This Week in Tech 1009 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 Great show for you today. Harry McCracken is here from Fast Company. Lou Maresca, former host of Twiet Lou, works now he has for some time at Microsoft. He's in charge of Excel, copilot, plus Python. We'll talk a little bit about that. It's fascinating. Also, she's on her way to the last Taylor Swift Iris concert tonight, but Christina Warren is going to make an appearance. We're so glad to have her. Lots to talk about. Silicon Valley's billionaires are moving into the White House. Is that good? I think it might be. The new NASA director is all about space exploration, the 12 days of open AI and now Google can predict the weather better than the best weather prediction systems in the world. Plus John Wayne can read you your bedtime story. All that and more coming up next on Twit Podcasts. You love from people. You trust this is Twit.
01:05
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1009, recorded December 8th 2024. Andy giveth and Bill taketh away. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the great news of the week, the tech news of the week, with my dear friends, every one of them a dear friend. But this is a special occasion because Christina Warren is here, above and beyond Christina. First of all, I said is that really your backdrop? She said yes, that is not fake, christina, where are you?
01:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm in Canada. I am a couple hours away from going to the very final Taylor Swift Heiress Tour show.
01:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, yes, the very the last one. Oh, come on, she's going to add another leg.
01:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, no, this is it. This is it for this tour. This is going to be this is a record breaking tour. Yeah, this is huge. This is, you know, almost 200 shows and just craziness.
02:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The world economy is going to tank now that she's not bringing all of that money into the ecosystem.
02:09 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean honestly Vancouver. It was wild at the airport when I landed. They had all kinds of stuff up in the airport. The flight attendants were getting in on it. When we were flying out this morning, the whole downtown area. There's a big deal everywhere. Yeah, like they, they. They know what this is doing in terms of what income it's bringing in, and they are embracing it big time.
02:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, you've got a nice hotel room. Do you think that this will be? This will certainly be, at the end of it, teary and special.
02:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes, yeah, I mean that's otherwise I wouldn't have I thought about do I want to go? No, I'm not going to go. This is dumb, this is dumb. Well, I was in Korea two days ago, so I so that that was part of it. I was like am I going to be able to stay awake, am I going to be able to be alive?
02:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then I was like my mom was the one who was like, just do it. You will regret not going.
03:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Exactly you would would. You would be sitting there sad.
03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so glad you're watching on tiktok and I'd be very sad that I wasn't there, so we're gonna get through this and get you there thank you, thank you fourth time. So you, you, you know what you're gonna see.
03:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's not gonna be a surprise no, no, um this, it is a different set list than when I saw it last year, but I've I've seen it, you know, on online do they still roll her out in a janitor cart to get her to the stage, or is that everybody knows that now? No, yeah, they all know that. But she, she comes out in like various ways, so they have all kinds of, they have different methods because they have to.
03:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the stage is surrounded by people, so they have to get her there sneakily, otherwise she you know everybody's saying oh, oh, I'm so happy for you. We're gonna get this done fast, just for you, christina I'm gonna get you out of here in an hour and a half. It'll be the shortest twitter in the last 20 years. Harry mccracken is also here, always great to have harry on fast company and we're working to get harry a big following on blue sky. How many people do you have on blue sky now?
04:06 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I have like 5500 or something. So I I um, I've been on it for a while, but I didn't really you're not gonna get twitter numbers.
04:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think you're gonna get twitter numbers?
04:14 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
well, you don't. I mean, one of the great things about these other social networks is you don't need twitter numbers to get right, something that's a lot better than twitter, like I mean. I think in in terms of people commenting on my stuff and likes and whatnot. I've already surpassed present day Twitter with a fraction.
04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that awesome? Yes.
04:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yes.
04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we're going to get you to 10,000 tonight. That's what we're going to do. Everybody follow HarryMcCrackencom is his official handle on Blue Sky. I'm LeoLaportme, so yeah, I understand what you're doing there. That's the nice thing about threads. What are you, christina? We might as well give you a plug.
04:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm filmgirlbskyapp or whatever it is. Yes, so it's filmgirl one word, because they don't do underscores, unfortunately. So it's filmgirl one word. I have a bunch of domains, so I'm probably going to wind up mapping it. Yeah, and I thought about doing that, but then I'm going to have to probably still squat on the old one, cause I I've been on blue sky. I think it keeps your I think you keep everything I changed it.
05:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think so. Yeah, you could switch.
05:24 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I was. I was a Harry McCracken at be skysocial at first. Yeah, I don't think it. Yeah, you could switch. I was Harry McCracken at bskysocial at first.
05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Lou Maresca is also here another dear friend, longtime host of this Week in Enterprise Tech and a huge Taylor Swift fan, oh you know it.
05:39 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I travel far and wide for Taylor.
05:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Swift. He's like he's in the bus following the band. Principal engineering manager for hey, this is good. Far and wide for taylor smith he's like he's in the bus following the band. Principal engineering manager for hey, this is good. Excel, co-pilot, you're on the hot seat these days. That's awesome we are so you're. You were excel, but you've now kind of specialized in the ai portion yes, I was on the office platform groups.
05:59 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
This is a group like doing all the programming interfaces within office and then we kind of rolled into Excel Copilot for Excel and Python. So we're actually my team focuses on the Python side of things Nice, yeah, it's fun Really cool, really fun.
06:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I have lots of questions, but we'll get actually one question we're gonna flatten. Two weeks ago, steve Gibson on Security Now followed along with a lot of blogs railing against microsoft, because it seemed that they were going to start using your personal uh content, uh, to train their llms, uh. I talked to paul thurot and richard campbell immediately and the show the next day and they said, oh no, no, it's always said this is not going to, we're not training our llms on it. But the following week, this past week, microsoft clear, made very clear we now have never and will not use your personal content to train our lms. They wouldn't want to, they won't, they don't want my personal. Let's get real.
06:57 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
That's your organization's content right. I think that's the biggest thing. It would kill business, right, right. Yeah, I think we focus a lot on synthetic data and we generate synthetic data that actually is relevant to the things that we're trying to do for inference, and it actually allows us to really fine-tune these things to whatever we want. So we don't need people's data there you go.
07:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, steve backed it down, which I was glad Because, yeah, I think that's been pretty clear. By the way, yeah, I don't. I think that's been pretty clear. By the way, christina, thank you, I got my GitHub universe name badge.
07:29 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes, which is a.
07:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pomerone yeah, that's three years in a row now. Thank you.
07:42 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes, yes. Well, we love you, we love you, and if anybody else wants to buy those, we've actually, for the first time ever, put those up on the GitHub shop dotcom, and so we still have some, so you can go to the githubshopcom if you want to get your own hackable badge.
07:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a processor, by the way. I love the circuit board, but it's a processor, so you can plug into it and modify it, change it. It's got switches. It's a. It's a Pimeroni, so you can.
08:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Exactly, you, you, you can you screen battery, um a whole thing. So, um, you know, by default we have the that led screen, but if you wanted to put in like a color screen or something you have to do, that, um, you can connect it to a battery if you want to be able to change things on the fly. So it's pretty cool.
08:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, maybe I'll put Tetris uh put doom on it.
08:18 - Christina Warren (Guest)
People have put doom on it, actually. That's great. And you're supposed to wear that around your neck at the GitHub universe.
08:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you can use it in any other conference you want to go to, I mean obviously you know, make it, say anything you want.
08:32
The first one, I got to have my Twitter handle and account on it. I don't think this one does. Oh, it does. It has Twitter. Well, I'm at Leo Laporte everywhere, so, okay, that's, that'll work. It's not. It's not, it's agnostic.
08:45
Uh, all right, so I guess we should talk about the news. I've been putting it off. Uh, you know, this election ended up being very interesting. Uh, turns out elon musk now with the fec. Uh, you know, information has come out donated a quarter of a billion dollars, or very nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, or very nearly a quarter of a billion dollars, to President Trump's campaign and he got a good payout. I think he got his money's worth because he is very much part of the transition team. New York Times story, I think a couple of days ago, actually says it's not just Elon, but it's Elon's buddies, and they are not just, you know, doing Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency. They are in on the interviews.
09:35
Right at the beginning, elon Musk and Larry Ellison of Oracle were house guests, went to the trans, the first transition meeting. I brought the two richest people in the world. Today, trump told his advisors what did you bring? Uh, and miss his mom. May musk has actually been in, apparently, on some of the meetings he so elon brought his mom uh, he also brought a whole bunch of people, including, including this Jade Burchall.
10:06
He's the head of Elon Musk's family office. He's been interviewing candidates for the job, for jobs at the State Department, even though that's not his bailiwick. Ftc, fcc. Mark Andreessen is there. Ftc FCC Mark Andreessen is there. Of course, the guy who invented Netscape Navigator when he was a student at you know whatchamacallit in Illinois, at the NCSA in Illinois, and he let's see who else Sean McGuire, who is a Caltech PhDD in physics and investor at Sequoia Capital. He's been interviewing candidates for Defense Department jobs.
10:51
David Sachs Well, and that's the big story, david Sachs, who spoke at the Republican Convention, is the host of the All In podcast is now the White House ai and crypto czar, despite the fact that he actually, as active as he is, he's a part of the paypal mafia. He doesn't really have any active participation in an ai company or a crypto company. I guess that's good. I guess, um, that we know of that, we know of all of this has done one thing for sure that we can see which is propelled bitcoin well, over a hundred thousand dollars a coin. This is good for crypto. Doge is up, everything's up. Meme coins are up.
11:35
Uh, hawk to a coin is up not that one no, not that one's up and then down, but that's another story. Um, um, you think I'm joking. There actually is a Hawk coin.
11:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I know, I know, and it was they, they, they, they rug pulled everybody Right. Was that what happened?
11:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they uh dumped 90% and uh, and she Haley Welch, who is the Hawk to a woman, is getting a little controversy because she, she says I didn't have any, I didn't do it, I didn't do it, nor did my team do it, but somebody did. It was pumped up, launched in December 4th at 10 PM, quickly rose to a market cap of get this $490 million, then went down 91% in three hours kind of a classic pump and dump, I would guess. But who did it? We don't know, because it's a cryptocurrency. Get ready. Yeah, this is her hawk anomics slide deck. It's short and sweet, um. So she apparently didn't make any money on it, which just shows, you know, she's not. Uh, she's not.
12:52 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Uh, I don't know what it shows anyway, people did snipe it though, so there's, somebody did make somebody made a ton of money, are you right?
12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
490 million dollars?
13:00 - Christina Warren (Guest)
uh, is I was gonna say somebody made money and if she didn't, then she was a victim as well as being used to bring more people into the scheme. No, she's not to be clear. She's not.
13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is she a victim really?
13:13 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, no. But if what she says is true and who knows she could have actually cashed out out then in some ways it's almost like okay, they, you know she missed an opportunity. Really dumb people who are not even going to be part of the rug pull that. They're putting their reputation um up to to. You know, screw people over on a reputation of the hawk to a girl let's talk about a real coin, bitcoin.
13:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
or you could talk about uh all the others that have gained ease and uh right and uh all the other other stablecoins and so forth, but let's talk about Bitcoin. Would you buy it today?
13:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
My investment in Bitcoin and Ethereum is finally up. Maybe two years ago I spent $80 on cryptocurrency. I got those and a couple of other ones which are still down, but my $80 is finally up after two years. Have I been way down? So I'm rolling in dough, mainly from Bitcoin being at $100,000.
14:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, congratulations. I have 7.85 Bitcoin. I cannot access.
14:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Oh no.
14:22 - Christina Warren (Guest)
We don't like to talk about this. We don't like to talk about this. We don't like to talk about this.
14:25 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But I don't think I would not buy a lot of Bitcoin personally. But it's OK, so it's gambling.
14:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, ok, so the conventional wisdom is certainly what we've been saying for the last few years is because it's not tied to any real value. It's not. It's not even gold, it's not even silver, it's definitely not a company. It's just speculative that when you buy it, it's purely speculative. There's nothing. It's whether people think it's worth whatever it's worth, which means it's risky.
14:53 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
As far as I, can tell it's pretty much a high stakes slot machine in terms of investing in it, and that's not a blanket statement about the idea of cryptocurrency, which I certainly don't dismiss out of hand in general, but, like as an investment vehicle, if you have enough money that you don't care all that much whether it goes up or down, maybe.
15:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well yeah, I mean. On the other hand, I could see being bullish right now on crypto, given what's happening in the new administration.
15:31 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That is true. Yeah, we may be in for four years of cryptocurrency being looked on with a lot more positive vibes than it has over the past four for sure.
15:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My advice would be if you do buy it, get out of it by January 20th 2029.
15:44 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right.
15:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, right, right Because one of the things. Now I've seen Bitcoin advocates say is oh and, by the way, as many companies have done, including Venezuela, always a paragon for us here in the United States you should eliminate capital gains taxes on Bitcoin profits. Just don't tax them, just let them all roll in. And I feel like that's the kind of thing we're talking about here. This is, in a way, the all right. It almost feels like the scammers are now in charge of the country.
16:19 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, it reminds me of the 90s, when a lot of people said essentially that the internet should not be taxed, which certainly did not last forever as an idea right, that made a little more sense, because you have a nascent technology, you want it to grow, you want amazon and companies like it to do well, and and and.
16:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then, eventually, you can tax it, as they did. You know, sales tax and so forth. Um, this, this, though, do you. Why do we? Why do we want bitcoin to grow unless we're holding it?
16:49 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I'm less. I'm less of a skeptic here. Um, I actually yeah, I mean I, I I actually like the competition for banks because I'm I'm not a big bank person um, and so like having them have some level of competition that goes around this type of thing. There's actually data that shows potential interest rates could drop because of it. There's better efficiency when it comes to actually cryptocurrency, which would help force banks like Chase and some other banks to be more efficient. So I don't know, I'm hoping that this will somewhat push them in that specific direction. I'm sure there'll be some negatives, like there's a lot of volatility and impact on other smaller banks that are out there, but I do feel like there's going to be something. I feel like it's going to definitely push in some direction I'm hoping somewhat positive.
17:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, if you're an optimist, I think it would be a good time to say you know, maybe this is all going to work out, the government's going to get much more efficient, right that Bitcoin is going to end up, maybe the U? S will create a digital coin, itself a stable coin. That would then kind of I don't know, I don't. I don't understand economics well enough to know what the impact of that would be. I don't think anybody does, to be honest with you.
18:07 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It looks like we might end up with a cryptocurrency reserve, and I don't understand the implications of that.
18:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
President El Salvador is very happy about his cryptocurrency reserve right. You're happy until it collapses.
18:20 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right.
18:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like it reminds me a lot of Vegas. You know those beautiful big buildings. But then they always put up a billboard of the guy who won a million dollars at the slots. What they don't show you is the 999 000 people who lost money as the slots to pay for that right, or?
18:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
or how much did did it cost that that person you know to win the million and something right.
18:40
Don't ever talk about that um, yeah, but having having said that, like I mean, I'm kind of with Lou here. I'm certainly not bullish and I'm certainly thinking if you don't have money to lose, then you shouldn't be investing in any of these things. But just being completely candid, I don't think that it's a bad idea to talk with whoever handles your investments or, if you do it yourself, to look at diversifying into crypto if you're looking for the next short term, I'm not going to touch it.
19:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not going to touch it. I just don't like something. I agree I'm dumb. I mean there's a lot of Bitcoin billionaires, a lot of them. A lot of that money went into the campaign in 2024. So I'm obviously dumb, but I don't want to buy an asset that I don't understand why the asset is valued at what it's valued at. That is just a random. To me, it's buying a lottery ticket.
19:30 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Just don't put all of your retirement funds into crypto.
19:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, that's for sure, absolutely not.
19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Only put stuff you could afford to lose.
19:37 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Exactly. But even then, I mean all I'm saying is at this point because just my own, like similar to Harry, I put $2,000 in a Robinhood account a few years ago and a lot of that was in Doge when Doge was cheap. And then I didn't sell the Doge when it was at a really good price because my nephew had just been born and I wound up being underwater on the investment for the better part of three years. It is now. I've had an 85% return, so I've made money, so to speak, and it's a small amount. It doesn't matter. But it is one of those things that, for me, I was like I put this money in just for fun, gambling genuinely. Now, with enough time has passed, because of the changes that have happened for various reasons, I have a good return, but I I certainly wouldn't stake my retirement or anything important on it, right, my wife will.
20:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time we go to vegas, she or reno. She has 20 bucks, she's I'm gonna play this slot. Still it's gone. She's twice now won $600 and $900. So she's way up right, and now any, you know.
20:50
The temptation is then for me to say, wow, I got to get into this, this is great, you're making a mint out of this, but we know what the reality is. There's also and I worry about Bitcoin, and maybe I'll address this to you because you're more bullish on it, lou Bitcoin, and maybe I'll address this to you because you're more bullish on it, lou. But I worry that what Bitcoin has done is enabled ransomware and all sorts of crime, because it is as close to untraceable almost as close to untraceable as cash, and it's a lot harder to transfer a million dollars in cash from your headquarters in Virginia Beach to Hungary quarters in Virginia Beach to you know Hungary. But it also costs a lot in terms of energy use. There are gas fees, you know, even though Hak Tua maybe hadn't invested in her own coin or wasn't doing insider trading, she made lots of money on the fees right Because there's fees Right.
21:43
And so all of these things and the speed with which a transaction happens is unpredictable. It's slow, unless you pay more to the minor to validate it, even though now they've got proof of work, so it's not as bad as it was. Uh, I think the whole thing has lots of negatives that people don't even know about or don't consider. They're mostly just saying, oh, but I could make so much money. I feel like we're promoting a technology that is not an ideal technology, not understood yet too.
22:13 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I mean there's that's, that's. You're calling all the negatives and that's what makes sense, because you know I don't the hawk to a thing drives me nuts, right, because this is a perfect example.
22:21
It's a big example of, like you know, just like you know, other companies coming up with new ai ways of doing something stupid, right, like? I think this is another example of you know, allowing somebody to go and create their own cryptocurrency. You know, and, and, and then, of course, you know, so I think this is this, is that's the bad thing about it, right? I mean, there's got to be some level of correction that needs to happen and so maybe that's why government should get involved.
22:46 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And some of this stuff is solvable at least partially solvable, like the sustainability aspect. There's already been some progress with some cryptocurrencies and there's a lot more that can be done and there are startups working on it, since the original way that the stuff was verified was incredibly energy efficient. But that's not just.
23:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's just not like a given for this whole idea well, we'll find out because, uh, the anti well, many considered anti-cryptocurrency, uh. Chairman of the fed, um, I'm sorry, of the sec, gary gensler, will be replaced now by a guy named paul atkins and he is, as far as we can tell, pretty pro cryptocurrency, right, and so while gensler has been kind of saying, and I kind of agreed with him, cryptocurrencies should be regulated as securities, uh, but the crypto community does not want it to be seen as a security, uh, and I think that they're going to get their way with this new guy, paul atkins, uh, the pre bukele, president bukele of el salvador has now got a crypto treasury of 600600 million from his initial investment in Bitcoin. Trump wants to do the same thing. He has said in the campaign trail. He said he wants to make the US the crypto capital of the planet and create a similar strategic reserve of Bitcoin.
24:22
Of course, if you hold Bitcoin, all of that is great news. It means your assets will go up, right, right. But is it great policy, right? I think the people who are looking at this aren't considering that. They're just saying, well, I don't care, because I'm gonna make my, I'm gonna make a mint, I'll get mine I don't understand I don't understand, even if you're bullish on this stuff, I don't understand.
24:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, I other than the greed aspect. I don't understand. I don't understand, even if you're bullish on this stuff, I don't understand. I mean, other than the greed aspect. I don't understand why this would not be a security. That's the thing that.
24:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've never understood. It seems to me that it is. I've never understood that argument.
24:54 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You should have capital gains taxes on it, which you do currently, Absolutely yeah.
25:06 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We are talking about a guy who went bankrupt running casinos.
25:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I wouldn't put too much stock in his take on this whole thing. Yeah, well, what now? So what's really interesting to me is it really looks as if and I'd like to know what you think president-elect trump has handed over the transition to silicon valley to the silicon valley billionaires. They have moved into mar-a-lago, they're doing the interviews. They're you know elon is sitting in and phone calls with Zelensky and others.
25:29
You know there was a conspiracy theory before the election that Trump didn't really want to govern. He liked being president and and he, you know, like the benefits of it, including putting all aside, all of his convictions, which it apparently has but he didn't really want to run anything. That's too much work. So he was very glad to have people like Elon come in and do it and that's. That was the conspiracy theory that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were funding Trump because they knew that he would take a backseat, he would enjoy the trappings of power without actually having to worry about it. Jd Vance, who was a Teal protege, would be the vice president. He'd be sitting there with Musk and Teal and all of these people running the country. It kind of looks like maybe that wasn't a conspiracy theory, or at least that's what happened.
26:20
So now I'm wondering though is that a bad thing? Maybe these guys I mean, they're all great businessmen, right, they know how to run companies, they know how to launch rockets, they know how to, so maybe they should be running the country.
26:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I'm not even sure if it was ever a conspiracy theory.
26:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It seemed kind of manifestly obvious from the get-go, I mean trying to be a plan.
26:49
Yeah, I mean well, I mean, certainly you can make a strong case that a business background is not inherently a great background for running a government. Well, I'm worried because a lot of these guys have big egos, because they've stumbled into money. I don't know if they you know, a lot of them are billionaires just because they were in the right place at the right time, but they think they're geniuses and there's a certain arrogance that comes with that. That worries me a little bit.
27:06
Some have likened it though, to JFK bringing in the Harvard elite, the best and the brightest right, or Abraham Lincoln's team of rivals bringing in the best minds to help run the country, and maybe that's what's going to happen. I mean, yes, they are arrogant but so is virtually everybody else at that echelon of power. Yeah, you don't get to be president without being a little arrogant, trying to be optimistic.
27:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I would hope that maybe there's the potential for them, by sitting in on these meetings, to soak up some knowledge they don't already have, and that they have enough of a humble side to realize that they are not experts on foreign policy or all these other things outside of their wheelhouse they're in there for the interviews, maybe just to make sure that the person is competent and smart, and then somebody else is going to do the other part of the interview.
27:59
We don't know it's also not clear how long this will last, because historically, trump trump doesn't get along well forever with other people who are as needy as Elon Musk is, and this could just get as much attention. Right, I mean this could all be kind of brave he was in love with everybody.
28:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was in love with Kim Jong Un as well, and he seemed to like Putin quite a bit.
28:26 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And there are all these other constituencies like the Project 2025, people who are also jockeying for power along with the Silicon Valley.
28:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I bet this happens in every transition All of the different constituencies say, hey, we have a seat now, we want it, this is our agenda, and it's up to the president and his staff to kind of keep them out of the. You know, get control it right, right, um, and so we? Uh, and because we're not sitting in the room, we don't know what's going on and we'll find out. One way we'll know is because david sachs, who's now whatever this means AI and crypto czar that is a new title has no congressional power, has no more power than any other. I guess executive branch czar is not a fan of open AI. And if you want to recuse yourself on this one, lou, you can?
29:21 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was going to say I'm going to have to.
29:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unfortunately, you work for Microsoft too, in a way, because you work for GitHub. I forgot about that. Yeah, we got two Microsofties on here, so recuse yourself if you wish. But David Sachs has said on the All In podcast that OpenAI is a piranha a for-profit piranha and it could be bad news if Sachs is again. I don't know what powers he's going to have, but if he's the AI czar, we know that he likes Elon Musk and his ex-AI, but he doesn't like Sam Altman and his open AI. Well, we know that will be maybe a litmus test of what's to happen. What do you think, harry it's just you and me on this one of what's to happen?
30:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
What do you think, harry? It's just you and me on this one. Well, and Elon Musk, despite being a co-founder of OpenAI, is also not a fan of what's become of it. So I mean, the cynical expectation is that they will knowingly use the power they have to make life tough for Sam Altman. There's also the possibility they won't do it on purpose, but it will color what they do. Really cynical prospect is that they go out of their way not to let their own personal interests affect things, which I'll allow, that there's a possibility that will happen. I'm not entirely sure what they would do right now to make life tough for OpenAI through the power they have, but it's certainly possible and I can certainly see that, the fact they have Trump's ear leading to Trump not being a fan of OpenAI and that having implications.
31:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I feel bad.
31:05 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I don't wanna talk too much about this, since both Christina and Lou have Well, I do wanna add one perspective though, leo, and this is not necessarily anything to do with the story, but I think the case of him suing open AI. I think I kinda go back to the stories that come out around Elon kinda handing over all of his patents to BMW and saying, okay, I rather another company build a better electric car than me. Uh, then the world kind of benefits from it, and I think he kind of goes back to that theme anytime he talks about any type of technology and he's really pissed off that OMA, open AI, is doing this closed door for profit model and I think he'll continue to do that. You know, if he can afford to go and fight the fight, he's going to fight the fight and I think that's the interesting part about this is to see where they go, cause, again, opening AI is on top.
31:54
You know the these are companies that are people like Anthropic and other companies are striving for what they're achieving and I think it's it's it's a hard, it's a hard, uh, it's a hard thing to follow, and even x I mean x is using existing models that are out there. I hope the open source community, really it succeeds here, like I'm really like, like meta, you mean, or any any of them. Like there's, there's, like there's. If you go to deepseekcom, there's lots of open source models that are there, that are, you know, that are in some cases actually doing better than than some of the opening eye models.
32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, well, certainly competition and of and of let many flowers bloom. Is it obviously best for everybody, including right co-pilot and github co-pilot? Because, uh, yeah, uh, yeah, I can see that one thing that may be very good is his pick for, uh, nasa, uh, but again, this is going to be interesting. He picked jared isaacman, whose name you may remember now. He, he made his money as the ceo of a payment processing company, shift for payments. But he has sponsored a couple of spacex missions. You remember the dragon mission where he rode with three others into space, and then he did the first private fund, first ever privately funded spacewalk, last september. So this guy is a man who loves space. He has close ties with spacex, admittedly, but he is and he is the the president-elect's pick for running nasa. Uh, I presume he has to be uh, confirmed, but uh, I would imagine, of all of the nominees so far, he would be the quickest to confirmation. He says he envisions a thriving space economy and vows to usher in an era where humanity becomes a true space faring civilization. I believe it because of his background, of his background Garrett Reisman is a retired NASA astronaut advisor to SpaceX says that Isaacman is definitely going to push NASA, but he'll do it in a positive way. Elon Musk said he's a man of high ability and integrity. This might be a great choice.
33:58
Nasa has been hamstrung by the fact that Congress gives it money but uses it really for pork barrels. So the space launch system rocket, the SLS, which has been a massive failure and $24 billion, was massively over budget. Part of the problem is that it's made in every different state in the union. Practically it's piecemealed, so that every member of Congress could get their little pork barrel in, and that is not the way to run a space agency. So maybe this will be good for NASA. Maybe they'll fix the Hubble. You know, the SLS is a real problem. Now remember, though, this guy has close ties to spacex and and this is, you know, the norm in government is you kind of recuse yourself, you step back from your investments, you, you, you step back from your ties and you act on behalf of the people, not any individual company or person. I don't, I don't. I don't know if isaac would do that. I don't know.
35:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We'll have to watch again and I mean there's this overarching question of the fact that Elon Musk controls SpaceX and is now involved in all these other aspects of the government and American life in general and global politics, and ultimately, ultimately, whose interests is he going to serve Once he knows all this stuff he is likely to know as a Trump confidant, you know is he going to leverage that for his own private interests?
35:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, NASA's current administrator, Bill Nelson this is quoted by Reuters said he thinks the relationship between Elon Musk and the president-elect is going to be a benefit to making sure the funding for NASA is there, so I see that as a positive.
35:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Seems like a cut.
35:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess if really your chief and only interest is we got to get into space. This is the right way to do it. Right, get it, you know, get the. What we've shown is that commercial space is more effective. I would love we'll have to get Get your SpaceX stock stock now right. Yeah, well, to the moon, literally. Um, so I guess really that we're just gonna have to wait and see. Yeah, there's there. My temptation is to say, oh, this is a, but maybe it's not a disaster. Maybe these guys are smart, maybe we're going to get better people in there, maybe government will be more efficient, maybe they won't cut my social security.
36:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
All these guys have a big interest I'm sorry for calling them guys I guess once we've been talking about our guys but they all have a huge interest in business deregulation, which in some cases could be great. There are also lots of instances where it could be a major problem, but I would expect that's what motivates a lot of people in the private sector to get involved here, and they will push Trump to make it happen.
36:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's his natural inclination, anyway is deregulation. This is, this is what America voted for. Frankly, it's what the supreme court's been pushing. I mean, this is head there.
37:09 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This is where we're going I, I think the, I think ultimately um, the real thing to see, because what we saw eight years ago obviously was different in terms of the types of people who were brought in, um, although you did have some, you know private sector folks who he put in his cabinet too, and some of those actually did better than some of the Washington types. But you know, I think, even if we take the most positive view about this, it is just kind of the uncertainty, is kind of what Harry mentioned before, which is kind of the capriciousness of the you know president elect, right, and how well everyone's going to continue to get along, and I think that's that's really the thing. That is the big waiting game. It's like, ok, these are the people who are in place now Is this going to be a repeat of what we saw eight years ago, where you have administration roll over after administration roll over, or is this going to be consistent?
38:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you know, I, ask asking how many Scaramucci's.
38:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, exactly.
38:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this going to take?
38:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
kind of right. I mean, you know, and because in some cases you're like, OK, some of these appointments make sense and they could be good things. And you know, maybe these are smart people who could potentially, you know, enact, you know, some some positive changes, who knows? But it could also be all for nothing. If you know people last a few months, and that that's, to me, is the big unknown. We just don't know how long any of this is going to last before we can even assess whether this is going to be good or bad.
38:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, I'm going to take a break, cause I promised to get you out of here fast and I know you're in one ear. Are you listening to Taylor Swift music as?
38:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm not, I'm not, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm plugged in right now.
38:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love you. Christina. This is such a sacrifice. She flies in from South Korea, is going to a concert tonight but makes time for us and I'm so grateful. And, of course, lou has 23 children, so he is also. He's also look, lou's sacrificing. We want to make five boys. Five boys, that's right. Five boys, yeah, five boys is like 23 children Sometimes. It is Lou we love having you here, former host of this weekend enterprise tech and a very smart guy. Great to have you on.
39:19
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42:54
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44:10 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You knew that if you didn't go to the taylor swift concert, christina, that you'd see it on tiktok yes, yes, I don't post on TikTok much, but yes, I have a TikTok and I consume a lot of TikTok and I've also been on record as being very uncomfortable with this legislation, this new law.
44:31
Whatever concerns privacy concerns you have about people, have about TikTok and I'm not saying they're invalid. I think those same privacy concerns frankly exist for all of our social networks and if we really want to address those things, then we should address them in terms of data protection, sharing and whatnot. I don't like the way this was carved out. I don't like the specificity in which this law targeted one specific company for what I think are pretty gross reasons. I felt that way in 2019 under the Trump administration. I felt that way under the Biden administration, and this is going to be interesting. I mean, tiktok has already said they're going to appeal this to the Supreme Court and we'll see if they can make any sort of decision before January 19th or if there will be any stay in lieu of hearing. That assuming the Supreme Court wants to hear this case.
45:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they may not get there. I mean, this is the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia denying its petition to overturn the law, denying its petition to overturn the law. So all they can do now is say, yeah, we're taking it to the highest court in the land, and then it's up to the Supreme court to give them certain, and this all has to happen before January 19th.
45:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right.
45:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I wonder. Look, I have a I've mentioned this before I have a little bit of a dog in the sun. My son became a Tik TOK star a year ago. Tik TOK gave him his business. If it weren't for TikTok, nobody would have ever heard of Salt Hank. But he had two and a half million followers on TikTok, has done the same on Instagram, has a best-selling cookbook in stores right now all because of TikTok. In fact, he's opening his first restaurant in New York City in the spring or in the early summer Again, all because of tiktok.
46:18
In fact, he's opening his first restaurant in new york city, uh, in the spring or in the early summer. Uh, again, all because of tiktok. And the key with tiktok, benito once said this. Our producer, who's on vacation, by the way, I hope he's having a good time in the philippines uh, anthony nielsen filling in for him. Uh, today, uh, benito said you know, if you're going to start something these days, you better start it somewhere where you can go viral, whether it's a podcast, yep videos, what book author newsletter, because there's so much content. Unless you're on a platform that can promote you virally, you don't have a hope, a chance, right?
46:52 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
is that true? Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that has an amazing generational reach. It's, uh, it's forcing cultural Trends. It's it's forcing creativity, innovation. So I think it's got it's got a lot of positives.
47:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's uh, you know, it's interesting that they it's they're focusing on the negatives here um, you know, I mean people would say, oh well, your son could just have done the same thing on Insta with reels, which is, I guess, I guess, true. But then that raises the issue Is that the real reason that we're shutting down TikTok Because we want to Mark Zuckerberg's? He's a, it's a US company, after all.
47:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right. Which is my issue with it, frankly, right Is that? Is that what is the real reason? We were told, you know, very nebulous, without any specificity. You know, national security concerns were given no proof, where we're not. You know, very nebulous, without any specificity. You know, national security concerns we're given no proof. We're not, you know, told anything beyond just, oh, we think this is bad. You know, meanwhile, technologists who actually look at this and let's also be honest, there are many, many, many thousands, tens of thousands of Americans who work at TikTok, who work at ByteDance. You know who are saying this is not how this works. This is not, you know, exfiltrating your data. We're not selling things to China. I'll also point out your data is already being sold to China and other countries, and your Internet service provider is doing it, and that's fully legal.
48:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And data brokers.
48:12 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, correct, correct. This is already happening. So if this is what we're against, I'm in full agreement. Let's pass that legislation.
48:20
I don't like how this is being targeted against one company in what, yes, does look like. It was very clear in 2019, which, granted, I know is a different situation than this current law, but in 2019, when the first movement of they have to divest or, you know, be sold to a US company thing, that was a very clear. We don't like that. Another company is making money in these platforms and is building momentum, and we don't like that. We don't have a piece of the pie.
48:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was what the situation was, and even worse, if it had been maybe a I don't know a Scandinavian country company like Spotify, maybe we wouldn't worry about it. So much we wouldn't worry about it at all people well, I mean.
48:59 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, the thing that does concern me and I think there is some evidence for this is that, um, stuff that the chinese government would prefer you not think about does appear to be harder to find on on tiktok. Um, that is concerning to me. It's not the only thing that concerns me. I'm also concerned about the fact that, on Twitter, stuff that Elon Musk would prefer you to not think about is increasingly hard to find, and on MSNBC and on Fox and other media outlets.
49:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
these days I was going to say can we make?
49:30 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean, you're not wrong about that, harry, but can we make? Can we be upset and be waving our hands about how awful it is that certain content is being, you know like suppressed on one platform when we mention that about other platforms and the response is well, it's the platform's choice about what to do. Now, again, if we want to have laws out there about how those decisions are shown to people so that they are aware that things are being suppressed, or that they are aware that there's a point of view, then I'm fine. That what is like?
50:01
I I don't, but I just don't see the the difference between what you know, facebook, twitter, youtube, um, you know anything else that is not just purely you know, determined by, by a chronological feed, anybody that does an algorithmic determination.
50:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't understand, like what the real difference is, other than this is the Chinese government, ostensibly, versus this is you know what if you could wave a wand and say you should only be able to access a social network that is created in your country by people in your country? Whatever your country is China, venezuela, the United States, mexico, canada If you're Canadian, you have to use a Canadian social network. What if we did that? Then you wouldn't have to worry about influence campaigns, you wouldn't have to worry. Right, or maybe not actually.
50:45 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Twitter is the.
50:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
United States and there's plenty of influence campaigns going on from Russia and China. But let's say you did that. Is that a good thing? No, because a social network is about a global community. That's the good thing about it.
51:02 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I have to say I feel a little bit less blithe than maybe you folks do about a social network under the influence of the Chinese government not being something to have concerns about. That said, as far as I know, there's not a lot of evidence that they are mining people's data or doing stuff that's harmful to individual users, but I don't think the concern about it is unreasonable and I don't know, I don't think Sweden and China should be considered in exactly the same way. Okay, that's fair.
51:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I don't want to diminish your concerns, because that's true. In fact this is what the court said.
51:40 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That said, I feel like I don't know enough about this to to say, yes, I think this is a great idea to pull it away from the current owners. I acknowledge the fact that I don't understand everything about it.
51:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The US District Court, which presumably may have seen more than than we see as private citizens, more than than we see as private citizens, uh tiktok, argued, the law unfair this is from the new york times unfairly singled out the company. A ban would infringe on the free speech rights of american users. The judges said the law was quote carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary end quote. It did not run afoul of the first amendment. The ruling acknowledged americans would quote lose access to an outlet for expression, a source of community and even a means of income end quote. But that Congress had weighed those risks against national security concerns. And that's I guess that's really what you're saying, harry is if, given all the evidence, the national security concern is genuine, that outweighs all the other things, especially since they're all alternatives to TikTok, like YouTube shorts and Facebook reels.
52:47 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I'm not going that far because I'm not sure whether it's really been proved that the national security concern we don't know because they won't tell us.
52:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They will only tell Congress.
52:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Exactly. I mean I think being concerned about it is legitimate. This action I'm not saying I support, because it is pretty fuzzy, and I think it would be a shame if TikTok goes away versus it continuing on or somebody else taking it over in a way that's not too big a blip for all the people who love it.
53:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
The thing that bothers me about this and I said this months ago, so I'm repeating myself, if people have heard me say this before, I apologize is that I agree that we shouldn't just dismiss the security concerns, and if there is real evidence there that we haven't seen and that, for whatever reason, they haven't shown us mea culpa, I will take that on. However, there has been a process historically. There is a. I will take that on. However, there has been a process historically. There is a process in the United States government known as CFIUS, and it's C-F-I-U-S is, I believe, the acronym.
53:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the Committee for Investment in the United States Right For foreign investment in the United States.
53:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
For foreign investment in the United States, and that has before forced companies to either decouple, from foreign ownership.
54:02
There is a process. Tiktok has been basically in that process for years under two administrations. It has not moved forward, presumably because the evidence shown hasn't gone anywhere. To me, this isn't a situation like ZTE or Huawei, where I think there are very real concerns and very real evidence, especially with ZTE, which is why that equipment is not allowed in the United States or many other countries, same with some of Huawei's equipment, where you should say, yes, a ban is absolutely correct here and there are real national security concerns and the companies have done things that are hiding what they're doing.
54:38
But again, the CFIUS process, which has forced foreign divestment before this is a known process, has been going on. I think at this point I think it's five years and I'm bothered by the fact that we are now potentially losing access to something for reasons that, even if we're talking about the best case scenario, I don't have any confidence that that's the case. Like, basically, the government you know has said, like the Congress said trust me and I'm just going to be honest me, christina Warren, individual citizen, I don't trust you.
55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And that's a big problem in our, in our polity in general, is that we have now decided we no longer trust politicians of any stripe well, donald trump has managed to take both sides of this issue. So he was the one who, you know, precipitated all of this in his last administration, and now he likes tick tock and then he said, oh, I won't ban it, but then he's, you know, been kind of demur.
55:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But then of course the deadline is is the day before inauguration day, so who knows?
55:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he may almost have the opportunity, yeah we almost had tech talk a wholly owned subsidiary of oracle yep, yeah, well, oracle did project texas, which was tick tocks kind of uh attempt to appease congress was, in fact, to store all the data in texas in oracle servers and see, uh, but it was pretty clear that the chinese government could get access. That, and that's really the problem, is that any country, any company run out of mainland china is, uh, partially owned by the chinese government. They, they mandate that and there's nothing for them to to defend themselves against in in chinese government intrusion. So I mean not that that's so different in the US. China could say the same thing about all of our US social media. It probably does, in fact it does. They block Facebook, don't they? They block X, they block all of those.
56:29 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I used to at a PC World magazine. We had a Chinese edition which was literally a joint venture with the government and which literally had an onsite sensor.
56:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there you go, right.
56:41 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
One of the biggest differences about the specific social networks like TikTok is the interesting thing is that's different than some of these other, like Huawei and so on is obviously you give them your data. Data is stored somewhere and probably in the region that you're in, but then you don't know what happens behind the scenes. They can go and take that data and exfiltrate it and send it over to mainland right. I mean, with these hardware vendors, they're tracked by compliance officers and there's no kind of service that the data is going to.
57:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But presumably a Huawei switch could be modified. The firmware could be modified by the Chinese government to suddenly exfiltrate everything that happens on that switch.
57:21 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Right that would be a problem, but that's easier to detect right.
57:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, these are networks that can detect it right.
57:26 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
But with social network, you know how your data is going to right.
57:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it could be going anywhere, well, but that's why we have no evidence right, because we don't know. That's really the the truth that I bet congress doesn't know. We don't know, nor do we know if there have been influence campaigns. It's interesting on friday the european union sent tiktok a request for more information. That because romanian intelligence files suggested that moscow had coordinated influencers on tiktok to promote an election candidate who suddenly became the front runner. The far-right populist, kaylan georges came out of nowhere in the election. The court the top court, supreme Court of Romania overturned annulled results from the first round of voting because of that, and now Romanian authorities think that Russia used Telegram to recruit thousands of TikTok users to promote George SQ. Now, whether that happened or not, they're investigating it, but that just shows that's not China.
58:27 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No Russia doing that Any social.
58:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This could happen on this.
58:32 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, I was going to say, I mean, and I think that, and I understand that the, you know, the district court rejected the First Amendment appeal and maybe it was because of the narrowness of how the argument was presented. I'm not a lawyer, I don't know how that works, but I do feel like there is something to be said, which is people are voluntarily giving their, their information, you know, to these services yeah, facebook and you're involuntary giving your information to data brokers, who are gladly selling it on to China, and there's no law against it, correct, in fact?
59:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so, stunningly, the FTC is considering. It's not even illegal. They're considering limiting the ability of data brokers to sell your social security number. Currently, they're allowed to do that. It's's not illegal. So data broke this. We found this out in the National Public Data Breach where my social security number was in it. A lot of a million Was it 300 million people? Social security number was in that breach. We don't know the actual number because there's duplication, but there was a lot. And those guys were selling that, in fact, to not only China but to the United States own intelligence agencies and law enforcement. And that's the real reason. There's no law against it because law enforcement will never let that happen. They need it, they use it. They don't have to spy on us illegally, they just let our ISPs do it legally and then they buy it.
59:57 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
If you go back in time, I I mean social security numbers should never have been never been any, anything but a number that is known by you and the government.
01:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so many problems to rent an apartment, you have to give them your social security number. Who knows what that apartment rental agency is doing with it. Right, you know, forget it. And it says on the card not to be used for identification. Doesn't matter, all right, but that's now, we're beating a dead horse, all right? Uh, I don't know what'll happen to tiktok.
01:00:27
Um, there is a guy named frank mccourt not the author of the fabulous books angela's ashes and tis, that's a different frank mccourt. Frank Frank McCourt is a billionaire who has something called Project Liberty and he's trying to put together a consortium of investors to make what he calls a people's bid for TikTok. This might be it, I don't know. Project Liberty includes a for-profit company, a nonprofit institute. Sounds like OpenAI. It was founded to build, help build and advocate for a safer and more equitable internet. Um, he says we've got informal commitments of more than 20 billion dollars, uh, and that they are going to they're going to do an investor road show early next week in new york city and san franc, in case you want to put some of your money in. Tim Berners-Lee supports it. David Clark, mit computer science and AI lab senior research scientist, supports it. I don't know, I don't know who Project Liberty is or Frank McCourt, frankly, I mean he has given a lot of thought to this.
01:01:36 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
One of the big unanswered questions is what happens if you have a TikTok in the US that's not based on the original algorithm?
01:01:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be way less Because China has said we will not, that is not for sale, you cannot get our algorithm.
01:01:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It might be way less compelling. You can argue that that would be either a good thing or a bad thing, or maybe somewhere in the middle, but-.
01:01:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can also argue that there's nothing magic in the algorithm.
01:01:57 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Right, I mean McCoy does say that he's thought about this as some sort of a strategy where you can have TikTok in the US, which I mean. He's very big on the notion that the social networks we have are unhealthy and he's partially motivated by wanting to have control over a large social network that is healthier and says he has a strategy for making TikTok compelling and interesting and fun, but also not addictive and not dependent on the algorithm it already has.
01:02:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
According to Axios McCourt says, the technology we're building respects individuals by returning to them ownership and control of their identity and their data. That's important. I don't know how he's going to do that, but anyway, but by survey and not by surveilling them. This is possible because we're not influenced by foreign actors, we're not beholden to big tech and we've built the necessary technology that can support this powerful platform loved by more than 170 million Americans. Maybe he's the white knight that's going to save this whole thing.
01:02:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, I mean. I think the big question, though, would be would ByteDance want to sell right? Because it's one thing to have a consortium, assuming you can get the money together, assuming you can have everyone ready to go.
01:03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
20 billion seems low, to be honest.
01:03:10 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It does. It seems extremely low, and so, but let's assume that that's not an issue and the money can come together. Can you? Does China want to sell? Because you know if?
01:03:21
If let's just flip perspectives if the Chinese government said to us that you know, basically Facebook, meta had to be sold in order to operate on in China and to be able to continue to work there let's assume they had a relationship or Google or Microsoft companies that do have granted their joint ventures, but had things that they had to be sold and couldn't have any of their current investment from the United States, I think that both the US government and those companies would individually say screw you, we don to be in your, in your country, right? So that's always an option. They can just pick up their ball and go home, and I actually think that is a con, a potential negative thing for the supposed national security concerns, which is okay. Let's assume that there's no stay of execution, that tick tock is not allowed to continue to operate after January 19th, at least in the United States. And let's assume that they move their infrastructure to other countries and they still are running in other countries and you can still log in.
01:04:29
So what Short of really forcing ISPs and VPNs and things like that to do things that those tools can't do, are you going to talk to all the cellular networks and say nobody can access any of these tools or whatnot? People are going to use VPNs, they're going to access the service anyway as long as it's still running, pretending to be in other countries, even creating accounts that make it appear as if they're in other countries but are still located in the United States. The data is still going to be sold to foreign adversaries, potentially even more so, and now you don't even have the people working in the United States as engineers on anything, so it's even more of a black box. So if this does happen the way that it's like the worst case scenario, I don't see a positive outcome, assuming TikTok still stays operating, because people are still going to find ways to use it, and now their information is going to be even less protected.
01:05:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, by the way, McCourt is the former owner of the LA Dodgers. It's the same Frank McCourt who is, according to Surge Strip in our Discord, one of the most hated men in Los Angeles. But he did develop or this Liberty Consortium has developed, apparently a protocol designed to do exactly what he's talking about, which I think is kind of interesting. It's called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. I think, Harry McCracken, you need to do a profile on this guy. I think this is something right up your alley.
01:05:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I have talked to him and something like that could happen, because he is an interesting guy and I think it's fair to say he's not in it purely because it's potentially a big business opportunity and he does have a pretty long history of thinking through some of these issues over the last few years. I'd like to know more.
01:06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He also owns the Marseille Soccer Club. I'd like to football club. I'd like to know more.
01:06:23 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
He's like a longtime big time Boston businessman and well-known there.
01:06:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, well, that's right up your alley. Harry McCracken is here. He does cover this kind of thing. He does really great writing at FastCompanycom. Harry McCracken is here. He does cover this kind of thing. He does really great writing at FastCompanycom.
01:06:40
I also and I've told you this before I love your nostalgia pieces about old school tech and so forth Really great stuff. It's great to have you on, as always, harry McCracken. Give my love to Marie, by the way, I will. When we had a studio, harry and Marie used to come up and visit the studio. Mary and Marie used to come up and visit the studio, as did many of you, and I'm sorry that we don't have a studio anymore. She's in the other room right now Sending my love. We are working hard to get Christina Warren out of here before the Eurostour begins. Christina Warren's here. She is a developer relations senior developer advocate at the GitHub, which we all love, and a really good example of how AI can be used for coding. It's really GitHub. Copilot is remarkable. Great to have you, and also from Microsoft joint principal engineering manager of Excel Copilot. Former host of this Week in Enterprise Tech, the great Lou, mm Lou Maresca. Thank you, lou. Great to have all three of you Our show today brought to you by ExpressVPN.
01:07:44
If you're going to China, bring ExpressVPN along with you. Actually, everybody who listens to this show probably knows about VPNs and what VPNs virtual private networks do. They encrypt your traffic from your computer to their server and then out into the public internet, thereby giving you some anonymity, some absolutely some security. But there's one more thing that a VPN can do. That's pretty awesome, because ExpressVPN servers are in over 100 countries around the world. You can emerge under the public internet from any one of those countries, which has an interesting, wonderful side effect. Let's say you have a Netflix account who doesn't these days, right? And you've watched all 6,000 of the Netflix shows available in the US, or at least you've watched most of them, and the rest of them you don't want to see. Netflix has three times that number of titles available globally. You're missing out literally on thousands of great shows.
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But if you use ExpressVPN by the way, the only VPN I use and trust how does ExpressVPN work to unblock content? Well, they hide content based on your location. You can then emerge into your country of choice let's say it's the UK and watch the shows on Netflix UK. Now I asked Netflix, is that okay? And they said, hey, you got a Netflix account, it's okay with us. They say we don't recommend it because a VPN isn't fast enough to watch high def content. Right Wrong, you can watch HD video anywhere in the world from any of their servers. That's amazing. It means you can access worldwide ESPN Plus or Fubo or Disney Plus or HBO Max in other countries, youtube, hulu, showtime, directv and, of course, netflix in any country of your choice. Let's say you want to watch, I don't know, yellowstone. Yeah, you can't see Yellowstone on Netflix in the US. But you open ExpressVPN, select a country where you can see it I don't know Germany, greece. Tap one button to connect, refresh Netflix and all of a sudden you're seeing Yellowstone. This is a really cool side effect of having a great VPN like ExpressVPN.
01:09:52
They invest that money also to make sure that you're secure. They rotate their IP addresses regularly. That's one of the reasons this works, because those companies can't see that you're coming in on a VPN. They also make sure that their servers do not record your visit. They developed something called Trusted Server, which has been audited by third parties. It spins up in RAM when you press that big button on your ExpressVPN app on iOS or Android, mac, windows, linux, even on a server, even on a router. When you press that big button and you spin up a server, it runs in RAM, it's sandbox. It can't write to the hard drive and as if that weren't enough which it is, third-party audits have proven but even then they run a custom Debian distribution which erases the entire hard drive every morning reboots, starts fresh, so there is no trace of your visit.
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01:12:06
Lisa yesterday. She says it's coming back. I said I know in January, half the time when I'm when you're on the show with Christina. I just want to talk about TVs and movies.
01:12:20 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean yes good stuff.
01:12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Content, taylor. Whatever you know, it's good stuff. But all right, let's focus on some tech news. Here we were talking about rip and replace, the idea of getting those Huawei switches out of the United States, and then infrastructure. It's expensive. It's estimated to be almost $5 billion to do that.
01:12:40
House of Representatives will be voting next week on the annual defense bill. That includes another $3 billion for US telecom companies to remove equipment from Chinese telecoms like Huawei and ZTE. That's probably good news. The fcc says it's going to cost as much as 4.98 billion. Congress had only approved 1.9 billion, so we're getting close now with this additional three billion dollars. In fact, I think this gives us the full amount that the fcc says we will need. Uh, it's interesting because this is not only on the agenda of the current FCC and his chair, jessica Rosenworcel, but it is also Brendan Carr's goal he says to do fully fund rip and replace in the next administration. So I think that that's going to go forward. I think that's what you brought that up, lou. I think that's one thing we can all agree should be done.
01:13:37 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Absolutely, yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah. I mean there's plenty of other hardware companies that can offer similar technology, if not better technology, that are in a better hand, so I think this is a better opportunity for us to get there well, that was the question in the beginning was is there anything as good as the huawei and zte and you think there is from other other countries or is there anything us definitely by now?
01:13:57
I mean they're used to not pisco anybody. Yeah right, cisco. I mean there's definitely used to not be, but now, now there's definitely companies that caught up right speaking of the big uh us companies oh intel so sad.
01:14:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, it's both sad and it's kind of self-inflicted, is it not?
01:14:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, well, it for years, right for years for decades, for decades largely self-inflicted.
01:14:26
I would say yes yeah, ben thompson's written a lot about this in stratechery. Uh, intel was the original integrated chip company where they would design and build their own chips, which at the time worked really well. But then along comes companies like Arm, nvidia, tsmc. Arm and NVIDIA design the chips. They don't make them. Tsmc makes them, and because so much money has been pumped into TSMC mostly, I have to say, by Apple their technology has leapfrogged Intel's technology and so they're better at making chips than Intel, and ARM and NVIDIA are better at designing chips than Intel.
01:15:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It kind of leaves Intel with and AMD, intel's traditional rival, years ago, stopped making its own chips and has been on a roll recently. I'm sorry that Pat Gelsinger, the CEO, didn't get more time because he was trying to undo a huge number of mistakes made before he got there and this is not the kind of thing you can fix in a year or two or three years, and I think he did have a pretty smart vision of what to do, but it was not something he could implement in the time that the board gave him of what to do but it was not something he could implement in the time that the board gave him.
01:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. So he says he told the board the board when they were looking for a new CEO. He says I'm not going to be the guy that's going to piecemeal out good, dismantle Intel. He goes back to the Andy Grove days of Intel. He was a chip designer himself. He says I'm not going to be your guy to do that. But if you want to save Intel himself, he says I'm not gonna be your guy to do that, but if you want to save intel, I think I have a plan to split off the foundry, the, the fabs and the design into two different kind of channels.
01:16:07 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We're going to maybe make chips for apple, he said in a very ambitious yes, he said, apple would come back to him at some point at least, at least that it could.
01:16:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But the board only gave him three years. I mean, apparently that was up front. You have three years. The three years is up. A week ago Gelsinger packed the box and left. He resigned. But the resignation was so abrupt and there is no successor in sight. It pretty much seems like they fired him.
01:16:37 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, yeah, I think they gave him two options either to retire or to have retirement forced upon him. Yeah, I think the stuff that's happened in recent years with AI also didn't help, because on top of all the stuff that Intel was dealing with, there was this new big thing that was also behind them.
01:16:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nvidia ate their lunch, nvidia is worth more than Intel is now.
01:16:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes, well, amd has been worth more right, and video is worth more than both of them. But yeah, I mean, you talk about a company who they missed mobile completely, like massively, and then were obstinate about it. I know you remember this, harry. Like they were. They honestly just we were dismissive of the entire regime. They were dismissive of arm chips, all up. They were like it doesn't matter that our, our, adam stuff is is terrible and it can't be used in phones. These things don't matter. Well, now they matter.
01:17:24
They've also missed graphics, repeatedly, over and over and over again, and they've had opportunities to buy, you know um, a reputable, you know graphics places and have their own GPUs that are not integrated stuff. You know AMD boughtTI, and they're not NVIDIA, but they at least have, they can do something, and now they've missed AI, and so I agree with you, harry, I think Pat Gelsinger had some good plans. I don't know if anybody could have done this turnaround. I do wonder, though, because they've been supposed to know, supposed to be working on, like, their 18A, you know process, and that's been delayed, and there was kind of a part in my mind that I wondered was that what forced the board's hand Like? It seems like to me that if things were going in the right direction, the board would give them more time. But if, maybe if there have been more delays in that process and other things, maybe that, you know, was part of why they basically said you know you can leave on your own terms or we will ask you to. I don't know.
01:18:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And also I mean Gulsinger's vision had a lot to do with getting other companies to let Intel make their chips, which I think has just been a slog, and if he had had more big wins it might have turned out differently. You're so right also about graphics, and I mean Intel, I think strategically decided not to be all that serious about graphics a long time ago and to focus on low-end graphics it could build into processors. If it had been serious about graphics 20 years ago, it might be NVIDIA today.
01:18:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe it's too little, too late, but Intel graphics has actually gotten better and better. Too little, too late, but intel graphics has actually gotten better and better. Uh, they've had new releases that are, you know, pretty good for on-chip uh graphics, for integrated graphics. Um, they are going to announce this week, uh, at the ieee uh electron devices meeting. Uh, they're going to announce some big advances in, uh well, this is from from Tom's Hardware I can't pretend I actually understand what they're saying but breakthroughs in atomically thin 2D transistors, chip packaging and interconnects. So you know, of course they've got an R&D department and they don't stop working, even if there's trouble in the stock market, and they've got some great new advances. But, no matter what intel does today, it's probably too little, too late. They'd also had a win with the chips act more than eight billion dollars flowing into intel to build plants in the united states, foundries in the united states, um, but it's just, uh, I don't know. Is it too little, too late? What's going to happen to intel lou?
01:19:57 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I don't know. I hope they stay around. I mean, there's it's a competition that we need to keep them, obviously coming from a company that's put a lot of stake in both intel and amd and arm and um. You know, we hope that they stick around. You know, and, like you said, I feel like there are other countries that are also offering, you know, uh, potential stake in this as well, like I think Germany is also offering a lot of money for people to bring boundaries in and actually produce their chips there.
01:20:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I would imagine the entire Western world is trying to do something to get manufacture out of Taiwan and China in case, just in case right of a global world war.
01:20:37 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
The chances are a lot higher. Now. It seems pretty obvious that Intel will be broken up or conceivably even sold. At one point it was reported that Qualcomm was considering a bid.
01:20:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So last week Qualcomm said yeah, no.
01:20:52 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean Gelsinger was trying to make an Intel that was still recognizably Intel, but more modern and successful, and I think that if the board had wanted to do that, they might have stuck with them and they will be more open to other possibilities. That would be kind of sad, even if ultimately they do make sense.
01:21:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would it be along the lines of design and fabs? I mean like split it down the middle, like that um, who would buy their fabs?
01:21:23 - Christina Warren (Guest)
that's the problem, right, because because tsmc, you know, I mean they all make arm chips, right other than like, and amd is not going to be letting intel unless they offer them a much better price. I don't see amd, you know, letting them do that. So yeah, that's the problem. It's great to have a, to have a foundry and a fab, but what's the point when TSMC is frankly better, assuming you can get time, putting the geopolitical stuff aside, there were a couple of things that probably the board saw as writing on the wall when Intel was removed from the Dow in favor of NVIDIA.
01:21:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not a good thing. And then I, you know, I'm watching football and there is a big ad from microsoft saying our fastest, smartest, bestest computers ever, and they're built on snapdragon right I mean this, this has been, I mean this has really been an inflection point this year that there are finally compelling non x86 uh windows devices they're good, although you could still get a co-pilot plus pc on intel, right, it's not. It's not restricted?
01:22:22
I think yeah, no, and india yeah, um yeah, it's, it's, it's almost a tragedy, a greek tragedy, that's that's what I'm saying.
01:22:32 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It really is.
01:22:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It really is it reminds me a little bit of digital equipment corp back in the day, which which at one point, was regarded as the inspiring startup success in this country and, within a few years, no longer existed.
01:22:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, first Compaq right and then HP acquired Compaq. So, yeah, yeah, I mean it is sad because you know Intel built Silicon Valley was built on it. You know, by Intel, people Right, like genuinely Right, like you know, going back.
01:23:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The trader is 12.
01:23:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, and so it just gets sad.
01:23:08 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Intel is unquestionably one of the five most important companies in the history of Silicon Valley, and you could even make a pretty compelling case it's the most important company in the history of Silicon Valley, wow.
01:23:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can remember, though, interviewing Andy Grove way back in the day, and even when it was Wintel, right, windows and Intel and that looked like a kind of inextricable partnership Grove saying how mad he was at Microsoft that they weren't supporting the new 32-bit chips, and then Microsoft mad at Intel that they couldn't keep the hardware up with the software, and then Microsoft mad at Intel that they couldn't keep the hardware up with the software, and it was always a kind of a difficult relationship between the two companies. It's just, it's fascinating. I love the history of it all.
01:23:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
There was a great old saying Andy giveth and Bill taketh away, meaning the hardware kept getting better and better and bill taketh away, meaning meaning the hardware kept getting better and better and it was hard for for software for software to get better rather than to get more inefficient.
01:24:03 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
and it had all that power yeah, leo, fun, fun fact one of my first internships was at uh in shrewsbury, massachusetts, for intel, right after the digital corp came in, and it was the itanium group and I. I saw a lot of that struggle actually. Oh my gosh yeah that was.
01:24:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Maybe you could say that was the itanium group and I I saw a lot of that struggle actually.
01:24:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my gosh. Yeah, oh, that was. Maybe you could say that was the beginning of the end. Yeah, because itanium was the next generation, it wasn't x86, it was some right 64 right, right and the whole idea is here's the next generation.
01:24:32
And the damn things were practically melting because they couldn't run at the speed that they were designed for. Intel, realizing they're not going to be able to sell these chips, looked to this little skunk works they had going in Israel where they were working on the core processor, and they moved the core into the mainstream and said titanium is not going to happen. And titanium just disappeared.
01:24:56 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And for a long time that worked really well. I mean it did.
01:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was amazing.
01:25:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It didn't seem like like X86 would go on forever, and no matter how often people predicted that it would hit a wall?
01:25:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, totally, and the thing is is that X86 arguably hasn't hit the wall. It was Intel's process, right, because AMD, with you know their couple of technology, with Zen, they were able to, you know, their, their, their, their couple of technology was in. They were able to, you know, really revolutionize the way they were able to get, you know, integrate the circuits and do all the stuff to get far more power efficiency, um, far more performance, and, and that was, you know, lisa, sue, and like that was, you know, only like eight, nine years ago, um, but yeah, you're right, Like the core thing was great. I do wonder, kind of going back to like, when we look at, like, the mistakes, if the success there maybe helps them have that hubris to continue to ignore mobile. That's probably right. It's the innervated dilemma, isn't it? Yeah?
01:25:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's always bad to be successful. So I? Retcon five says I didn't realize we were going to have an open casket wake in today's show. Retcon 5 says I didn't realize we were going to have an open casket wake in today's show, but it does raise an interesting question, because sometimes I think we're like you know, fish don't know they're in water, it's just what they breathe. And I feel like sometimes we're in the middle of this big tech revolution and we almost don't see that the business cycle still holds, that these, that google and microsoft and apple and and amazon will just go on forever, but there is a business cycle. Ibm fell victim to the business cycle. It's not gone, but it's a shadow of what it was before. It looks like intel has fallen prey. There is a business cycle, right? Yeah?
01:26:38 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean. Apple and Microsoft are rare examples of companies that were on top of the world and then faced real challenges to the things that made them successful and figured out how to continue to be extraordinarily successful. They reinvented themselves While not being exactly this thing they once were, and there just aren't all that many examples other than those two companies.
01:26:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're the exceptions that prove the rule almost.
01:27:00 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
IBM at one point was too Remember, like when Lou Gerstner came in. Ibm was in real trouble and Gerstner pushed it away from hardware and towards services which worked quite well for quite a long time.
01:27:12 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
There's tons of examples Like Xerox is another one. They keep trying to reinvent themselves.
01:27:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kodak, polaroid, sears, general electric. You know there is no general electric corporation anymore. Nope, I mean, who would have thought that? Right, these were titans. Um, the world marches on, uh, and so does this show. We are half an hour to the eras concert, so we gotta keep going here. Christina warren, great to have you.
01:27:40 - Christina Warren (Guest)
We will get you out of here, I promise I appreciate you guys if you guys need to keep going.
01:27:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, I gotta get going here. I gotta get going um, I'm excited for you.
01:27:51 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I wish I mean, I didn't realize this is the last one.
01:27:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's pretty damn exciting wow it's gonna be fun.
01:27:57 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's gonna be really fun christina, I live really close to westerly, where, uh, where you know she has her house.
01:28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you never, you never know she lives in westerly rhode island she has a house west taylor swift.
01:28:08 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, she has a huge house yep, huge house. It's on the ocean house, everything. The ocean house is a great resort. It's on the ocean. It's one way or the other.
01:28:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wow, I grew up near westerly. Who would have thought right, is that her main place?
01:28:23 - Christina Warren (Guest)
no, no, no one of hundreds probably I think like seven, but yeah yeah, we.
01:28:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I once had dinner with paul simon and his wife, edie brakel. It's a long story, but at least lisa, wow that's kind of a name drop.
01:28:37 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's amazing, that's so good, uh, but but there's a long story, but at least lisa, wow, that's kind of a name drop there that's so good, uh, but, but there's a point to this.
01:28:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So lisa and ed got, really got into it they were having a great time and lisa starts selling petaluma to ed and ed so it's a sister, paul.
01:28:50
Hey, paul, we gotta get a house at petaluma. And paul says we have six houses already. We are not buying a house. So there, but for the grace of God, I could be Paul Simon's next door neighbor. Uh, let's take a break. Also with us, harry McCracken, from a fast company, lumoresca of Microsoft and the Excel co-pilot group.
01:29:13
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Visit lookoutcom today to learn how to safeguard data, to secure hybrid work and reduce IT complexity. That's lookoutcom. We thank them so much for supporting this Week in Tech and invite you to support us by going to lookoutcom. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech and invite you to support us by going to lookoutcom. And if they ask you, make sure you say I heard it on twit. That's good news. Uh, let's talk about ai, the 12 days of open ai. It's an advent calendar of artificial intelligence. The only story I saw was that OpenAI will now have a $200 a month plan. That seems like a lot. Is there a market for it? I mean, I understand how expensive AI is. I pay for the $20 OpenAI plan and I use it, by the way, a lot. In fact, I use it for coding, maybe not necessarily what you would think of OpenAI is doing, although I imagine is it what's behind GitHub Copilot, or no? Is that?
01:31:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It is it is. Well, actually now GitHub Copilot is multi-model, so the default model is GPT-4.0, but you can choose to use the 01 mini or 01 preview.
01:31:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, but it's all OpenAI stuff.
01:31:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, yes, but as of a couple of weeks ago, we also introduced support for Anthropic and. Gemini Pro. So, it's multi-model now. So, yes, but historically, going back to the very beginning, it was built in partnership with open AI.
01:31:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're in the middle in December. No-transcript. If I'm coding, I have to always go back to the books. And what's the syntax for that, or how do I do this? I do that all the time.
01:32:55 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Okay, it's not just me, and that's why it's great, because it doesn't for you yeah
01:33:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but I put those books in the, in the, in the, in the, uh, chat, gpt, and it knows them all. But then the funny thing is, then I tried it with copilot and I tried it with gemini and it knew them, knew them all too. So I don't really need to do it this way, uh, anymore. The one advantage of it is I say don't make, don't say anything that's not in the books I gave you, so so it can't hallucinate, right.
01:33:24 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I am still trying to teach ChatGPT, trs-80, level 2 Basic.
01:33:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are not enough books for you.
01:33:31 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That's the problem I mean there are quite a few, and they're all in the Internet Archive Without being trained on it. It's terrible.
01:33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It has to be trained.
01:33:39 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Just because it needs more material. But at some point point I'm going to upload those PDFs in and see whether it's as good at programming basic as I am.
01:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would I don't use it. And just to be clear, actually there's a little bit of a controversy around the advent of code because you know it's a timed coding challenge. I do not do it for time, but there are people who are solving these daily challenges in minutes, but all of a sudden a few have come along. In fact, the very first one solved it in nine seconds and it became apparent that that person had just fed the it's a text problem fed it into OpenAI or something, copilot, and had it write the code and it worked and he got the answer in nine. I don't even know how you cut and paste in nine seconds, but he somehow did it. And uh, there's still a kind of ongoing controversy because there's the leaderboard and there are a few people on leaderboard who really unreasonably quick seconds instead of minutes. So, uh, they are, but I don't. I don't cut and paste code from it. It's mostly for me a reference, right?
01:34:38 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
uh, work I also do like php and css and yeah, what knows php in? That case. Uh, usually I've written code that doesn't work and um right, one time out of 10 it's completely confused and gives me terrible advice, but most of the time it it quickly helps me get to where I'm trying to get one thing I've done that is great is I've given it a block of code.
01:35:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what does this do?
01:35:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
yes, it's great.
01:35:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very good for that great expression for regular expressions, you can give it the most complicated best, but was both to explain and to write them, like I, because I'm terrible at regex, and that's one of the things I use copilot for so much.
01:35:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm like, please write this.
01:35:17 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's a natural yeah, the interesting thing about 401 which is why this is cost so much 200 a month is the 401 model. I've been had a chance to play with this and utilize it for a while and it's really impressive with coding, um, you can give it I could. I could say give me a web app, give it some parameters. It'll go do some reasoning and it'll dump out code that actually works. The first time it'll give you explanations, you know I'll tell it new features like I want swipe left, swipe left, swipe right, right to delete that kind of thing. It'll actually go and adjust the code for you and re. You know, like if you do that in 4-0 it actually you know you get weird responses, you get some strange errors in the code. So, like I would say that's the biggest thing that people are paying for is just you know the additional reasoning that's going on in the correctness of it yeah, so so they've only announced.
01:36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So just to be clear you you said oh one, there was chat for oh which that was. They had that video where they were talking to it and scarlett johansson got pissed off and and all of that, that was 4-0, which is a more conversational one, but they've gone beyond that now. So what are the models now? So they 4-0, which is a more conversational one, but they've gone beyond that now. So what are the models now?
01:36:25 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
so they 4-0, but they have like six or six versions of 4-0, so they come out with different versions of you know. It's like there'll be a may version and august version, which actually are better. They have you know more. You know better.
01:36:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know and they're good at reasoning. Isn't that what they said?
01:36:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
that better reasoning. That's the new ones, that that's, that's the new model. So this is the you have to give them more time though.
01:36:42 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Right, yes, right okay, right, well, it depends, like that's why the 200 ones exist. Uh, it's actually has more time, more cpu, yeah more gpu, right, yeah, tpu.
01:36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's interesting. So you're paying 200 bucks so you can have access to more hardware resources, so it can do it faster.
01:36:58 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
That makes sense, all right right because the original models you know in the preview days you you used to run it. It could take 30 seconds to a minute for it to come back with right.
01:37:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah so is it? It's not practicable to do it in a timely way on on your own local hardware at this point oh no, not at that level not at that level no I mean you.
01:37:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You can do some pretty impressive things with llama if you have, you know, a 4090 or or even like a cluster of them, or even mac minis, right like oh yeah, who doesn't have a cluster of nvidia 4090s? Well, no, but even on like local apple silicon machines, especially if you have like multiples or even if you have ones that have like high ram things. You can get pretty good results from from um, some of the llama and some of the um uh, tuned llama like versions people put on Hugging Face. Now is it?
01:37:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
going to and when they're tuned, they're tuned to specific tasks.
01:37:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Or for specific sizes.
01:37:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, Right sizes.
01:37:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So what people will do is they'll basically be like okay, we know that this many parameters won't run on your hardware, but we can maybe remove some things that we don't think you want for a specific task and also to fit in a specific size.
01:38:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is one of the biggest and most interesting developments to me in AI is these different size models, so that you can run some models on a device like a smartphone, which Apple does with Apple intelligence, and then, if it's too big for that, it goes to Apple's own servers which they're building out. And if it's too big for that, then they say, okay, we can't do it, but maybe OpenAI can do it. Or Claude Well, they don't have Gemini or Claude yet, but maybe OpenAI can do it. Beware, now we're going to be sending your data to third-party servers, and then they let them do it. I think that's fascinating, and you can now locally play with these different models by downloading them.
01:38:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
There's a number of programs on. I've usedama on mac.
01:38:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Olama's awesome, yeah, and what's it called? Any anywhere, anything, any something? There are a couple of them that let you download the models and then play with it. It's nice to have it locally, but honestly, I don't mind paying 20 bucks to google for gemini, claude, for athropa, for claude and sonnet. Open ai and perplexity I pay for too, and they're a multimodal. So, yeah, I have four different.
01:39:07 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I'm wasting $80. All of them have their Avengers, you know.
01:39:12 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Totally. I'd like like a $30 version of a chat GPT that's a little faster just a little and a little less limited, Cause I do sometimes max out my access to the best stuff, so do you use it for writing Harry?
01:39:25
Not really, maybe occasionally if I'm trying to think of a word and I use it as like a super powerful thesaurus Notebook LM, though, which is this Google tool based on Gemini that lets you organize your transcripts and notes. I do use that, and it's been super helpful when I've like interviewed a dozen people and I'm trying to remember who said something interesting.
01:39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would think that'd be so useful.
01:39:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It's great. In fact, I did a big story on Google DeepMind, which has been up on our website for a couple of weeks, and it is our new issue that's just coming out. And since that was about Google DeepMind and Gemini, I went all in on using Notebook LM to help me put it together and it really was extremely helpful and solved some longstanding problems I've had with not remembering who said what.
01:40:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the 12, I want to get. We have stuff about DeepMind and we have stuff we have. I want to talk about all that stuff in a second, but I do want to finish this 12 days of OpenAI. There's only been one so far, right. Is that right, lou? They want to finish this 12 days of open ai. There's only been one so far, right is that right?
01:40:25 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
uh, lou, um, they're taking the weekend off. Actually, I think there's two, there's two so far, but yeah, yeah, but you're right there, they are taking some time off and you know, I I'm wondering if they're leaving to the best, the last we'll have to see.
01:40:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, so the first one was o1 and chat gpt pro right and there's sam altman on the left with his uh, with his team, and what was good about the pro Is that the $200 one, that's $200. Right, okay, and what is 01 good for?
01:40:51 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
No one's the reasoning model, the chain of thought model, right, yeah, okay, and that's the one that you'll get amazing results with, with correctness and so on.
01:40:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it can do math, which right was hard to do for a language-based llm, because all it was doing is predicting the next word and it turns out one plus one isn't always two it's multimodal too, so it supports images, images as well. Okay, uh. And then the next announcement, uh, the day two announcement was uh, open ai's reinforcement fine-tuning research program. Anything to tell us about that?
01:41:25 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I don't know too much about that, but I do know there was also another thing that's kind of a minor.
01:41:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess if you're going to do 12, you're going to throw in some You're going to have to look.
01:41:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Look, not everything's going to be a hit right, it is an advent calendar. It's the same thing.
01:41:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sometimes you get a chocolate. Sometimes you get a chocolate, sometimes you get a plastic toy, you don't know. Correct. Correct, yeah, sometimes it's just like a little like card we love you, we love you. It's like Cracker Jack. When I was a kid you'd get actual toys you could choke to death on. Now it's little pieces of paper, it's nothing. All right, so we'll watch. Do you anticipate any big announcements? I know both of you probably already know a lot, so don't say anything.
01:42:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't actually. I know nothing, so I don't know. I mean, I think, this is a great marketing. I think this is a great marketing opportunity.
01:42:12 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Honestly, I think it's a fun way to show off.
01:42:14 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes and cause, I think it's two things Like one, I think it's a fun marketing thing, and two, I think that this is especially given all the very good competition that's out there from you know companies like Anthropic and you know Google and of course you know Meta, showing like how much they're able to innovate and how much they're able to ship, like I think that's it's. It's so it's kind of two things right, like I think it's it's good for the consumer to, you know, maybe put out new things and and get awareness. But I also think that it's almost maybe a secondary thing is almost probably for the investors, where it's like, look at, all the stuff we're doing well, especially now because it looks like there may be some headwinds with the next administration.
01:42:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now might be a good time to kind of say hey, remember, we're still number one, we're still the best, we're still out there, we still have the microsoft deal sam said not to expect gpt5. Ah, okay he also, though I saw somebody, did he not say that they already have agi in the lab?
01:43:08 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think he's adjusted the definition of what agi is.
01:43:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is is, I think, but they were trying to kill one of the models and it didn't, and it didn't want to be killed this sounds like this is 2001 this sounds like bs to me, but all right, I am still I. You know I come and go with ai, like, obviously there's uses. We just showed many valuable uses. At the same time it's I don't know if we'll ever get hal 9000 and maybe we should hope we don't actually come to think of it.
01:43:41 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Do we need it Like? That's the question. Maybe the question isn't, will we but like should?
01:43:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we Should we All right, let me take another break. I'm trying to get out of here. I have a lot more AI stories, though. I want to do some more AI stuff in just a second. But first a word from Veeam. This is a sponsor you want to know about because Veeam get this.
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01:46:26 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
They published a paper in nature that said they are better than the best european center for medium range weather forecasts ens yeah, they had an earlier one, which I did mention, which itself was impressive, but this, this one is like on a whole another level this is a really good use for ai, right, because you have weather is a chaotic system mention, which itself was impressive, but this one is like on a whole nother level.
01:46:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a really good use for AI, right? Because you have weather is a chaotic system. I mean, probably at the base, at the root of it, it's deterministic. I guess, if you could get all the you know millions of data points in there, very hard to predict weather. Obviously, this is something an AI might be really good at I mean, I think it's also in google deep minds wheelhouse.
01:47:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Uh, alpha fold is like probably their signature accomplish the best chess player in the world. Right, and they beat go and so, yeah, they're good at this stuff this is the sort of thing that, um, that they are really great at. Sometimes they have more challenges, kind of productizing and commercializing AI, although they have made inroads there, but in terms of the raw research that can do useful things for humanity, they have a great record and it'll be fun to see where it goes and you can see how important this is.
01:47:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not just because of these big hurricanes we're getting, but if you're a farmer, knowing you're going to have dry weather or wet weather is so important. They have, they say, faster, more accurate forecasts, up to 15 days ahead of time, and they are better at predicting extreme events than the ens or the ecmwf ens my story.
01:47:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean my story touches on kind of there's a little bit of tension now because Google used to have Google Brain and DeepMind, these two large AI research arms, and Google Brain was kind of focused on making Gmail and Google Search and Google Maps better and DeepMind was doing stuff like proteins and weather. And last year they merged them and put Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, in charge of both of them and he was trying to continue to pursue this stuff like weather. That's really important, but not necessarily like an immediate cash cow for Google, while simultaneously keeping up with Apple and Microsoft and Meta and all these other companies who are much more focused on the productization side, which Google had been struggling with a little bit.
01:48:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very interesting.
01:48:59 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And I think at the moment they've made progress on the product side and they are continuing to do the deep research, so it's possible they'll be able to do both. But it's kind of a new twist and a new challenge for Demis Hassabis. Super cool For Sir Demis Hassabis, who also became a Nobel laureate recently.
01:49:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Nobel. That's right. Yeah, Pretty amazing. And then you mentioned notebook lm. One of the features that got a lot of attention was notebook lm starting to do podcasting yeah taking your documents and turn it into a male and female pair of podcasters.
01:49:37
Uh, I am not threatened by this. I know maybe some musicians are threatened by the idea that AI can make music. I don't think they really are. As good as Sora is. It doesn't replace real musicians like the wonderful Taylor Swift, who's about to perform in about three hours. No, she will not be replaced by AI and I'm hopeful that podcasts won't be replaced by AI.
01:50:02 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean the ones that Notebook LLM puts together. Just in terms of how they sound and the conversational aspect, they're astounding. It is amazing isn't it, they're really shallow, and they do hallucinate a little bit.
01:50:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're stupid, but they sound great.
01:50:19 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They do, they sound great. It's one of those things. It's obviously early and it's not perfect, but it's kind of takes the idea that we had, like a decade ago, with Instapaper and Pocket and things like that, where you know we were like, oh well, what if I could turn this into an audio digest? And there were a number of startups that have come out over the years that you know would hire voice actors or sometimes use AI to read those articles to you. And this is kind of like the next step of that, which is to a the. You know the AI voices have gotten good enough and it is a threat, frankly, to you know voice actors, unfortunately, but, um, you know, for things like audio books and stuff like that. But uh, you know, consolidating several sources and kind of giving you a digest. It's not perfect, but I like the idea of what it is.
01:51:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's cool and we are all old enough to remember early voice synthesis and harry, you're probably old enough like catholic castle wolfenstein on the uh, on the apple 2 and the german soldiers go yeah, I mean I on blue sky recently I um, I shared the TRS-80 voice synthesizer which was, I think, $400.
01:51:26 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And you could barely understand that. And then there was this long period of an uncanny valley. Like you know, in recent years the voices have been about 90% towards being great, but that last 10% was really hard on your ears. You finally have voices which you might listen to for for an hour, I think no, to be indistinguishable, probably.
01:51:49 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
This might be your chance to localize, go global. They can actually turn turn into different languages.
01:51:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I could. The technology now exists to take all of our podcasts and and put them out in Chinese with my lips matching and everything. And 11 labs has just announced a similar podcast uh tool. They, they do amazing voices. We've used some of them. Yeah, isn't anthony? Didn't you use 11 labs to do ai leo's voice? Yeah, yeah, so I have a little uh, imaginary uh friend. It sounds just like me, but so I, so I have 11 labs. They bought my favorite news uh reader, which called omnivore. They just recently bought them and so I'm now gonna have to use the 11 reader. But they just added a new voice which cracks me up. Let me see if I can find it. They just added, so they have.
01:52:41
I'll play a few of them, like they have. John wayne's voice they license being scared to death but saddling up anyway. Sure, I say that all the time. And they have, uh, you know they've. So they've, they've, they've. Uh, there's lawrence. Olivier to be, not to be. That's not a recording of olivier, that's a synthesized voice. Okay, you can stop talking, sir lawrence, but now they have. I gotta play this for you. This is hysterical. Oh, where are the voices? Shoot uh apps. I just I don't understand them. Oh, here they are. They have richard feinman. You want to hear richard feinman? This is hysterical. I don't know why you'd want a book read in this, but it's pretty cool. I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned. That's richard feinman.
01:53:37 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
They must have got jerry garcia sometimes the light's all shining on me other times I can barely see lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.
01:53:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what Jerry Garcia, if he really sounds like that but I have no idea what he sounds like at all.
01:53:50 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, you know, you get a question where audible.
01:53:53 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You get a question where audible will be in five years.
01:53:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I was going to say I I've a good reader, can make or break an audio book for me, and, and there there's some, some you know readers who are just fantastic.
01:54:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Out of work soon.
01:54:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And and I feel like the highest end ones, like the Scott bricks of the world, will probably always get work. But the people who are not as good like you know you do, you do wonder, like are you, are publishers just going to default to these voices? And and part of me feels like, okay, well, if it's close enough, maybe that's progress. Maybe more books will have audio versions. But then there's another part of me that is very upset about the fact that what I do think is a real art form for people who can narrate things really well, you know is is being potentially disenfranchised just because we can do it faster um, this is the all the in every creative realm.
01:54:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what's happening with ai and you know, I imagine pot there's. It's already a problem that there's 18 million podcasts, but now that number is going to triple because half of them will be. Somebody was just saying that there are I didn't know this a lot of ai generated documentaries on youtube and he says they're all kind of shallow and human, but, and I don't know, maybe that will go away also.
01:55:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, um, but we've had those things right, like you've had a lot of videos that weren't completely ai generated but were largely kind of piecemealed, like you know reading with kind of a generated voice of you know some, you know snippet, they've gotten someplace, you know, with kind of generic background stuff and whatnot. Like that's been happening for a long time. We can do it faster, and so on the one hand, that's bad because more of that can infiltrate the system and we create more spam, but on the other hand, like it's I don't know, it makes me feel slightly better to be like. This isn't a brand new problem. It's just maybe the velocity and maybe, ironically, using AI, you know, we could, if the networks care like, or the platforms care they could, you know, block the uploading of some of the AI things you know, it's harder and harder to do that, by the way, because these guys are really sneaky.
01:55:58
Yeah, but but you know it doesn't mean that it's that it like. But that's an interesting challenge too, right, which would be like okay, how just treat it like any other form of spam?
01:56:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I. So what you can do with notebook lm. It's the same two voices all the time, the same woman, man and woman, but now you can do with 11 labs. In fact, somebody's done it. They took the transcript from a notebook, notebook lm podcast, fed it to 11 labs and changed the voices. So now you can have a podcast with john wayne and richard feinman if you want it, that's going to be how we all burn to the estates of all these dead celebrities.
01:56:29
Yeah, I'm sure they're paying them. Uh, I hope they're paying them a lot. Judy garland's in there. A lot of famous people are are in here. Um, we live in a very interesting time, like I'm actually I I think are we are over.
01:56:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean I'm very curious how the licensing on this works.
01:56:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, I mean they have to pay for it. They're using their name. I assume they have to.
01:56:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I just I'm just curious how the licensing has worked on this like the estate they just go to the. Well, I wonder if it's the estate or see. This becomes an interesting question is it the estate or is it the? Is it the um, the studio? Because, like, did they just go to MGM and license the catalog, or are they going to be?
01:57:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
see what I'm saying they're using her name.
01:57:06 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think you'd have to pay, then I'm sure it's her estate. But again, like I think that that's going to become increasingly like an important point for people to have in their contracts, Look, here's Deepak Chopra.
01:57:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now he's still alive. I'm sure he's getting paid.
01:57:19 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, he definitely is paid, without a doubt. Let's play a little.
01:57:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deepak Chopra. When you align your thoughts with love, compassion and gratitude, you open yourself to the infinite potential of the universe. That's all I need, man. I'm done. That's it. That's great. I'm adding that to my podcast voice. You won't hear me much more. Hey, I want to thank you, lou, for putting in. We love.
01:57:46
Oh, malik used to have him on the show. Gotta get him back on. He's kind of semi-retired. He's the Yoda of Tech. Uh, created giga, ohm, uh and uh and then became a VC. He has a vlog now called crazy stupid Tech and he writes you wrote, you put this in here, and I think Lou is a great which everybody should read Will AI eat the browser? And you know he's talking about the evolution of technology really, and specifically in this case, he's talking about what Arc is about to do. Arc created the browser that I'm using right now. I really like it, but they are now moving to something new. They call it DIA, which is a I don't know what. We moving to something new. They call dia, which is a um. I don't know what. We'll see a, an ai browser or something um. And he interviews the uh, the head of the browser company, right, and josh miller, and talks about him it's impressive like this.
01:58:34 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Is the like, the intelligent browser that understands your, what you like and what you enjoy, and and is able to weed out false information. Oh, that would be good. Yeah, it's just a really impressive thing. I think he's going to create art.
01:58:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you trust an AI to do? That is the question, I guess. Right, right, right.
01:58:51 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
OpenAI has been talking about building a browser. I mean, I think we may be headed for a shakeup in browsing in general, especially if Google is forced to sell Chrome to somebody else, and I wrote a newsletter about this recently. I mean, browsers go through these cycles of being exciting and boring and, other than things like Arc, the last few years have been kind of boring and we haven't seen Safari or Chrome change much. Edge has been fun to see, but even that's been around for a while and I think there's a good potential for AI to kind of shake things up. And it kind of feels right now like Chrome is what I used to be. It's the 800-pound gorilla and it's hard to see how it'd be less popular. But there's a decent chance that AI could give somebody an entry point to be the next browser that everybody uses and well and not just the browser.
01:59:46
Harry search as well, right, I mean, that's how, that's how google really makes money right and, and the browser and search are inextricably linked to each other, particularly with all these people not getting around to changing their their default search engine right, uh I.
02:00:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like, um you know, I use uh kaki, which is a really I thought I was the only one.
02:00:11 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I love it.
02:00:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm paying them 10 bucks a month 10 bucks a month to to have a good search. That's surprising that people would do that, but interesting. How about you lou? What do you use?
02:00:20 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
for your search. I don't use a search anymore, I just use, uh, you know, copilot or something like that.
02:00:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You see, that's what google's worried about is and it should be and kagi offered me perplexity. That's how I got involved with perplexity, and perplexity now has a search tool. Uh, that's an ai search. It's very interesting. We are, thank goodness, getting into interesting times. Now we're also getting into the witching hour for Ms Christina Warren, film girl. I'm going to let you do. You have a special outfit you're going to wear.
02:00:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'd probably, just because it's so last minute, I'm going to have a hat on. This is kind of a black reputation. I've got a hood. It looks good You're ready to go?
02:01:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you're ready to go. I think you're ready to go?
02:01:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I'm basically ready to go, so I'm I'm going to pass out, I'm going to leave you guys, uh, enjoy the rest of the show. Thank you so much as always for having me christina lou harry, great seeing both of you and uh, everybody have a great evening thank you, christina have fun christina have a great time at the last era's show one I gotta hear all about it.
02:01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll post on instagram, right? I will post on instagram and uh, and I'll talk about it.
02:01:20 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You'll post on Instagram, right? I will post on Instagram and and I'll I'll talk about it next time I'm on.
02:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, christina, all right, thank you so much, take care, guys.
02:01:26
We do have some final stories. We'll get to those in just a minute. But first a word from our sponsors. Recruiter loves it. They're more than a sponsor to us. Zip recruiter is where we go when we're hiring there.
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02:05:11 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
that's my bad one second it's trying to get rid of me. You've disappeared.
02:05:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
lou thanks, anthony. Uh, lou mm continues with the show. He is, of course, the product manager. For let me get it right Engineer, engineer, engineering manager For Copilot for Excel. For Copilot, for Excel and.
02:05:32 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Python, yep and Python, or in Python, Basically Python. Yeah, copilot for Excel with Python.
02:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So let me ask you about that, because that's really interesting Sure, so you can write Python code in your. Excel spreadsheet. You can write Python code in Excel now.
02:05:48 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yep, that's been released. You can just go in there and just in a normal formula, like you do, normal formula today Not VGA anymore or macro formula. You can actually do it in Python. You can still do those, but the Python is there for your whatever Yep, do those, do it in python. You can still do those, but the python is there for your.
02:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome. Yep, python is the number one language for uh data, uh processing.
02:06:06 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Right, I mean people, right, yeah right and you can basically pick any library that's in the well, most libraries, in the anaconda library, um and uh and just dump the code in the in a formula and and away you go, and now copilot will actually write it for you so you can ask it to do some advanced analysis of your data and it will go and produce some pretty amazing graphs and charts and insights in there. It's really fun to use. I think I've had a lot of fun actually playing with it.
02:06:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember when they announced that Python will be part of Excel. That was a few months ago and I thought that's really interesting, but I didn't understand how. So that's really interesting, but I didn't understand how right. So that's really good. That's tight integration, that's really super tight, yep, and they haven't added.
02:06:47 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
They just released a super cool editor analysis with obvious code based um, just right in excel. So you just pop it open and and click the uh. And click the uh, you type in pi into the formula and and the editor opens is this primarily for data scientists, or I guess it is not?
02:07:03
It is not. I thought so In the beginning. I would say, yeah, that's basically who is playing with it. But now it's just as simple as you go in there and say give me a distribution, give me this, do an analysis of trends or give me a prediction, and it will actually generate the model, the code for it, actually generate the model, the code for it, and generate the model and produce the insight and dump the graph in the in the document. Right there.
02:07:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty impressive we were uh talking um. I've mentioned the advent of code. We have a little group of people uh in the club that are doing that and one of them, darren okey, uh used to code for uh you know, back office stuff for data, for brokers, for uh finance, and he's a lot of the quants use python um, so I imagine banks.
02:07:48 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You know, in fact, if you want to be an analyst for a bank now, you have to know python. Yeah, wow, so yeah, but this is not. This is really not I mean the co-pilot integration stuff that I'm doing. You don't have to know python. Like this is just so you can do some really cool things with. You know the fact that python has some more advanced analysis capabilities than just core, like excel, has, so it's actually a lot of fun to play with. In fact, I saw a real estate agent recently um dump all of their like comps in there and do like an advanced analysis, be able to do trending, and they don't. They don't know any python.
02:08:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So wow, that's a cool. Uh, you're in a cool part of the company that's really neat.
02:08:25
It's a lot of fun. We had mentioned, uh, I think, last week that there was a rumor uh that there were the government was investigating microsoft once again, uh, but microsoft has denied that. And then the ftc says, um, we're no comment. I think this is a story that has no legs, to be honest with you, so I'm not going to mention it. Ap says ftc opens microsoft antitrust investigation. Trump administration must carry on or drop. So many times had it a lot of bloomberg, I think, started it uh, everybody independently confirmed it, I guess, with the ftc. But the ftc is not talking publicly, and nor is microsoft. So, and, by the way, an investigation doesn't mean a lawsuit or a trial or anything.
02:09:14 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It just means they're looking at it right, and it seems like it stemmed from the fact that, with our partnership with OpenAI right, I think that was where it mainly stemmed from.
02:09:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The FTC. According to this is the story from AP FTC is investigating Microsoft's cloud computing business and related product lines like AI and cybersecurity. According to a person not authorized to discuss details publicly, you know who knows what will happen. One of the things I think if I were big, a big tech company, a ceo of a big tech company like jeff bezos or sundar pichai or your own, satchin adela, uh, I would be pretty bullish about the next administration. A lot of that big tech, uh, uh, you know. Prosecution, I think, will go away because, as trump has about Google, the Chinese are scared of them. This is the playbook that Tim Cook used in 2017 in the last administration to keep Trump from putting tariffs on iPhones.
02:10:17 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I'm actually writing about this for my next newsletter right now.
02:10:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh perfect, We'll tell us about it.
02:10:23 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people do see Tim Cook as a model, because he quietly forged a relationship and was able to get taxes repatriated from other countries at a favorable rate. That was a big deal right.
02:10:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Apple had billions of dollars in Ireland.
02:10:40 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And obviously, if the iPhone had become a lot more expensive because of tariffs, that would have been a major problem.
02:10:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But there was an exemption.
02:10:46 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That's what Cook told Trump apparently there was an exemption.
02:10:48 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You're just going to help Samsung. This isn't good for us.
02:10:52 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And it did involve a little bit of kind of sucking things up, like he led Trump on this tour of this Flextronics plant that had been around forever in Texas and Trump talked about it. He had opened this great, great new Apple plant.
02:11:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple has been making Mac pros there since 2013.
02:11:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And nobody pointed out that it's not an Apple plant and it's not new. So I think one of the things I plan to write about is that part of the challenge of this is that being on Trump's good side involves not saying bad stuff about him, which you know.
02:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what that's called politics Right. Anytime you deal with a politician, you're trying to get the best for your company. That's what a good CEO is going to do.
02:11:37 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I do think it will be a challenge if some of the worst case scenarios pan out in terms of what Trump might try to do this time around, and you also have people like employees and customers who might not be thrilled if you only say these kind of guarded nice things about Trump.
02:11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're a stakeholder of a big company like Apple. By stakeholder I mean you hold, you benefit. If they benefit, you're a stock holder. You want tim cook to do what's best for your stock, for your, for the company this is what they're going.
02:12:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
They're going to lean towards, although, if you're going to, you hold your nose and you say hey, this is politics, this is how it is although there were a few instances last time around, like particularly with the family separations, where you did see CEOs speak out against it, that came and went very quickly, so I'm not sure if it actually had any great impact on how that panned out, but I think it's at least conceivable. It will be harder for this kind of very gingerly relationship between the CEOs and Trump to not cause new problems for the CEOs involved.
02:12:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that. Do you agree, though, that in the in, in the long run, it's going to be better for us technology companies, or maybe not?
02:12:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean, this is, this is potentially an area where we might be okay. Um, yeah, I think there is.
02:13:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You remember that there was this whole issue with conservatives and many in trump's court and for trump himself who felt that big tech was censoring conservative speech and they were bad, they were mad at big tech for that. It's my guess that that's going to go away. They're not going to worry about that because they got Elon and he's not censoring, and they're going to really look at and this is the, this is the path that Tim Cook used so effectively last time what's best for American companies.
02:13:35 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We'll see. I mean, I think I think you know Trump quite recently talked about putting Mark Zuckerberg in jail. So I don't't, I don't think that's true, that you know, the chances that that's going to translate into anything happening are probably incredibly tiny.
02:13:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I think he's gotten over that and I think zuckerberg just says to him look, dude, we're an american company.
02:13:54 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think you want american companies to do well right I think it's possible that trump will continue to say whatever he wants on truth, social or x or wherever he exactly he goes, but but it won't translate into unfavorable situations for these companies. Well, we'll watch with interest.
02:14:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Speaking of rhetoric, this is hysterical. Of course there's this salt typhoon problem, which is the chinese hacking group that has gotten into our phone system and now we know has been listening in the phone calls of the at the highest levels of the american government. You, you interpret that as you wish, but that's what they're saying. Uh it, they're still in there. The government is trying to get the phone consent the phone companies to lock down their systems. I don't know how easy that is going to be to do. In response, the FBI has warned iPhone and Android users start using secure messaging, not the built-in messaging on your phone. Use Signal, facebook Messenger, whatsapp. But then and this is a great piece by Zach Doffman of Forbes they also say oh, but make sure you only use an encryption technology that we have a back door in what, what they call it responsibly managed encryption.
02:15:21
The FBI says, quote this encryption should be designed to protect people's privacy and also managed so US tech companies can provide readable content in response to a lawful court order, aka a backdoor, which, by the way, is why Salt Typhoon is in there. But Kaliya, what Salt Typhoon is doing is tapping into the lawful intercepts that were authorized by Kaliya almost 20 years ago, they found a backdoor. This is just more of the same. So, by the way, what tech companies do provide responsibly managed encryption? None, none. Apple doesn't have a backdoor. None. Apple doesn't have a backdoor. Signal doesn't have a backdoor. Meta uses the signal uh technology in what's app right, so it's iMessage right.
02:16:14 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, imessage uses signal protocol as well, so they all use that. Or I didn't know that? I think so.
02:16:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in my understanding in my understanding, yeah, fbi Director Christopher Wray says the public should not have to choose between safe data and safe communities. We should be able to have both. We can't have both. Collecting this stuff is getting harder. This is the going dark problem, right? Because so much of that evidence now lives in the digital realm. Terrorist hackers and child predators are taking advantage of end-to-end encryption. So if you don't want the chinese to use our own wiretapping technology to listen in on the president's phone calls, we want you to use encrypted technology, but please don't use end-to-end encryption, because we can't listen in either that's the same old, same old the hypocrisy is mind-boggling.
02:17:06
Anyway, just thought I'd pass along that, that advice from the fbi, you gotta.
02:17:11 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You have to wonder how this is going to impact these companies, though, like there's, you know. Obviously, fear mongering is a thing that does prevent people from moving forward on things, and so people think my data is gone or my you know, I need move something else, that it could hit the profits of these companies.
02:17:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You think Apple might say, all right, well, we'll give you, we'll give you a backdoor to our encryption. I know signal never will.
02:17:37 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
There's a new story about Apple being sued over this stuff they did to detect CSAM, which they ended up not actually deploying.
02:17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They didn't do it. They're being sued. They didn't do it.
02:17:48 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yes, Well, they're being sued because they didn't do it and therefore they didn't take action to make it harder to share that stuff.
02:17:56 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You can't win. What stops them from not like? There's backdoors that these companies find, you know, in like. Even iOS 18 has some backdoors, like what stops Apple from just not fixing it for a while.
02:18:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what they could do. Celebrate, of course, is which one of the technologies law enforcement uses works right up until the latest iOS 18. You know they found in this case, with the assassination of the chairman of UnitedHealthcare the CEO of UnitedHealthcare a phone was left behind and I thought immediately oh, the FBI is going to have to go to, whether it's Apple or Android or Google. They're going to have to go to that company and say we want in, unless it's an older phone, in which case they can use, celebrate, exploit it and exploit it. But Apple patches that every time.
02:18:43 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I guess you think they might drag their feet next time I mean we say that they don't like agree, or they don't partner with these, these federal organizations, but that doesn't mean that they don't have another way of doing it.
02:18:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So right yeah I guess you know. See, I have nothing to hide. I guess I don't really care.
02:19:08 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Take my phone.
02:19:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, a big. You know about the cesium clock. The atomic clock is actually measuring the vibrations of cesium. It's actually transitions, not even measures, measurements. Well, timekeeping is on the verge of a leap, a great leap forward. There is a cesium fountain that's used by nist, um to create the digital second. It is uh, it is um. It uses cesium-133. They count the high-frequency transitions. The transition of an electron of cesium-133 occurs in every second 9,192,631,770 times, 192 million 631 770 times. And uh. The reason that this is uh important is because if they could get a higher frequency transition, then mismeasurement, which occurs from time to time, would be less of an impact. You'd have a more accurate second, stable, very stable, more stable second. Well, it turns out they have found a way, apparently, to do that. Uh, in september 2021, scientists use strontium, which has a much higher transition frequency. In fact, it falls within the range of visible light that the transition frequency of cesium is much like that of, say, a microwave in the billions. This is it, much, much higher, which means by 2030, we may redefine the second. We may have a new standard for a digital clock.
02:20:52
I don't know why I'm bringing this up. I just think it's. I think it's great, fascinating, nothing else. Yeah, yeah, the, you know, I mean it used to be. They measured a second, like in the old days. They measured a second by like measuring the sky, or so I don't know what they did. Accurate time keeping is always this is a great story in the science alert, accurate time keeping has always been part of humankind's social evolution. At the neolithic monument of new grange in ireland there's a picture of it. A special opening above the entrance allows sunlight to illuminate the passage and chamber on the shortest day of the year coming up the winter solstice, december 21st, and that's what Stonehenge did. And there have been other clocks like that. Then there were water clocks Up until 1967, a second was 186,400th of a day second was 186 400th of a day, I think.
02:21:47 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I think what's really fascinating about this is this will actually have impact on scientific research, like, for instance, the search for dark matter or something pretty interesting there you need very, very, very precise measurements yeah, I was going to ask what, what the downside is of the seconds we've already got nothing, don't worry about it, you're okay, you know it's.
02:22:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's fascinating because gps uses a clock. It's very important right for gps to work, to have a clock that is uh accurate with all the satellites, because you have to measure the difference in transmission of the signal at different angles, but at all. But in they have to make a adjustment for relativity based on the speed of the earth's movement, the satellites movement. It proves einstein's theory of relativity because those relativistic adjustments based on einstein's calculations are accurate and gps works only because einstein was right. So you know, I don't know what. Thank those.
02:22:52
Thank your local physicist I don't know one last story we talked on wednesday. Andy and ako brought up the fact that the original ruby slippers and from the Wizard of Oz were at auction. They have sold now. They sold this weekend for $28 million.
02:23:13 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Hopefully they'll get some wear out of them.
02:23:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do not put those on. They have her name sewn into it. They went through a whole bunch of uh stuff to to prove the providence that these are the actual. There were three models made for the movie.
02:23:28 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I was gonna say.
02:23:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought that I thought there was more than one pair yeah, there's one in the smithsonian, I think, um, and so they compared it to that. There's a whole. It's actually a fascinating uh subject, uh, which we talked about it extensively on that break weekly because it was very little apple news are they the um the most iconic? No, I think they're just one of the three, that's all.
02:23:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But I mean, are, are those three pair like the most iconic movie prop of all time?
02:23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, well, that's interesting. Your times asks that question. The previous record holder was marilyn monroe's dress from the seven year inch. You know the monroe's dress from the seven-year inch. You know the one where she stands over the subway goes up. That's sold in 2011 for five and a half million dollars yeah, I mean you have.
02:24:10 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
You have stuff like christopher reeve superman suit, although I assume there were probably a whole bunch of those right, yeah, right right um delorean delorean delorean, the delorean delorean, yeah, an auction of the wicked witch which, of the west hat worn by margaret hamilton, also sold at that auction sold for three million dollars that's kind of cool that they actually bothered to keep them back then, uh, like which I guess they must have done before the movie even came out, and they did not know at the time that decades later people would care the slippers actually were stolen at one point. Oh yeah, was it. Was it this pair that were stolen or the other ones?
02:24:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, uh, the slippers were lent to the judy garland museum in grand rapids. They were stolen in 2005. Fbi agents set up a sting operation, recovered them in 2018, uh it's gotta be a movie someday.
02:25:08
Well, there is because the guys stole them, not because they thought, oh, ruby slippers, the wizard of oz, those will be worth something. They thought they were actually made of rubies. No, they're made of glass. Uh, these, these nitwits that stole them thought, oh, we got shoes made of rubies, they weren't worth anyway. Um, so the judy garland museum said the museum was raising money, uh, to buy them back. But they were only able to raise $100,000, which isn't enough For $20,000, though the museum did buy a painting depicting the scene where the Wicked Witch's hands are zapped as she tries to take the slip. So they got something out of it. It's $28 million Unbelievable, folks.
02:26:01
I think we're off to see the wizard. It's the end of the end of the line for this show. Thank you so much. Harry McCracken miss you. I wish we had a studio for you to come visit, but at least we can do it this way, so it's not so very bad. I can't wait to read your article about the. What was it? The weather, what? What was it? I forgot what you were right.
02:26:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Well, I mentioned too my google deep mind story is already up on our site. That's a big uh feature on that. And then I'm still writing my newsletter, which will come out next wednesday, which is is about these tech ceos and how they will attempt to deal with uh trump 2.0, dealing trump 2.0, and how do we get your newsletter?
02:26:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
where?
02:26:45 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
is that go online and and either google or kagi for um plugged in fast company and you should. You should get the page where you can sign up the name of it is plugged in by harry mccracken. Yeah, and it is from fast company and yeah, and you don't need to subscribe. You can also find a page on our site with all the newsletters.
02:27:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you do want now, do you still do that ride that you've been doing all the way up to the golden gate bridge and back?
02:27:12 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
yes, um, I, um, I went to larkspur most recently and I need to figure out where I'm coming next, and I I have two e-bike batteries now, so maybe, maybe someday farther maybe someday we'll get to Petaluma by e-bike, which I think would be doable as long as I could charge. Once I was there.
02:27:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be fun. Yeah, you could charge. Here I ride a Rad Power e-bike and I love it. It's a lifesaver because we live on a hill and I don't have to worry about it. I could just pedal up the hill. What do you? But you? I see you have an article in your, in your plugged in newsletter. Which one do you like?
02:27:54 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I have a gazelle. I've, in fact, I've had the same gazelle for four and a half years and I've done so many upgrades. I don't particularly want a new one, because the one I have is exactly what what I like it to be.
02:28:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, I'll have to take a look at it. Why do you like it so much?
02:28:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I like the mid-mount motor. It doesn't have a throttle, but it's really good for hills. See, I like the throttle. The motor is built right in the pedals. It's a Dutch bike. I think that's cool.
02:28:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think VanMoof went out of business, didn't they.
02:28:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
They did, but then they were rescued at the last moment. But yeah, one of the challenges is there are so many e-bike companies and there are big ones, little ones, there are ones that do a lot of their own tech, there are ones that are basically just assembling parts.
02:28:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the rad powers is Chinese motor, mostly Chinese parts.
02:28:42 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, the the Gazelle uses a Bosch system, which a lot of nice bikes do.
02:28:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, all right, it's expensive, it's more than $5,000.
02:28:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
So I'll have to when it's time to replace the Rad Power. The one I wrote about was $5,000. Mine was not $5,000.
02:28:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, you wrote about the what is it T11 Plus All right the teal. You wrote about the uh t what is it t11 plus all right. Well, you see, every time I read these reviews I go I should get that. That looks good there's some.
02:29:09
There are some great e-bikes that do not cost five grand I will watch your plugged in newsletter for your article that you're working on today. Harry mccracken from fast company great to see you. Thank you, leo lumoresca. He is a principal engineering manager in charge of wow. What is about the coolest thing I ever heard of excel?
02:29:29 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
co-pilot with python yeah, talk about a supercharged spreadsheet.
02:29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excel has always been like amazing we I used to have a guy named mr excel.
02:29:40 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Oh yeah, he loves this too, by the way I bet he does, yeah, yeah it's funny because people don't think that new stuff come to excel, but uh, you know, this is just a lot of fun to play with.
02:29:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If, if you're in school and you want to get a job, if you became an excel wizard, proficient excel with python and copilot, this the world would be your oyster, yeah to excel with python and copilot.
02:30:04 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
This the world would be your oyster. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like I was saying, we, we work with a lot of banks and I would say 90 of them. Some people have been saying hey, I'm learning python just by utilizing this feature.
02:30:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'll have to play with it. There is a. There is a guy on an advent of code who has been using excel to solve the problems. But I guess if you have python and copilot, you probably I mean mean you got everything you need in there.
02:30:24
That's pretty cool. That's really cool, lou. It's really great to see you again. Lou Maresca miss you Long time. Host of this week in Enterprise Tech, one of the nicest guys in technology Actually, two of the nicest people in technology right here. And then there's Christina Warren. We miss her, but she's off, probably right now and walking over to the arena so she can see the last year's tour.
02:30:47
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