 55% year over year, driving its first ever profitable quarter. Roku earned a bill roku you wouldn't think of as an advertising company they are. They earned more than a billion dollars in revenue last quarter thanks to strong growth in its platform business, which includes advertising. So advertising's up for those companies. It's doing very well. I wish we were doing a little better for podcasting, but that's another matter for another day. Consumer Reports doesn't take advertising. You're golden. Nicholas DeLeon Never has, never will I love that yeah, no, no ads.

02:45:40 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
It's all subscriber funded and may it continue. I'm proud to be a subscriber.

02:45:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very proud to be a subscriber. Very proud to be a subscriber. Nicholas, thank you so much for being here. Look look forward to your coffee reviews.

02:45:51 - Nicholas de Leon (Guest)
I think this will be very interesting, uh yeah, I don't know when the first ones are going to hit. Uh, like I said, I was just informed maybe two weeks ago, so it won't. It won't exactly be tomorrow, but yeah, yeah in the coming.

02:46:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, takes a while to test a lot of coffee makers. If you need, uh, anybody to help you judge or anything, I love coffee, I'll, I'll, I'll help you. Don't ask thanks. Don't ask this one here, shoshana weissman likes nescafe. But I'm not going to hold it against you, shoshana, because you also love sloths. How did you become the chairman of the sloth committee?

02:46:23 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
so, uh, about 10 years ago, a little more than 10 years ago, when I was working for a pack, they wanted us to use a lot of gifts, and I was glad because I like the internet, uh and um, I ended up, uh, uh, just falling in love with sloths. You see sloths, gifts everywhere, and there's this one of a sloth giving a flower to a woman, and for sloths the flower is like chocolate and I'm like, oh my, that's so selfless and sweet and you just fall in love with them and they're so cute and I'm also an associate fellow at the Sloth Institute where I FOIA the government for sloth-related things.

02:46:56
I actually do things for them, wait a minute.

02:46:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there really a Sloth Institute?

02:47:01 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
In Costa Rica, yep, oh, and you FO in Costa Rica, yep, oh, and euphoria. The Costa Rican government, no, the US government for sloth imports, because they don't want to release the Lima, the Lima's database, because it basically has like trophies, like elephant trophies, and stuff oh, wow but it also has sloths and no one cares about the sloth data. So the the uh, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, was like, yeah, you can have the sloth data they don't.

02:47:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't redact sloth names out of the documents or anything like that.

02:47:28 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
But I did that and created a database of sloth-related inspections across zoos across the.

02:47:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
US.

02:47:38 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
You really did that. That's awesome, yeah, and they were cited in the New York Times, citing my data. We still haven't published it yet. They can be a little slow sometimes, honestly matches, but uh, but they do incredible work. They're really good at sloth protection and I'm glad I can help them shoshana is a mountaineer who, for fun, climbs 40 percent grades.

02:48:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you can find her at senator shoshana on xcom and there's lots of links there to her various things and, of course, her work at R Street, at rstreetorg, where you've done some really good work, especially on. I really like the age verification stuff you've done. I hope that. Congress listens to you. That's all I can say.

02:48:21 -  Shoshana Weissmann (Guest)
They don't usually listen, but sometimes they listen, Sometimes sometimes.

02:48:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Great to have you. Thank you for being here, shoshana, and thanks for all you've done for the sloths. I really appreciate it. They are, they're wonderful. They move slowly, but that's okay. Well, they're never in a hurry, are they? No, you shouldn't be, amy Webb. I shook the magic eight ball and it said trust. It said the future is today. The future is today. So live life to the fullest right now. Uh, embrace uncertainty.

02:48:57 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think that's a great way to to end the show futures today. Futures today, happy birthday thank you because um the future is the result of the decisions that we make today.

02:49:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right.

02:49:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Right.

02:49:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And today was the future yesterday. So in a way, yeah, it's very confusing, but at least I'm not in the same room as a dead body. Thank you so much for being here, amy Webb futuretodayinstitutecom. I really appreciate all three of you. Really fun to do a show with you guys, especially in a day where there's not much to talk about, cause we got to talk about a lot of other things, which is kind of fun.

02:49:34
Go vote everybody. Your vote matters, not just, and, by the way, so much focus on the presidential election. It makes me feel bad. There's the local elections are even more important. Those are the people who affect your day-to-day life. So, yeah, you may go vote for president, but make sure you do the down ballot voting too, and in some states like california, that is not easy. You might want to start early, do some research. Um, actually, I was really pleased to see and I was should have made this at one of our it was should have made this at one of our stories today.

02:50:06
But perplexityai, which is one of my favorite AIs, has an election site now where you can go and not only follow the election but you can enter in your locale, see your ballot, and it collects information from a lot of different sources nonpartisan information from a lot of different sources, so it helps you vote. So if you haven't yet cast your ballot and you're trying to decide on those initiatives and propositions not just the top of the ballot but the lower down parts of the ballot there is a lot of information on here and it's good information. You can see the source. It's not an AI generated summary. You can see the source. I think Perplexity has done a great job on this, so that's perplexityai. It's free to use. There's a link to their elections site on there. Do your research, be a smart voter and don't forget to cast your vote on Tuesday.

02:51:01
Thanks everybody for joining us. We do twit every Sunday afternoon now at 2200 UTC because finally we're in standard time. That's 2 pm Pacific, standard Time, 5 pm Eastern. We stream now live on eight different platforms and there are 1300 people watching us, 600 on Xcom alone. We stream for our club members at Discordcom. I have to hold up my fingers because otherwise I'll miss a few. Discordcom, youtubecom oh, that's the wrong finger to let down tell us how you really feel about youtubecom twitchtv, kick, xcom, facebook, linkedin and tiktok.

02:51:52
There I got them all so you can always watch us live, but that means you have to be around when we're doing our shows. You can always watch after the fact. We have youtube channels for all the shows. We have a website, twittv, where you can download shows, audio or video. Almost all our shows have video, and you can also, of course, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way, you get it automatically. So you have it for you know. Your next drive into town or whatever it is you do if you're working at home, your next walk down the hall? Uh, thank you everybody for being here. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can. Bye-bye.