This Week in Tech 1005 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, abrar Alhidi, lisa D'Adichico and Dan Patterson join me to talk about the 23rd birthday. Yes, it was today 23 years ago that the iPod was born. We'll also talk about the big winners in the 2004 presidential election. I'll give you a hint it wasn't the president, it was cryptocurrency and Roblox. Is it a threat to our children or a great way to learn to program?

00:28
all that more coming up next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit this week at tech episode 1005, recorded sunday, november 10th, 2024 125 000 in baguettes. It's time for twit this week in the show that covers the week's tech news, and I love this panel, this panel. All of us have either worked for or currently work for CNET. Completely by accident, abrar Alhidi is here. She reports on technology for CNET. Hi, abrar, hello, how are you? I'm um well, as well as one could expect. I'm.

01:28 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You know I'm doing all right, but how are you? You're wearing a fabulous shirt and I'm jealous that I'm not, and I wish you had told me that you were going to wear a cool shirt, because I would have done the same, but do? You have syrupy colored clothing. I need to.

01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really got to step it up next time, honestly, yeah no, this is, I'll tell you, when I first, uh, when I was in the studio, I would always wear a blazer and a dress shirt, you know, button down shirt and kind of, uh, office casual look. Yeah, but in here in the, in the attic, it's so colorful and I thought you know so I have. I have about 40 shirts that a listener has been sending over the years from a store in San Miguel de Allende, wynton Churchill. Every few months I would get a new bunch of shirts, and so I love these shirts. They're very colorful, they're made locally in Mexico with patterns that reflect Mexican culture and I just it makes me happy.

02:25 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It makes me happy too. Thank you for wearing that for us.

02:27 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Thank you yes, did you ever wear that on television?

02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, they would have stopped me. Yeah, the bosses would have stopped me, that's. Dan Patterson, he is editorial director Blackbird AI and a contributor for ZD net, which is kind of sort of like CNET. But you worked for cnet back in the day, right? Oh, I sure did I sure?

02:47 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
did I don't think I stopped like I went to work for other companies. I left cbs but I continued like, like, no, you can't stop working for cnet never, none of nobody can, because they're so dominant.

02:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, a bra works on the same team as lisa edachiko. Senior editor has seen it. Lisa, we haven't seen you in so long, hello hello.

03:07 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yes, thank you guys for having me back.

03:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been a while so long that she lost the microphone it's true, it's buried under my piles of gadgets in the basement somewhere oh well, you sound fine.

03:20
Lovely to see you as well. Senior editor at CNET. So it is kind of an alumni gathering. I was talking about this before the show. The fourth employee of CNET back when it was just Halsey Minor and a few other people Didn't work out, but that's a long story, we don't need to go into that. You know what today is. Oh, I was going to pull this down off my shelf. Hold on a second. It might be with your microphone in the basement, but let me check.

03:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You're never gonna live that down, lisa.

03:52 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I hope you know I know I did this to myself this ipod turned 23 today.

04:02 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
23 today, wow, the vibes and the feels.

04:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet you a bra and Lisa don't even remember the first iPod Of course. I do. I couldn't afford it.

04:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I was like in probably sixth grade at the time, but I remember it was like what the rich kids had, oh yeah. But I did get an iPod shuffle a couple of years later and that was my starter Apple device.

04:25 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Oh yeah, I also could not afford one, but I had a Dell Pocket DJ instead.

04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh Lord, that's awful.

04:30 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm so sorry, leo. I bought an iRiver H140 because you could plug a microphone into the top, and thus began my podcasting career.

04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, you were podcasting on the iRiver river yeah, this was not my first mp3 player I had um something called the diamond rio before this yeah, that thing was awesome, yeah, and it played audible books, which is the main reason I got it.

04:57
I had spent years commuting two hours, sometimes four hours, a day, to cnet, I'm sorry. Two hours, sometimes four hours, a day, to CNET, I'm sorry, zdtv, which kind of was CNET. Anyway, it's a long story, it's very incestuous, but anyway, and that commute almost killed me. So I was listening to books on tape, but they came in boxes of cassettes. And when Audible came along and said, oh, you know, you don't have to have a box of cassettes, you just need an MP3 player, I thought, oh, this is great, this was remember cassettes, you just need an mp3 player. I thought this is great, this was remember steve jobs, a thousand songs in your pocket.

05:30
And one of the things that made this possible was there was a little hard drive, a little tiny matchbook sized hard drive inside this, which the manufacturers I'm trying to remember was a canon, who made that first hard drive couldn't figure out where the market was. In fact they were close to discontinuing it when Steve Jobs came along and said we want to make a music player that can hold a gigabyte, and at the time a gigabyte of flash RAM would have been obscenely expensive. So they found this hard drive and they put it in here and it became the first really popular. I would say this was apple's first consumer hit right. Not the apple ii, not the macintosh, not the imac this because I think it was for everybody right.

06:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
it was like as a child you'd hear about it, right, because all the cool kids had one, and it wasn't just people.

06:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all the sixth graders wanted one Exactly.

06:32 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
And it was like, yeah, in the era before, like you know, cell, the first like device that you had that you were like proud to show off, like a bra was saying like it kind of made you look cool and everybody wanted one.

06:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
um, I feel like it was like I consider it to be like the first like really like consumer tech gadget that kind of, you know, started the era that we're in today really for everyone is such a key phrase, because apple was this cool kind of smaller company but apple people were their own, it was its own culture and it was uh kind of in its own universe. And the ipod really was for everyone. It it made people on windows want mac devices or Apple devices.

07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and this, of course, inspired the iPhone in some respects. Remember when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007,. He showed it with a phone dial on it first. Then he said we've invented an iPod phone. And then he said no, no, just joking, and showed the remarkable iPhone in 2007. That was, of course, the biggest consumer hit for Apple.

07:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
But this is what started off.

07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought you were going to say the rocker, the rocker, yeah, the Motorola rocker which predated the iPhone.

07:52 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It did. It was the first introduction of iTunes on a mobile device.

07:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the iPod came out on this day, november 10th 2001. Wow, oh, I totally got my dates wrong.

08:03 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Then I was thinking about I was not in sixth grade 2001. Wow, oh, I totally got my dates wrong. Then I'm thinking about I was not in sixth grade in 2001. I was in first grade, but that sixth grade was the first time I remember people having one. I think that's the difference.

08:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was ridiculous. This was not. This was. I'll tell you. One of the reasons this was a niche product at first is because it only worked with a Mac. Yeah, see, it has a FireWire port on it.

08:25 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Oh my gosh.

08:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it did. Yeah, so that was Not for everyone. Not for everyone, and it wasn't until his employees convinced Steve Jobs that to make iTunes for Windows that it really took off.

08:41 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
So this was a niche product and it was really for everyone yeah.

08:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then it really was exactly. This was really for everyone. Yeah, then it really was exactly. This was just for the few, the hardy it was. I think it was toshiba actually that made the hard drive, that made this possible. Anyway, happy birthday to the ipod, and this is a good time to think about your first ipod. To think back in time, I'm glad I kept this. You know, what's funny is I every once in a while I plug in the Firewire cable and see what I was listening to in 2001 and then I immediately disconnected and say oh, never mind, never mind.

09:17
I think it was Britney Spears. I love that. Hit me baby one more time, as it should be.

09:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, yeah.

09:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the time Britney's still a thing.

09:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, timeless yeah.

09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a 1.8-inch drive made by Toshiba. Thank you, Keith. I think you're right. It was the first. If that didn't exist, this wouldn't have existed. It's also the reason this is called a podcast. Oh, this wouldn't have existed. So it's also the reason this is called a podcast. Oh, you're right, bonito. Our producer is pointing out this gave the name to the shows that we do podcasting. I never always hated the name podcast, because it's it implied an ipod and in the early days you did have to listen to this. Yeah, because our first our first.

10:06
My first podcast was 2004,. Three years later, and it really was a podcast. It was the only. You'd have to download it on your Mac and then synchronize it using iTunes to your MP3 player, your iPod, so you can listen to it.

10:19 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You could use others. I you know I had the juice podcast receiver that was, I think. Oh yeah, this thing. Um, I was, do you remember like the podcast alley and podcast pickle days and adam curry had the daily source code, dave weiner had morning coffee notes no, I don't remember any of that at all. No, no, of course I do, I was I was one of the first 10 podcasters in the world. There were many of us the listener, you, not the Leo, you.

10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I was around back then. I really was All right Enough memory lane. Apple actually in the news because, without telling anyone, when they released iOS 18.1,. When they released iOS 18.1, they changed the code so that if your iPhone isn't unlocked for a period of time, it switches off, which the police can't. Uh, you know, because if it unlocks, you got a problem. The story from joseph cox in 404 media on thursday 404 media reported police were freaking out about mysteriously rebooting iph, which caused iPhone experts to look at the code in 18.1, which came out last week, and say "'Oh yeah, this is a new code in'. Oh, why am I holding that up? I'm sorry, this is new code in the iPhone". I'm confusing the two. Which reboots it? This is interesting from Apple.

12:05 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It's interesting too that it mentions the phones communicating with each other and then signaling each other to reboot. That's just.

12:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I hadn't heard that. Tell me about that.

12:14 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, I read somewhere that it's in some way. They kind of just communicate with other phones and send a signal, and then the others also reboot.

12:21 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, I was going to say I imagine it'd be similar to like how the Find my Network works, yeah, yeah.

12:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what's the theory there? We've been captured.

12:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That sounds like it doesn't it Release. Release us. This sounds like a Pixar film, guys. This needs to like-.

12:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting, I didn't see that. So, uh, has apple admitted that it's? I think it's. It's finally said yeah, yeah, we, yeah, we did that. Um, it is better for your security. You, apple, can make the case. Oh well, if your phone is stolen case, oh well. If your phone is stolen, uh, and it gets shipped to China, they won't be able it. No, you still have to unlock it, right. What is the theory or subpoenaed? Yeah, if once it's rebooted, it reboots into a locked mode. I guess one of the problems and this was first reported in the Wall Street Journal by joanna stern was people shoulder surfing you after you unlocked your phone and noticing your code. No, but that wouldn't work either. It would have to be that you had unlocked it. They grabbed your phone and then they kept doing this as they ran down the street. So the phone wouldn't lock, right, or the police grab your phone, and maybe the police have some sort of jiggle finger.

13:45
I'm going up and down the phone screen, the cops definitely have a jiggle finger they have a jiggle finger, or uh, as as it's professionally known, a mouse jiggler, and it uh, and then at what keeps the phone from going to sleep? That wouldn't work either. I don't know who this. Why would police be upset about this? I don't understand yet. I should have done more research on this story, but it just. It just broke from semaphore, yeah it definitely.

14:10 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
It definitely seems like a like part of apple's anti-theft measures. But yeah, it's hard to kind of place exactly um the benefit of it and what how and why are police upset? Yeah, I guess the challenge is the phone locking, like you mentioned.

14:27
So whether the phone is on or off, it's still going to be locked. So yeah, I don't know, but this does remind me of like a new thing, speaking of like anti-theft updates. I guess Android 15 also has like a new thing where, if your phone is stolen, like if someone swipes it from your hand and like runs off, it can apparently detect that and automatically lock the phone.

14:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I have not tried that.

14:51 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Thankfully I haven't had to see whether it works.

14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It notices that somebody's running with your phone. I guess, and it's no longer in your possession.

15:00 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It's really interesting that Apple would add these technologies to the phone. Yeah, I mean I this as a consumer just gives me a little more sense of ease. You know, especially not you don't have to report someplace where they want to take your phone to appreciate features like this. But even if it's a lost or stolen, this gives me a great sense of ease.

15:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right. Well, there, you have it All right. Well, there, you have it All right. I started with kind of more toy story stuff, candy store stuff, because what I am nervous about going forward on Twit. I want people to have a little respite from what has been a very difficult election season and I think sometimes tech can be that respite. It's fun, it's interesting. There's lots to talk about without talking about politics. There is an intersection, however, between tech and politics, so we have a few stories that are related to the election. I don't want you to experience PTSD or anything. We're going to move through them fairly quickly. Tsd or anything, we're going to move through them fairly quickly. This is not a partisan panel and we're not going to be partisan about it, but there are some stories. You wrote a story for ZDNet, dan, about how the election will determine tech's future. Now, you wrote this the day before the election.

16:19 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I wrote it like I mean it was working on it in August and September. You know, one of the most interesting things about this story and this was for ZDNet it's about tech policy, not the partisanship, and it was one of the hardest stories I've ever written to source. I'm not saying that hyperbolically. I'm sure you know, Lisa and Abrar, you're pretty familiar with the sourcing process. When you're doing a tech story, Often I call people who are kind of in my stable and I try to get first person on the phone and talk.

16:51
And if that doesn't work, I usually write a like seven to ten question email and send it to people who are reliable, who I know will, will, who are authoritative and reliable, and in this case I send it to will uh, who are authoritative and reliable, and in this case I send it to, I think, 18 people. I had two want to go on record. Everyone else said this is great, I'm happy to contribute off record, I'm happy to help you understand, from our perspective, regulation. And some of those people were in DC, but most people were like look, I just I'm exhausted, exhausted. I don't want to talk about this and imagine how they feel today I think one thing surprising though.

17:31 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I think one thing.

17:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you think the stock market's already kind of weighed in on this. I think it's generally perceived as good for tech. Look at all of the um careful ceos who sent congratulation messages, messages to President-elect Trump, many of them with big exclamation marks. Jeff Bezos, big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th by the way, interesting they all used X for this Formerly Twitter To our 47th president on an extraordinary political comeback, a decisive victory. All of them focused on the future, the prospects for the nation. No nation, bezos wrote, has bigger opportunities, wishing at real Donald Trump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love. Of course, bezos told the Washington Post not to endorse Kamala Harris in the days before the election. That probably was even more appreciated by the president-elect, tim Cook. Congratulations, president Trump, on your victory exclamation mark. We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead and will be fueled by ingenuity, innovation and creativity. Subtext what is he really saying in that uh tweet?

18:51 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
please be nice to us and don't and don't like, let antitrust touch us in any way.

18:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um well, that's probably good news for the companies, except maybe google, because I I don't think trump likes google, but I think most of the companies lena khan's going to be gone from the ftc.

19:10 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Most companies probably say, good, we can proceed with mergers and acquisitions without imp being impeded by regulatory bodies, right, except for the thing, I wouldn't be surprised if there was like a wave of acquisitions in these next four years, because for that very reason you know, there's been a lot of scrutiny on, you know, acquisitions and I do feel like at this point I of course don't know for sure, but I would imagine the thought is okay, like if we have plans or interests or you know companies that we want to invest in or buy, like these next four years would be the time to do that, because we don't know what's going to happen after that yeah, uh, this is your chance, big chance right now.

19:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sam altman, of course, ai. I think there are a few real beneficiaries uh, ai and crypto. For sure a sam altman, uh, president or founder and boss CEO, I guess, of OpenAI. Congrats, this is. It was like I'm too busy to capitalize. Let me just type this out real quick Congrats to President Trump. Wish for his huge success in the job. In a follow up post, he said he forgot the part where you say oh, america, it's critically important that the us maintains its lead in developing ai with democratic values. I don't know that looked. I don't know uh is. Did you find, dan, in your research that the trump administration would be very pro-ai? Um?

20:40 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
one of the interesting things, the biggest takeaway, is that anyone who says they know really does not know. It's difficult to get from the campaign any sense of policy when it comes to AI, and you really do have to just read tea leaves. When it comes to the, the president elects past statements found very interesting was the chips act and this attempt by the biden administration to reshore a lot of the, the manufacturing and the technology, the, the process and the chain. I don't have an indication of what the next president will do with chips at, but it seems as though that is pretty aligned with much of his uh rhetoric during the campaign.

21:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you're going to make america great again, you've got to bring chip manufacture back.

21:30 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I I would think so.

21:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, right, uh, what does that mean? That's intel and amd tsmc is a taiwanese company. I think he was somewhat critical. At least he's been in. The problem is, yeah, he's not very consistent, but in the past he's been very critical of TSMC.

21:47 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And we'll see what happens there. I mean, that's just a lot of this is so tied to geopolitics that it's really hard to without knowing what their policies about China will be. It's hard to get a sense of what will happen with TSMC and Taiwan.

22:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's hard for us to know what the right thing to do is in general. Right, uh, we have time. Close ties to china economically, but they're clearly an adversary politically. Um, it's, you know taiwan is is a uh un. You know it's an unknown sitting in between the US and China.

22:27 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
China wants to take it back it's a democracy and they want to be independent right, but China considers it part of their uh, just like Hong Kong yeah, or Russia considers Crimea, crimea to be part of their country.

22:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, here's Elon Musk's ex. What do you call it as a? They can't call it a tweet anymore, that's so boring. Yeah, it's morning in America. He says, calling back to uh Ronald Reagan that was his campaign slogan and then a clearly AI generated picture of Elon saluting the American flag floating high above New York City. I don't know, since I see the Empire State Building in the back. I don't, I see it. Maybe he's at one. He's standing on the I don't know what he's one World Trade Center. I don't know what he's standing on. It's. It's AI. What doesn't need to be standing anything? Google's uh CEO, sundar Pichai.

23:20
Congratulations to president at real Donald Trump. No, by the way, all of them are adding him on X, even though he posts rarely on X, mostly on his own Trump social. Congratulations to President at real Donald Trump on his decisive victory. We are in a golden age again of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to bring help, bring the benefits to everyone. That's interesting. Satya Nadella, ceo of Microsoft. Congratulations, president Trump. We're looking forward to engaging with you and your administration to drive, oh, innovation. There's a word we haven't heard much Forward that creates new growth and opportunity for the United States and the world. They all feel like innovation is a word. They really want to get in there. Michael Dell, congratulations to President Trump on a successful campaign and election win. We look forward to continued progress and opportunity. Did you mean innovation, michael? Under his leadership and working together toward a strong and unified future for all.

24:27 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
This is just smart business, though, right yeah, we could take a cross-section of ceos and they're all executives are going to say similar statements in fact go ahead.

24:37 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I was going to say kind of like a bra mentioned earlier. I mean, in their eyes, it's in their best interest to align themselves with whoever's in office, because nobody wants to get to be the target of a big antitrust probe. Because that's been happening a lot in the last like five to seven years, more so than in the decade before that, for sure, and that's one thing that's really been at the top of my mind, especially with a lot of talk and concern about AI regulation and AI being so unregulated. Um, and now that like we're at a point in time where ai is really part of like every single tech product that we actually use, um, I don't know, it's interesting to see how things will play out.

25:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like dan said, we just don't know yet it's just politic, it's just smart if you're gonna do that.

25:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And I think, like we kind of mentioned, you know, trump's ideas and policies and opinions change a lot, and so I think a lot of these tech leaders believe that if they start now in trying to get along, then it becomes easier for them to achieve whatever their mission is. And so I think that's why we're seeing all these congratulatory posts. And I also saw in that CNBC article that apparently Jeff Bezos has only tweeted twice this year, and both times They've mentioned Donald Trump. So that's kind of telling.

25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean Bezos and Musk both have space ventures, commercial space ventures, which means there's a lot of potentially a lot of money coming from the federal government, uh, toward them. I know would love for Blue Origin to beat SpaceX in this, that I don't think they're even close to doing that.

26:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I. It's very interesting. I mean, we can make jokes about the Washington Post all we want, but it's interesting that Bezos elected to use X, as opposed to his own media company, to make that statement. Um, they all used x.

26:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that really a tacit admission that it's not just donald trump you want to court?

26:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
you wanted to court elon musk as well I think, I think I think threads just kind of sucks like I don't know, I don't know it's not going to be threads blue sky and it's definitely not going to be mastodon.

26:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand that oh, there's.

26:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You know what's so interesting about that, though, do you? Let's flash back to 2016. I made a lot of hay back then about cambridge analytica and the exploitation of facebook and the social graph in order to. At the time, there were, um, uh, claims that that, uh, our behavior can and would be manipulated, or was manipulated. Um, and you know, social media and criticizing facebook was big business for several years. Um, now, uh, we have just kind of leaned into. Okay, this is what happened.

27:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to post about it on x yeah, you know, by the way, there was a lot of concern before the election. We talked a lot about it. Uh, we had alex stamos on who for a long time, ran the internet observatory at stanford watching election disinformation. There was real concern that ai would really become. I remember this a year ago.

27:42
We were saying well, well, so here's from the washington post today ai and this is quoting a study, uh from um, this uh institute for strategic dialogue uh, researchers noted that ai did not sway the, that people didn't change their minds, and I think this makes sense to me. Anyway, people didn't change their minds because of disinformation or AI, although it does say it deepened the partisan divide. I think one of the things that it's my opinion. I'd like to know what you think memes, tweets, posts do is, uh, to confirm your, it's confirmation bias, to confirm what you already believe? Yeah, or it's a way of showing you're part of the tribe and uh, confirming you know that. Uh, this is what you now you, you, blackbird ai, this is my day job is this right we?

28:47
yeah we call it. So what's your?

28:48 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
opinion on all this. Well, I don't want to log roll for my company, uh, but I had log roll, my friend I know a little bit about ai and ai disinformation and many of the goals and techniques.

29:01
I really don't like seeing articles like this because it's total misrepresentation of the goals of threat actors or bad actors. They are not trying to switch an election and we know this. We went back to 2016 and 2020. The bad actors trying to influence those elections weren't trying to flip a switch or change the election. They were trying. They had larger geopolitical and strategic goals. One thing, that's more subtle goals.

29:26
maybe that wouldn't be so obvious as flipping Well to, to, to reinforce views, sometimes to change views, but to play the long game of the big game. And look, let's not forget that there were billions of people, literally, that voted this year. Not just the United States, but more than half the world's population voted in 2024. And when we take we looked at all of this In fact I just dropped in a link We've been looking at this all year.

29:54
We've been looking at election disinformation and the role of artificial intelligence, and what AI has done is the same thing in cybersecurity. And in fact now we find almost all cyber attacks have what we call a narrative attack or some sort of disinformation that's tied to it, or a use of narratives. Ransomware is a great example Naming and shaming, you exfiltrate data and then you use that data to get additional information from your target. But what we see with narrative attacks that are targeted at elections is that there is not one big boogeyman trying to change things for the bad. What we have are agenda-driven actors who all want different things in different regions, different countries, different counties, different, different cities. But ai has reduced the distance and friction. It has made it easier to perpetrate agenda-driven activities at large scale very quickly. Sorry, again, that's a rant and I always do this on the show. Right, leo, I go into these places it's your job anyway.

31:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, that's your. This is the story at blackbirdai, vote 2024 the top narrative attacks disrupting global elections. Dan wrote this with emily coleman uh, at blackbird ai. So you're actually talking about the. This is actually quite interesting because it's the different uh narrative uh stories that are that are said about yeah and their impacts, and I think that's very interesting. You also talk about ai flooding uh, something steve bannon calls flooding the zone with poop.

31:35 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yep I love my former employer. I am very close friends with many people there, but they started a disinformation desk with fact checkers, like every big news organization did. And that is a reading of 20th century geopolitics you can't fact check it away.

31:51
You, you can fact check, but many of these techniques are designed to flood, to make it just like you said uh, it's too so much, there's so much in the zone. You really and that's another goal of disinformation well, either, to increase cynicism. I don't really know what to believe all these politicians. They're just talking and I don't like any of them it worked very much.

32:13
It also worked in your own working in taiwan and a lot of other places where disinformation and narrative attacks are being deployed so that's another really important point, because we're very uh, unfortunately, we're in the US.

32:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most of our contributors are in the US, so we tend to be a little US centric. But there are, there've been, elections all over the world. This is happening everywhere in the world, not just in the US Is there. But it's hard if you, if the goal is nebulous, it's hard to say, well, they're trying to do this or they're trying to do that, what are they trying to do Dan.

32:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Well, there's no they. I say agenda-driven actors because there is no. I mean, in the case of, let's say, russia and NATO and Ukraine, there is a they and we know that it's Putin, and it's very easy to do a binary, a one and a zero, or a black and a white. Maybe when it comes to China and taiwan, it's, it's analogous, but look, no, this is deployed. You look at what happened in bangladesh and in india and you look at what happens, you know, in small towns and in cities and in counties. It's not one they. It is many of us who have access to artificial intelligence and we can create information that reinforces our worldview, and some actors are more coordinated and have larger goals, but it doesn't mean that it's one big boogeyman against the rest of us. It just means that all of us have to be vigilant against narrative attacks.

33:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's such an interesting perspective because it's I think the way it's been framed has been that misinformation, ai or not, will sway people and make them change their minds. But I really like that idea of we're already so fragmented and we're already in our echo chambers and that will really reinforce whatever preconceived notions we have and instead of having factual information to back things up information should always be factual you now have misinformation to kind of back up whatever your worldview is.

34:08 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I also think it's interesting, dan, what you're saying about like this just kind of amplifying technique like AI, just kind of amplifying techniques that have already been used by you know bad actors or you know people out there with specific agendas and interests, because I think that's the biggest criticism about a lot of the fears people have about AI is that like, hey, this isn't necessarily new, photoshop has existed forever. But what it does is that it makes those tools accessible to anyone. You don't have to have any technical know-how, you just have to know how to push a button on your phone the same way you would push a button to do anything else on your phone, and you can just generate an image completely from scratch and share it.

34:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, key, lisa, yep, yep. I think that was our biggest concern about AI was that it would just make it easier to flood the zone, that it wouldn't necessarily take any particular position, but that all the positions would have many, many more posts. Dan, does anybody study this? Do we know how many bots were disinformation bots on on X, for instance? Do we, do we have any?

35:10 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
idea. Lots of people study it. I loved when you had Alex on the show. I I thought that was such a fascinating conversation um.

35:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unfortunately, he left the Stanford Internet Observatory and works in the the private sector now as a CISO at uh sentinel one, but uh, he's still a great resource of information I think renee de resta is fantastic.

35:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I I again I don't want to log rule, but my ceo was team khaled is. Just do a google search for wasim khaled and fortune. He gave a talk last year or in the summer. Uh, that was it really. It's like 10 or 15 minutes, but it really frames this in a way that helps us understand, like like, our understanding of information is really based on facts and facts are fungible. Yeah, that wasn't what he said. I'm paraphrasing, but but it was just a tremendous speech. Again, I hate coming on here and log rolling. It's not my intent.

35:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody's on here for their expertise and this is an area of your expertise, so it's not log rolling, it's just talking about something you know.

36:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I hope would be helpful. Yeah, I. I really think was seem is tremendous and and the speech that he gave is really it, it visualizes, it helps, it helped me understand that the scope and scale of the challenge of disinformation interesting one thing that did change very much.

36:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I think the number one source for, certainly for younger people, is YouTube. Youtube viewers watched 84 million hours of presidential election day coverage on YouTube 84 million hours. That's why that's yeah. Is that where you?

36:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
got your news. Yeah, I have flipped between different networks on youtube.

36:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, I watched on youtube tv because I I don't have cable, but I don't count that as watching uh youtube. I I think they mean youtube videos, right? Well, maybe not. Uh, fox news is the most popular broadcast streamed live on YouTube, setting a record of 1.14 million peak viewers, nbc News trailing behind with six like half that 616,000 peak viewers. Nielsen reported the traditional broadcasts and cable viewers drew 42 million viewers. So there's a big, still a big Gulf across 18 television networks. That is down more than 25 percent from last time, which doesn't surprise me. There's definitely some burnout happening. Uh 59, 56.9 million prime time viewers. Fox, of course, uh outranked all the other networks 13 million of them watching Fox, and the digital platforms did very, very well as well. One of the advantages, according to Nazar Babemko, who's product manager at Streams Charts, it's not just about watching anymore. People are actively debating and reacting in real time, reshaping election discourse in the process.

38:02
I guess that's where social networks like X come in and the YouTube comments section and oh yeah, I didn't even think of that and chat and YouTube as well, and threads and threads yeah well.

38:13 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I think there's like a couple of things going on there too, like it's you know for one um. You know, a lot of younger people might not even own television, so they're probably already used to getting most of their information and their news through places like YouTube because they're watching on their phone. To. A lot of us have subscription fatigues. Even if you do own a television, you probably don't have cable or you might not have access to those networks the way that you had in the past. So I think those two trends are certainly, like you know, a big factor in this. But also, I do think you know this election cycle in particular, I think, was so influenced by, like, online discourse, more so than many elections in the past, and I was thinking about this really brilliant piece I read by Taylor Lorenz.

38:59
I don't know if you guys had a chance to check it out on website user mag, but she just had this great story about how, um, you know, republican right-wing influencers kind of galvanized these like giant audiences online, um, throughout the election cycle and it just um, I don't know, it was just one of those things that I feel like was a really mind-blowing revelation, and this has nothing to do with youtube, but in a way it does, because a lot of um, you know, youtube is where people go to watch their favorite personalities, whether it's about politics, whether it's about tech, whether it's about anything. So I do think, you know, I'm not surprised to hear that you know, election night viewing also happened on youtube I mean that's, and it's going to be bigger every four years, right?

39:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean it's just inevitable. This is, this is where everybody's moving.

39:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It's just miraculous that youtube has. I mean, it's one of the few. I feel like that's just continued to become more relevant over time and I do think it's really benefited from what lisa mentioned. I mean, I'm in that second camp of people who owns a tv but doesn't have cable. It's never even crossed my mind to get cable. I'm going to be so honest with you. I just, you know, rely really never and I feel like I should at this point, because I don't want to have 10 different subscriptions for things I really watch, but and there are times where I kind of wish I had, you know, easier access to live tv.

40:15
But um, but youtube's always there and it's free I mean, I actually pay for premium it's always there, yeah you have to, otherwise there's so many ads and so on.

40:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, somebody in the twitch chat said pats said uh joe rogan's interview with uh donald trump got 40 million views. So you know, podcasting became very important in this cycle, not my show, but you know, other big podcasts became very important. What is 60 minutes do? Ah, that's a good question. Of course they didn't have uh well for harris harrison um all right, big, we'll talk.

40:57
We'll take a break when we come back. Big winners and losers uh, in the election there were, uh, some technologies that did very well. But I did want to mention, by the way, I don't know, 1.8 million, 7.8. Sorry to interrupt you, fewer, that's really interesting. Far fewer than Joe Rogan, but really great for CBS News, is it? That's a good number. I mean today, I guess it is.

41:22
Have you seen what's going on? Yeah, I used to do a live with Regis and Kelly back in the day, and it is. Have you seen what's going on? Yeah, I used to do uh live with regis and kelly back in the day and, uh, it was always, oh, four million people were watching. So seven's good. Yeah, it's not, it's a fraction of the total. It's nothing like joe rogan. Uh, I used a perplexity ai during election and it did quite well. I think it's something I use for search as well. And they created I wish they'd created it sooner an election hub. I wish they'd created it because I had voted already by the time they created it, so I couldn't use it to do my research. But I think very cool what they did to do my research. But I think very cool. What, uh, what they did, um, and I don't know, did any of you uh look at that, or before voting, or during the uh, during the uh election night?

42:15 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
coverage. No, but they've really done an interesting content strategy move maneuver yeah, they're not.

42:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not trying to be a chat bot. They're essentially trying to replace google right, as is, by the way, chat gpt now, because they have search as well, although it's not quite as um forefront as it is for perplexityai, perplexityai slash elections. Let me just oh yeah, it's still there. So this was I thought this was quite useful A lot of information, including in my local races, which was kind of interesting as well.

42:59 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
You know, I think this is a good example of something that AI is very good at right now, because I think there's also this perception that AI can do anything and everything because there's so many new products and services coming out. But I think organizing vast amounts of data so that you can present them more easily is one example of how it is actually useful.

43:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Especially, yes, because you're pulling it's what we call RAG retrieval, augmented generation. You're pulling from a known set of data that, so it's harder to hallucinate. You can't make up stuff or you don't make up stuff because you're pulling from a set of data. Let's let's hope they didn't make up anything. My, my cursory, my cursory, uh inspection didn't see anything completely, uh wrong on that. All right, let's take a little break. That's it for uh. Well, I want to talk a little bit okay, it's not completely it for election news. I want to talk a little about about crypto, because the crypto bros had a big victory last Tuesday. But first a word from our sponsor. Abrar Alhidi is here from CNET where she reports on technology. Great to have you, abrar. Lisa Edichico also works on that team, senior editor of CNET. Nico also works on that team, senior editor at CNET. And Dan Patterson, old friend, formerly CBS, now editorial director at Blackbirdai and contributing editor at CDNet, and just really a shameless log roller. I'm teasing you. It's good, bring up the stuff you know. That's wonderful, that's excellent. That's what we bring in here for. It'd be better that you talk about stuff you know than the stuff you don't know. Right, that's my job. Our show today is brought to you by Lookout. We have a big, big friendship with Lookout. I love them.

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46:25
So, uh, president-elect trump did go to the bitcoin conference. Uh, changed his mind a little bit. In the past, he said bitcoin is bs, but he said, no, we're gonna make america a bitcoin country. We, we, uh, he was very uh and you know what. It was a smart move because, uh, there are quite a few bitcoin, uh, billionaires and millionaires out there. Uh, who, who, I think, supported it. Uh, dogecoin and other meme coins also did very well. Bitcoin hits what? $75,000 per coin. Meme coins surged on Wednesday after the election. There's a Doge which, as you remember, elon Musk kind of liked. Doge coins surged 15%, shiba Inu 6% and Bitcoin actually I'm sorry got to $76,000.

47:28
Why is the cryptocurrency folks happy about President-elect Trump? What is he going to do for them? One thing he said he was going to do is fire Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who's been a little bit hard on Bitcoin, according to the Bitcoin supporters saying it's a security prosecuting people for securities violations. I'm sure you know. Trump said it twice. He was going to fire Kessler. I'm sure he'll put in somebody, but it wasn't just Trump. For instance, bernie Moreno, who is a Bitcoin executive, defeated the chairman of the House Banking Committee or the Senate Banking Committee. I'm sorry. I think that this was very much a pro-cryptocurrency election. Yes, nothing to say here.

48:32
I was going to say it seems that way, based on the coverage.

48:34 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I'm not a huge crypto person. I don't follow crypto that much.

48:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you better start.

48:41 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Apparently, I better start.

48:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bitcoin. I'm sorry, now eighty thousand dollars. I gotta find a password in my wallet.

48:48 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I could tell you the easy answer is deregulation.

48:51 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Again, it's likely deregulation, yeah that's exactly what I was going to say.

48:56 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I don't know much sorry, sorry, lisa right, no, no, no, please.

48:59 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I'm just like adding on to what you're saying, but that that's my as a non-crypto person. That is my take.

49:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, deregulation, nobody saying it's a security, but didn't you know? This is one of the things that puzzles me, because one of the advantages of regulation to the incumbents is it pulls up the ladder for new players. Right, it's one of reasons. Uh, open ai and other ai companies have asked for congress for regulations. One of the reasons mark zuckerberg at meta keeps saying regulate us because it makes it harder for competitors to arise.

49:36 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yes, well, you know, when I say deregulation, I'm using that kind of as a broad catch-all. You know the Biden administration has enacted more stringent regulations than perhaps the Trump administration would. But really what it is, it's a signal to the market, and what we saw, of course, with the rise of crypto were a bunch of associated scams. There's just all kinds of. You know, there was a core technology the blockchain and crypto technology and there are a number of less than desirable business people who are drawn to that. And so when I say deregulation, what I mean is that what we kind of saw broadly over the last four or five years was a number of state, local and federal laws not just regulations but laws and we saw law enforcement kind of go after the scammers. I think what we could see is a relaxation of that. I'm slowing down a little bit because I really don't know, but I think that that was kind of the mood in the climate and that has shifted pretty abruptly.

50:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Detroit has announced that it's going to accept crypto for tax payments. Now, one of the problems one of the reasons Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have had a hard time making it as a currency as opposed to a speculative security is that it's so volatile and you don't know what it's worth at any given moment, not to mention gas fees converting it. Detroit's avoiding this because they're going to take the crypto price it at its current price and immediately convert it into dollars To minimize the risks. This is from decryptcom to minimize the risks of crypto price volatility, payments will be converted to US dollars on PayPal before reaching Citi accounts.

51:32 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
So they're not going to be glass hands. Hodel yeah To the moon, To the moon. Diamond hands, diamond hands. I'm sorry, I got my hands mixed up.

51:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, no, I thought you were making a play on diamond hands, like they're not very good I mean, yes, that's exactly right.

51:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I was clever. That's right, right, right, of course. I just didn't know it, of course that's all the time.

51:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I didn't realize paypal was a crypto exchange. So, uh, at paypal you can uh, buy, hold and sell bitcoin, ethereum, bitcoin Cash and Litecoin. I did not realize that.

52:06 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I didn't either, but that's got to be strong for people.

52:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so anyway, this is an interesting move. Detroit is partly doing this because they want to bring blockchain innovators to town right. Detroit needs business investment. Blockchain innovators to town right. Detroit needs business investment. Blockchain technologies have the potential to drive greater accessibility and efficiency, says Justin Onwenu, who's Detroit's director of entrepreneurship and economic opportunity. This isn't the only place where this happens, though. Apparently, colorado, utah and Louisiana will accept crypto payments for certain public services. I think that's kind of surprising.

52:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I didn't expect that yeah, I don't know much about crypto but I do think it's, I mean, good for detroit, for trying to figure out ways to you know.

52:53 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, but yeah, rev the engine exactly good that one's.

52:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You see, you are clever if one were cynical which of course I'm not.

53:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if one were cynical which of course I'm not, but if one were cynical one could also say Bitcoin allows people to donate to elections anonymously.

53:15 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Oh, you wouldn't be that cynical.

53:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's estimated although we don't know that as much as $100 million from the Bitcoin, from cryptocurrency fans went into the Trump campaign. As long as money is such a big part of American elections, there will be many ways to get around limitations.

53:37 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
This is bipartisan, though. I mean a number of Democratic legislators accepted cryptocurrency perfectly above the board, but were were pro-crypto over the last half decade. Yeah, I mean in like a non-scammy way, or at least in ways that like yeah, I don't think it has to be scary right.

53:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so sherrod, brad sherrod uh, what's his last name? I don't know. I can, I can't remember. Yeah, sherrod Brown, who is the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, was ousted by Mernie Moreno, who was a crypto executive. More ad dollars flowed into that Ohio contest than any other congressional race this cycle. Heavy investments from the crypto industry, some say. You know, that was the key to moreno's uh victory. He was, uh, he was losing in the polls until shortly before these. This money kind of flowed in. Um, so they got I mean, the crypto industry got a congress. I think the total number of members of congress that were pro-crypto elected was 153 is a number I remember seeing, compared to a much smaller number of anti-crypto or less less solid crypto supporters. What would, what would be, what would be? Are the cryptocurrency community? Do they want the United States to move to a digital dollar? Is that what they're going for? Is that a good idea? Okay, we're going to get off of this. I don't know Enough. Anyway, watch with interest because it was a lot of money spent by the crypto community into the election.

55:52
And uh, the brian armstrong says the us voted for 257 house candidates favoring digital assets. He's the chief executive at coinbase and says it is the most crypto Congress ever. So get ready. You know I have mixed feelings about this. I understand the power of blockchain and you know I'm not completely convinced that in fact, it's all about getting money into the hands of the unbanked. I think it's a lot more about speculation. Money into the hands of the unbanked. I think it's a lot more about speculation.

56:29
According to Armstrong, americans went to the vote partly to show their distaste for how the SEC have trying to strangle the industry for years. He said the country fully reputed the work of Senator Warren and Garyensler, who tried for years to unlawfully kill our industry. The next Congress will be the most pro-crypto Congress ever. Stand with crypto. Voters showed up and forced to help elect pro-crypto candidates in almost every district on both sides of the aisle 257 elected in the House. This will be interesting. Stand with crypto, which is an industry group.

57:06
Obviously, I gave trump an a rating. Uh, I think this is. Uh. The next four years are going to be very pro-crypto. I don't know. I don't know what that means. You know, I think a lot of us in the tech community be kind of anti-crypto because it seems to be. It's empowered. Uh, ransomware, right, it's become the. You know, I think without crypt, without bitcoin particularly, ransomware would not have taken off in the way it has. It's been used to kind of for hidden payments Hidden payments, anonymous payments in politics, and I think often it's been used to take advantage of less sophisticated investors. People could put crypto in their 401k now I think that's a terrible idea.

57:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Sounds risky.

57:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but you know, I saw somebody on X say well, well, all you people didn't like crypto. All this time you're losers.

58:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm rich fair enough.

58:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, I'm rich uh, all right, that's great. All right, let's take a break. We'll drop this crypto thing. We're gonna drop it. We're gonna go talk about ai. It's much more interesting. In just a second you're watching this week in tech. We're covering the week's tech news with Abrar Al-Hiti, lisa Edichico and the wonderful Dan Patterson. All three of you, great to have you today. Our show today, brought to you by Zip Recruiter.

58:38
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59:46
Lisa will post on zip recruiter, usually in the morning, at breakfast. I remember when, when in our continuity Department we got notice, ashley said I've got a job closer to home, I'm going to move, and we said okay, we love you, we support you, but now we need somebody in continuity Bad. Lisa posts it at breakfast. And one of the things that ZipRecruiter does it immediately posts your job listing to over a hundred job boards and social networks. But it also does something amazing it looks at the qualifications, the requirements you have, compares them to all the resumes more than a million resumes, current resumes it has on file because people come to ZipRecruiter looking for work and then says hey, here's some people that match your requirements. So Lisa posts Within an hour. She starts getting these recommendations and she goes oh, this person's great, oh, this one's great. And here's the fun thing. You can then invite them to apply for your job and I got to tell you, when you're in a competitive environment and most of the time you are when you're hiring, when you send an invite to somebody, they go oh, they want me, they like me. That's how we found viva. She's fantastic.

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01:02:10
This blew me away from today's New York Times an AI robot painting Sold at auction for 1.1 million dollars. The creator, a robot named Ida. It depicts the British mathematician Alan Turing as the god of artificial intelligence. Uh, here's the painting, okay, sold at auction for $1.1 million. The experiment was the brainchild of Aiden Meller. Oh, interesting A-I-D-A. Aiden Meller, former gallerist living outside of Oxford, has worked with a team of nearly 30 people. You have to build a robot because you need something to hold the paintbrush. I guess the robot is dressed like a woman with a bob haircut. Oh, oh, you pronounce it ada because it's an. It's a in honor of ada lovelace, a-i-d-a, but it's pronounced ada, ada lovelace, of course. The world's first computer programmer from the 19th century, meller says. I'm trying to adapt to this slightly surreal moment.

01:03:31
The painting which depicts Turing as the god of artificial intelligence was offered as part of Sotheby's digital art sale. They thought it would sell, I don't know, around $120,000 to $180,000, which, if you asked me at the time, I would have said no, nobody's going to pay $180,000, which, if you asked me at the time I would have said no, nobody's going to pay 180,000 for that. It got 27 bids was sold to an anonymous buyer. I'm going to bet a crypto, bro. I'm just guessing from the United States.

01:03:55 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Oh to be rich.

01:03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, it might've been an investment because you think about it. This is the. This is the first AI painting, yeah To sell at auction for more than a million dollars.

01:04:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
This is history it is history, you can say. I mean, you could argue if it's a, a robot performing the action like that's, that's interesting, that's novel, it's novel, is it good art is?

01:04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess it's. Uh, here's a picture Ada the robot with a Bob haircut, and here's some other paintings I guess that should we say. She it, what do you think? What are, what are her pronouns?

01:04:39 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You know, what might be interesting here is, if you are a painter, theoretically what you produce is finite.

01:04:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're only capable of producing so much right, yeah, but, ada, unless you're Andy Warhol and you have a warehouse of people silk screening your paintings over and over and you'll.

01:05:00 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Maybe this is Andy Warhol, maybe this is, but people were very critical of the warehouse right of Andy Warhol.

01:05:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People were very critical of the warehouse right Of Andy Warhol. He was making a statement.

01:05:10 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
He was saying this is the industrialization of art. That's what Ada is right. Yeah, Like the robot could paint all day and it'll always be the same.

01:05:18 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
If it wants to be Like, I guess you could just hit a repeat button, Like as a human you'll never be able to repeat something exactly the same again. I wonder if there's a way to, with AI, just be like do that again. I don't know, unless it thinks for itself.

01:05:30 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, and do it in a different color or different ways. I do think it's interesting because and not to play devil's advocate I do think there's a lot of really important concerns and questions around the creative industry and AI, but it's cool to kind of see someone embracing it in a way that I guess enhances their art versus, you know, feeling like it's taking away from what they do.

01:05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is the process. By the way, mellory is going to take the million and put it towards making Ada better. This is the process, though, which is I think it's almost a human robot collaboration. So ada of the software, ada herself this this is all in software at first interpreted a photograph of turing oh no, I guess and then painted 15 individual paintings based on different parts of his face. This is all from the new york times.

01:06:21
The robot chose three of the robot, chose three of the portraits alongside a painting it is made of turing's bomb machine, which was a device they used to decrypt the enigma machine. The works were then photographed I guess humans did that and uploaded to a computer that used ada's language model to decide on the assembly of a single painting, which was then completed using a 3D textured printer. Oh okay, that seems cheating. This is a story from Zachary Smalls, so I'm reading Zachary's writing here. Studio assistants helped to create a more realistic finished product on the canvas. Ada then added marks and textures to the portrait to complete it. Meller said Ada was supposed to prompt discussions about the ethics of artificial intelligence and how technology is changing our definition of who or what an artist can be. Can an artist not be a non-human?

01:07:29 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I think it depends on how much um a human was involved in like creating like this sounds like a human was involved more than than I thought, yeah exactly like, even if, like, let's say, a a different example, where maybe there isn't so much human intervention. Like is coming up with the prompt ideas? Like is that part of the artistic process, if you're, you know, creating something that involves typing prompts to get a desired result to come out in a different way? I don't know, it's interesting yeah I feel like I'm I'm remember.

01:08:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm twice as old as both of you. Bernito, you're an artist. You're an artist, you're a musician.

01:08:08 - Benito (Announcement)
I said this, I think, the last time we talked about the robot making art, making like a piece of art is that, like I submit that the robot is the art and not it's a robot.

01:08:19 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think Mellon would agree that the art.

01:08:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
here is a human created a thing Ada.

01:08:24 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah.

01:08:25 - Benito (Announcement)
And that's the art. There you go, I'm down for that.

01:08:28 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Benita I like that perspective. Yeah.

01:08:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Got us out of that. I was going to say that there's no art without a human.

01:08:35 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah.

01:08:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right.

01:08:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And I think this whole AI race has led to that big question of, okay, ai can do something, but do we want it to do something? Does it mean something if it's created by AI? And so that's why I like Benito's perspective, because it's like, okay, well, look at this really cool thing that a human was able to achieve, but do I want the product of that thing or do I want something where there were feelings involved in the creation of that and there was a lot of human thought? As a human, you're going to relate to other humans more than you would a machine. So it's hard to kind of. It doesn't matter how old you are. I think it's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that AI could be as create something as evocative as what a human could do.

01:09:17 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Right, I think art is the one area where AI has a long way to go before humans will not be involved, just because I don't know if you've ever seen like over the past few years there's been like AI generated movie scripts and things like that and it's all just so terrible, like doesn't really make much sense. I think there's always going to be orchestrating things at the very least, whether it's building the robot or deciding you know what kinds of prompts to enter into a machine or something like that At least that's my hope into a machine or something like that.

01:09:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
At least that's my hope. I use AI as a creative tool every day. I use it like Adobe Creative Cloud I mean I use For images, not just for images, no, to analyze intelligence. To, I would say write. But you're right, lisa, I mean anyone who's tried to get AI to write for you. It's just garbage.

01:10:08 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
It's mediocre.

01:10:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It's mediocre, right, you can work alongside it so I work with intelligence analysts and their job is not to be writers, it's to be intelligence analysts. So they will often give me their findings and I will. My most common prompt is organize these notes, uh, but now I use, I use. I have a convoluted process, but I use the Claude, the Anthropix, claude, api. I create a prompt to help it create a prompt, because it will create a much better and longer prompt that I can then feed into other AI systems. That will give me a little more not better copy, not better writing, but a little more intelligible and useful. But this is a process and often I've thought, if I had an editor, this would be a lot easier, like if I just could hire a human would do a better job as well, right.

01:11:02
But we're a startup and we just don't have the budget for that. But if I had, like, a managing editor who worked for me, it would be faster and better. But I hate to say this, I hate this so much, but that process has kind of replaced the managing editor for me and a copy editor too, and a copy editor. Oh my God. Look, I don't have a copy editor. I don't have a copy editor. So I have to use Grammarly Pro, which is great. It's like a copy editor, but I so miss my copy. I had Jodi at ZDNet and she was wonderful. Cnet had wonderful copy editors, cbs News tremendous copy editors who always made my work stronger, and now Grammarly, which is a tremendous program, but it just makes my work tighter.

01:11:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you guys still have copy editors Brar and Lisa?

01:11:51 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Oh yeah, thank goodness I was going to say if you're a publication, just plug your ears real quick during Dana's little agreement there. No, we need copy editors. I tell you what when I go to a website, I know if there's a copy editor or not?

01:12:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
right, because there's typos. There's a copy editor or not right? Yeah, because there's typos. There's ungrammatical stuff. You can always tell when somebody with has proofread and copied, edited something. Oh yeah, because when you're right, especially when you're writing for a website, you're doing it fast oh yeah, absolutely.

01:12:19 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And also, like I, I love the saying that I learned once from a teacher but there's no such thing as good writing, there's only good rewriting. But not just that. You always need a second pair of eyes.

01:12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No matter who it is. Wait a minute, you went right over that. There's no such thing as good writing.

01:12:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
See it again.

01:12:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really good. That's so good.

01:12:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
There's no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. Oh, that is perfect. Yeah, I know, make a poster. Have you ever?

01:12:44 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
written something like a lead graph, and then you come back a day later You're like I've written a lead and I'm like that is so good. And then that is like, and then the next day I'm like no.

01:12:55 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah.

01:12:55 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
So for those of us who are not journalists, what is it?

01:12:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
or writers, what does a copy editor do?

01:13:02 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
A copy editor will look over your writing, your copy, and sometimes it can be as simple as making sure that you know periods and punctuation are all in the right place, but it could also be hey, I'm seeing like a loophole here. Like I feel like this is something we need to address. Do you have a quote or any type of information that can kind of fill in this gap here? They're kind of the final check before it goes out into the public.

01:13:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or if it's not a logical flow, maybe or you left out.

01:13:27 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah.

01:13:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see a lot of movies where I feel like they needed a copy editor because there's a gaping hole in the plot here.

01:13:36 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Well, that's also to a broad point. That's like what a really good copy editor does. I feel like sometimes copy editors really do just look out for grammar and punctuation, because maybe it's a breaking news moment and that's all they have time for. But again, I will get off. I feel like we've been on copy editing for too long, but no, no.

01:13:54
This is great because they do story edit sometimes too, and they're like a good you know. Usually your editor knows what you're working on and what your story is about, so they might not catch something that maybe, like the average reader, wouldn't understand, but the copy desk will.

01:14:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so, yeah, lots of love for the copy desk I was uh rad watching a tv show alfonso cuaron's disclaimer last night, and there was this gaping plot hole um, no spoiler. But uh, there's a bad guy at the hospital who's about to kill this woman's son and this woman is racing to get there to stop him. Right Then she's frantically texting her husband saying don't let him in. And I'm thinking, oh, you just call the hospital, stop them, just call the nurse's station and say don't let this guy in, I don't want him to see my son. But then you don't have the chase. You don't let this guy in, I don't want him to see my son but then you don't have the chase, you don't have her.

01:14:52
You don't have yeah, you get no movie chat running breathlessly. There's a copy editor would have seen that.

01:14:56 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, exactly, uh, alfonso, there's this problem here I gotta say rad and ali at zdnet, who edited the story that we talked about earlier. They both did exactly what you talked about, lisa. They found areas of this story that I was like, oh you're right, it really is not very good without these suggested changes. Yes, thank you, love that Accept change.

01:15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did think that there weren't a lot of copywriters left. I did think that maybe it's just your big publications like CNET I have heard that there. Maybe it's just your big publications like CNET I have heard that and maybe the New Yorker.

01:15:27 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I have heard that there are, you know, some publications that don't have a copy. How about?

01:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
fact checkers. Do you guys have fact checkers? Oh no, I wish we did.

01:15:35 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I wish we did. I mean we all fact check our own work, but it would be nice.

01:15:48 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
But the whole point is not that down a few years ago, but there was somebody who would kind of go through and really make sure everything was uh, cause it was in print, right, you can't change it once it's in print, Um, so that was that was really, really helpful, but I, oh gosh, I wish more publications had a budget for that.

01:16:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wrote so the aarp magazine, because I'm old, asked me to write a column for them. I ended up not doing it because, uh, one editor said, can you make it more techie? But his boss said, can you make it less techy? And I figured this is not gonna be a good marriage. But the one or two pieces I did write, I got multiple calls from fact checkers and and like I'd say okay, no, this, and I sent them links and then they say no, well, and they'd followed up. It was. It's kind of a pain. It is.

01:16:38 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
It is, but I appreciate publication before and have gone through that process as well. I've had to like in some cases, like share, like transcripts of my interviews for fact-checking purposes, which, honestly, I still do it myself just because I'm a little bit neurotic. Transcript for everything.

01:16:54
Yeah, and it is helpful because, again, having that second pair of eyes, sometimes as the writer, as the person that's closest to the story, you think, okay, I know this is right because this is how I found that fact and you know this is I'm convinced that it's correct. But sometimes having another person to just read it that's not attached to the story look at it is very can ai do that as well as a human?

01:17:17
doubt it I don't think so, because I think so much of journalism that, um, you know, maybe people who aren't journalists don't understand is like the way that you phrase something, even even if it's such a subtle difference, it can completely change the characterization of a piece of information and those like subtle nuances. I don't know if like a machine would ever be able to do that.

01:17:39 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That's just my opinion. Art is right. Art is in the nuance.

01:17:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I also worry about bias from AI. Right, because it's like as journalists, we have a really huge responsibility to not project biases either in our word choice or what we choose to convey, and I don't know if AI is there to be like.

01:17:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
maybe don't say that, you know like I'll give you another quote when I see when I see AI paintings or AI writing or AI singing see ai paintings or ai writing or ai singing. I'll give you a quote from uh joanna michefska, who is a writer and an artist. On twitter. She says I want ai to do my laundry and dishes so I can do art and writing. Yes, not for my ai to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes yes, I've seen that too.

01:18:23
Yes it's a great quote's. Yeah, it's been around for a long time, since the spring, but uh, yeah, cause it keeps coming up.

01:18:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
If it's not making the things that I don't want to do easier, why is it taking away the fun things Like I want to have fun? I want AI to have fun, it just makes sense.

01:18:42 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I do think it can be helpful for like learning. Like if you're learning a new hobby or a new skill and you don't always know where to start, or if you're just like you know. Like, for example, like I used to play guitar a lot when I was younger. I don't play as much anymore, but if I pick up my guitar and don't know where to start, I can ask chat GPT for like an easy chord progression or something like that. And then I'm still doing the thing, but I'm using AI to like help me figure out, like what I might want to play.

01:19:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think what I go ahead. I'm sorry, I was going to say.

01:19:08 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think what I'm realizing more and more is how AI averse I've been, because it's like it's been like a stance for me of like no, I will not consult AI for anything, but I love seeing these kinds of like less apocalyptic takes on yeah.

01:19:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think maybe you should reconsider, because I think the key is not avoiding ai, but using ai in an appropriate way, yeah, for sure almost always that's in partnership with human right it seems like at least, yeah, I mean, that's my stance at least yeah I saw an article about ai's being used more and more in medicine and hospitals but, for instance, in radiology reading x-rays. But the doctors who do that said but it's really important that the humans still be in the loop, that this is a it's like driver assist.

01:20:00 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You can't take your hands off the wheel, or at least you can't take your eyes off the road, but you can let the ai, you know, do some of the work and I think that is an area that's so promising and has so much potential for good, because I've seen, you know, reports about how it can detect things like cancer very, very early on. Um, and I I understand the doctors who are, you know, obviously want to make sure that the they're important, the importance of their work is still recognized, and we're in this really weird transition period that's only just beginning and figuring out how to balance all of that.

01:20:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a friend who's a younger person and an AI enthusiast and a physician, and what I proposed to him and I think he kind of liked, was doctors kind of have two jobs. One is as a diagnostician, which really requires memorizing a lot of symptoms and their causes right and kind of getting it all in your brain. The other job is the human element of that, which is relating to the patient finding an appropriate cure or finding appropriate drug, and I said I proposed that, but maybe the ai would be a better diagnostician, better at saying, well, here's the medicines and the treatments we use, and then the doctor becomes the arbiter and the translator of the ai's work and he seemed to think that that was a pretty appropriate use of ai. He does use ai in transcriptions. I think most physicians now do. I know mine does.

01:21:34 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
And he says you always want to review it before you memorialize it and make it permanent. Yeah, I think that's a good example of AI being assistive and not necessarily replacing what a doctor does, but making their job easier. And also, ai has been used in medicine for a pretty long time, or at least the research has been happening way before this wave of generative AI, chat, gpt developments. So I do kind of trust it a bit more too, because I feel like a lot of the stuff that I've seen, at least around AI in medicine has to do more so with computer vision and these other technologies that have been explored for a long time versus, you know, generative AI.

01:22:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A big victory for OpenAI. It won in court. A number of news outlets suing over OpenAI using their content for training. Raw Story, which was acquired by Alternet in 2018, was acquired by Alternet in 2018 sued OpenAI, saying it misused articles from news outlets Raw Story and Alternet to train its large language models. A New York federal judge Thursday dismissed the lawsuit. Judge Colleen McMahon said that the outlets could not show enough harm to support the lawsuit, but did say you can file a new complaint, although she was quote skeptical that they could quote allege a cognizable injury end. Quote. In other words uh, who does it harm? What's the harm?

01:22:58
Open AI said we build our AI models using publicly available data in a manner protected by fair use and related principles and supported by long-standing and widely accepted legal principles. This was a lawsuit filed last February. They said thousands of their articles were used to train chat GPT and then it reproduces their original material when prompted. This was the crux of it, with L over the New York Times as well. Mm-hmm. The New York Times says well, you don't have to read the New York Times, you well. The New York Times says well, you don't have to read the New York Times, you can use OpenAI to write the paper. But it is pretty hard to get OpenAI to regurgitate its training material at whole cloth. In fact, you have to jump through many prompt hoops to do it. The court's ruled in their favor.

01:23:52 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think what's interesting is the judge essentially saying you know you're upset about, uh, this issue of the copyright information being removed and fed into this, when maybe what you're really worried about is chat, gpt using this uh information and not paying you for it. So maybe, right, how you should angle it, right, interesting to see, you know. Just point that out. Maybe that's what-.

01:24:10 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, and I think that is a big part of it. Like Leo said, like you're not going to be able to get ChatGPT to like reproduce an entire article from you know a website that you want to read, but what it does mean is that you know this information, all of this, like reporting and writing and research that the New York Times did, is being used to create like an entirely different product that the New York, or to improve an entirely different product that has nothing to do with the New York Times. So, or whatever outlet, it might be right, because there's like multiple lawsuits in this.

01:24:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, if you go to perplexity AI's election site, you might be doing that instead of going to the New York Times election site. I understand they'd be more worried about that than it re. Now. Judge mcmahon, I think, really saw through. Uh, what raw story was trying to win here. She said um, let us be clear about what is really at stake. As you said, a bra, the alleged injury for which the plaintiffs truly seek redress is not the exclusion of cmi, but the use of plaintiff's articles to develop chat gpt without compensation.

01:25:09 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
They just wanted to get paid for it yeah, you know, and to that larger point that you were making about not just regurgitating the article but the actual news and the reporting, I just loaded the perplexity app. It just updated um and under the discover feature it is just a news website. It's right for you top stories, science and tech, finance, art and culture, sports, entertainment. So this to me seems like it would be is greater competition.

01:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I? I should not admit this. I quite like perplexityai and I say that knowing full well that at some point it's going to do a podcast. That will you know, as notebook LM does from Google. Google's Gemini, and at some point it might do a podcast, is better than mine, do you know, philip?

01:26:04 - Benito (Announcement)
Rosedale yeah yeah yeah, he's one of the co-founders. Second life, that's right.

01:26:09 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah uh, really good guy or very interesting guy, um, his son I to that point of AI creating podcasts. His son did that last summer. Uh, we were chatting and I was talking, we were having this conversation about like well, it's going to take my job, uh, and he said, well, my kid actually did something. That's pretty interesting and it is the top news stories of the day read in a. I mean, I'm sure it uses 11 labs, but it it sounds like a fantastic newscast, and this was a year and a half ago.

01:26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So imagine what they're doing now, right.

01:26:41 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, right and that right. Just like notebook LM, I can imagine that. The imagine that soon this show will be just our avatars swearing at each other, or mine at least.

01:26:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's my hope that it will be immortality for me, because I have so much audio and video on record tens of thousands of hours that somebody will use it to generate an AI. Leo and I won't live forever. I'm hoping that's all.

01:27:08 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
That's my Shakespeare, but maybe there'll be an AI you know, you don't know, do you?

01:27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You never know? Do you think Shakespeare knew that people would be reading him 400 years later?

01:27:19 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I think my two-year-old is going to have AI friends, absolutely. I think my recently departed relatives are going to I'll have conversations with. Wouldn't that be cool? I don't want that feels very black mirror.

01:27:36 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I don't want there's a company called my heritage and they I am. I've covered them kind of on and off over the years because it's very fascinating, but they basically let you upload a picture of your deceased relatives and then they animate their faces. It's so creepy. They add voices to them too. So yeah, that's on the horizon.

01:27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They call it deep nostalgia.

01:27:58 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean give it five years a little advance, like let the processors advance a little bit.

01:28:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we're getting close to that, aren't we? Yeah, uh, 11 labs voices blow me away. And of course they've. They've paid money to the estate of lawrence, olivier um and others so that they have actually really some really good sounding uh, and they're moving into content too.

01:28:25 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean their new, their new app. They just bought omnivore. The read it later.

01:28:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I love omnivore. I'm a huge omnivore user and I was a little distressed. Omnivore was like pocket, where you would send it yeah articles later. Wouldn't that be better if omnivore? Then I collected everything and made a podcast out of it yeah, I mean it's.

01:28:47 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It's really what eleven labs is doing is really innovative. We can love it or hate it, but it's really innovative and it is content, and it's content that is somewhat meaningful or interesting. I there's also, you know the using these serif fonts and it comes across as though it's newsy. It feels as though it was something created artisanally. It's a typewriter designed to evoke my feelings look.

01:29:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I understand why humans don't like this. Are we right not to like it? I mean like is this the end of the world? Or are we just like uh the uh, the Luddites who didn't want Jacquard looms to replace their manual looms? Are we just fighting against the tide of technology? I am yeah.

01:29:37
You know Perplexity. Ai came up with a really good story, by the way. Hackers demand baguette ransom, a ransomware attack. This is not made up. It comes from the register in yahoo news malaysia. The ransomware attack on a french match multinational, schneider electric, has taken an unusual turn hackers demanding payment in the form of 125 000 worth of baguettes. That's very french points for creativity what are? You gonna do with. They'll be stale by the time you get through them all.

01:30:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
This is the Hellcat ransomware group, so random.

01:30:13 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, that was not on my bingo card.

01:30:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
See Complexity, see, although I have to say when you read that you go, oh, that's made up, that's an AI hallucination for sure. I will fact check it later. It's too juicy not to you know. I really I welcome our AI overlords. I don't think it's going to replace humans. What would be the point?

01:30:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
How are we feeling about you? Remember two years ago? What would be the point? How are we feeling about you? Remember two years ago, there was this wave of you know, the first chat. Gpt public release was available and Nick Bostrom's profile rose and we were all talking about immortality and, like the robots they're so capable. Now I really feel like it's just Adobe Creative Cloud, it's just another creative tool. How do you guys feel?

01:31:09 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, I kind of feel mixed about it. Sorry, abar, I didn't mean to no, no, go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, I kind of feel mixed about it. I do feel like there are certain things that AI can be really good at and areas where I do see promise, and then other times I feel like not only do the results not kind of live up to what we expect, but I also find that I have to go out of my way to like remember to use some of these tools Like. They're not very like natural yet they're not something that I think most people find themselves using on an everyday basis, and for me, I write about phones all the time. So my first thought is, like, all of these new AI features we've seen in the last year, like, do they actually make your phone better? Do they actually help, or is it just kind of, are these companies just doing this just to say they have an AI phone? Now, I think it's mostly the latter, but there's a couple of things that are promising.

01:31:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to take a break, but when we come back I have an opinion about Apple intelligence which is slowly dribbling out to our iPhones. But we'll take a break and we'll come back and talk a little bit about that with Lisa Edichico, who covers phones and other things for CNET. It's great to have you Abraar Alhiti, who is on the same team, technology reporter at CNET and a former CNET ZDNet writer. Well, he still writes for ZDNet, which is c net sort of who owns, I can't remember, does zd net on cnet? Or I think cdn owns cnet.

01:32:29
Now, right, I think ziff davis owns everybody yes, ziff davis owns both uh, cnet and zdn but ziff davis is not the ziff davis I used to work for for zd tv. That's a difference if it's a difference but it's, this is cd net which, but is it red ventures?

01:32:46 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
no, no, no, it's ziff davis no, it's.

01:32:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If it is, is there private equity?

01:32:52 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
involved. No, no, apollo is paramount, come on it's so simple, leo, come on I need an ai to draw me an org chart.

01:33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I need. Uh, dan patterson's also here from blackbirdai, but it's not an ai company is it.

01:33:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, we use a and in fact, I would never say fact check, but if you want to check things, compassblackbirdai, compassblackbirdai, it's slow, but it is great. If you want to check the uh, veracity of any claim, any image, a deep fake, a meme, anything, compass will check it. It checks it and says it's real or it's fake, provide no, no, no, no. It's way more complex than that. It will give you the context and we call it a context claim yeah um, it's a context checker um there might be.

01:33:48
There might be a like a sign up bump there, but all all there is is it used uh in industry or is it? Used. Yeah, I can't I, and I'm not on the business side, I'm on the editorial side, so I can't speak to that. But yes, it is absolutely used, not just in industry but governments and large organizations. How interesting.

01:34:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I it can detect ai propaganda that kind of.

01:34:13 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Well, it, it looks, it. I mean, if you try to use it and it's instantly understandable, like you type in, um, I think I have to pay for it to you is the earth flat.

01:34:23
No, no, it's no, it's free I'll give you an invite, yeah uh it, we might have something up for enterprise right now, but no type in like the is the earth flat, and it doesn't just say yes or no. It'll give you a paragraph or two that explains, with links and context, what you're asking about, and even complex issues like who's right the israelis or palestinians. That's a really complex and heated topic. It will give you the context.

01:34:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It won't say who's right, but it'll give you.

01:34:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Exactly With a deep fake, we are able to say you know, this is manipulated or synthetic media. But what our AI really does? You know we have a suite of AI products, but what they really do is find, not users, not networks. We find narratives, we find disinformation, themes that are crossing from chat apps, from social media, from the dark web, and we find how they are pushed and where these narratives go. Our artificial intelligence also works hand in hand with human intelligence analysts, so it's not just an AI black box and you know there's a bunch of products on the site. Of course, I'm not in business, I am on the editorial side, but I I'm at this company because I believe in what we do, I believe in the mission and the technology, and my day job is I work with ai engineers and I work with threat analysts, threat intelligence experts, and AI is at the center of that, but it takes a lot of collaboration.

01:35:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, weirdly, apparently I already had an account.

01:36:01 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm out of logs, though. I can't roll any more logs, so I'm just going to have to smash that one.

01:36:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just signed up and they said well, you already have an account, I might have put logs, though I can't roll any more logs, so I'm just going to have to smash that one. I just signed up and they said well, you already have an account, I might have put you on it.

01:36:10 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I might have put Leo on the back end, okay.

01:36:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I said the claim is Donald Trump won the election and now it's gathering data to tell me, like I said, it might take some time.

01:36:25 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Compass is not fast, but I think we shouldn't expect things to be fast, right, right. I want quality over speed.

01:36:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's right In fact that's one of the things that OpenAI is saying is, if you're patient, our models will do a better job than if you want an instant answer. Take your time.

01:36:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I use Compass just as an editor.

01:36:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have it open in a tab and I just paste stuff in there all day, every day well, I'll come back, uh after this word, uh with the, with the context of the claim that donald trump won the election. I can't wait to see what it says. Uh, I'll tell you something I do use all the time our show today brought to you by mint mobile, the time Our show today brought to you by Mint Mobile. In fact you know it's so funny I've been going through all of my cell bills and cleaning them up. You know, after we closed the studio, one of the things I also did is go through a bunch of stuff that I've been paying for all this time and saying you know, do I really need it? I choked when I saw my cell bill from the big carriers. Fortunately, there was one cell bill I'm not canceling. There was a lot less my Mint Mobile bill the same great service for a ridiculous amount of money. I mean, look, I love a great deal as much as anybody, but I'm not going to crawl through a bed of hot coals just to save a few bucks. It's got to be easy. It's got to be no hoops, no BS. Back in the day when MIM Mobile said it was easy to get wireless for $15 a month when you buy a three-month plan, I said, come on. But then I signed up and it turns out wow, they're not making this up. It really is that easy to get the same service you're getting for $100 a month for $15 a month. $100, what am I saying? Sometimes it's a lot more. In fact, sometimes the hardest part of the process is the time you spend on hold waiting to break up with your old provider. Trust me, it's worth it. Do it. Mint Mobile is amazing and right now is the greatest time ever because it's $15 a month for the first three months. Go to mintmobilecom. Slash twit. All three-month plans for every amount of data, including unlimited, are only $15 a month. Including unlimited, are only $15 a month. All the plans include high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. I'm going to tell you a secret because I investigated it's T-Mobile. So if you get good T-Mobile coverage, pay a lot less.

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01:40:03
When you get about 40 gigabytes on the unlimited plan, additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply See Mint Mobile for details. Only speeds slower. When you get about 40 gigabytes on the unlimited plan, additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply see mint mobile for details. Mintmobilecom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech. This is, this is the uh. This is the result from blackbird ai of the claim that donald trump won the election. The claim that donald trump won the election refers to the 2024 united states presidential election, where donald trump indeed won against kamala harris, according to multiple reputable sources, including npr and cbs, and it goes on. Associated Press also confirmed it, because it's this is great, so you could put factual stuff in there and it tells you yeah you're right, yeah, yeah, right.

01:40:55 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean it's a paragraph of context instead it's good now, yeah, yeah, a lot of context.

01:41:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Therefore, the statement that Donald Trump won the election is accurate in the context of the 2024 race. Now, if I said in 2020, I'd probably give me a little bit of a different answer it'll be more complex and more nuanced. It'll probably give you a longer answer I like it compass yeah yeah, I'm uh, I didn't realize it was free. Yeah for sure, I mean, I don't need a freebie it's's free right?

01:41:26 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, it's free. It's not freebie for you guys. It's free, but we're not a consumer tech company, so we haven't been promoting it to consumers Too late and we've been. Well, that's what I hate. I want to talk about cool stuff, but I don't want to be promoting a thing. No, no, no, I asked you. It's the journalist in me. That's like. I know you're cringing, but it's okay. Um, but I, I mean, really, I was using this. I admire your integrity, dan it really, you know I was just raised a journalist yeah, you can't get it.

01:42:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can. You can take the journalist out of the magazine, but you can't take the. That doesn't work. Yeah, here is it Now. Okay, so I did mention, and I'm actually curious what you think, lisa, have you used Apple Intelligence yet?

01:42:17 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Oh yeah, I've been using it for a while in beta before it rolled out.

01:42:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have a theory, because it is they rolled it out and they only rolled out like three features. Right, you get notification summaries. You get uh, mess document summaries and bullet points. I think it has rewriting too.

01:42:36 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
You can have friendly or yes, there's the image editing tools also, like um, are those?

01:42:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
out now, or that is that 18 too. Is that already out, the image editing stuff?

01:42:46 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
um, you're thinking of uh, image, playground and genmoji yeah. I just know this so quickly off the top of my head. Those are 18.2, but 18.1 has like, if you want to remove something from an image or something like oh yeah yeah, yeah yeah, and that's what all the Android people say is yeah, we've had that for a couple years.

01:43:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, when are you talking? But what I think is interesting is Apple is rolling this out slowly. At first it seemed like, and I think people have said, oh, it's just because it's not ready, and Apple sold these phones and promoted this, but then didn't ship it until a few weeks later, and 18.2 is, of course, rumored to be coming out in early December and I think they're smart. I think you know, I have a google pixel 9 as well and I think when you get overloaded with too many new features, you don't use them. Yeah, you don't know about them. So they're smart, just pick a few. I love the meshes notification summary. They're sometimes hysterical. I love the message notification summary. They're sometimes hysterical, as in the guy who we talked about a couple of weeks ago broke up with his or his girlfriend, broke up with him and the summary was something she broke up with you and she wants to stuff out of the apartment.

01:44:00 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
It's very clinical yeah.

01:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the guy said it, it was accurate no, I totally agree, though, yeah I think I think they're smart, I think that doing it a little bit of time is, you know, it's probably a lot of pressure on a company like apple when you have google and open ai and everybody and their brother and anthropic pushing out all these features to say, yeah, yeah, we got all that, and putic pushing out all these features to say, yeah, yeah, we got all that and put it all out.

01:44:29 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
But I do think they're smart. I do think they're smart and I agree. I also agree that the message summaries are the most useful part so far. I just published a story about that like a couple of days ago actually, but yeah.

01:44:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh sorry, I stole your idea.

01:44:48 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
No, but it's true, and they are funny and inaccurate a lot of the times, but they're also good enough just to get the basic gist across.

01:44:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:44:52 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
But I think the one reason why and this is kind of specific to me, I guess because as a reviewer I do feel like it is hard to really review the new iPhones and say whether or not Apple intelligence is a big deal or if it's worth upgrading for when it doesn't feel finished and it's not like completely out yet. That said, I do agree that for general users it's not very overwhelming. It's, you know, it doesn't really feel like your phone's very different. So I do feel like it'll make the learning curve a bit easier, right.

01:45:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And not scare anybody right.

01:45:25 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yes.

01:45:25 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think they're. They benefited from the fact that they're rolling it out gradually, but I think it was really just them not being ready Like I don't know, that's my, I don't have any Intel, but I just feel like if you're going to roll out a new phone, you would rather have the AI features ready to go when the phone is ready to go.

01:45:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's true.

01:45:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And so I feel like maybe it will play to their advantage, but it does not seem like something that would have been ideal to just have this like stage of like. Okay, first roll out, roll out the iPhones, and then we'll do the first phase and then we'll do the second phase of AI.

01:45:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If they were ready, they would have rolled out at least the first phase at the same time as they shipped the phone.

01:46:02 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think that would have been great right, like having that first batch, and then people are introduced to AI as they unwrap their iPhone 16. And then they say, oh, but there's more coming. And then you get the second batch of people who are buying for the holidays, who will then have the full picture of you know. Well, I think you know abroad.

01:46:20 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
to that, though, like, what does it mean to ship? Like we know, the iPhone launches on a day in September, but right, there's a whole window where people are upgrading, not just yeah, we buy it the first day.

01:46:35
But yeah, I know I'm still in my scenic mode. I have apple upgrade program and the like as soon as it comes out. I still feel like I gotta get ready to write about what I'm not writing about this phone, but I do. I feel like much of the consternation about this was silly. How how many times has Apple released updates throughout the year? This is pretty common. I really am not upset that I might get updates later in the year. I don't under. I just don't understand why people were upset about this.

01:47:04 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, think the problem is the wwdc and the iphone event were both so focused on ai and yeah, okay, it wasn't ready, right, so it's like they made it a big deal. Nobody made it a big deal for them, and then we ate up the narrative and then we're like apple intelligence is coming, and then it wasn't there I guess I wasn't paying attention to those events like I was when I was a tech reporter.

01:47:25 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
So I mean I was, but not like I didn't watch them, but you're a more normal person now, dan yeah. Well, I don't know, leo, Come on, oh, let's not go too far. But I think I followed it like a civilian and so maybe that's why I just don't like I don't care. Fine, I'll get some updates this year.

01:47:51 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
That's fine. That's good to your point. I don't think the average person really cares. I think, um well, I feel like apple is also a little bit unique in that they still have that fan base of people that like they're not just people that are getting a new phone because they need it.

01:47:58
These are people that want the latest iphone, want the newest features, want to use them right away. Not everyone, but I do think apple has that audience still and a lot of other phone makers probably don't. So I feel like that's kind of maybe the exception, but I think the vast majority of people like do not care if they get a software update two months later would it be better if apple were like google, for instance uh, uh, or or open ai.

01:48:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I mean, I think apple wanted to err on the side of caution. They were really afraid of you know both. But google really stumbled when it released its gemini. At first it hallucinated in its in its demo yeah, that was an incredible demo it's like dudes, it's wrong, like out of the gate, and so I think apple kind of wanted to avoid that oh yeah, and they're always very cautionary, right?

01:48:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think that's why they didn't even announce apple intelligence until later this year is that very cautionary approach of we're not going to do something unless we do it right and we do it better than everybody else, and it's up. It's still, you know, up for debate whether or not they end up being better than everybody else, but they're going to work towards that and try to avoid any gaps.

01:49:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, to be fair, they're kind of copying what, at least if I correct me, if I'm wrong, but doesn't Pixel have a monthly feature drop? Every month, google pushes out new features.

01:49:18 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. It's not monthly. I think it's quarterly for the feature drops.

01:49:28
But I do think the age of like there's one big software update every year is slowly fading away. Like, yes, there will still be like a new big version every year. But I think you know, like to your point, google's already proven that you know there's big updates once a quarter. I think Samsung, you know, does that to some extent as well. But for Apple they've largely stuck to that approach of like, okay, this wave of new features is coming with the newest version of iOS. But now with Apple intelligence, I do think these, like you know, dot one, dot two, dot three updates are going to be important in a way that they haven't been in the past.

01:49:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's funny is Google pushed out Android 15 a little bit early last month. I didn't see a lot of cover. It wasn like iOS 18. It wasn't like, in fact, I don't even know what's the dessert it's named after they don't do that anymore. They oh, I think with like Android 10 or something, they stopped doing that oh, okay, um, is it just that we are kind of it's not a whole lot new that you can do.

01:50:30 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I mean, really, ai is the biggest new feature in any phone these days, right yeah, I feel like a lot of the interesting software features now launch like with the phones themselves, versus like in Android 15 or you know, I guess, iOS 18. But that's technically not true, I guess, because Apple intelligence launched with iOS 18. But I do think it's more tied to like the moment when the phone launches versus when, like, the new software update comes out.

01:50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, one of the features I think I gave it credit to Apple for this One of the features in Android 15, I was just looking at Google's blog is the new theft detection lock, which uses AI to keep your data safe. If your phone senses someone has snatched it and is trying to run, bike or drive away, it will automatically lock your device. You can also use remote lock to quickly lock your device from any phone, from any device, using your phone number and a simple security check. So wow, uh, okay, I guess Apple didn't invent that. As usual, android was there first. It's funny, do you see? I'm really curious because we had an Android show which we canceled for lack of interest. Do you see as much interest as there used to be in the next generation of phones?

01:51:45 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Depends on the phone, I think for sure. But yeah, I would say we do. I don't know, abrar, if you have specific thoughts on this too, but I think everyone always gets excited about the new iPhone. I feel like there's always a lot of interest there, and then a lot of the bigger Android phones, like the next Samsung Galaxy phone, the new Pixel phones. Yeah, people are interested.

01:52:06 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, I'd agree with that. I think it's the big ones, the big three.

01:52:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, we should mention that the hosts of all about Android, including Jason Howell, continue to do. They call it the Android authority show now, and they do it on the relayfm network. So, if you're a fan of Android, it was nothing we I mean we didn't. We didn't cancel it cause we hated it. We loved them, but there was just not a big enough audience for it for us. Uh, here's something I'm not thrilled about. I've always worried about ai being given agency. Like you wouldn't want ai to control the nukes, right? Uh, there's plenty of movies about that. And how bad an idea. That is anthropic. It's been announced is teaming up with palantir to sell ai to defense customer. By the way, customers is plural. Uh, is it just us? Well, they say us defense customers. Um, so that means that ai will be used in warfare, will be? Actually, it's already being done in ukraine, isn't?

01:53:17 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
it and it's real, that's in the future.

01:53:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, is that a good thing makes? Here's what I really don't want. Maybe I'm old-fashioned. I don't want an AI to make kill decisions.

01:53:30 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely not. That doesn't seem like a good idea.

01:53:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Access to Claude. This is the announcement from Kate Earl Jensen, who's Anthropix head of sales. Access to Clawed Anthropix AI within Palantir on AWS will equip US defense and intelligence organizations with powerful AI tools that can rapidly process and analyze vast amounts of complex data. That's not saying much. This will dramatically improve intelligence analysis, enable officials in their decision-making processes, streamline resource-intensive tasks tasks and boost operational efficiency across departments. Now remember google's? Google's engineers revolted when google was going to provide this kind of technology. Google was going to provide this kind of technology to the defense industry and and convince them not to do it. Yeah, anthropic was actually a splinter group that was leaving. I can't. Was it, uh, google or open AI they? I think it was Google.

01:54:39 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
They left because they were concerned about ai safety and here here they are, uh selling their uh ai to uh defense department yeah, the article uh notes later on that the the terms in the terms this can't be used for the design or deployment of of weapons. But until until when, though? Right, because it's you start with um, analyzing data or information and say, oh, but this could also help with this next thing.

01:55:09
Right this, give them an inch, they'll run a mile. So I also get nervous about what are the future implications of this, as they realize how capable it is. I also agree that I would like to not have AI be in charge of making decisions about whether or not people die.

01:55:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dan, is that happening in Ukraine and Israel now?

01:55:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I don't know anything that anybody else knows. I think there is a compelling I have heard I'm not making this argument. I am not making this argument. I've heard a compelling argument on why you do want AI in the kill chain and that's so that you are not. There's not a human culpable, um.

01:55:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's not a legal chain, um that's why I have a firing squad with one bullet and right, right, exactly, yes, that's right.

01:55:59 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Very similar, yeah, yeah, similar rationale. Um, I, I mean, I think that if we're hearing about a consumer AI company making a deal with the Defense Department, then this has happened a long time ago.

01:56:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, you're right, and by the way, palantir is likely to be one of the recipients, uh, of a lot of largesse from a Trump administration, because it's run by Peter Thiel, who who was a very large contributor, along with Elon Musk.

01:56:28 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And well, I mean, there's a. Really this is pretty interesting. I mean, not for nothing, but law enforcement love Palantir. They love it. Again. This is not me, this is just an observation as a reporter and somebody who's been around it for a long time. Law enforcement loves it, including close people who, who I trust quite a bit. What do they use, however? This is the fbi. This is the fbi. They use it for law enforcement. They for the the things that law enforcement want to use it for, to to use it for face recognition I, yes, I probably, but nobody has said we use it for face recognition they're actually not

01:57:06 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
databases they can search yeah.

01:57:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I think they say they rely on it. I've asked to see screenshots of what they're looking at and I can't get that. But what I mean, my guess, is that there's a really interesting thing happening. The FBI, which is law enforcement, really love this. At the same time, the FBI is about to have an interesting come to Jesus.

01:57:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, because of the new administration.

01:57:36 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, we can infer a lot from that statement.

01:57:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should mention that Palantir had a very large jump in its stock value in the last five days. If we look at the one-month trend you'll see it was actually November. Well, it was interesting. It was kind of November 4th that it started to go up, but quite a large jump in the valuation. I mean I'm not surprised. I guess I'm not surprised. I guess OpenAI spent a little bit of its huge VC funding. They, I think, recently got raised $167 billion, I'm sorry, the largest single raise in the history of venture capital. They have purchased, with some of that that money we don't know how much the domain chatcom. So if you go to chatcom now you'll get chat gpt. Uh, last year hubspot co -founder and cto dharma shah bought the domain chatcom last year for $15.5 million. So you got to figure he sold it for at least $16. How?

01:58:53 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
much did ABC buy gocom for?

01:58:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh can you Well, but that was way back when, right I think the first time there was a big domain sale I think it was a million dollars was sexcom. But what ended up happening is all the people who in the early days of TLDs registered those generic ones like newscom and sexcom and chatcom realized that generic TLDs weren't as valuable as they thought they would be, at least in the first few years.

01:59:27
We've now proven them wrong because chatcom probably sold we don't know how much, but sold for a lot of money. Yeah, shah sold it. He acquired it last year and he sold it in march of this year to, at the time, an unnamed buyer. Today, in a post on, actually confirmed oh yeah, oh, that was.

01:59:49 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
you guys all know who owns newscom, though right.

01:59:52 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
This is the common theme of the day. Where have we?

01:59:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
all spin and I do know, did. Did CNET buy it or did it? Uh, did it? Was it smart enough to register it from the very beginning?

02:00:03 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I don't know, I think they bought it right, you were there I'm not sure I was saying yeah, you should know more than I.

02:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, what I worked for them?

02:00:10 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
they didn't own it, so okay, I think I heard that it was bought, yeah, yeah so maybe that conventional wisdom that the generic names aren't that good, maybe that's wrong.

02:00:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says um, uh, he didn't. This is his breaking news secret acquirer 15 plus million dollar domain chatcom revealed and it's exactly who you'd think um. He bought it and then sold it. I wonder if he bought it for sam altman well, that's what I was wondering.

02:00:45 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
When did he buy it? Because if he, bought it around the time ChatGPT was blown up, then he probably thought oh, I could probably make a pretty penny on this.

02:00:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, smart thinking. Actually, he says he bought it for a project. He doesn't usually speculate and sell domains, but when he does sell a domain, it's almost never at a loss. Openai was the perfect home for this domain, so he decided to sell it. He's known Sam for over a decade. He doesn't like profiting off people he considers friends, so maybe he just sold it to him at a cost.

02:01:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That would be foolish. I hope he wasn't that foolish about it. That would be foolish.

02:01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope he wasn't that foolish about it. Anyway, it does work. I went to chatcom and there is a chat GPT. You know who else is getting AI now and it's about time. Microsoft notepad and paint they were just kind of the freebies that came with windows and all of a sudden they're putting ai in it like this is the next big thing I think my favorite line in the story was in july microsoft finally upgraded notepad with spellcheck and autocorrect.

02:02:01 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
So you go from that to like and now it'll write everything for you.

02:02:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's got rewrite.

02:02:09 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
That is wild, yeah finally, I've created, just put ai and everything. I feel like that's the strategy maybe that's it microsoft is pursuing as they can, so why not?

02:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, look at that. It put a castle in bliss. That's perfect.

02:02:23 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Those are the two apps where it does make a lot of sense for there to be AI tools, because, again, all of these things that we're seeing whether it's Apple intelligence or something else, it's all about the first wave of AI features that we're seeing is all about summarizing text or rewriting text, or making it easier to make changes to a photo without having to know how. So it's kind of surprising to me that this didn't come to notepad and paint sooner.

02:02:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah.

02:02:52 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
To that point. I saw an ad yesterday for Adobe because I Netflix ad and I was like, ok, it's interesting, it's an ad for Photoshop and it was a 15 second ad and the only thing they focused on was removing distractions from photos and I thought, oh, oh, this sounds like a direct response to tools like cleanup in ios or um you know magic eraser, object eraser, uh.

02:03:14
So really interesting to see kind of more traditional platforms say okay, we need to like show people that you can also do this on our platforms too, especially ones that you pay for, like photoshop wait a minute, you, you.

02:03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have the ad supported version of netflix it just happened.

02:03:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It happened like a month ago because I had the basic plan that they phased out the 12 a month one, so it was either upgrading to what 17, 18 a month or the six, seven dollar a month with ads. I've been surviving. It's not been bad.

02:03:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good, like water break time, you know yeah, so actually I've never met anybody who has the ad version. It's very successful.

02:03:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
By the way, netflix was really thrilled at how well this is gone and they're thrilled because they get ad money from it and subscriber money yeah yeah, honestly, I I'm kind of with you a bar, I don't.

02:03:59 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I don't mind commercials that much as long as they're not like two too long, because I feel like I miss having that moment to just like stretch my legs or something. It's healthy, right this?

02:04:07 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
is how you got to look at it. Yeah.

02:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They hit 22 million subs to the ad version.

02:04:14 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I mean, it saved them right. Like this and the password crackdown. Password crackdown, it turned everything around.

02:04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry that was out of date. As of May it was 40 million users, wow, wow, I mean it was growing fast. So tell me about it a brock, because I don't know anybody who has it, are they? So they're all short ads. How often do they show up?

02:04:37 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
they, um, they, so I so right now I'm re-watching the crown again, so imagine an hour-long episode. I think there are probably about four ad breaks throughout the hour. The shortest will be 15 it the hour the shortest will be 15 it's not bad. Shortest will be 15 seconds, which is very, very short. The longest I've seen is a minute, so it's really not bad at all, um and do they just do one ad or do they?

02:04:56
they piggyback a bunch I would say it's about four throughout an hour long episode, um, and they're. They did a pretty decent job figuring out because I was like, where in the crown do you feel like there's an opportunity to like promote? Because it's not made a razor yeah but like yeah, it like found a way to like make it a little bit more seamless so the length of the breaks total.

02:05:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would say under three minutes, okay, honestly long enough to get a cup of tea, but not so long that you lose interest exactly, and I think that's the sweet spot is you're not giving up and you know it's over in the blink of an eye but remember cable used to do that, but now cable is full of ads, so it's like you know that's gonna. Podcasts used to do that and now podcasts are full.

02:05:36 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah it does feel like the beginning right, it's gonna ramp up yeah uh well, maybe not, though I mean they're already.

02:05:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're still charging you, so they're maybe making enough money just doing a few ads. That's true. I mean, it depends whether you think they're softening you up or this was all they needed.

02:05:53 - Benito (Announcement)
You really think they don't want more, though you think they're happy. You think they're satisfied with the bar's $7 and the ad money. You think that's enough for them.

02:06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our rule is no more than one one to two minute ad per half hour. Yeah, which I think is okay. I mean, I came from am radio, where it's literally 19 minutes of ads every 60 minutes. It was one third of the content and that was hard. You know, I didn't like that at all. Yeah, well, and that's the risk is you can, you can get greedy and then and look what's happened to am radio.

02:06:26 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I was going to say it's impressive that they had 19 minutes of ads to.

02:06:29 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You know, people fan them oh, a talk radio was lee. Did you ever go to the talkers talk media conference?

02:06:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I went once, michael harrison one of the first ones yeah it was at the only because it was in san francisco at the. Uh, I think it was a sir francis drake or maybe it was a saint francis, anyway, um, I remember going and saying hello and the guys said hello, yeah I worked in am talk radio, the talk radio news service that's.

02:06:58
I was on political campaigns running radio rose, running all over the country hooking up isdn lines, if you can, oh yeah, well, I had an isdn line until you know very recently, because that was the only way you could do radio remotely.

02:07:12
And nobody by the way, no talk show host works in the studio anymore yeah if you go down to iheart, where I used to work for premiere, you go down to their studios. They built this facility with probably 10 studios. There's nobody in them. It's they're empty, except for maybe a board op, but there's no hosts there. They're all working at home yeah, I discovered I'll voice tracked it. Yeah, maybe that. No, and call-in shows you have to be there. Yeah, you can't voice.

02:07:37
Maybe you could voice track a call-in show, kind of think of it. You could voice track that. Yeah, probably that. Show the talk the tech guy you could probably voice track. Uh, but show the talk the tech guy you could probably voice track uh, but uh on the other hand, am's kind of dying.

02:07:54
So maybe kind of dying, kind of kind of it's one of the reasons they got rid of isd and that the fact that phone companies didn't want to support isd anymore but they were very, very expensive and so we replaced I mean a few years ago we replaced the isdn line I had to the studio and so we replaced I mean, a few years ago we replaced the ISDN line I had to the studio in LA with what's called Comrex, which is regular phone lines yeah, comrex, and actually nobody said a word. It was just using not phone lines. You could use phone lines, but it was using the public internet. It worked fine. All right, I do need to take a break. No more AI.

02:08:26
We've got other things to talk about, like roblox, the big roblox section coming up next on this week in tech, our show today with this wonderful panel. I should you know. Round of applause abrar al-hidi, lisa edichico, dan patterson. Yay, great to have you all. Our show today brought to you by something I used for years on the Tech speaking of the Tech Guys show and loved for years, and I kind of got out of the habit. I don't know why, but I was so glad when they said "'Hey, we wanted you to talk about Experts Exchange'". I said, oh, I remember Experts Exchange. You still around? They said, yes, we're still around and still great.

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You know it's been around for a long, long time. If it's e-ecom slash twit Experts Exchange, we're so glad to have them around to sponsor our shows and we thank you for supporting us by going to that address. E-ecom slash twit On, we go with the show let's talk about. I said I would talk about Roblox. Okay, okay, I'll talk about Roblox if that's what you want to talk about. Roblox is banning kids from some of their spaces and specifically the social hangout spaces. They're introducing changes to make things safer for kids after recent reports about child abuse linked to the platforms. Now I I've have any of you ever played roblox?

02:14:07 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah, download you have. I don't play it, no, but I mean they're they have a kid, but not old enough to play roblox, right? Yeah, no, I I mean I didn't download to play it. I downloaded because this has been around, like these accusations have been around roblox for years and years also the mechanics of roblox are really interesting and the way it's informed other games yeah, I don't have a lot of um like first-hand experience playing roblox.

02:14:30 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I do feel like it's more geared towards children, but um, but I do think, similar to what dan was saying like the like mechanics of it are fascinating.

02:14:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's got to be highly addictive, right? Because kids, just like I mean more than is it like Minecraft it?

02:14:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
seems to have taken. You can create your own games Go ahead.

02:14:50 - Benito (Announcement)
It's a platform. It's more of like a gaming platform, Like kids make their own games and give them to other kids to play the games. And you know, some games go viral.

02:15:02 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And yeah, yeah, so it's more like okay, it's like a place you make games. Yeah, there were accusations, uh, a couple years ago from a pretty good youtube channel that did like they were all investigative reporters and and created a youtube channel. I think people make games, I think that's what it's called. People make games, um, but. But they investigated the payout mechanics. So, allegedly, just like Benito said, roblox is a platform much like Minecraft, except instead of building in one space, you can create a game. You can create a roller coaster game or something like GTA, or you can create any type of game and then sell that game or create microtransactions within that game.

02:15:38
So people make money, yeah, and that was what was investigated that advertising it to minors and also the payouts per hour allegedly were in the pennies and again, allegedly there were a number of predators who would use it as a place to meet young people. It's just been a controversial platform for so long that it's fascinating.

02:16:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well and you would think that this would be what they would have said all along is let's protect kids, especially because COPPA. But apparently they didn't have any restrictions on how kids could use it and now, by default, users under the age of 13, which is the COPPA age limit, will not be able to play, search and discover unrated experiences. So they have ratings and they can have suitable for children. This will ensure that parents and users have more clarity into the types of content. Is there adult content on Roblox? A second life? There was, is.

02:16:46 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I'm honestly not sure.

02:16:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It depends on, I guess, how they're moderating the content if at all, I'm not familiar with, like what kinds of approvals are needed to get a game published on roblox lou mm uh, who was a long time hosted on our shows of this week in enterprise texas. Uh, kids can build their own games with 3d assets and lua code. His nine-year-old has a number of capital flag gates on there. So lou's a programmer. Games can get quite sophisticated to first-person shooters to advance games like mist. So I wonder Lou uh, he's in our uh Discord chat do would you? Could you do it? Or do adults, would they be interested? If you can write Lua, you could write your own games in there. Is there uh? Are there adults in in Roblox or kids?

02:17:35 - Benito (Announcement)
There are absolutely adults making games for kids there and making a lot of money off of that too.

02:17:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And apparently predating. I mean predators are on there.

02:17:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
To be fair, they're everywhere, on every platform.

02:17:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lou says there is adult content on Roblox, including extreme violence and terrible language, howent, so maybe I should start playing. I like Lua, it's a good language. I like Lua, it's a good language. They're also restricting access to social hangouts. It seems like they should have done this from day one and freeform user creation experiences to users under the age of 13.

02:18:07 - Benito (Announcement)
The thing is, I think it was like Minecraft, wherein it wasn't necessarily, at the beginning, meant for kids, so they didn't anticipate what was going to happen and kids took it. Now it's for kids, yeah.

02:18:38 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Katie Grant learn how to become a little entrepreneurial through this platform that was accessible to them. Um, but again, like I, I don't know too much about roblox. I just remember that being like part of the reason why. It was like in the news cycle, like years and years ago, like early 2010s or whenever roblox launched, I don't remember I should have paid more attention to it during the.

02:18:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the biggest game of all. During the average day, more than 80 million people use it. That means more people log into roblox every 10 minutes than use second life in a month at its peak. 380 million monthly active users twice as many as steam, three times that of the playstation, three times the number of unique annual users of the Nintendo Switch. Five times as many have bought the Xbox console in the last 10 years.

02:19:26 - Benito (Announcement)
But I think the ratio of those numbers are the same if you look at kids' content on YouTube to other oh yeah, it's just because kids' stuff. They have time to do that the whole day. That's true.

02:19:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And parents often just let their kids do that.

02:19:39 - Benito (Announcement)
That's the babysitter, which I'm not sure is a good thing.

02:19:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the funny thing is Roblox has yet to make any money. It's very expensive to run but it's very hard to profit from it.

02:19:55 - Benito (Announcement)
I just want to say that I'm seeing a lot of hate for Roblox. Personally, I don't care about roblox, whatever. I'm seeing a lot of hate for roblox, but I bet you, if any of you are 11 now, you would all be all over it.

02:20:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, all of you I was really into minecraft when I was a kid? No, we didn't. We had uh stones and abacuses. No, but I love minecraft even just a few years ago. Um, run rate spending on roblox. This is from a really good uh piece by matthew ball. At matthewballco he's at headline. Roblox is already the biggest game in the world. Why can't it make a profit and how can it? The run rate, the revenue rate, uh, right now on roblox, or at least when he wrote this in May, is over 3.8 billion dollars annually in 2022. Roblox users designed 170 000 virtual clothing and accessory items. 15 000 virtual worlds every day. 15,000 virtual worlds every day. Average daily users have grown 40% since then, so it's probably even more. Tens of millions of worlds have been created. Over 100 user created worlds have been played over a billion times. One has over 50 billion plays. It's funny. I think the normie world and the adult world doesn't know about this and every kid does. All right, I obviously have to play more Roblox. I'm going to make that my resolution.

02:21:31 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It's a good one.

02:21:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wow, anyway, roblox is finally doing something to protect kids. I feel like they should probably have done that sooner. But anyway, speaking of success, reddit had a very good year stock-wise. A 12 rally on election day lifted reddit's market capitalization to 21 and a half billion dollars, making it more valuable than Snap, which is four times bigger.

02:22:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
They seem to have really put the controversies of 2023 in the rear view.

02:22:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I thought it was over for Reddit when the moderator revolt happened and people were shutting their subreddits down and protest over Reddit's management. And no, they managed to not only quell it but move on and succeed even better. They went public shortly after that.

02:22:35 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, I guess I'm curious because you mentioned how well it's doing in the context of Snap as well, and it's kind of interesting because I feel like and I could be wrong, but I feel like Snap maybe isn't as popular as it used to be during its heyday. I feel like it's been overshadowed to some degree by TikTok and by Instagram that you know, instagram essentially copied TikTok and Snap, but I don't know. I just I feel like I don't hear Snap mentioned a ton in like the social media vernacular as much as I used to in like 2016, for example.

02:23:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When you were a younger person, you probably used Snapchat, right?

02:23:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I feel like that's the funny thing about Snap is we were just talking about Roblox and how every kid uses it and everyone's like what? Like you know, unaware, Snap is one of those things where, as millennials, we, when it first launched, we were super into it and then we decided that it was like uncool and we stopped using it. But Gen Z's love Snapchat.

02:23:33
Like still still, and that's the reason why it's still around and, honestly, like it does impressively well every quarter, it seems like, or at least every year or so. Um and uh, it's. It's that idea that ephemeral media is still a hot topic. Right, it's still. People still want to have disappearing messages for whatever reason. Uh, that's what I want, young, yeah.

02:23:56 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Well, no for social media, yeah you know, the one feature in mastodon that I think is like I mean, I don't keep any content on social I. I used it for years, but I don't do any of it. And the one feature I'm asked it on that's great is that it will auto delete posts. You can just set it to auto delete posts. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there, but like that's a new feature though, isn't it, dan? No, it's been around for a while. Yeah, I want every social network to have that feature, and then maybe I'll think about using social media again. But right now I post stuff and then a couple hours later I deleted it. Like I just post a link to here's my work. Here's something I'm working on today, like in the link to a blog.

02:24:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've lost that urge to post pictures of my lunch and updates on it.

02:24:39 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Well, that's the thing with like disappearing messages and stuff. It's like it still scratches that itch of posting something and getting reactions to it and seeing that people are seeing it, but it's also not there forever. So I think people get a better peace of mind with that.

02:24:55 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I think you have a right to control. Oh, sorry.

02:24:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
No, go ahead. I was going to say the digital footprint could be horrifying, but yeah, go on.

02:25:02 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Right, you have a right to control your digital footprint. And it's kind of when I stopped it wasn't, leo like I was in the Twitter beta because I was in Odeo and I used all this stuff years ago at ABC and other places and I just found that like I had this enormous, enormous digital trail and it did me very little good, but it was owned by other companies and I like that. Never really I was like this, but you you make it very hard for me to erase this in bulk. Like I can't just select all delete. It's really challenging. And when I started looking around in fact, I did a whole package on this at cbs news in 2018, like a long time ago like it's very, very difficult to delete your digital trail, and when I kind of figured out how hard it was or how like time intensive it is, I then it was like Nope, nope, these companies don't have my best interest in art, they have their best interest. I'm not going to keep posting here.

02:25:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, now everything's being used to train AI, so it's like, okay, I guess they want your content.

02:26:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You take it down, you're taking value away from them. Yeah.

02:26:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm not disparaging any one particular company. It's me, not them, but it's it's not you, it's me. I just changed my posture.

02:26:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, and to your point, leo, I think, like that idea of you mentioned, you know you don't necessarily feel like you want to post, you know, every little thing, like your lunch or whatever. I feel like our attitudes towards social media have shifted where it felt like there was just like, when these things roll out, you're like I want to post everything on Instagram. And now you're like I'm being very selective about what I post on Instagram for whatever reason, whether it's privacy or feeling like it's not going to get enough attention or likes or whatever it is. And so then to Lisa's point. I think that idea of the ephemeral media kind of scratching that itch without it being like this is who I am forever and ever and ever.

02:26:48
That's why platforms like Snapper to bring it back to that- are so popular still.

02:26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We just don't necessarily hear about it as much, maybe within our circle when you post to snap, you're posting to a specific group of friends, though, right, it's not a public. Or is it a public post?

02:27:02 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
it's to your friends, or you could dm somebody.

02:27:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Essentially, it's not like twitter, where you're saying hey world, here's what I had for lunch if you are a persona, then maybe, uh, and I think some people do if you're dj khalil, I'm sure yeah.

02:27:16 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, but um shows how the data.

02:27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know who's big on Snap anymore.

02:27:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, sometimes I get random recommendations for people who are in my contacts but I haven't added. I don't use Snap I don't really post anything, but I check it every now and then but it'll be people in my contacts who I guess are posting publicly because it has the option to add them as a friend on there. So there must be something again. This is not something I've used in like six years, but maybe there is a way to still be somewhat public on there.

02:27:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to get some younger hosts.

02:27:45 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, we're out of date here.

02:27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need some 14 year olds you remember the first iPod were too old. I used to ask my kids, but they're in their thirties now. It's like no, that's not gonna work. I'm gonna ask dan's kid how old is your baby now?

02:27:59
uh, she's two and in fact at some point she might need to go to bed, but uh, she's two, and we're almost done here uh, I just was curious what you're gonna do when she gets to 12 and wants to be on these things yeah, I think about this, especially with ai, and I do think about, like ai relationships and ai friends.

02:28:17 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Um, I think about that as like perhaps a way for her to interact with her relatives. Um, yeah, I don't know.

02:28:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, I fortunately you have a while to figure this out.

02:28:30 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I don't know. My wife and I are pretty private people when it comes to, so I hope we teach those values to her. I, I don't know you just parent like I. Like there is no trick, just be a parent right, and nor are there any rules. Yeah, there is a lot of privilege in that statement, though. There's a lot of privilege. I am a white man who works in new york city. I make a salary I like it is. It is harder for some people to parent as often or in the same way, of course, right uh, canada has ordered the shutdown of tick-tocks Canadian business, but they're not blocking the app interesting.

02:29:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder if this this is a couple of days after the election. I wonder if what's going to happen in the US with tick-tock. I was thinking the same thing yeah, me too, because Trump has gone back and forth.

02:29:17
He was he was the first to suggest banning it, mm hmm, back when he was president, yeah, now he likes it, but I wonder if, when he's president again, he will, because it's Chinese, he won't want to ban it again. This is why Canada is banning it. The government innovation minister, francois Philippe Champagne perfect name says. Mr Champagne says the government is taking action to address the specific national security risks related to bite dances operations in Canada, to the establishment of TikTok technology Canada spectacular accent.

02:29:54 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I was going to say that was pretty good, I don't know how he talks.

02:30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is they have a like cepheus in the united states, the uh committee on foreign investment in the us. They have, uh, the government can assess political risks in canada, national security from foreign investments, uh, but they're not gonna. They're not gonna shut down the app. Maybe that's what the us needs to do. I don't think that solves the privacy issue, though, right it?

02:30:20 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
definitely doesn't. It makes it look like it solves the privacy issue. It's the opposite, but it doesn't do it. Yeah, and there's. There's, just as, as people who are against this have said, there need to be measures that protect people's data from being still, you know, given to third parties. Um, and getting rid of tick tock does not solve that problem at all.

02:30:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The canadian government, like the us government, bans tick tock from government issued devices. Tick tock says it will challenge the order in court. Shutting down tick tock's canadian offices and destroying hundreds of well-paying local jobs is not in anyone's best interest, and today's shutdown order will do just that, of course. Uh the time the clock is tick-tocking in the us because they have until january 19th, one day before inauguration day, to sell tick-tock or face a ban I almost forgot that that deadline was coming up, with everything else going on.

02:31:14 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I mean, that's yeah that's why I feel like I don't know if a TikTok ban would go into effect that soon, because it's so weird that it's January 19th and this was a long time ago, months ago, but it's kind of weird.

02:31:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like they knew, you know, on January 20th everything changes.

02:31:31 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, they were preparing for that, just in case, and here we are. So I don't know. Tiktok doesn't seem like it plans on selling anything and I don't know if the us government would really go go through with that. Um, it's going to causea lot of uproar if they do, uh, so I don't know if that's gonna happen let's, uh, let's begin to wrap this up, because dan's got uh got an appointment with uh.

02:31:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Strained broccoli or something. She's eating human food now, right, oh of course, yeah, Pizza everything. Pizza, that's human food.

02:32:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
She's just, it's bedtime. I think, yeah, all right.

02:32:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, one last ad and then we'll wrap things up. What a great panel. So nice to have you on here. Dan Patterson from Blackbirdai he also isa, contributing editor at zdnet. Uh now part of the cnet family or is I can never remember scene that's part of the zdnet family, I think. Uh, lisa edichico, working in the cdnet family at cnet, senior editor, and uh, of course, her friend and colleague uh alhidi from uh cnet as well course her friend and colleague abra alhidi from uh cnet as well.

02:32:42
We didn't plan it like an all cnet get together or anything. Just answered by no, just kidding. Brought to you by uh. Actually it's brought to you this week by expressvpn. Uh, I probably don't need to explain why you want a vpn. You don't need it all the time, but with expressvpn you could run it all the time if you want, because expressvpn is so fast you really won't notice a slow down.

02:33:05
The thing is, unfortunately, there are three reasons you need a vpn. You know about security. A vpn encrypts everything going out of your computer or your phone into the public internet, encrypts it right to the server and then your data emerges in the public internet on this anonymous server somewhere out in the world. So security for sure. We were talking when Alex was on, stamos was on about how easy it is, for instance, for a bad guy to impersonate your home Wi-Fi on a public Wi-Fi network. You're at a coffee shop so that your computer goes oh, we're home and joins his malicious access point. That's really easy to do, unless you're running a VPN. Then they can't even see you you, they don't know what your home access point is. There's also, though, another reason. You might want to use it for privacy. Your internet service provider can see everything you're doing, so can your carrier, where on your, on your phone. So can the Starbucks when you're on Starbucks. That means they know all the sites you're visiting and, believe me, they collect that information and sell it on. But they can't see it when you're running ExpressVPN. So that's the second reason. There's a third reason, though, we don't talk enough about, which is with ExpressVPN, you are located wherever you emerge onto the public internet, wherever that server is, and ExpressVPN has servers all over the world, so that's useful. For instance, let's say you've seen the Crown over and over again. You're looking for something new on Netflix. Netflix has about 6,000 titles available in the US, 18,000 titles global three times that number. You're missing out on thousands of great shows unless you use ExpressVPN.

02:34:55
It's the only one I use, expressvpn. Here's how it works you fire up ExpressVPN and you'll see a big button on your phone, on your laptop, on your desktop. You can even put it on your router, by the way and when you fire it up, you can choose what country you're in. Normally it will just automatically choose the closest server, but you can be anywhere. Let's say you want to watch yellowstone. It's coming back tonight. I'm very excited. You can't watch that on netflix in the us, but if you're in germany or greece, use expressvpn to make yourself in germany or greece. And now you've got yellowstone.

02:35:31
They have servers now in over a hundred countries and because they invest in their network, it's fast enough to watch HD video. So security, yes. Privacy, yes. Watching content on Netflix, disney Plus, bbc iPlayer in other countries yes. That's ExpressVPN. And, by the way, they protect your privacy. They go the extra mile to make sure they do no logging, and I've been seeing a lot of conversations over the last week about people saying how can I protect myself if I want to be on the internet and nobody can see what I'm up to? Very important.

02:36:09
Choose a VPN service that doesn't log like ExpressVPN. They do two different things. To make sure that you're completely private when you use ExpressVPN, you log in through a trusted server that's running in RAM on that server without ability to write to the hard drive. It's completely sandboxed and, by the way, third-party audits have again and again affirmed this and as soon as you close your ExpressVPN connection, it goes away. There's no trace of your visit. But if, as if that weren't enough, expressvpn also uses a custom debian distribution that erases the hard drive and rewrites itself every morning when they reboot. So even if there was something or were something about you on that hard drive, it's gone the next day.

02:36:49
I like it because expressvpn is absolutely committed to your privacy. Believe me, I wouldn't travel anywhere without expressvpn. Uh, so it's the best vpn out there because it works on all your devices your phone, your laptop, your tablet, fast speeds rated number one by top tech reviewers on places like the verge, and I think I know cnet keeps you private, keeps you secure and it's a very fair price. I want you to try it out. Take advantage of expressvpn's black friday, cyber monday, offer to get the absolute best vpn deal you'll find all year.

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Yes, use our special link. You're going to get four extra months with the 12 month plan, six extra months when you sign up for two years, absolutely free. Go to expressvpncom slash twit ex. We got to go there, though ExpressVPNcom slash twit, to get an extra four or even six months of ExpressVPN for nothing when you sign up for a 12 or 24 month plan. It really is the way to go, expressvpncom slash twit. Thank you, expressvpn. We appreciate your support. Let's see there were a bunch of other stories but I'm not going to worry about them because baby's got to go to bed. Oh geez.

02:38:08 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And by baby he means all of us, because last night I went to bed at eight. I don't know.

02:38:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know.

02:38:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I noticed my bedtime there you go. You know so. I'm on the West Coast, though. So, dan and Lisa, you actually have permission to go to bed.

02:38:20 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Yeah, I was going to say it is almost eight here.

02:38:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, when are you, Lisa?

02:38:25 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
I'm in New York.

02:38:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
New York and Dan's in New York and Abrar, you're in the Bay Area. I can't remember yeah.

02:38:31 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I am in Oakland, yes would invite you to our studio, but there's no one there.

02:38:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad I got to see it while you still had it. That was, yeah, you got to visit once, which was really nice At least once I was there when you visited. Yeah, if you ever want to come to the attic, you can have a cat bed if you want to bring your cat.

02:38:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I need a cat cameo. Why did we not have a cat cameo on this?

02:38:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a cat camera but unfortunately, the cat here I'll show you the cat's never in the bed. I don't know why the cat's got a bed, it's just waiting for her, but she doesn't like it. Oh, I got this idea from. Anthony Nielsen is one of our producers who always, every time he's on a call with us, he's got a kitty cat here.

02:39:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I love that I know your lighting is incredible too. How fun your cat I would be there.

02:39:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know well, come over, have a cup of coffee. Thank you, you can hang out in the cabin. We do have a. We have a special chair for uh for visitors it rotates for whatever. Yeah, the chair, the chair's right here there's an actual chair. It's the old dr evil chair that we had that's right before I don't know.

02:39:38
You know, I got all these extra cameras and all this extra set, but there's just me, so I just always stay on single. Oh well, oh well, dan patterson blackbirdai, where he's editorial director, and now that I've got my account set up, I'm going to use this more. Thank you uh, it's useful, you're going to read his stuff there or on cdnet from time to time, where he's a contributing editor thank you, dan always oh, thank you.

02:40:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I really appreciate it. I always love being here and uh, thank you, lisa and abrar, it was great talking to you and benito, thanks for the great benito gonzalez, our editor and producer and, uh, booker and everything else.

02:40:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He does it all. Do you ever use that manual typewriter behind you?

02:40:20 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I have. Yeah, I mean I've tried to get a ribbon in it, but I think it's a relic, but I've tried. I mean I learned on a manual typewriter.

02:40:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just somebody where was it? Maybe on microblog? Or Mastodon who bought like a thousand feet of typewriter ribbon. I guess you can roll your own. That's going a little too far. That's extra manual. Yeah, thank you, dan, appreciate it.

02:40:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Thank you Likewise Thank you to Abrar Alhidi.

02:40:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Always a pleasure to have you on. She works at CNET and she's Abrar Alhidi on Instagram, so you do publish stuff or post stuff on Instagram.

02:40:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I do Instagram and TikTok are my favorite. So you do publish stuff, post stuff on Instagram. I do, instagram and TikTok are my favorite.

02:41:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
TikTok is completely unserious, but Instagram I try to actually you know, do you have a TikTok account?

02:41:05 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I do. It's also a brawl heedy, again, it's. It has nothing to do with my actual job. So uh and a lot of random memes that I feel like making. So, yeah, yeah, feel free. It's a nice change of pace, but I'm a little too addicted to it, but it's fun we have.

02:41:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, we are now. Maybe you didn't know this, but we now stream on tick tock, so we have an audience 1249 people watching us right now. That's amazing. Friends, discord, youtube twitch, youtube Twitch, twitter, slash X, tiktok, linkedin, facebook and Kik. Wow, I love that.

02:41:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Everywhere. It's great. I mean also, streaming live on TikTok is a great move, so I'm glad we're doing it.

02:41:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I think it's really been good for us. I keep getting comments like he's still alive. I used to watch him on tech TV and things like that.

02:41:59 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, it makes me feel better. When people hear that I work at CNET, they say, oh, it's still around.

02:42:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, it's pretty much we're the old timers. And of course, when you work at CNET, you work with the wonderful Lisa Adachiko, who's a senior editor at CNET. Is it just phones you cover, or many other things?

02:42:16 - Lisa Eadicicco (Guest)
Many other things.

02:42:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I don't know everything's related to your phone these days it is every story is about your phone if you think about it, it is the primary computing device. Now, right, we started the show with the ipod and now we're ended with the primary computing device, your iphone. It's kind of amazing. Thank you you for being here, lisa, a bra Dan. Thanks to all of you for watching all 1249 of you who watched live, and all the thousands, tens of thousands, will be watching after the fact. If you want to watch live, we do the show Sunday afternoon, starting at 2 pm Pacific for 5 pm Eastern, 2200 UTC, and, as I mentioned, you can watch it on all of those streams. Of course, if you're a club member, that's the best way to watch because you're surrounded by other really smart, interesting, vibrant and exciting people. If you're not yet a member of the club, it's seven bucks a month. I mean mostly, we want you to do it because it supports what we're doing. Ads are not enough to keep doing what we're doing. A significant portion now of our revenue comes from the club. Thank you, club members. We really couldn't do what we do without you, but you get some benefits ad-free versions of all the shows, so you don't have to listen to ads. It's kind of like Netflix, right? You don't have to listen to the ads. You also get access to the club, to a Discord a great community. You can watch live in the Discord as well with the other club members. You also get specials. We do a lot of specials Chris Markwart's photo segment we do now every month. We have a coffee segment that we've been starting to do and that's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to do a coffee tasting next time with Mark Prince, the coffee geek. Stacey Higginbotham does a book club. Micah does a crafting corner. I'm going to start doing some coding because we're getting ready for the advent of code December 1st. There's a lot of fun stuff in there. We invite you to join the club because we really appreciate your support. By the way, we now offer two weeks free. So if you just want to see what it's like, you could do that, and there's a way you could do it for free forever. When you join the club, you're going to get a special code that you can put on your socials, on your tiktok, on your insta, and everybody who joins using that code will get you a free month. So if you, if you do it right, you'd never have to pay again. Find out more.

02:44:33
Twittv slash club twit um. What else? Oh, after the fact, you can watch the show on our website, twittv. There's a youtube channel dedicated to this week in tech, but the best thing to do would be subscribe and that way you'll get it automatically in your inbox and put it on your ipod and you can listen when you drive your dusenberg to work in the future. Uh, you'll find links in our, on our website, but you can also just look for this week in tech or twit, uh, in your podcast player. All of them know about twit. Subscribe right there, audio or video, your choice. Thanks everybody for watching episode 1005. Another twit is in the can. We'll see you next time, bye-bye. Amazing.