This Week in Tech 1024 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. Harry McCracken is here from Fast Company, father Robert Balassaire from the Vatican and from France, patrick Beja. We'll talk about the future of Intel, tiktok's future, who's going to buy it and what's going to happen. And finally, france has freed Pavel Durov. Our long nightmare is over. It's all coming up next with a whole lot more on TWIT Podcasts. You love From people. You trust this is TWIT.

00:39
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1024. Recorded Sunday, march 23rd 2025. Payday loan burrito. It's time for twit, the show where we cover the latest tech news this week in tech, and three of my favorite people are here. The technologizer himself, harry mccracken, from fast company, who has, in many ways, you've become our internet historian or a technology historian. I love that. Love all your wonderful pieces on old technology. Great to have you, harry.

01:16
Thank you for joining us great to be here, leo father robert balas air joins us from uh, high atop Vatican. Uh, he is uh not in Vatican City. I? I can't quite figure it out, but you are overlooking St Peter's Square right.

01:33 - Padre (Guest)
So there's Vatican City, and then there's there's the land that the Vatican owns, that's outside of Vatican City. I'm on one of those pieces of land. So it is the Vatican, it's just not Vatican City. And, by the way, we are the history of technology here. We have all the oldest, it's all here, baby.

01:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, in fact it looks like you stole something from our studio with that uh that uh thing behind you there, what there?

01:55 - Padre (Guest)
may be some elements of twit.

01:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, well, the studio's officially gone now. We gave it back to the landlord. Oh, so it's over. Great to see you, robert, uh, and of course, from. I think you're back in france, aren't you, patrick beijing?

02:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yes, yes, I'm back in france, so, uh, it's delightfully early here, only 10 pm early days.

02:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I see you have the mythic quest sword in your kitchen, which is a little, it is.

02:22 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It is not the mythic quest sword. It your kitchen, which is a little. It is not the mythic quest sword. It's actually, uh, I, I used to work at blizzard, right back when we thought, you know, it was a healthy company. Uh, and this is my five-year sword, which I, I keep very proudly displayed they give you a sword after five years. They give you like a kind of big mug, what's the big beer thing? Old timey.

02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A stein, a beer stein?

02:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yes, After two years. Then the big one is the sword. After five. Then you get a shield after 10 and a crown after 15. No, crown is 20 and the ring is 15. But I got the sword. I'm happy with that.

03:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is the sword an actual sword? I mean, could you it? It is, it's very sharp.

03:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Uh, it's very dangerous. So it's here at my studio, not where my kids.

03:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not the minecraft sword that father robert is now wielding. Do you get that?

03:20 - Padre (Guest)
after five years of playing minecraft, father, I think so no, no, this is actually given to all the swiss guard oh, yeah, sure, this guy's dressed so cute.

03:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, uh, I understand, the holy father is uh out of the hospital, he's home, uh just around the corner and uh and doing better, and that's great he has back in santa marta yeah, he's resting, he's we're, we're hoping.

03:43 - Padre (Guest)
We're hoping that he will listen to the people around him. He is a workaholic and he just wants to get back resting. He's we're, we're hoping. We're hoping that he will listen to the people around him. He is a workaholic and he just wants to get back at it, and we're all telling him just be calm, relax, take it easy and slowly come back joe, by the way, says you're not at the vatican se.

03:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah uh, breaking news. This just came in moments ago. Uh, the new ceo of intel has decided to go ahead with, uh, the intel vision conference, uh, at the end of the month. So they were going to be doing it much later in the year. They've moved it up, and so I guess we will find out what is going to happen to Intel in just a week or so.

04:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Very good move, I think A little bit surprising, but there's been so much uncertainty around Intel in the past three months. What was it when Gelsinger was ousted? And whatever he says, I can't imagine that he would, you know, sell off the foundry business. It's such an opportunity now. But whatever he says, whatever they do, he has to announce the strategy for the next few years and whatever he says, at least we'll know. Uncertainty is the worst possible thing. Exactly, uncertainty is always bad. So I think that's a pretty good, a pretty clever move on his part.

05:15 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I remember Pat Gelsinger tried to pull off something similar by announcing a big conference, but he was admired in the pandemic and I believe the big conference he announced it ended up. They could not actually hold when they expected to and I actually worked on a big story on him and they had rented out Fort Mason in San Francisco and then they had to cancel that but they already had it. So I was like the one person who attended their big conference in order to talk to Pat and other that they just broadcast from fort mason, but there was nobody there in person intel's uh stock has actually recovered somewhat in the last a few months after the announcement.

05:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can see this is right around. When they announced the new ceo a couple of weeks ago there was a quite a big dip, although it isn't fully recovered from its uh heights of uh last year or even actually last february. So uh, it's still pretty low. In fact, if you look at the five year it's, it's obviously the you know people are. You know intel was, you know, well over 60 a couple of years ago is now just around 25. Not a lot of confidence. I'm surprised. You think he might not break it up. It seems like that's the only possible strategy.

06:32
And integrated Intel has not done well.

06:35 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, no, it hasn't, but it seemed like Gelsinger had the right idea, because manufacturing-.

06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For which he was fired.

06:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yes, I don't really understand. But well, maybe I'm still on Gelsinger's plan and that's why I think he can't spin it off. I think probably for shareholders which is maybe what he cares about it could make sense to split the company in two and have two very competent companies instead of one middling. But it seems like, if he can execute, there is so much need for uh, you know, in not relying on uh, asian manufacturing in the chip space, and intel has huge assets in that field. I don't see how they could not leverage that Now. Maybe technology-wise they're behind, I don't know. It seems like such an asset. The foundry business seems like such an asset. And if they manage to turn it into a, you know, as Gelsinger wanted to do and has started doing a, you know manufactured to order outlet, it would be hugely profitable because people want to have things manufactured more locally, especially in the US. But I don't know it. Maybe he has a diff. Obviously he knows the business better than I do, but um, it does.

08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does seem like, uh, big technology companies are struggling in, uh, this new era. Yes, uh, apple announced last week that it wasn't going to be able to get its ai uh into the iphones this year. Um, I guess you could say microsoft's doing okay, although everybody I talked to loads windows. I mean.

08:24 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Unfortunately, intel has been struggling ever since that the, uh, the windows based pc, stopped being right the thing at the center of computing, um. So you know pretty much the moment um smartphones came out and it had no, no smartphone story. It's been trying to to rectify that ever since and you would think that if they were still going to follow galsinger's strategy, they would have galsinger doing that, and that would suggest that they will try something significantly different, whether it's truly splitting it up or or making some other radical change to what galsinger was attempting to do, which I don't feel like they gave him enough time to do I mean they're all struggling under the weight of their own legacy Microsoft, apple, intel, google, add Google to this.

09:10 - Padre (Guest)
All of them right. It's very hard to innovate when you're tied down to what you're expected to maintain. But if you look at Tan's legacy, if you look at what his lineage is, he is a chip design guy, but so was Gelsinger, right. Yeah, but Gelsinger was more. I mean, he did chip design, but he was more on the administrative side.

09:29
Okay tan actually has a background where he understands what's going on. So he could. What I'm hoping is that this conference is not just going to be a hype cycle where some pr guy said we need to get out there to stop the bleeding and he's actually going to say, look, we have to stop. We have to look at what we need. We have to listen to our customers, we have to listen to our designers, we have to listen to the market and we're going to design a new piece of silicon around that.

09:53
And I I'm with patrick. I think if they sell off the foundries and tells us good as dead, if they, if they have to go out and design things out of house, they have no competitive advantage as it is right now. They are so far behind that it will not do well enough for them to be incremental here. They have to announce that they are shooting for a new processor fabric or it's just going to be oh, the next step is going to be slightly faster and that's not going to cut it Gelsinger, who he started Intel like as an intern, I think, maybe in the late 70s.

10:32 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
originally he was the principal architect of the 486.

10:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he was a real. In fact, I'm not sure Litbuten really was. He has a master's in nuclear engineering from MIT and an MBA from the university of san francisco. He uh, you know, he ran cadence, which was a chip design uh, firm uh, from 2009 to 2021 like a chip design software company yeah, but that doesn't mean he was actually active.

11:00
I mean he ran it, he uh, really I think he's more of a a money guy. So I don't, I mean, he might be the guy you bring in if you wanted to sell off a company. To be honest, oh God please. No, that's what happened to GE, right? Uh, ge just got so big, got out over its skis so far that they just ended up chopping it up into pieces, each of which is done fine. Uh, what would you? Chop Intel up? Fab and design.

11:27 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, that's the delineation that makes sense. There are many options. I mean you can sell off one part and keep the other. Either would do. You can split the company in two and you know, I don't know the technical financial terms but essentially get stock in both resulting companies technical financial terms, but essentially get stuck in both resulting companies. But again, maybe it's because I see this from the EU, where strategic independence in the area of chip manufacturing is absolutely essential. But I feel like the world has realized this with COVID right when chips became less available. Then everything stopped and every country has started thinking okay, we need to bring back manufacturing locally to an extent. Maybe, you know, you don't necessarily need to become a leader, but you need to have some measure of independence. But maybe Intel is so outpaced in that area that the partnerships with TSMC in the US are enough.

12:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they got a big chunk of change from the CHIPS Act. I don't know if they'll get to anymore.

12:37 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But now that is somewhat uncertain, because Trump says the CHIPS Act is terrible, which is, as far as I can tell, he's saying only because it was a Biden thing, given that in a lot of ways the CHIPS Act.

12:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's what he wants to do, which is bring chip manufacturing back to the US.

12:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Exactly I mean Trump should love the CHIPS Act.

12:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Intel's market cap is only $100 billion. I mean this is in an environment where others are in the trillions.

13:02 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Its price-to-earnings ratio is negative.

13:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the market does not believe in Intel at this point. Well, I think the founder, there might be a bargain?

13:12 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah Well, I mean it depends. The issue is the processes right. With Intel, they made huge technological bets, like mistakes, and they didn't go to. Whatever the process, is that Right? Oh, what's the Dutch company that they enable? The EUV, the?

13:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
extreme ultraviolet lithography yes, extreme ultraviolet process.

13:40 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But Gelsinger was saying okay, we made a mistake there, we're going to switch to that technology. That ended up being the one that everyone uses now, and but maybe it's too late, maybe intel is too far behind and by the time they implement that technology um, you know it will it would take three or four years, and I don't know, maybe that's you know.

14:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Patrick, uh, you could also say that American big tech is foundering because the EU is killing us, right?

14:12 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I mean Google. No, you could not say. I mean you could say it, you would be wrong but would we be wrong?

14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
okay, yes, I. I have a lot to say about this, but I will let you well, in some way, you know, I have to say, if you're a privacy advocate in the United States, you're grateful for GDPR, the the EU's privacy regulations, because we don't seem to be able to make any privacy regulations here in the US uh, but on the other hand, I mean Apple, microsoft, google, everybody's uh getting fined dramatically by the uh EU. I, I can't seem to get it together.

14:50 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I wouldn't say dramatically, but yes, there are very large fines that are possible if you don't follow the um, the, the, the new rules, especially the DSA and DMA, are quite stringent and the.

15:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, both of which are both Apple and Google's stores, are in trouble with that. And there's many social networks in trouble with the DMA right.

15:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It touches on a lot of things. I think the most prominent one, the most visible one, is the way that Apple has been forced to open up iOS, and there's been a story in the past week that is kind of things are heating up between Apple and the European Commission. The latest from the European Commission is that Apple has to open every function of iOS that is privately available to Apple, to its competitors, and this is like the first time when even me I'm thinking, oh okay, this is pretty big the goal. The thing is it's it's the goal. The thing is this is trying. I think it's being discussed a lot in the US, especially under the impression that this is just to annoy Apple and to get back at them, because we're so angry that you know the the Americans have managed to have such success in tech, and I mean, maybe there's some of that, but this is not what these uh regulations are about.

16:31
I think one, one element that is uh very much uh obfuscated in those discussions is that the issue is a fair competition. If you don't have free and open competition in a market, which is actually, I think, the basis of the free market and capitalism, then the machine is stuck and it doesn't work. And currently we have several markets where competition is arguably not free and open. New entrants have a very, very difficult time entering the market, and one of those to take the example of Apple and iOS is the smartphone market, and maybe it's not in numbers a monopoly. It's certainly there's a case to be made that it's monopsony, meaning if you're a developer and you want to make money, you have to be on apple plat, on apple's platforms so they can set up their rules. But in order to breaking open is a I guess a loaded term smartphone market, but in adjacent markets, connected devices, watches, all of that If Apple restricts the functionalities that you have access to, then you're never going to be able to compete. So the the sort of free, open competition doesn't work.

18:08
And what the eu is saying, um is you have to open everything.

18:12
Like, for example, one of the things that apple is very angry about or at least we believe they are, because they've communicated in a very strange way through a letter sent to media outlets that are usually sympathetic to them and nothing public.

18:29
So we don't know the details of what they don't like. But one thing they've been saying is if you enable uh, third party watch makers to access uh notifications, then it's a privacy nightmare and everyone can access all of your information and suck it up, and Meta has been asking for this and it's unconscionable. I understand the idea that opening up, like enabling notifications to be available to any third party actor, could be a privacy issue, but if you take the problem from the competition aspect, in order for someone else than Apple to be able to compete, then you need the access to those features. It's not a ridiculous idea, even though it does have some drawbacks, which, again, the reason you are you agree to uh. Those drawbacks is that you have a market that is completely closed now, with apple's dominance in the in that space apple's defense is always.

19:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it will make it insecure, uh, and it's starting to, frankly, wear a little thin. Patrick, I'm sorry, uh. Uh. Father robert, you, you are standing like a colossus with a foot astride both continents, uh, but you're also a security expert. Is there, can you? Is there any credibility to what apple's saying?

20:00 - Padre (Guest)
I. I mean, yes, anytime you open up a closed system, of course, course, there's going to be security exploits. There's going to be the possibility that you are making a closed environment open to attack, but that's not necessarily a reason not to make it open. I mean, if you come from the open source background, which most of my compatriots do, background which most of my compatriots do, you recognize that opening up a closed system will reveal security exploits and, even more quickly, it will help to patch those security exploits. So that whole idea of the security sky is falling, while it makes for really, really good press.

20:40
When you're trying to explain why you won't do X, y or Z, I mean, remember this goes back to the original iPhone and jailbreaking it. The ability to install your own apps was one of these things. They said oh no, no, no, that's so insecure and we're just trying to protect the users. Oh, and we can't open up these features. We can't let you use your phone as a hotspot without charging you because it's allowing people to access parts of the operating system that they shouldn't have to ask. I mean this goes back more than a decade. This, this goes back to the, to the, the foundation of Apple's ascendancy in the tech space and unfortunately, we've just heard it far too many times. I'm I'm with Patrick here. I I think, yes, I understand why Apple wants to keep it closed and, at the same time, I understand why the EU really does want to open it, not to punish Apple, but to spark competition in the space, which just doesn't exist, with the juggernauts of Apple and Samsung on the other side.

21:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And I think another aspect of this is the way Apple is doing things is absolutely awesome and I love it. And I think, in a world where Apple, the irony of all of this is that the reason Apple is so dominant is because they have made this closed, convenient, super controlled system and users do love it and that's why they're so strong in that field, at least partly why and I love that proposition for the user the problem is they're so dominant that competition doesn't exist anymore. So you can Do you punish a?

22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
company that's that successful because they're successful.

22:29 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, you don't punish them. You enable competition, and it's not about punishing Apple. It's about enabling competition, which is the bedrock of capitalism. You should be the ones defending this, not me, I defend it.

22:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Believe me, I defend it. So I'm not taking a dog. I'm not picking a dog in this hunt. Martin Peers, writing for the Information this weekend, says that Apple's troubles actually might be good for them in fighting off these antitrust issues. Both in the US and in the EU, antitrust regulators might have a harder time proving Apple's Market power because Apple's struggling both in AI they're struggling with the Vision Pro and, he's pointing out, spotify leaves Apple music in the dust. Apple music has 100 million subscribers. Spotify, 263 million paying subscribers. I mean that's a big difference. Spotify, but and, by the way, it is Spotify that is complaining about Apple in the EU, right?

23:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think everyone's complaining about okay, software is a little bit software is a little bit different than a hardware, though it's. It's uh. It is possible to really establish yourself on Apple's platform as an app, such as Spotify and Compete, even though Apple does even have some advantages there. But Eric Michikofsky, the Pebble smartwatch guy.

23:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's been complaining.

23:55 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
He had a good post that went up right before the EU announcement about how he can't make a Pebble smartwatch awesome on iOS because he simply does not have access to the same stuff that the Apple Watch people do.

24:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pebble's releasing its effect. You could place orders now, I think, for their new Pebble watches. Mijakovsky kind of bought the company back. He was the original creator, but he has complained that while they'll, they'll be uh powerful and sophisticated if you use it with an android phone, it won't do nearly as much if you use it with an iphone.

24:30 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
this is a long time story, right, I mean yeah this has always been the case, not just for pebble, but for a lot of things yeah, I mean, I had a garmin watch for a couple of years, which in a lot of ways I liked, but it was dependent on bluetooth to talk to my iPhone, which is always going to be a little bit flaky. And when I switched to an Apple Watch, it was just so clear that there's this extremely reliable communications bandwidth between two Apple devices that you just don't get access to if you're not Apple.

25:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's interesting because, on the one hand, if you're not Apple, so it's interesting because, on the one hand, apple says well, we're doing that because we make a better product and it's closed and that makes it more secure and better. But then, on the other hand, people like Eric Medjikovsky and Pebble say yeah, but that means no one else can make something as good.

25:23 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Apple also says. I mean Apple also says if you don't like what we're doing and you want it to be more open, you can use. Android. Great use Android. It exists and it actually has vastly larger market share worldwide than we do.

25:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and you know what, With the failure of Apple AI and the success of Google's Gemini AI, maybe people are starting to say maybe I shouldn't buy an iPhone. Apple, should Apple be worried?

25:51 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think that. I mean, I think AI is this inflection point that is still in the process of playing out, and it is at least conceivable that, on the other end, smartphones will look quite different and and Google will have a lead in terms of innovation on the experience standpoint that it has not had historically.

26:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

26:11 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But I think if that happens, if Apple falls on its face with AI, then that will be and you know, let's say, in five years, iphone sales decline because the AI products that Apple is creating aren't up to par with what google is creating. I doubt that will happen. They have such an established base, uh, they have a dominant platform now. But maybe if that happens, then the decline in market share for apple or in revenue share you know, that's that's the main thing in that market will be because Apple failed on AI, not because the EU opened up the OS enough that Pebble is able to do a decent watch.

26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what free marketers would say is just let the market decide this.

26:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, no, no, I mean the free marketers would say say free market, awesome, all the time, except when there's a monopoly. That's the, that's the basic. Even adam smith said that yeah yeah, yeah, uh.

27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is mijakovsky's post from uh march 17th. Apple restricts pebble from being awesome with iphones and he points out that their app is uh stuck. And this is really one of the big complaints people, a lot of developers, have about apple is the app store uh process is arcane, is opaque, is challenging, frustrating, and he's having a hard time with that because uh apple won't let his app store, uh app through to the app store.

27:44 - Padre (Guest)
Um, well, you know, I don't know where I love see.

27:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sitting here with a daily driver, which is the iPhone. I and, like mo, like many users, we love what Apple has done, but I also understand the issue, especially for third party developers, that Apple is maybe over controlling.

28:07 - Padre (Guest)
So I worked with a company that is exhibited at CES I'm going to leave their name out of it but they designed a product that works for both iOS and for Android, and they said they were able to work with some very competent Apple engineers on getting the product to work. What took them the longest time was getting Apple marketing to approve everything from the packaging to the font to how they write the instruction manual. So that's actually another level of the difficulty to work inside of a closed system. Apple is so perfectionist.

28:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they say they're protecting users. They're protecting the user experience.

28:44 - Padre (Guest)
By delaying a product for eight months until they get the right color on the box.

28:48 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But I think you know, if Apple wants to function that way, I think it is absolutely their prerogative. You know it is their company, their products, and while we could discuss the frustrations that developers and partners have with Apple, I think they've proved time and time again that it works really well for them because it works really well for their customers. And you know, I have an iPhone. I've had an iPhone for a very long time. I use a PC, but I also use a Mac. I have an Apple Watch, I have AirPods. I'm in the Apple ecosystem mostly except for work, but this is not the issue that the EU is trying to address here. Again, monopoly slash, monopsony, that's the problem. And we can complain about the way Apple handles their developers for marketing reasons, and those complaints are valid, but they're separate from the things that the EU is trying to achieve with these rules, except when they use those marketing hurdles as punitive.

29:53 - Padre (Guest)
So the company that I was working with in order to make all the issues go away, they took out the packaging that said that it works with both iOSos and android and it said only ios. Oh, and then suddenly everything went through, says oh, fine, right that sounds like they can't prove it but, it feels punitive it does.

30:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's another aspect of this, of this whole thing is that did they demand an apology, robert apple isn't shy about using all of these advantages or specificities or quirks, uh, to gain a competitive advantage, which is normal. That's what any company would do, obviously, but again, when there's a monopoly, rules are different mitchikovsky says we're going to try anyway.

30:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem is 40 of everyone who signed up still uses an. Uh for the pebble. The new pebble watch repebblecom still uses an iphone. So we're gonna make a damn ios app, he says. I guess we're gluttons for punishment. Apple will never change their ways unless you, the pebble curious iPhone user, complain loudly or switch to Android, which is also hard, because Apple tries its best to lock you into their platform.

31:16 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And the Apple Watch is one of the best tools they have to lock you in. I mean, the Apple Watch is literally kind of the only thing that if I were to go to Android permanently, I would really miss my Apple watch. I think everything else I could figure out a suitable alternative on Android.

31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little break. Great conversation. It's nice to have some people from across the pond, as it were Patrick Beja representing the EU today.

31:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I'm sorry to put you in that position. I was angry at all of these ideas for such a long time and I was the one saying but look, we have Android.

31:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have the alternative, the open alternative. In fact, Android sells better in the EU, does it not?

31:59 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, the issue is it doesn't matter if it sells better because the money is in iOS, the profit, the profit, and for developers, financial monopoly. Yeah yeah, issue is it doesn't matter if it sells better because the money is in iOS, the profit right for the profit and for developers.

32:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's great to have you notpatrickcom. He has, as many of us have, now abandonedxcom, formerly Twitter, and is on blue sky at notpatrickcom. Follow him there, father Robert balisar, you are where are you these days? You're on, uh, you're on blue sky, I see.

32:28 - Padre (Guest)
I am on blue sky. Uh, I mean, it just became so toxic on Twitter about six months ago and so I just gradually pulled away, and at the end of the last year I just pulled the plug entirely and I've actually been very happy on blue sky this guy is as close to the old Twitter twitter as anything for now I I haven't really had a bot problem. I haven't had a problem with people coming into a conversation just to be in a nuisance.

32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, fingers crossed yeah, I, I stopped posting on twitter when elon bought it. I kind of saw the, saw the future, but uh, I finally this week deleted the the x app from all my devices because I kept going to it and I, you know, I kept. It's like a traffic wreck, you can't.

33:12
I kept looking at it, I said stop it, I still go to it too yeah, it's hard admit yeah, it's hard not to look at it, but I realized the things I was seeing were not good for me or other other living things. So I.

33:26 - Padre (Guest)
I am so much healthier emotionally.

33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, now that I don't go to twitter exactly and harry mccracken from fast company.

33:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Uh, you are also on blue skies I'm well, I um, I use this app called open vibe which lets me post to blue sky mastodon and threads. So I use them all a little bit I'd say probably blue sky, the most mastodon, a little bit behind and threads somewhat, and um, and I'm off twitter and I found it remarkably easy to not, uh, keep returning to it.

33:57
I do look at it occasionally, just because if you're writing about tech, it's kind of you kind of need to look at it sometimes, but I thought I would be quietly still addicted, which turned out not to be the case at all yeah, well it's.

34:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is palpably worse. I mean it's not. You know, there's still a lot of people I respect there, like corey doctorow, but I've noticed, uh, on this show, there's been this gradual move. This is the first time, I think, on this show that nobody is on twitter at all. Um, gradually, our, our panelists have slowly been moving away, uh, from it. So there you have it. Uh, let's take a little break when we come back.

34:35
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37:54
Uh, google says it is testing removing its european news content, for one percent of users did this for eight eu countries. And guess what? That's what the data shows. According to google, that people visited google only slightly left softened when news was removed and, more importantly, from google's point of view, ad revenue did not significantly change. This is the reason for this blog post at google's keyword blog is to set governments on notice that, hey, you could start trying to make us pay for news links. We'll just leave. It's not going to hurt us, it's going to hurt you.

38:36 - Padre (Guest)
Uh, they did it in australia, they did it in spain first, um it's amazing how often this story keeps popping back up, because I remember, I remember covering the Spain thing when I was still living in California, right, and it's it's like no one learns. They don't need you, they don't have to have to rank your content. If you want them to take you off, they can take you off and they'll be perfectly happy. So why would you turn away free advertising for your content? It's, this is this is it's.

39:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I think Rupert Murdoch started this in Australia the link tax where, hey, you, google, are making money off of our content, so when you link to us, you need to give us money. Australia passed that law, canada passed a law to do that, spain did. Google withdrew uh facebook's withdrawn pretty much from uh canada and it turned out these companies uh don't really need that. They don't need the traffic. The newspapers need the traffic yeah, exactly google writes.

39:40
During our negotiations to comply with the european copyright directive, we've seen a number of inaccurate reports that vastly overestimate the value of news content to Google. So we did a little experiment.

40:06 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And it wasn't reduce our ad revenue, which obviously, you know google is gigantic. It's not this one thing that's gonna affect it. So I think they put it in a constant in a context that's favorable to them. But I do think this argument from the newspaper industry comes back so often, uh, and it doesn't seem to to ever die that I, I think they wanted to have a piece of data that they could earnestly show the newspaper industry to say you keep saying that you provide value to us. We assure you that's not the case. You, like you, don't have the cards to to.

40:48
To paraphrase, uh, someone in the oval office a few weeks ago like in this case, that's completely true. Like the newspaper industry has no leverage on google. The one thing they can demand, like recently the argument has morphed into you have to pay us if you use our links, but also you have to use our links. Like you can't not link to us anymore. Like because the argument has morphed, because Google is like okay, fine, if you want us to pay you, we won't include you in Google News or we'll shut down Google News. And the newspaper industry doesn't seem to understand what is happening there. So I think they really wanted to have an experiment, somewhat academic, to say look here, it doesn't change our bottom line, we won't cave, it doesn't change our bottom line, we won't cave. That being said, in all of those negotiations, um, there was usually and I think actually always money that google would cough up, and they referenced that in that, uh, very short blog post.

41:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They referenced the fact that they give money to the newspaper they gave canada, canadian news outlets a hundred million dollars and they continue to do so a year, yeah, yeah, which is not a lot for from Google's point of view. Meta, famously, when Canada passed the online news act in 2023, said fine, no more news for you and the the impact has not been on meta, it's been on Canadian news publishers, who faced substantial declines in online traffic, but it's. But there is a consequence, and this is kind of an interesting side effect canadians are consuming less news as a result of the ban. So when you take the news out of the search engines, out of the social networks, sure it doesn't cost the social networks or the search engines, but it does maybe cost something to the Canadian people.

42:48 - Padre (Guest)
How much of that is the change in the news industry itself? If you go back 15 years, the landscape of reporting across the world was very different. You still had a lot of independent reporting. You still had a couple of new shops that were really good at at their jobs at investigation. Now all outlets basically parrot the same talking points that get the same releases. They sometimes the wordings are the same on two top ranked sites. So it's not as if I need to use your search engine to find the story that's going to end up on your site anyways.

43:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well in the long run. Honestly, I feel like Google is in trouble. Anyway, I don't go to Google for news I guess some people still do but I use AI now and I think that's the real threat.

43:38 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think that the news outlets do at least somewhat of a better claim with AI because, you know, because the deal whether you wanted to be part of the deal or not with Google, was always you'd get traffic for if people went to Google and if we're talking perplexity or yeah, that's what I use, and and they weave together information from your content and you don't get traffic.

44:03 - Padre (Guest)
That seems to me to be a to be a little a more legitimate beef yeah, of course you've got altman saying that if you don't let us steal all that copyrighted material, we'll never have ai.

44:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So steel is a loaded word, father robert. Uh, are you shoveling?

44:17 - Padre (Guest)
into our read a book, are you?

44:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
stealing the book.

44:21 - Padre (Guest)
Uh no, you, you're reading it and remembering it, maybe even regurgitating it but if you have the text of of my book in your llm and I can actually find that text that is stealing, yes, yeah, but can you find that text?

44:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't. I think you don't. You have tokens right. So if you, uh, let's say you memorize a poem, should you pay the poet.

44:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think this is a very valid argument, but also the form changes the conclusion. If you're talking about if you're talking about, for example to do a very quick aside Moderation, for example, when you only have 10 outlets, moderation is possible. When you have social media that's fused out information continuously all the time and millions of pieces of content every hour, then the issue of moderation is different and I think that's why in the eu again, sorry to come back to that we've sort of somewhat, a little bit deputized um, the uh platforms themselves to take out the content that is egregious very quickly themselves and we can't put a judge behind every single piece of content. So freedom of speech is very wide, but the conversation becomes different and the arguments become different when you have, you know, people in a town square and national newspaper than when you have everyone being able to say anything about anything and it has global reach In this case.

46:06
To come back to AI, I think you're right, Leo. Obviously, when you read something and you remember it and it informs your creative process, I think that's not copyright infringement. However, if you industrialize it and automatize it and make it systematic on every piece of knowledge, then I think the conversation becomes different and the it is not actually copyright infringement. It's different, it's transformative. But I understand that someone might say the argument is not necessarily the same, the conclusion is not necessarily the same, and we should re-examine the thinking behind it before we declare yes, it's the same and it's not copyright infringement.

47:04 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It is a different process. The Atlantic had a good piece a couple of days ago about the fact that Meta trained Lama on an enormous collection of pirated books.

47:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes.

47:16 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And they had internal communications that made it pretty clear that Meta was not proud of the fact it was using pirated books, and they knew it. To me is using pirated content is an entirely different question than trading on stuff that you've either purchased or which is, you know, openly available for free is it.

47:36 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Is it different, though, if they had gone and purchased every single book, digitized it and trained their llm on all of those? Would it be different?

47:45 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Ben M. Well, I mean, if I as an individual go in and shoplift books from Barnes and Noble and read them, that's quite different than buying them from Barnes and Noble Trevor.

47:52 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Burrus Jr. Sure, but then the issue is the theft, not the training of the LLM. Right. They could have trained their LLM with legal purchase. Nate Hagens, what our producer Benito?

47:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
has always said is his. His real concern is these big, rich companies getting richer, based on absorbing content from writers, creators, artists.

48:09 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I know that a lot of publishers also wouldn't be happy if Meta had purchased all this stuff.

48:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The publishers would still hate it.

48:15 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
But I think Meta gives up a little bit of the right to get on a high horse if it uses pirated content, if it uses pirated content.

48:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, do you have, what do you have in france to protect uh websites, comment sections or social media uh against lawsuits? We have something in the united states called section 230.

48:41 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
oh my god the communications dec Act.

48:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there anything like that in Europe?

48:44 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't even know, because Section 230 has become such again I'm going to say the bedrock of the internet. I don't even know. I'm sure there's some legal mechanism in France as well and in the EU. If we do, it's probably very similar to Section 230. And I can't believe that it's now. Actually we've come to a place where it is under threat.

49:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There actually is a book, the 26 words some the 26 words that created the internet, which is based on the 26 words it's very simple of section 230, which says that that uh, social networks, networks, uh meta, uh, tiktok, my own sites, my mastodon site, my uh forums are not responsible if something, somebody puts something up there that it violates the law or is libelous, that that person's libel, but not the interactive computer service. It's simply no provider or user of interactive computer service should be treated. Simply no provider or user of interactive computer service should be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. That has resulted in, I think, a very vibrant, exciting, user-generated internet, because Google and Facebook and Twit don't have to worry about our liability. In fact, it's uh, it would be thrown out in court if somebody sues us over something somebody put on our mastodon instance.

50:14
However, it's at risk. Uh, paris martineau, writing in the information uh this weekend, points out that next week uh, senator dick durbin, a democrat, senator, lindsey graham, a republican, plan to introduce a bill that would set an expiration date at the end of next year for section 230, and I have to tell you, if that happens, I probably would shut down our forums, I would shut down our mastodon. I would turn off comments because I can't afford to go to court to defend uh somebody's posts on our sites the most.

50:56 - Padre (Guest)
the most disingenuous part of any attempt to shut down section 230, either from the Republican, republican side or the Democrat side, is they say this is necessary to stop the flow of misinformation on the internet and to stop the flow of defamatory information on the internet. But Section 230 specifically addresses that it's not an unlimited power to post, publish anything you want. There is a provision in Section 230 that says if someone finds copyrighted or otherwise offensive, slash, illegal content posted, then the website owner or whoever's actually hosting it needs to take it down. So there's a system in which you can submit a complaint and action needs to be taken against that content in a reasonable amount of time. There is no specific timeframe set, otherwise that hoster does become the publisher. So Section 230 already has a remedy for the things they say they want to fix by removing Section 230. That's the strangest thing. I don't know if it's incompetence of the law or they just don't understand how hosting works.

52:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but josh hawley, masha blackburn yeah sheldon whitehouse and amy klobuchar talking about unlikely bedfellows have all co-sponsored this bill. Dick blumenthal and peter welch also discussed joining his co-sponsors. The thing that's really important is this also gives and I think this is why the right doesn't like it it gives these social networks the power to moderate without getting sued. And if you take away their power to moderate, then you think X is bad now.

52:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The way. You probably know this better than me, but the issue there is that they can moderate without becoming essentially editors right, correct, without becoming liable for the content.

52:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not now publishers of the content.

52:54 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Right, yes, mike Masnick at TechDirt has a paper up that essentially says yes, it is incompetence. That is the issue. They don't understand what the law does in specifically for the um, the Democrat, uh senators that support that bill, his headline Democratic senators team up with Maga to hand Trump a censorship machine that is so weird and that is the issue.

53:19
The problem is, uh, the the Maga movement has been livid with the fact that the big internet companies are able to moderate misinformation and disinformation because, I mean, I I don't think it's actually politically it is charged, but I don't think it's political to say that a lot of their platforms run on I mean the MAGA platforms run on disinformation. Donald Trump lies all the time about everything. It's become very common and the fact that for many, many years, twitter and other platforms could say this is not true. They would label things you know, they had third party check, fact checkers. Label misinformation and disinformation which, by the way, has gone away on both Twitter and Facebook is a problem for the political movement of the MAGA party, and I think that's why I don't know why the Democrats want to get rid of Section 230, but that's why the Republicans want to get rid of it.

54:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It creates a world where moderation becomes incredibly difficult, and I honestly think that's what they want that Dick Durbin confuses actual criminals, who can and should be prosecuted, with the tools they misuse. He says it's like blaming the phone company for criminal conspiracies plotted over phone lines. The thing I want to say is you know, whenever these conversations come up and there will be debates over this and Congress will talk about this they always talk about Google and Twitter and Facebook, but what they forget is those companies probably can afford to defend themselves, but there are a myriad of small forums, chat rooms, discussion areas run by small companies like mine that absolutely cannot defend ourselves in court. We could not afford this and we would be immediately attacked by people who would sue us, and that would be that, if this passes, I will then shut down all of our interactive content, all of our chat rooms. I mean right now we have, we're streaming on eight different platforms and all of them have chat rooms open.

55:52
So I can see what people are saying about this. That would all go away. I can assure you that would have to go away Already. There's a fixie site, a fixie forum in the UK that is closed because of a change in the laws in the uk. He says I'm, you know, it's the small guys that are going to suffer. It's the forums that you participate in, the discords, that are going to go away. You, you know, x isn't going to go away. Facebook's not going to go away. They can afford this.

56:22 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't know if they're liable for every piece of content that is posted up there. Mark MANDELMANN JR. It's not going to be fun for them, I'm not saying that FRANCESC CAMPOY JR, yeah, I don't know that they can function.

56:34
That's the issue and, by the way it is set, to what is it? Sometime in 2027. I believe the idea is to force big tech to come to the table to find a solution. The problem is, what solution to what? Like what do they actually want? I no one knows, um, but I don't think in their intent they actually want to invalidate uh 230 by that time.

56:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want to negotiate ah but what are they going to carve out? You know klobuchar in 2021 proposed a carve out that said that the CDC and the NIH could take down misleading health information. That would be a modification which would give RFK Jr the right to take down any vaccine information on every social site. I mean any carve out is fraught with peril. Mike points out, even with section 230, if a website wants to defend its right to keep content up or take it down, winning such a case typically costs around a hundred thousand dollars, absent section 230 protection. So it's 130 000 100 000 with section 230 without these protections. Even if you ultimately win on first amendment grounds, you're looking at about two million dollars in legal fees. Now for meta or google. That's a rounding error. He writes for a small news site like tech dirk mike masnick's or a blog. It's potentially fatal.

58:02 - Padre (Guest)
It would certainly it's also fatal to something like twitter, twitter truth, social gap. Those are all gone because are they?

58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
can they afford? They can afford to defend themselves.

58:10 - Padre (Guest)
No, they can't afford it not, and I mean the most healthy among them would be Twitter, and Twitter is operating on razor thin margins. If anything you add the apparatus, you would need to respond to every challenge.

58:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's done what's sad is no way it's going to survive.

58:25 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It really feels like these senators don't even understand what they're legislating that doesn't seem to be at the crux of it and I, just as an individual with a few blogs, I'm worried. Uh, I have self-hosted blogs yeah as do I you can still

58:40 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
publish. Right, you can still publish. You just have to turn off, can't let?

58:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
comments be yeah, say something defamatory on there and I would get sued for that yeah.

58:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Is there a way to get out of it? By never moderating anything? Does that? It doesn't right, no good no, because it's still.

58:56 - Padre (Guest)
It's there's if they remove the safe harbor provision. It's no longer doable, it's no, it's no longer reasonable for you to be able to post anything that could cause offense to anybody. You break the internet.

59:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You break the internet, yeah, yeah well, just thought you'd like to know that will be uh on the uh. Fortunately, congress is completely dysfunctional and nothing can ever get through, but it is going to be on the table and what's really scary is it has broad bipartisan support. Uh, and that, to me, is very, very scary. We need to educate.

59:28 - Padre (Guest)
Anybody want to take bets on whether or not trump issues an executive order to remove section 230?

59:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
you know I wonder why he hasn't. He may have done it while we've been on the air don't give him any ideas all right, let's take a look, that's how it works.

59:43 - Padre (Guest)
But yeah, it totally works, you really?

59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't get many ideas he's got plenty of his own. Let's take a little break. We will come back with more. Father Robert Ballasare the digital Jesuits here. He's got a on the bottom, on the lower third. They're a plug for his app that he created, the Jesuit pilgrimage app at Jesuit pilgrimageapp. What is that?

01:00:04 - Padre (Guest)
So it was just something that some of us had too much grappa one night and they said, hey, why don't we do an app? And six months later, and a lot of recording and writing, we've got an app in multiple languages that show you basically the path that St Ignatius that's the founder of my order took as he was roaming around the world looking for enlightenment. It has some very nice recordings.

01:00:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do people follow the?

01:00:30 - Padre (Guest)
pilgrimage do they, do they like they do oh, that's cool so the because it's on your phone, it knows where you are and it will say, okay, you're near this site or you're you should go here, um, and we are improving it all the time. We're actually integrating it a little bit with, uh, the jubilee year that's happening in the Catholic Church right now.

01:00:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to go to Rome this year, I think you do, just to go through the Holy Door. The door has it been opened.

01:00:55 - Padre (Guest)
The door has been opened since December 24th.

01:00:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my goodness. So how often is that door? This is a door into St Peter's Basilica that is normally closed. How often is it opened?

01:01:08 - Padre (Guest)
It's only open during the Jubilee year, so that was 13 years ago.

01:01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not often You've been in St Peter's, yes, and if I could, yes, which is, by the way, everybody in their life has to see it, catholic or not, it's the most amazing architectural feat and, of course, the Pieta is there. There's so much beautiful artwork.

01:01:25 - Padre (Guest)
It's the pieta is there. There's so much beautiful artwork. It's just that's where the holy door is. So if you were standing at the pieta, if you were to look to the right, that wall is actually a door. They just they wall it up in between jubilee years, wow.

01:01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's open now and you can go through it and does it wash away all my sins if I go through that?

01:01:42 - Padre (Guest)
uh, okay, I'm going to give you the official spiel here. This is how it works, according to the Office of Faith. You can go through the door and every time you go through the door, you can get two indulgences one for you and one for a person who cannot be there. Oh nice. They only take effect if you go to Mass and confession in a reasonable time after you go through.

01:02:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Immediately. You just go. Well, you're going in, you go in. You confess you sit for the beauty. I bet them you've served mass in st peter's right I have at the big altar.

01:02:14 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, oh, of course, naturally, I've got my. I got my celebrate my, the little roman identification card, specifically, so I could do that. Oh my god, but, leo, so maybe, maybe I can advertise this I'm to jump back and forth through the door and then I'm going to sell the indulgences, because I don't think there's going to be any trouble with that.

01:02:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just, you know, get some post-it notes, write down somebody's name, jump through the door. Good thinking Used to work like that. I'm an entrepreneur. It did Back in the middle ages, yes a few centuries ago yeah, we, we had, we had words about that yeah, microtransactions we had. That was the answer. Oh my gosh, it wasn't our fault no, I'm using that, patrick.

01:03:00 - Padre (Guest)
We had the original microtransactions indulgences.

01:03:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
patrick beja also here, not patrick uh on uh blue sky, or not, patrickcom no notpatrickcom actually.

01:03:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
uh, I created my blue sky account it was not patrick and then they were like, oh you can you know use your domain to identify yourself? Yeah, yeah, uh. So I went and did that and didn't realize it would free up, not patrick, and it was before they had the protection system oh no, so somebody got, not patrick yes, somebody did, and I was very frustrated and angry. I wrote, I wrote them and, uh, and they were like, yeah, sorry, we didn't have that in place before.

01:03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So oh, I didn't even think about that. I I am leolaportme, which is also a website which means Leo Laporte is probably probably stole Leo Laporte, oh man, oh man. If you go to notpatrickcom you'll see all of his French language. Is Phileas Club still around you, still doing that?

01:04:01 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
it's actually back in a different format. Yeah, because the last time you were here you said you stopped the English language absolutely yeah, um, but I I relaunched uh the philly club because I wanted to talk about stuff and for other reasons, but it's a different format. I'm I'm alone and I do, every couple of weeks, a kind of uh, a letter from your friend, uh, from a different place, from outside the us, and I talk about something local and something international, um, and most recently.

01:04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are not completely insane.

01:04:34 - Padre (Guest)
I would debate that completely not insane what do?

01:04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
just add a I should. I shouldn't ask this, but I should, I shouldn't ask this. But yeah, you're, you're compatriots. When you look across the atlantic at what's going on in the us right now, I bet there's probably imagine a mix of points of view no, no mix, no, we're concerned the the, the real thing is concerned um, very concerned they understand that there will be a change every few years in our governance right so.

01:05:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So that's one of the things I I uh discussed in one of the latest episodes.

01:05:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes us it makes us nutty because it swings like a pendulum back and forth.

01:05:23 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, it's broken, it doesn't matter. The problem if you're thinking internationally the trust is broken, especially with issues of conflict like military conflict. If you can't trust what happens every two or four years, then you have to prepare for a situation where you can't, and so, especially militarily, you can't plan for well, maybe Maybe they'll be back in four years.

01:05:58 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Maybe not.

01:05:59 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But maybe not, and maybe in three years things will improve for America's standing in the world. But then maybe four years later, you know, jd Vance runs or Donald Trump Jr runs, and with the same platform. So you know it makes me crazy.

01:06:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A 200% tariff on French champagne, that's what makes me crazy, that's just not right.

01:06:25 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We're not. We're not big and I could, if you want, to hear more about what I think about all of this I Phileas in details about in detail in the Phileas Club.

01:06:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm very interested yeah, I mean, we're not a political show, we're talking about technology, but I just, you know, I just was curious what, uh, what the with the?

01:06:42 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
thought, concern, I think concern, and uh, this man.

01:06:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know, I know we no longer have any friends in Canada. They just, they just written us off completely. We're our cousins from.

01:06:53 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't know.

01:06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know I.

01:06:56 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't want to prolong this too much, but I think everyone understands um what is happening in in the US and it's not the will of the majority of Americans which is actually even more concerning.

01:07:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's more concerning, yeah, and Mr Harry McCracken, the technologizer fastcompanycom lives in San Francisco. Say hello to Marie.

01:07:22 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Hi Will. What you working on uh well, I just had, uh, a big story come out. Um, we, um our print issue just came out and the cover story is on waymo and I wrote that and that's also available on our website. And that was based on talking to a bunch of people at waymo and outside waymo and people who love waymo and people who are skeptical about the whole question of whether self-driving cars are really necessary to make the road safer.

01:07:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Waymo is dominant in San Francisco. You cannot drive down the street in San Francisco without seeing multiple Waymo vehicles.

01:08:01 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Totally, I mean in theory, self-driving cars, because they drive rather cautiously, help improve safety partially.

01:08:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They drive like a grandma.

01:08:11 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, the car is behind them, can't drive any faster than they do.

01:08:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Must drive people crazy.

01:08:16 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
On the other hand-.

01:08:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because I drive like a grandpa and I know people are so annoyed behind me.

01:08:20 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
On the other hand, there was also just recently a report about the number of parking tickets Waymos have gotten, which is extremely large and they often cause problems by parking where they should not or stopping where they should not.

01:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You had interviewed Larry Page back in 2013.

01:08:37 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Oh yeah, yeah, that was my newsletter last week. Larry does not talk to the media anymore and has not since shortly after I talked to him. But even back in 2013, the Google self-driving car was a big story and we talked a fair amount about it for the story I did for Time Magazine and I dredged it up and it is 12 years old but it's some of the most recent stuff he's said about self-driving cars and it talked about the fact that when he was at Stanford, even before there was a Google, he was excited about the technology and he was already impatient and he kind of wished that somebody else had started tackling it 10 years before Google did.

01:09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your cover story Hail Waymo. I get it. I get it.

01:09:23 - Padre (Guest)
Waymo should be proud that their car has never run into an Acme style Wiley coyote oh my God.

01:09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mark Rober, the uh NASA engineer turned YouTube star, drove uh several Teslas through a wall that was painted to look like a road like like Wiley coyote and it made it. It's cute because he, I guess he pre-cut the hole. So a roadrunner looking hole in the in the wall it's.

01:09:56 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's kind of dumb, isn't it?

01:09:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it doesn't prove anything like well you don't want to drive around where there might be a coyote drawing pictures of the highway.

01:10:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean in theory. It might say something about whether lidar is important or not that was the point, right right the camera can't distinguish I.

01:10:10 - Padre (Guest)
I understand that, but it's such a specific case you're never going to encounter this in actual it's a typical youtube link grabbing headline on the other hand, way most have, way most happen you're never going to encounter this, but I mean I'm, I am guaranteeing you at DEF CON this year, someone is going to do it of course.

01:10:32 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I mean you can do it, you can do it, but there are a million things you can do that you know. Here's the thing nails on the road.

01:10:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we've learned do not paint a Horizon with a road on your garage door? Yes, yes that would be a mistake, although I have to point out that later tests with uh subsequent tesla vehicles, including the some with the more recent full self-driving, successfully avoided running running into the fake road wall and even even uh, waymo's have been known to drive into wet cement, uh, which oh, I remember that which they can't tell us not dry cement.

01:11:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Oh, I remember that which they can't tell us not dry cement.

01:11:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's hard. Poor AI, poor AI.

01:11:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It is Okay. I just want to say I have had that article by Harry opened on my desktop for like three days. And I want to read it because I didn't realize until now that it's actually Fast Company and Harry who wrote it, but Waymo's dominance is incredible. We've been talking about the self-driving cars for 15 years, right, and at some point the hype cycle died and it went away and no one's talking about it and Waymo is doing it like we actually have self-driving cars.

01:11:50 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
That's it, like they're here and a lot of what a lot of the companies went away before they got there. And um and Waymo is only in a few cities. It's doing 200,000 rides a week, which is, you know, minuscule compared to Uber or Ly left. Isn't zooks coming to san francisco next? Uh, zooks is testing in san francisco and on on the strip in vegas that's the one that.

01:12:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That looks like it's out of west world.

01:12:15 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It doesn't have a steering wheel, but there is there there is some question about whether a car without a steering wheel and brake pedals is legal or not, and and zooks does not have it all the uh. The way mows that are currently on the road are converted conventional cars, so jaguar.

01:12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Huh, I think it'd be kind of fun to ride in a zooks, but I've never even ridden on a way mow.

01:12:40 - Padre (Guest)
It just makes me, the whole thing makes me scared and I want to see how a way mow would do in rome.

01:12:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that looks very different from anything it's scanned first of all, it couldn't fit down half the streets, so there's a problem there. They are walking in Rome and, uh, you pedestrians and vehicles, especially in the old part of town, are really in competition for a very narrow strip of uh Street. So you're walking in the street and Lisa's constantly pulling me over. I said they're not going to hit me, so she looks it up how many uh pedestrian deaths occur in Rome? It says well, the statistics say yeah, no that's not good.

01:13:23 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The ultimate test is the uh Charles de Gaulle Etoile here in Paris. Oh, that's crazy.

01:13:29 - Padre (Guest)
200 meters away from here, not the Arc de Triomphe, not the little circular. Yes, that's the one. That's the one.

01:13:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because the roundabout rules are different for that one roundabout, no, they're the same, but it's just chaos.

01:13:40 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You have 12 major arteries coming into that one roundabout. I thought that. No traffic lights.

01:13:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's crazy normally in a roundabout. The cars in the roundabout have the right of way well, in theory they do.

01:13:53 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The last time I was in paris my thing was once you enter the roundabout you never leave.

01:14:01 - Padre (Guest)
I think I did like 12 laps just trying to figure out where the heck I'm supposed to go ironically, it's very safe because everyone's scared to death.

01:14:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um except for pedestrians do not walk across they do not walk there no

01:14:13 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
there are. I mean, there are several cities in china that have robo taxis, and some of those chinese streets are also kind of crazy, so uh, but see, if all the cars were talking to one another, you could.

01:14:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could actually navigate this kind of thing safely, because you know it's the after you, Alphonse, no, after you, Alphonse, they would. They would kind of.

01:14:33 - Padre (Guest)
No, no, no, they're French cars, so that'd be.

01:14:38 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, but I think, I think the hype cycle is burying the fact that we essentially have self-driving cars in many, not everywhere. Not here or in rome, yes, but in, in, like they're here. And 10 years ago we were like, oh, they're coming, they're coming. No, it won't. And they're here, that's here, they're working.

01:14:56 - Padre (Guest)
Two, two right now yeah, it's crazy I drove a land rover here with all the new avoidance features on it.

01:15:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does not work in italy well, the first time we got swarmed by vespas, the thing went crazy and it didn't matter.

01:15:21
All right, we're gonna take a little break. Uh, I hope you're having fun, I am. This is this week in tech, our weekly roundup of the week's tech news. We'll talk about tick tock next. Uh, they say it's gonna. The sales are gonna wrap up soon.

01:15:31
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01:18:28
Jd vance says the tick tock deal uh should become clear early next month. Uh, he said friday. He expects the outlines of the deal that allows tick tock to keep operating in the us will become clear by early april. There will almost certainly be a high level agreement that satisfies our national security concerns. It's so funny really. We're still concerned about that, are we? Uh allows there to be a distinct american tick tock enterprise. He told nbc this in an interview aboard air force two a week ago. Um, he's the guy doing the negotiation, according to president trump, but he didn't say anything about who might buy it.

01:19:09
The information reported that oracle has emerged as a leading contender to play a major role in the deal. Oracle has been running that was project texas that oracle's been storing tick tock's data for american citizens in texas in oracle servers for at least a year or two. Now TikTok owner ByteDance is hoping the Trump administration will prove a deal based on the same contours of Project Texas and that it would store the user data on Oracle servers in the US. Oracle would review the app's algorithm. Review the app's algorithm.

01:19:47
Meanwhile, of course, congressional aides are a little concerned about. Well, what does that mean? Here's Larry Ellison just sitting there in the White House. That's actually back when they were talking about the project Stargate. Oracle met with top aides on Capitol Hill to talk about how they plan to work with TikTok in the United States in the coming weeks. April 5th is the deadline. You think this deal will be done. Are we going to be safe forever now from tick tock? Are we even worried about tick tock now that we know the chinese hackers are sitting in our phone system and the phone companies can't do anything about it?

01:20:34 - Padre (Guest)
you know, leo, honestly, so much has happened since, since this was first pushed back. It's almost comical to think I'm we're still who cares anymore. Nobody cares, right I? I I mean, look, if you were concerned that tick tock was destroying our youth because it was destroying their, whatever it is that you were, you were arguing that's not going to change just because a us company owns it. It just means that a us company is now going to misuse that information. Uh, if, if you were hoping that tick tock's going to go away, that's far too big to make it go away. Even if a deal doesn't come by on April 5th, there's going to be another executive order that's going to further push this down the road. I'm having trouble caring, honestly.

01:21:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, as soon as it came out and the phone companies themselves said there's nothing we can do about chinese hackers listening to your phone calls, I figured you know the tick tock is minor compared to that all right, can I convince you?

01:21:35 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yes, it is still an important issue. Yes, please hit me. Everyone is seems to be concerned about the data aspect of TikTok being owned by, essentially, the Chinese Communist Party, and while I understand that it is part of the concern, I think it pales in comparison to the algorithm issue which gives. So would you agree that media can have an influence on what is a concern being discussed in any society? Sure, yes, of course, absolutely.

01:22:22
Information, not like news, but just consuming content in a country, becomes a problem because the algorithm can be tweaked by the government of China, which is not a full friend of the United States, or France, for that matter, and tweaking the algorithm in maybe subtle ways, maybe not so subtle ways, can present to you disinformation, misinformation, certain types of opinions that some people might take as fact or influence their thinking. It is a political weapon and actually we've seen this in Taiwan in an article which I don't remember where it was published here, but it was criminally underreported on, about how the sentiment of national pride in Taiwan has been steadily going down in younger people who primarily use TikTok, and you've seen, in Taiwan specifically, some content that shows up in young Taiwanese feeds that show China in a more favorable light.

01:23:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That of course don't discuss.

01:23:53 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You know the more unsavory aspects of the Chinese totalitarian regime. And it's funny. There were elements that showed that it was through TikTok, elements that showed that it was through TikTok because there were some slang words, slang Am I saying this right? Yeah, keywords, slang words that were from rural Chinese areas that started entering the Taiwanese youth language, and they showed up through TikTok. So the problem is not so much data, the problem is the influence that a massive media can have on society and on the opinions of people that consume it, and that's not just TikTok, it's media in general. But, as you well know and discuss often, rupert Murdoch had to become an American citizen right before he could buy Fox News, correct?

01:24:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh boy, was that a long time ago.

01:24:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Sure, but it is, and it really did protect us, didn't we, against Australian influence in our national media. No, but if China has an influence through TikTok tock on american youth and american, the american public in general you're not wrong, in fact really.

01:25:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, there seems to be a lot of evidence that the reason this bill started was because the anti-defamation league the jewish anti-defamation league didn't want to be able to control the anti-israeli propaganda on TikTok and didn't feel like they could control it. So they went to Congress and they said you know, we need you to suppress TikTok. They have actually called for TikTok to submit to an independent anti-Semitism audit.

01:25:44 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean also to Patrick's point. It seems totally clear that even in the us um tiktok is suppressing stuff about the uyghurs, who the chinese government, of course, would prefer you to not think too much about.

01:25:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I do find that that troublesome but I also should point out that we are very happy to have chinese and russian disinformation on xcom they have plenty of outlets that are owned by the united states for their disinformation. But see, that's.

01:26:18 - Padre (Guest)
That's why I don't care about tick tock because, patrick, the problem that you described, it's not a tick tock problem, it's a media problem. I can do exactly the same thing that you described that the Chinese state can do on TikTok with micro buys on meta or Twitter. So I don't have to own the company to be able to get the influence. The companies exist and they're more than happy to take my money. I can micro target the people that I think are most acceptable to the message that I'm trying to push.

01:26:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, we showed that that actually was in effect in the 2020 and the 2016 elections so, yeah, the, uh, the, the trump campaign had it facebook people embedded in the campaign, clinton campaign turned it down. Maybe they should have paid attention, uh, in 2016.

01:27:03 - Padre (Guest)
there is also, if you're talking about, privacy.

01:27:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's also the issue that we have no privacy regulations in the united states. Data brokers collect all the information they ever could want, including our social security numbers, and sell it, and to the highest bidder, which includes often foreign governments like china. So tiktok isn't collecting anything that china can't get otherwise. China has other ways to propagandize american youth, ample ways I. I mean I agree with you, patrick, there, tick tock isn't a vital service, you know. I mean, we'll survive without tick tock. And I should confess I have a little bit of uh conflict of interest here, because my son's career uh started because he went viral on tick tock as a tick tock chef. So, um, I see the I. This is my problem. There are a lot of creators, there are a lot of talented people who have made and tick tock is advertising this all the time, by the way who've made their businesses and made their careers on tick tock. Who will lose that outlet for uh, for an opportunity to go viral.

01:28:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Leo, both can be true and it is very true. I I use tick tock a lot uh as a consumer and I also post a little bit on it, but it's I think it's an awesome platform. It doesn't change the fact that if it becomes one of the main uh entertainment outlets of a country, the fact that it is controlled essentially by the government of an adres an adversary government is a problem. Um, and I understand what you're saying, uh, father. It is also possible to micro target and to do similar-ish things on other platforms. Doesn't mean you should just be happy that they have the keys to the one most used platform in the country right and the article I mean honestly, there's no loss if TikTok goes away.

01:28:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think because any creator, then moves to Instagram. I just feel like there's a little bit of conflict of interest, that Meta would be very happy to see TikTok go away so that their platform Of course.

01:29:06 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Of course there is, obviously there is, obviously there is. All of these things are true at the same time. Yeah, all of that can be true.

01:29:12 - Padre (Guest)
I don't want to spend energy addressing tick tock. I want them to address the larger problem the ability to buy misinformation, the the fact that truth is now how do you fix that in a country where the first amendment is problem?

01:29:26 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
to fix. That is a very difficult problem to fix and I'm very concerned by it. I think that's putting us in a very difficult situation, but I don't think we could find a solution to that problem that would satisfy everyone if we talked about it for 15 hours. I think TikTok is a more specific issue that can be. I don't tick tock to go away. I don't. I like it. I spent a lot of time on it. But the fact that the the control of the algorithm, is a problem. It's not even about the algorithm. It's the control of the prominent media by a foreign, foreign adversary.

01:30:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The article I was talking we have enough adversaries in the United States that concern me. Now, you do, yeah.

01:30:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Now you do. Is TikTok pushing Taiwan's young people closer to China? It's a Financial Times article from January 17. Yeah yeah, and I encourage everyone to read it because it's a subtle thing the way they're doing it, but it seems I don't want to speak in absolutes it seems to be showing that the Chinese government is using TikTok to specifically do what we're fearing they could do elsewhere.

01:30:35 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
TikTok has also been pushing America's young people closer to Donald Trump, and I think Donald Trump is aware of that, and so the odds are probably pretty slim that TikTok goes away. They can, I mean, if a deal is not ready, they can just keep kicking the can down the road indefinitely.

01:30:53 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, and a huge.

01:30:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Republican contributor Jeff Yass owns about a third of TikTok, so that's also an issue.

01:31:01 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
There's no one to stand up for the Trump administration to actually do away with the service.

01:31:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It's not going away and I would be very interested to know. There was a line about Oracle checking the algorithm. I would be very interested to know exactly how that's going to work and how often they're going to check it. Are they going to check every change to the algorithm? Like every time they change a line at a thing? There's someone at Oracle that's that's going to look at it and say, yes, good, you can push it, or not?

01:31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
like that seems weird here is, uh, the the piece actually referring to the Financial Times. Piece in the Taipei Times saying tick-tock could be affecting this is from January affecting views taiwanese. Compared with other platforms, tick tock's algorithm pushes a disproportionately high ratio of pro-china content. You know what, if I were, uh, the taiwanese government I'm, I could see suppressing tick tock absolutely so that's not an issue with with the algorithm.

01:32:02 - Padre (Guest)
You, you can't fix that by fixing the algorithm. You fix that by saying we're not going to sell, saying we're not going to sell advertising space, we're not going to sell micro-targeting to certain entities or we're going to fact check what they want to push that again. And, as Patrick has mentioned, that is a much bigger conversation and a much bigger problem. But until we're willing to sit down and say, oh, it's not just tock, it's, we have to adjust the entire industry.

01:32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I just feel like we are rearranging deck chairs on the titanic. Yeah, I, you know, I I do feel like, uh, it's one small part of a larger chinese influence operation and I guess the question is okay, let's say you close, tick, tock down, is everything okay now? No, yeah, no, no, it hasn't improved anything. It's just one venue of dozens well, no, you're saying.

01:32:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Is everything okay? Then no, but it hasn't improved anything. I would disagree with that. It fixes a probably hopefully a small thing, and it's not even it fixes something for now. I really don't think china is push, is manipulating the algorithm today to it's for future, this or that. I don't. Yeah, it's something for the future, like I'm sure. If there is a pro-trump um crowd on tick tock, I'm sure it's genuine.

01:33:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not, you know China tweaking the algorithm there well, everything on TikTok is originally created by an individual. The algorithm is what surfaces it and, uh, it can, and you're right that they can.

01:33:42 - Padre (Guest)
But it feeds back because people will create content. We think, yes, that's right, that's true henry says that he's.

01:33:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My son says that he says the way he succeeded on tick tock was watching carefully what went viral and they making more of that something I should have probably done years ago but for some reason I've. Just I can't figure that out. I don't know he he always says that to me. He says, dad, your socials are god awful. I said, yeah, we're trying, we're not. We're trying to be unsuccessful. That's our goal.

01:34:12 - Padre (Guest)
We don't, we don't want it, his first viral video jousting on a hoverboard in a dorm? Yes, I think that that's.

01:34:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's you're right yeah, it was on uh talk super, whatever that that show was early days. Was on uh talk soup or whatever that that show was early days. Uh, when he was at uh CU Boulder, I gave him a hoverboard his friend, his roommate, actually, no, I accidentally bought two hoverboards by accident that is the least surprising thing I've heard so far. When you have two hoverboards, what's the first thing you gotta do is joust, naturally, yeah, yeah, so I guess I'm responsible for all of this.

01:34:55 - Padre (Guest)
You created Tick Tock, leo. That was you.

01:34:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You did late night Instagram purchases. That's really the problem. If they ban that, I'll be very happy. You're watching this week in tech, our show today, brought to you by. We'll have more with father Robert, patrick Baja, harry McCracken, the technologizer, in just a moment. But first a word from Melissa, the trusted data quality expert. Since 1985 I've been talking to Melissa's folks and they have really moved into the AI sphere with acquisitions and it's really interesting. They're so smart. It's really interesting what they're doing.

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Go to melissacom slash twit. M-e-l-i-s-s-aa. Melissa dot com slash twit. These guys are remarkable in what they're doing and I think you should find out more melissacom twit. I know they can help your business. Thank you, melissa. They've helped our business and you support us when you use that address melissacom slash twit. So Pavel dorov has come home. You, you, you've, you people have released him. We let him go. I think this was a victory for the french uh authorities actually, who arrest, arrested the founder of telegram, uh, saying he's not cooperating with law enforcement, uh. As a result, he immediately stepped up uh, you know their moderation, their investigation into illicit activity, uh. And I guess the french authorities at that point said okay, you can go. Is that what happened?

01:39:31 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
that's what it seems. Uh, that's what seems to have happened. It took a few months. Um, they held him for a long time.

01:39:38
Yeah, I mean held that, held him. He was probably in his you know luxurious hotel somewhere, um. But yeah, there was a lot of confusion about this story because there was a fear that the french authorities wanted to break encryption, which uh, actually, uh, the parliament tried to do like last week, which was outrageous uh, but ended up not happening, thankfully and of course, the brits have already done that with the investigatory powers act.

01:40:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure america will. Australia has has done the same thing. Encryption is under threat all over the world yes, including in france.

01:40:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The government has asked to include backdoors, which they say you know, oh, but they won't be backdoors. And then they describe them and they're backdoors and you're like, what are you talking of? Telegram? It wasn't about encryption, it was about metadata and the fact that Telegram as a company did not even respond to legal requests. It seems we don't have all the details, but it seems they didn't have any contact that could.

01:40:54
When you say, okay, we have this person talking to this person, we want times and maybe IP addresses I don't know what the level of of uh, uh encryption they have. They didn't get a response. Or there was one person lost in an office somewhere, and that's what's changed. And the um in the in the intervening months, they have apparently used some of their money to create a department that does that. So it really wasn't about encryption. It's not like the French government or the authorities were trying to get into private messages. It was really like at some point you're like come on, man, like we're just asking, we're being reasonable and you're the one not being reasonable and uh, it seems uh, he ended up agreeing that he wasn't being reasonable and uh acceded to the demands of the authority he was charged with complicity in crimes such as enabling the distribution of to see Sam child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking and Friday we know this.

01:41:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, the telegram is full of groups. It's one of the things telegrams does really well is these groups to do all sorts of illicit stuff and then refusing to cooperate with law enforcement when they made inquiries. Every big tech company cooperates to a point right. Putting a backdoor and end-to-end encryption is a bridge too far for some companies like Apple is a bridge too far for some companies like apple. But everybody, when, uh, you know, is provided with a subpoena or whatever you call it in france, a legal order from uh local authorities, will provide information, apparently information information. They have.

01:42:32
Now telegram has in fact, we talked about this on tuesday in security. Now uh scientists have finally kind of looked at what telegram is doing in its encryption. It's always done a roll your own encryption system which they claim to be strong but is in fact not uh standard, uh end-to-end encryption, uh well-known uh standard technologies, and these uh researchers said, yeah, it's just a tower of tower of Babel, it's not really. It's not really really encryption. I think Paval Durev's brother have you looked into that, robert, at all. What? The encryption of Telegram.

01:43:09 - Padre (Guest)
Well, I did at the start of Telegram, when we were evaluating it as a global communications platform, and, like you, I couldn't find straight answers on exactly what was used, what standards were going to be in place and whether or not there would be any records kept of the messages that we were sending back and forth. They had the option to turn off logs, but that wasn't enough for us. So then we just said no, but we use it as a distribution platform for generally public information, but we do not use it as a secure messaging platform yeah, uh, and no one should.

01:43:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
On the other hand, it's it's, you know perfectly fine to use is just kind of casual messaging. I always like to telegram uh quite a bit. In any event, uh, after durav was arrested this is almost a year ago, isn't it? It's been a while, is it? It has been a while? Yeah, uh, let's see durov. Uh was arrested in France. He just says last year this is the New York Times story he'd been barred from leaving France, but the prosecutor's office in Paris said on Monday the judge's handling his case had lifted the traffic restrictions. Uh, but he does have to go back to france april 7th for a hearing. Um, but immediately, oh, it was last august, so it wasn't quite a year, but last august, immediately. Uh, telegram seems to have moved quickly to uh give the authorities the information they wanted. So it worked, it worked. After being released from custody last year, he was required to check in at a police station twice a week. You're right, he wasn't suffering.

01:44:44
He has, uh, he has, by the way, I think, a joint dual citizenship with the uh united arab emirates in france. Right, he's? He's triple citizenship, I think, triple citizenship. Yeah, he's from Russia. Uh, in fact, telegram was created in Russia. Uh, putin forced him out, forced him to sell. He was, at the time, considered the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia because he had a social network. Um, after Putin forced him to sell, he went to Dubai and created telegram. Um, yeah, I, you know, I I feel like it's not unreasonable for these platforms to give authorities in the countries they operate in the information they request. I do feel like it's a bridge too far to force companies to break end-to-end encryption. This is what apple decided it couldn't do in the uk, and it but it. But it ended up being a victory for the uk, in my opinion, because apple withdrew its advanced data protection from the uk.

01:45:47 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So, um, so in fact no one can use it.

01:45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So no one has right. English users now have no protection, basically.

01:45:54 - Padre (Guest)
So uh you know, leo, every time I hear a government spokesperson say, oh no, but we'll keep the key, yeah right, sure we'll take care of it. I always think back to remember when the tsa published a photo of this super secret tsa skeleton key that could open all the locks, not realizing that the photo meant oh now anyone can create that skeleton key.

01:46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excellent yeah, and, by the way, those locks are still on the suitcases sold everywhere yep and uh and the plenty of people have keys these days I've got three of them.

01:46:26 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think we should, we should have three of them.

01:46:28 - Padre (Guest)
What do you have three for? You know, sometimes you never know when you're gonna need. Well, honestly, it's because we get guests into the career all the time and sometimes I get they don't know how to open up their own luggage. So I've got a couple sets.

01:46:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Hey, it's okay, I got the master key, wow I think we should put ourselves, pat ourselves on the back a little bit about this.

01:46:47
Uh, yes, I think so I think it's the relentless uh education that people like all of you have been doing for years. That means most of the time those laws don't go through because people understand now what seems like a reasonable idea oh, we'll just have the key and we'll give it to no one actually doesn't work. It's not. It's not, uh, an idea. That is that. That is instinct in instinctive, like you could think. It works right.

01:47:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've explained it enough that people now understand you know what did happen um in the United States?

01:47:28
uh, in 19 I think it was 1996 uh, the FBI convinced Congress to pass a law called kalia, the yeah, of course yeah, assistance the law enforcement Act, which provided a back door to digital Communications to law enforcement, because law enforcement say, hey, you know, we've been able to wiretap all these analog systems with these new digital systems. Uh, we can't get into them. So the back door was provided and that's exactly the back door that Chinese hackers used to get into the phone system so they could tap administration officials the same chinese hackers.

01:48:00
We can't get rid of because these backdoored systems are so prevalent and would be so expensive to remove and would take we'd actually. Somebody said, uh, somebody from the telecom said it would take us, we'd have to take the entire united states telecommunications system down for 12 hours to fix it.

01:48:19 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We're not going to do that is it hard coded in the hardware it's ss7, right?

01:48:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, robert, is that it would?

01:48:25 - Padre (Guest)
be, you would have to do a forklift upgrade. You literally have to rip equipment out. Yeah, in order to make this work, properly.

01:48:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's built into all the hardware.

01:48:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I'd be willing to live without communications for 12 hours.

01:48:36 - Padre (Guest)
If I would help that actually sounds kind of fun, I mean I'd be down here.

01:48:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, ari, good for you, just not on a sunday. Since then, we couldn't do twit yeah, I have other podcasts, you know. I mean, there's only a few days of the week you could actually do this without killing me imagine, imagine if that actually was the.

01:48:56 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I guess the. The solution is that you slowly upgrade the infrastructure over time and when you replace hardware you put hardware that hopefully doesn't have a backdoor.

01:49:06 - Padre (Guest)
The problem with that is, if you introduce new hardware with any of the existing hardware, there's a venue for them to infect the new hardware. Nice, so it wouldn't work. You'd have to rip it all out at the same time well, great, that was the, that was the lesson.

01:49:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we gave the FBI a back door. Uh, the FBI at times said great, what you know, this is, we're never gonna let anybody know. And here we are, you know, 15 years later, mo, almost 20 years later 30 years later?

01:49:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yeah, it worked for 30 years. What are you complaining about, leo? It was true, although we don't know how long they've been in the system, maybe they've been in the system for 29 years forever.

01:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
SS7 has been widely known to be broken for at least a decade so it's an evolution it solution.

01:49:56 - Padre (Guest)
It wasn't yeah.

01:49:57 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The solution is actually to never say anything on a system that doesn't have strong encryption, right, right? So you need, now more than ever, strong encryption everywhere.

01:50:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually I would be able to do the shows if they took down the telecommunications system. Nobody else would. But I have Starlink here. We're running on Comcast, which would go down.

01:50:21 - Padre (Guest)
I bet starlink is secure, right, robert, I don't have to worry, but the base station starlink terminates to ground somewhere and that's running on equipment that you'd have to shut that down. Yeah, amazon life, I'm sorry, not amazon alphabet has a starlink competitor we need.

01:50:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, let's get some Starlink competitors up in the sky as quickly as possible, right? Elon has way too much power, uh, at this point, uh, and you know he can turn off Starlink for anybody he doesn't like. He could right now say I don't like Leo and flip a switch. Uh, alphabet has. You remember Project Loon? This was where they were going to have balloons with lasers.

01:51:03 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I loved that thing that was from the same era as the original Google self-driving car.

01:51:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yep, yep, yeah, larry. Did Larry talk about Project Loon?

01:51:13 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
We did In time. We did a list of all the moonshots, some of which are totally forgotten. Waymo is one of the few that's actually happened and Loon kind of evolved into this thing that's happening.

01:51:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so Loon. They brought a Loon setup to the amphitheater.

01:51:28 - Padre (Guest)
Sorry, they brought a Loon setup to the very first Google IO that they had at the amphitheater, so you were actually able to go and touch and see the hardware.

01:51:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They weren't in orbit, they weren't even in. Were they in the stratosphere? Where were they so big?

01:51:44 - Padre (Guest)
balloons with, uh, basically, baskets hanging with all the equipment that you would need to be able to like the lizard of oz okay but the cool part of it?

01:51:53
the cool part of it was they would be auto launched. So whenever they needed more coverage or when once one balloon was going down, they'd auto launch and then, depending on where they have it on in altitude, would depend on that shows control, where it went right so they could bring it up and down, and these things could loiter for weeks and weeks on end. So very interesting idea. Not super practical and they tended to have issues with bad weather. So yeah, right.

01:52:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the financial times once again says that alf alphabet has spun off. Uh, this technology from project luna, and they are now putting these lasers on towers, giant towers, and to connect remote areas to the internet, they do they do.

01:52:39 - Padre (Guest)
I, uh I used a couple of them in, uh, the DRC, in Congo, in the DRC. So they are extremely useful when you have a stubborn last mile right problem where you just you can't run fiber A wireless link is either too slow or it runs into issues with interference. You can get 20 kilometers. You can get 20 gigabits per second, wow, yeah, the nice thing about it is the terminals, so you need two of them. They're going to a solid state, but right now they have a mirror system so that they will automatically adjust, so you don't have to get like super, super solid like you. But they are line of sight systems they are line of sight.

01:53:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is rain does. Does fog inhibit them? Does is there?

01:53:28 - Padre (Guest)
rain it can. It can do as long as it's not too heavy, but cloud cover and fog, that kills it yeah, yeah, so it's not super reliable, not super reliable. But if you've got an area like, I don't know, congo and most of Africa, there's nothing else you are going to be able to get line of sight and clear skies for 99 of the year. It's a lifesaver. I mean it saves so much money and the speed is amazing so this is, uh, they're calling it Tara t-a-a-r-a.

01:54:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know where that name comes from. It operates in 12 countries now, including India and parts of Africa. They've created a five kilometer laser link over the Congo River between brazzaville and kinsasha, which is the capital of the DRC um. It also supplements overloaded mobile phone networks at events like Coachella, the music festival. Yeah, okay, tara this is the Financial Times writing has a long way to go before it can compete with Starlink, whose 7,000 satellites generated an estimate estimated 9.3 billion dollars in revenue last year from 4.7 million subscribers. I'm one of them, uh, not because I I want to be, because I have no choice. It's comcast or starlink or nothing. Uh, and I needed, I needed, uh, redundancy, in case, you know, the Comcast goes out, which it does from time to time.

01:55:01 - Padre (Guest)
It's not a true competitor, though it's interesting technology. It is great for point-to-point deployment. It is great when you need a temporary, last-mile solution to deploy to something like Coachella or South by Southwest, where you just need to get some temporary towers to increase your bandwidth for an event. But it's not a global delivery system. It's not a permanent system. You're going to have all the issues that you do with terrestrial towers. So I want a competitor to Starlink. This, ain't it Okay?

01:55:33 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of this originates from Google wanting to reach the next billion people who were not on the Internet at all.

01:55:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yes.

01:55:43 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Sometimes because it was very hard to get the Internet that last mile to them, and so this, I think, has really been tailored for that, rather than Starlink, which is this massive global consumer product.

01:55:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This week, evan Feynman, former director of bead, the broadband equity access and deployment program just the name alone tells you they're probably in trouble in the trump administration. Uh, they provide grants to expand internet access across the country. Uh, the former director now former resigned and warned in a scathing resignation letter that Elon Musk intends to get rich at the expense of rural Americans. He wrote in a lengthy email obtained by Politico. Stranding all our part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by washington.

01:56:41
The infrastructure investment and jobs act granted 42 and a half billion dollars to the bead program in 2021. As of yet, no projects have actually begun and in a statement earlier this month as a commerce secretary, howard lutnick said that biden's woke mandates, favoritism towards certain technologies and burdensome regulations had prevented bead from connecting a single person to high-speed internet. Lutnick says they're going to rip out the pointless requirements and probably set up Elon to to provide that bandwidth. Elon was mad, he was hopping mad because he had tried to get to be one of the providers for bead and was refused. Uh, because it was, I guess, so expensive. Uh, they, I think they were also continuing costs.

01:57:37 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, continuing costs of Starlink are far more than installing a fiber network. Yes, a fiber network is way more expensive up front. You have to put a lot of capital outlay in order to make it work. But once it's in the ground and once it's connected, it's not just connecting rural communities, it increases the possibilities for those rural communities to use that fiber. So we're losing out on something that could be infrastructure for 10, 20, 30 years down the line in order to get something that will be obsolete in a year. That's not a good trade.

01:58:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No yeah, if I had fiber, I wouldn't need Starlink. Come to think of it. Uh, we haven't been able to get it up here.

01:58:17 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Uh, all right yeah, sorry, no, I'm just. You know, I lived, uh for six years in finland in a very rural area, incredibly rural. We had fiber. Um, yeah, I understand that it's not easy to lay out and and we didn't have fiber. I mean there were government uh subsidies and help, but it was essentially a community, half community have official project, so we did have to pay a lot of money but it was. It allowed me to work from there and I had faster fiber than I did when I was in France before I moved to Finland. The advantages of laying down that groundwork are immense and I still don't. I mean, I understand why it's not happening Like in a place like where you are, leo. I understand why, but it's such a shame that it's not more voluntarily encouraged and implemented by government efforts.

01:59:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can see the attractiveness of wireless solutions though. Right, you don't have to dig holes in the ground, um, it's quicker to set up it's awesome.

01:59:29 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, but it's a.

01:59:30 - Padre (Guest)
It's a quick temporary fix, as temporary yeah father said right we did the math on it and according to elon's plan at about year eight, it is now as expensive as it was to run fiber and then from then on it's way more expensive so again it's. If it's a one administration type thing, yeah, it makes sense because it looks good on paper, right, but for the course of a generation it is a horrible deal yeah, um, here's a fun one.

02:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, clearview ai that's the face recognition company that's used by law enforcement all over the country also has issues, of course. Uh, and have has been the cause of false arrests of people of color, because, if it's false, positives. They apparently spent nearly a million dollars in a bid to purchase 690 million arrest records and 390 million arrest photos from all 50 states. This is a story from 404 media, which does a great job on investigative reporting. Um, attempted is good news sounds like they weren't able to. For years, they've collected photos from social media websites like face. They just scrape facebook, linkedin and others and then they sell access to its facial recognition tool to law enforcement.

02:00:55
Um, new documents obtained by 404 media review that they spent a million dollars in a bid to buy all of this uh, arrest records and arrest photos, including current and former home addresses, dates of birth, arrest photos, social security by the way I say this again and again and nobody can believe me it's not illegal to sell Social Security numbers Nope, that's just mind-blowing Cell phone numbers and email addresses. The contract was signed in mid-2019. Ultimately, the deal fell apart after Clearview clashed with the seller about the utility of the data. Each company filed breach of con. They got, they got in a fight, breach of contract claims. Thank goodness for that, yeah, thank goodness.

02:01:51
Um, anyway, they're trying to. I guess is the point they're trying to collect this information that's working to acquire all us mugshots nationally from the last 15 years. By the way it, I don't know how it is in france, but in the united states, if you're arrested there's a mugshot, it doesn't mean you're guilty. But the fact is, if you have hooked, yeah, you just think you've been booked. The fact is that if a mug shot exists, anybody who could find that's going to say, well, obviously they're a crook.

02:02:24 - Padre (Guest)
It's probably not good that's why, if you ever get arrested, remember to smile, because you smile that dour yeah, no, always smile.

02:02:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, don't look unhappy, be happy, hi, I love it.

02:02:38 - Padre (Guest)
I'm being arrested uh, I mean you, can they? This would have succeeded if they had gone to a company like Palantir that's the problem.

02:02:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They went to the wrong company, yeah yep, yep.

02:02:49 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I think we're lucky that Clearview is not more competent, inept as inept as it is.

02:02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah they are too. By the way, this is not the first time. All right, I want to take a little break. Uh, come back with more. You're watching this week in tech fabulous panel with harry mccracken, uh, who you know. You interviewed larry page in 2013. The had the last interview, not quite the last, but almost. How was his voice? Was he able? Was he talking back then?

02:03:20 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
This was soon after. He started losing his the news came out about him having some issues. So actually the story addresses that. But the main thing I when I played back my old recording, the main thing I was struck by was that old audio recordings sound terrible just because microphones have gotten so much better. I must have recorded it on my ipad at the time and it's. It sounds like we did it underwater, just just because the quality has gotten so much better since then it's amazing, isn't it?

02:03:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
technology never ends, never stops moving. Also, patrick beja, we always love having you on and it is getting later and later.

02:03:57 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I'm sorry, it's almost midnight now, uh it is a quarter past midnight, oh, but uh no, you keep me energized. I'm sorry for being the, the angry european. No, that's.

02:04:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why you're here. You're here to be the angry european.

02:04:13 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Shake your fists say that's exactly you.

02:04:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You have been to France and the father, robert balisier, who, as I said, is a Colossus who astrides both continents. Well, and he's pretty good.

02:04:30 - Padre (Guest)
You look good in shades, you, you look dangerous sort of a future so bright, I gotta wear shades, shades it's great to have all three of you our show today brought to you brand new sponsor.

02:04:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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02:07:49
Scientists always love any story that begins with. Scientists achieve record-breaking fusion stability, bringing us one step. Everyone and guess what? They're french scientists. So you know they're good scientists in france have just shattered a fusion energy record holding plasma. It's hard to hold plasma. They've held it longer than ever before. Big step toward nuclear fusion. We keep making these steps. Uh. The french atomic energy commission in southern france has held, maintained a plasma field for 22 minutes. Uh. Stability obviously is important. The particles are at 100 million degrees celsius, which uh is in freedom units. 1.8 million degrees fahrenheit. Uh, atoms collide at incredible speeds. That's where the plasma comes from a superheated, electrically charged gas. But maintaining that stability is challenging and the 22 minute record is a significant improvement over previous attempts.

02:09:01 - Padre (Guest)
You know, leo, I love science and I love fusion technology. I love the advancements that they've been making, but as much as this is sort of big headline science, the issue is no matter how long you're able to maintain a fusion or even a fission reaction in a controlled environment. The mechanism that we use to convert that into usable electrical power goes back to the steam engine. We haven't made any massive strides in the conversion of this energy directly into electrical power that we can use to power still have to turn a turbine to generate electricity with steam yeah yeah, this is.

02:09:38
This is just a bigger fire, it's a bigger boy, but it's a bigger fire, that is, that burns not coal, not oil, but water.

02:09:48 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's a start right, but the thing about fusion is that for people I'm sure everyone knows, but it is it essentially means unlimited energy, correct, and like we're getting we have enough advancements uh in the. As you've mentioned, leo, in the past few years there's been like significant improvements and advancements uh to the, the, the experiments that we could imagine in the not too distant future that actually working. The problem is now it still eats up more energy to create that reaction than it puts out, so it's really not usable at all yet.

02:10:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Until you have a net gain in energy, you're not doing anything important.

02:10:34 - Padre (Guest)
But even then they're talking about the net gain of how much power you have to put into to start the fusion reaction and then create the magnetic bottle to contain the fusion reaction versus the amount of heat that it puts out. It's not even factoring the fact that we're going to lose a massive percentage to the the heat and mechanical loss of pushing it through a steam engine so you need a lot of net a lot of net this is part of a broader international effort to create fusion.

02:11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The international thermonuclear experimental reactor, itair, is being built in southern france. It's a collaboration of china, the eu, india, japan, south korea, russia, the us everybody's trying to do this and they're working together which is pretty damn impressive to build the world's largest tokamak um. It will stand 30 meters tall, weigh 230 sorry, 23 000 tons, and they're the primary goal to achieve a 10-fold energy gain, in other words, producing 500 megawatts from 50 megawatts of input um and so there are two things here.

02:11:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
First of all, this isn't going to be practical, like we're not going to have lights lit up by fusion reaction for the next few decades probably I don't think you know, it's not until we probably won't be here anymore. But imagine a world it changes everything. That's yeah. Where energy is essentially, essentially, free, it is insane the impact on society that it would have.

02:12:01 - Padre (Guest)
Like that's the most scarce, that's a post-scarcity world, right? Yeah, that same technology used by the sun.

02:12:08 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It changes everything. It changes everything. Yeah, and like the first thing you think well, maybe not everyone thinks about that, but when you think about AI and big uh data centers, the first thing at least I think about AI and big data centers, the first thing at least I think about is okay, where are we getting the energy from Right and how much is it going to cost energy? Wise? That's the main constraint. That's what half what Jensen Huang spent half his keynote talking about. Almost last week. He was like your, your gains, your business, uh uh uh, profits are going to be constrained by how much energy you can have. Like. This is the main concern. So once we have fusion, it's going to change everything. However, it's not coming for a while and oh, man something.

02:12:53
Oh, let's get my hopes up works really well and that is the next best best thing, and that's uh like no fishing, nuclear nuclear reactors yeah nuclear

02:13:08
reactors can actually take the waste from previous generation reactors and use it to yeah, and and it seems like AI is pushing a lot of companies, including big tech companies in the US, to kind of get the financial impetus to fight the negative image that nuclear has in the US and elsewhere and actually invest in nuclear because it is. It's not super clean, but it's definitely uh decarbonated I don't know if that's a term in english and it it creates a lot of energy, um, and, and it is a solution to a lot of our problems. Until we get fusion uh going. In france we have, I think, something like what is it? 70 percent of our energy is, is uh that's down right, you.

02:14:01
You were 80, I believe, at one point, and that's it's yeah, no I think it's more I I don't have the exact basically, we don't have to worry about energy because we have so much nuclear, uh and and it's a specific thing that we have in france and it is old model reactors like it's the ones that we were building in the 70s. The new generations are much, much better and more efficient than recycled and safer waste product.

02:14:27 - Padre (Guest)
Yes, you can't melt down a Gen four reactor. It's physically impossible because they've designed the fueling system so that if it gets to the point where it's an out of control reaction, the pellets actually expand and it shuts down the reaction it's, I mean, gen 4 would be amazing, except for the fact that we had three mile island and chernobyl and we are so afraid as a nation the united states, I'm talking about that we don't even want to talk about nuclear power yeah, unlike france, germany just decommissioned all of its nuclear power plants.

02:14:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They took them all offline but ai is.

02:15:01 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You know, that's the beauty of capitalism yeah, we need that. We need the power now and now, uh, who is it like? Uh, google, meta and someone else went and signed, uh, the agreements of I can't remember the name of the organizations. This is, it's essentially promising try vying to triple the amount of energy, uh, these new modular, small modular, uh nuclear power plants.

02:15:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you mentioned GTC. I completely forgot this was just this week, jensen Wong, nvidia's uh GPU technology conference, which is now a lot of it's about, ai. Uh, were there any big stories coming out of that? What were the stories coming out of it?

02:15:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I, we didn't really cover it I think there were two interesting aspects of it. Of course, jensen huang being jensen huang is uh the story. He's so cool, uh, in a way, that I'm kind of scared to point out, because the last tech giant that was cool turned out to be so cool. But there are two things. First, he is laying out the plans for AI GPUs or AI chips for the next like three or four years, so that companies can plan what they're going to buy and what they're going to do, and in big details. But the other thing, the most exciting thing I think to our audience is going to be, from GTC and from other outlets as well, other companies as well the progress in robotics.

02:16:36
I think it is incredible what we're seeing in robotics aided by AI, of course, but not just that mechanically as well. There's Gemini robotics that was announced two weeks ago, I believe, and it seems like I don't know if you've seen the new version of Atlas and there are a few other companies that create robots that don't even need the big wires that connect them to the um power supply and such, and they mechanically uh move in a way that is so they can do so much, uh, like the. The can do so much like the machines themselves, the articulations, the power that they put into the limbs, they can do movements that are incredibly lifelike already, and then you have AI that enable these situations, these movements in context of a request or a changing environment. I think I we're maybe getting into the beginning of a new robotics hype cycle. Is this?

02:17:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
going to be the year of robots. Everywhere we're going to see robots.

02:17:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, maybe not this year, but I think in the next five years. I don't know if they're going to be financially viable. Uh, it seems like it's going to be very expensive, but I think they're going to become extremely capable, like we're seeing robots rise up.

02:18:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was going to say the little robot that he brought out was very cute. Was that autonomous or was it? Was there somebody with it?

02:18:09 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yeah, it seemed to be autonomous. It's a joint project between them and Disney and someone else, but the more interesting ones there. So one thing that they're doing at NVIDIA is thanks to their digital twins technology, which is Omniverse, and Cosmos and another technology together. Essentially, they can train AIs to do things in actual environments, because the physics simulation is so true to actual real world physics they can train AIs faster than they could train the physical items in a sufficiently realistic environment digital environment that they can do it really fast. And so the robots become trained with the AI models that are dedicated to that. And, as I was saying, gemini has a robotics version of the model as well, and we have companies that are creating the mechanics of it that work like you can see robots doing cart flips and, uh, you know, like even more impressive than boston dynamics, uh, uh, atlas.

02:19:28
Even the new version is vastly improved yeah, the new one is like doing somersaults and cartwheels and all sorts of stuff and it's very it's human shaped in the sense that it doesn't have the bulky backpack it doesn't have like it works. I don't know how much battery life it has, but I think we're seeing robots uh, arriving like now huang says this is going to be the uh, the year of the uh personal robot.

02:19:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the uh. This is the the little jensen uh robot.

02:19:58 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, I can't remember how it's cool. Let's be honest, that's wally it looks just like.

02:20:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, of course, disney designed it. Um, he didn't really go into great depth about how it was working. It could easily have been remote controlled, but I I gather that it's supposed to be responding to his gestures and his queries and so forth I am sort of sick of these remote controlled robots. Yeah, I don't want to see any more of those.

02:20:23 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Like the bartenders at the.

02:20:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tesla event Right right those are humans controlling that one right, yes, yes.

02:20:32 - Padre (Guest)
But you need a robot that has its processing on board. As long as they're tethered to a giant bank of super power hungry servers, then it doesn't matter.

02:20:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree yeah, so what I think is interesting is that in some ways, ai has already eaten the internet. It's eaten as much textual contact content as it possibly can, but what it lacks is this knowledge of the physical world. It's one thing that we have that AIs don't have, so robots now take it out into the physical world, and I think that that may actually speed up the development of AI. If it actually sees things falling, it can understand gravity a lot better than reading about it in a book.

02:21:14 - Padre (Guest)
Yeah, Well, that was actually part of GTC as well, because he was talking about the advancement of photonics and advanced storage systems, because that's sort of a missing puzzle. If you can store more data that you can access more quickly, then your models become smarter. So if they become smarter then they can do a better job at modeling the actual physical world, and that was sort of pushed to the side. No one really talked about that. But I think the advancements in AI infrastructure for me, because I'm an infrastructure guy, that's far more interesting Because if they get that working properly, that has ramifications beyond just in a better AI model, more efficient, faster storage that can be used in quantum states that's extremely interesting for me.

02:22:06 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
The quantum stuff was interesting, particularly because at CES, jensen Wang seemed to say that people were overly excited about quantum computing and stocks dropped and people started talking about maybe it being another 20 years before there's anything kind of useful, and at GTC he said that he had maybe sounded overly pessimistic about it and in fact there's a lot of stuff happening with AI on classical supercomputers, like ones powered by NVIDIA chips working in concert with quantum computing, and maybe it's not going to be 20 years until that stuff happens.

02:22:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, he walked it back.

02:22:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just I hope that we are not being surrounded by the most massive multiple hype cycles and that all of this, you know, agi, asi fusion, all of this stuff isn't just BS and it's just going to be the same, same old, same old for the next few decades, because it's not so great the way it is.

02:23:05
Right now, for instance, police are telling people, law enforcement telling people uh, if you have a smartphone, dangerous texts have soared 600. This is because of a chinese cyber attack tool. They're now saying the fbi and the ftc are saying delete dangerous texts as soon as you receive them. I've seen more and more of these texts will hello, how are you? Who are you? What are you doing? You want to go to dinner? That kind of thing.

02:23:37
But there's a new one, the unpaid toll scam, and I have seen quite a few of these. Their message is tailored to the locale you're in. They look like they're coming from the local toll collection agency and you're warned that unless you pay immediately, you'll be subject to escalating fines. And there's a payment payment link which looks like it's coming from the agency. Here's a easy pass. It looks. You know this is fake, this is spurious, but if you click this link you get a place. It looks just like you know. Easy pass, uh. And of course, it's not.

02:24:13
The best result the uh fbi says if you fall for the scam is you'll lose some money. More likely, you'll lose your credit card number and other personal information, which will be harvested and sold on. Delete and report is what the fbi says. And here's the graft, the graph uh toll-free scam texts in early 2025. I wish they had some scale on the left side. This is the worst graph I've ever seen, but uh, but there it is anyway. Uh, this is from forbes uh, 604 percent rise in toll free, toll fee scam texts is this a problem like all over the world, or is that like?

02:24:56
are you just? What do you get in france?

02:24:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yeah, does france have the same issues yeah, I think less, uh, but we do get some, and you get some of those um calls that either you know that you connect and no one say anything, so you want you try to call them back, or there is now it's starting with uh ai voices that oh yeah, it sounds like people, you know yeah no, actually, well, no, not not quite that, but, um, an automated voice that tells you oh, you are, because I, I have my, you know, I run my company and or it's like you have, you have, uh, uh, the right to get this kind of subsidy, or you have this kind of thing that you could get, and we can tell you, we can walk you through that, or and of course, it's always existed, but because, because of AI, it's very easy to, uh, massively increase the amount of calls that are placed and if you can make a a lot of them cheaply, the chance of you catching a fish.

02:26:01
Go up and so yeah, just like it's yeah it's just, yeah, I.

02:26:06 - Padre (Guest)
I would think the french would be less acceptable, since you're all naturally cynical and skeptical.

02:26:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, well, I, I so far I haven't fallen for anything, but I I've certainly seen an increase in these kinds of things and, you know, I think, one that you've all seen as well. Like hey, I've changed my number, Please help. Like hey, dad, I've changed my number. This is my new number. Please send me money. Or these kinds of things which I didn't see even six months ago or 12 months ago. Now I see them regularly. Which I didn't see even six months ago or 12 months ago. Now I see them regularly. And I think in France we're probably better protected against these things because it's easier to take action legally.

02:26:46
Oh good, but I still see them every once in a while.

02:26:51 - Padre (Guest)
I have a Google voice number that I registered in Los Angeles a long time ago and I wrote a chat GPT client for it, and so it gets scam attacks and it keeps them on the conversation as long as possible I do that myself.

02:27:05 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Sometimes I just chat with his people, but maybe that's a bad idea my dad does that.

02:27:09 - Padre (Guest)
He loves answering those phone calls and just to waste their time, you know what what who?

02:27:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
who does that right? These calls there's.

02:27:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a big butchering scams out of myanmar and yes, yeah.

02:27:22 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And these poor, yeah. This is why I don't want to torture them.

02:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is hard because these people are also slaves, right? They're not?

02:27:28 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yes, they're unwilling trafficking yeah um, yeah maybe I will just ignore them from now on yeah, just well, it's not like it's going to improve their situation, but I, I have, I have ish I mean I've had too many people that are close to me who have fallen for that.

02:27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I know, and I, I that's a soft spot for me. Yeah, I don't blame you, that's my rage point. Uh, I guess just the point is that some, sometimes a person calling is as much a victim as as as your friends and family do you? Uh, is there a move in france to ban cell phones from classrooms?

02:28:03 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yes, okay, absolutely there certainly is.

02:28:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the united states, uh, california just uh implemented that. I know our local schools. The lancet, the british medical journal, has published a study that says researchers find no improvement in student well-being or academic performance in schools that restrict cell phone use. It doesn't improve grades, it doesn't improve well-being. The study examined 30 schools in the UK, 20 of which restricted cell phones in some capacity, 10 of which did not. In restrictive schools, the Lancet article says phones were not allowed to be used during the school day for recreational purposes, were required to be kept off inside bags, stored in lockers, kept in a pouch, handed into the school reception or not even allowed on the premises at all. In permissive schools, phones were permitted to be used anytime or at certain times, at breaks or lunch or in certain zones. Contrary to popular belief, the researchers found no significant difference in the wellbeing of students allowed to use their phones compared to those who were not.

02:29:11 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It did sound like even even the non-restrictive schools had had some restrictions.

02:29:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was not binary between a ban and do whatever you want whenever you want taylor lawrence writes in her sub stack reactionary hacks have been pushing the false narrative the social media and smartphones are leading to declining literacy and mental health problems. It's false and it's simply the latest iteration of a long-running freak out about the technology and media that young people are using. She represents the other side of that story. This is a I mean my- organization runs schools.

02:29:52 - Padre (Guest)
That's that's like yeah thing, that's yeah. And we have policies that go back uh, 20 years now on the use of cell phones, and they've been about laptops uh, laptops we allow. So we will allow laptops in classrooms, but we shut off the, the wi-fi unless the assignment is needs connectivity.

02:30:12
Oh, that's we allow cell phones to be used, just not in the classroom, not in the hall hallways. So it's not just restricting the technology, it's putting the students in the right frame of mind to know okay, this is time for me to pay attention to X, y or Z. So I think that's where the report fails, because they're just trying to do this binary. Well, if we put the phones away, does it increase scores? Or if we put the phones away, does it increase scores? Or if we allow phones as a do score slip? It's. It's more important to look at the attitudes that students develop around the use of their devices. I agree if they recognize that the devices are extremely useful, but that at certain times they're not appropriate. That's the lesson you want to teach. That's what our schools have been using for the last two decades all right, I think you're right, I forget, forget.

02:31:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I even brought it up, just forget. Uh, we're going to take a break and then I'm going to tell you the final story of the day that will convince you. We are, in fact, in the worst timeline. Just if you add any questions, this will tell you. All right, harry mccracken, father robert balisar, the digital jesuit and, uh, the wonderful patrick beijan, not patrickcom. It's all wonderful to have all three of you here. Nice to have experts to talk me off the ledge. You know, just you know. Don't have cell phones in the classroom, you don't need them. Just don't have cell phones in the classroom, you don't need them. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, it's time to talk about our sponsor this week in tech, brought to you this week by Oracle. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped.

02:31:47
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02:32:38
Right now, oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI For new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. Offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer. Go to oraclecom slash twit. That's oraclecom slash twit, and we thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. This is how I know we're in the worst timeline. Doordash has done a deal with the buy now, pay later company, clarna, so that you can borrow money to buy a burrito pay for your takeout burrito in installments. Doordash announced this week it'll be teaming with clarinet to offer a range of payment options to customers, including buy now, pay later. That allows users to defer payments to a more convenient time. That allows users to defer payments to a more convenient time as well as you know, if you're borrowing money for a burrito, you've got problems.

02:33:44 - Padre (Guest)
It seems like that's.

02:33:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a sign, then you got to go pick it up yourself okay, a sign of what a sign. It's a sign of poverty obviously, but it's also unrealistic, because if you can't pay for it now, what makes you think you're going to be able to pay for it later?

02:34:00 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
no, but I, I would like for everyone to go, and I this is the last uh story, right? That's what he said. Yes, so let's push this to its logical conclusion. Yes, if a society creates situations where people have to, um, get a loan to buy a burrito, is the problem with the person getting a loan to buy a burrito or the society that is? Oh, I agree with you I agree with you.

02:34:34 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
I mean like any time you use a credit card to buy a burrito, we are in some sense alone taking out a loan to buy a burrito. I like the fact that on blue sky, um, people were bringing up wimpy, who was famous for I'll gladly pay you tuesday for a hamburger today on papa and yes, he invented this business model you're right, you know, point.

02:34:55 - Padre (Guest)
I don't think there are a lot of countries that have as much uh, that live on credit as much as the us, and I think that is our biggest product.

02:35:07 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That is the biggest product of the united states. You know we don't really have credit cards here, are mostly debit cards yeah, isn't that interesting.

02:35:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, here's. Uh, here's from Chase passive income on xcom. Excited to announce I closed on a 31.38 transaction to secure a burrito inside of chips. 20 years senior fixed rate financing provided by Klarna DoorDash provided delivery of the asset. Congratulations to all involved you're absolutely right you brought you.

02:35:43 - Padre (Guest)
It seems funny, but it really is a sad commentary on the rising cost of food and the rising amount of poverty the next step, the next logical step is for doordash to partner with clarna and patreon or gofundme, so that you can also ask the public if they might want to chip in, so you can get chips with your burrito.

02:36:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I mean.

02:36:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It's all vertically integrated Leo. It's ready to go. I love the US. Everything I work on is probably at some point made in the US or thought of, thought of in the US. But when you come from Europe and we have problems in Europe but when you come from Europe and you go to California and you see how things work, it is surprising and that's the worst time you you brought up the clarinet thing with DoorDash, which is essentially it probably is just a hype up clarinet, because they have their IPOs coming up um yeah, that's the other thing.

02:36:43
Is it a serious thing like? Is anyone actually good it feels like I hope not.

02:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I God, I hope not it seems like you're you, I don't know. You should rethink your priorities.

02:36:54 - Padre (Guest)
I guess I mean, if you're taking a loan to door dash, they should have a partnership with an addiction specialist, because you're doing something wrong in your life and you need to fix it right away hey, this is the country where every sporting event is sponsored by gambling concerns and every ad for these gambling concerns features a fine print at the bottom saying got a problem, call 1-800 gambling uh, so actually we're seeing a lot more gambling, well, a lot of gambling sites in in France as well, um, and the problem is you can't really ban them because they would operate outside of your jurisdiction that's true, then they'd be illegal.

02:37:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, and essentially yeah gambling until the internet or recently in the internet's age, was just a national. Uh, is it companies or organizations that were organized? You know lotteries, the lotto and stuff like that. But now you can bet on anything in france as well, where it was heavily controlled until now, and uh, yeah, obviously that's, that's a problem.

02:38:02 - Padre (Guest)
But I don't want a world to fight. You can go to vegas right now and bet on the next pope. I'm dead serious I'm always there.

02:38:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who is the layoff right now? The front runner is cardinal tagle, from the Philippines, really followed by Cardinal pyrolyn oh, they think it's time to get out of the uh, out of the Italian Pope thing, of course, uh, your Pope is Benedict, is from Argentina, right?

02:38:31 - Padre (Guest)
Argentina.

02:38:31 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yes, Argentina yeah, the the did you see?

02:38:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
conclave.

02:38:36 - Padre (Guest)
I've been meaning to ask you, I, we, actually I did. That was a good movie. It was a fun movie, not super realistic, but it was fun. It's not realistic. How about? I mean there is there is a thing called the murmur at seal, and we do it here in the society, just as they do in in a conclave, and that's basically where you have one-on-one conversations with people of well, who do you think would be good for this? There's no campaigning. There's no, they're not supposed to be any campaign, right, it's supposed to be. What qualities are we looking for? What does the next pope need to be? What? What do we need him to do? And then it moves to a conversation of, well, who would be good for that? So so.

02:39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there are front runners in the sense that there's probably already a consensus. I mean, benedict is an amazing pope, but he is also a reformist and I know has made many enemies in the conclave right.

02:39:30 - Padre (Guest)
Yes, Well, I mean he has picked more than 80% of the cardinals who will serve in the next conclave.

02:39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're all his cardinals. Now they're his cardinals, but it's not like he stacked the deck.

02:39:36 - Padre (Guest)
He was picking the best Francis. I'm sorry, 80 percent of the cardinals who will? They're all his cardinals? Yeah, okay, there's Cardinal, but that that he it's. It's not like he stacked the deck. He was picking the best Francis. I'm sorry, I keep saying Benedict, benedict's the old, pope Francis is the current his whole papacy has about been about reforming the Vatican and reforming the hierarchy, so you get the best person for the job, not just the next two's in line, right, so?

02:39:54
but there is a general consensus that the next Pope is probably going to be a European and is probably will continue the work of reform, not from the Philippines, it'll probably be an Italian, would be my guess, italian or German and will probably be with the reform, but more conservative Right, just to sort of be the reconciling Pope well, god willing, uh, we won't have to worry about that for some time to come and Francis will have a make, a full recovery well, they're gonna. That's going to be conclave two, the sequel.

02:40:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I loved conclave. Lisa thought it was a little slow but I enjoyed it. But now I'm disappointed that it was. I mean they do sew the ballots together.

02:40:41 - Padre (Guest)
They throw them in the fire yeah, yeah, no, the, the, uh, the traditions are. But okay, I've got your triple header, so you have to start with the two popes, then you have to watch the pope's exorcist and then conclave. I think that's that's the.

02:40:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a movie. Have you ever seen anthony quinn in the shoes of the fisherman? Yes, oh, that's. Oh, that's the. There was a movie. Have you ever seen anthony quinn in the shoes of the fishermen?

02:41:00 - Padre (Guest)
yes, oh, that's all. That's a classic and that's also about the conclave yeah, yeah, but was that accurate?

02:41:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
don't tell me, I don't want to know.

02:41:09 - Padre (Guest)
You're ruining all of my all of my childhood fans, chat gpt chat gpt never lies, just ask hello, it will probably get you know chat gpt never lies, just ask.

02:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hello, father robert, so great to see you um I uh, I hope all is well in your neighborhood and uh, your family's doing well and we, just, we just I miss you so much. Uh, now that we don't have a studio, I don't get to see anybody anymore. So but it also means you can come here I really would very much like to come for jubilee. I need to walk through that door a few times. I'm going to bring my post-it notes I will take you underground oh, I really want to do that too.

02:41:50
Anyway, it's wonderful to see you. Jesuitpilgrimageapp is his app. He's on bluesky Padre SJ. Thank you for being here, father. Thank you, great to see you. Uh, patrick, thank you for staying up late as well. You guys have stayed up well past midnight. It's almost 1 00 am such a pleasure at notpatrickcom. Don't be fooled by uh anybody uh impersonating Patrick by the other, not Patrick the other not. Yes, blue sky also notpatrickcom. You still have the website and that's that's what really, yeah, matters, anything you want to plug. The Phileas Club is back.

02:42:27 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I'm thrilled to see that yeah, I, I guess the Phileas Club for this audience. I mean I, I do my weekly tech news show called uh the rendezvous tech. I also have a daily, actually a very short three minutes uh, called lactutec. I've been doing this for a couple of months. It's really fun.

02:42:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a lot of friends who are learning French. This would be a wonderful thing to listen to. To, yeah, perfect your French.

02:42:50 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think that's actually something I've been recommending to English speakers who want to learn French, because it's usually a subject matter that they're familiar with right, so you kind of know what's going on, yeah I have a wonderful voice so that also plays into it.

02:43:04
Um, but the phileas club is in english and that's where I uh talk about the, the, the way things are currently, and the thing, the way things are in france and um, internationally, and you can get links to that show, the podcast, at notpatrickcom. It's very easy, love that be careful with that sword.

02:43:27 - Padre (Guest)
It looks sharp and everything else is going up.

02:43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where are you working now?

02:43:34 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
oh, I'm in, uh, in paris. I'm in my it's actually my old studio apartment. Uh, that is my one thing I actually bought and infested in where I started podcasting.

02:43:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, 20 years ago now, 19 years ago, uh, a show about uh world of warcraft that introduced podcasting to a lot of nerds in france, wow you know our 20th anniversary show is april 13th it's in a couple of weeks and we are asking people I've been getting some great submissions if you've been watching, uh, the show or maybe if you're new. We want to honor our community, so make a video. Tell us how you found twit, where you first watch it, how you watch it today, that kind of thing. Any reminiscence? Somebody wrote a poem, there's a guy on a boat, we're getting some fun stuff and we'll play as many of those as we can on the april 13th 20th anniversary edition of twit, but you've been doing this almost as long, patrick. That's cool that's great.

02:44:36 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, and I, I mean, I remember very clearly that I started listening to you and to my friend, scott Johnson on the instance Right and and I I traveled to Las Vegas for the podcast and you media.

02:44:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the new media expo yeah. Patrick Barrett expo yeah.

02:44:54 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And you had to stand there and I went to see you and I think we did a thing, you, you had me. That's how we met yeah, that's the first time we met you. That's awesome it's wonderful.

02:45:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great to see you again, patrick. We'll get you back soon. Thanks same for harry. Harry and his wife marie used to come to the studio and I miss you guys. It was so nice to see you used to visit Petaluma. Do you still ride your bike up across the bridge?

02:45:21 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
Yeah, I've gotten, as far as Larkspur.

02:45:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, it's an e-bike.

02:45:25 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
It's an e-bike and I have two batteries. It's like one battery gets me there and the other battery gets me back.

02:45:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's so cool. What a great idea I got to emulate. You Read Harry's work at FastCompanycom. He's also on BlueSkyHarryMcCrackencom.

02:45:40 - Harry McCracken (Guest)
And I have a newsletter which I should plug from Fast Company. It's called Plugged In and it just moved from Wednesday morning to Friday morning and if you search online for Fast Company Plugged In, you should be able to sign up pretty easily.

02:45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's free. It is free, you don't have to. So it's nice to have a a. Uh, no, that's not it. That's from focus on the family. That's the wrong one. Oh my cow, don't subscribe to that one. Don't subscribe to that one. Subscribe to this one. Focus on the technology, please. Uh, awesome, yeah, very nice. Let me just click that subscribe button and uh, and you should all do the same. Thank you, harry thank you, leo.

02:46:19
As always, hope to see you in person sometime yeah, you know, we got to figure out a way. Maybe we'll do um a live show out in the world at some point and then invite, uh, local people, please do and go out on france and italy or a tour. Wonderful love to do it. You could all come to rome let's just all go to rome.

02:46:38 - Padre (Guest)
We have the aula.

02:46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a huge room, we could fit everybody I would be fun to do a live show in rome, wow a tour does sound fun.

02:46:47 - Padre (Guest)
Let's go on tour, leo benito likes the idea actually benito. The problem is we are set up for remote operation, so you could actually run it from there no, we have to bring him, that's the rule.

02:46:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and you have to bring him, he must come. Uh, jammer b says live show equals new equipment. No, you can't unretire jammer b, you've got to stay. Say, we had lunch with jammer b. He came down to see umphreys mcgee. It was so great to see him again, our old studio manager, who's retired now but still a regular listener. It's great to have you, john sliming, now. It's great to have all of you.

02:47:21
Thank you for being here, especially our club members. Uh, really, you make a big difference. Uh, keeping the show and all of our shows on the air club twit members pay only seven bucks a month but for that they get ad free versions of all the shows. They get access to the discord, where a lot of fun stuff uh happens great people hanging out in the discord. But also we do events like stacy's book club and chris mark rutt's photo adventure. We just booked another coffee geek hour with mark prince, the coffee geek. So it is a lot of fun in our club.

02:47:54
Uh, I know you get the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing you're supporting the stuff that we do. I think it's more important than ever, frankly, to do what we're doing and get the word out about what's happening in technology. So thank you in advance. Twittv slash Club Twit. If you'd like to join, we'd sure love to have you. Another way you can help us out leave us a review Five stars if possible on your favorite podcast client. That turns out to be a very important way for us to get new advertisers, whether it's podcasts from Apple or Spotify or Pocket Casts, whatever you use. Just put a five-star review in there, thank you. Thank you for that. We will be back next week.

02:48:37
Nextay from two to five pm every sunday afternoon pacific time, that's five to eight pm eastern time, the middle of the night in italy and france. Uh, actually it's a 2100 utc. That's when we start the show, and I mentioned that because you can watch us live. We stream, of course, for the club members into the Discord, but there's also YouTube, twitch, xcom. We stream on Facebook, on LinkedIn, kick and tick, tock, as for as long as it's around. Uh, you can watch our streams live there, but it's a podcast, so you can also download copies of the show audio or video or both from our website. There's a video channel on YouTube dedicated to this Week in Tech and you can subscribe in that podcast client of yours and get us automatically the minute it's available. Thank you everybody for being here. Hope you have a wonderful evening. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.