This Week in Tech 1030 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. Gary Rivlin is here, the author of AI Valley. We're glad to welcome our first Pulitzer Prize winner onto the show. Ian Thompson's here from the Register, owen Thomas from the San Francisco Business Journal. We're going to talk about Apple Big spanking in court this week, google saying please, your Honor, don't make a spinoff search. And finally, jeff Bezos gets his first Kuiper satellites in the sky. All of that and more coming up next on TWIT.

00:33 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Podcasts you love.

00:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
From people you trust.

00:37
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1030, recorded Sunday, may 4th 2025. Journalism comes in second. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news. I'm pleased to bring together three stellar journalists. Owen Thomas is here from the San Francisco Business Times. He's managing editor there. Great to see you again, owen. You're getting buffer and buffer. Would you stop lifting? We're going to have to do a movie about you. We'll call it. I don't know. I'm trying to think of what we should call it pumping tech news.

01:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, that's it. I was.

01:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I leo, I I flipped some tires this morning just to prepare for this show, did you really? Oh, you're mr crossfit now. Huh, all right, it's great to see you and always, always, a welcome. Uh voice on the show. Ian Thompson is also here, mirror technology reporter. Now he got out of the editing gig at TheRegistercom. Always great to see you, ian.

01:52 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Thank you for being here. Always fun and reporting is always good. It's been a busy week this week.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need more reporters Joining us for the first time. I'm thrilled to have him a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Gary Rivlin. His latest book AI Valley, but you've read him in many publications and, of course, you won the Pulitzer for Katrina.

02:14 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
It was for Katrina, wasn't it? No, the Panama Papers. Oh, that's right, the Panama Papers, or the investigative team.

02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that was huge. That was something else.

02:20 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
That was fun, like we was something else that was fun, like we had to keep the secret for a year. That was actually the hardest part not to tell anyone was there.

02:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it's funny because it revealed really how much uh hidden money there is in politics and business everywhere, but it didn't feel like anything ever came of it like nobody went to jail.

02:40 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Uh, that that's not 100, true? I mean some politicians were kicked out of office. Oh, good changes. I mean not in the US, but you know, I, I, um, it's funny. I had the sports stars like Lionel Messi and other big names. They would get their salary, but their, you know, like their cleats money, their their endorsement deals, they would kind of hide it overseas to avoid paying uh taxes. So you know, that practice ended because they were outed and embarrassed yeah, it stopped it anyway.

03:09
I guess that's it, that's it well or you know it stopped some and then they moved to the cayman islands, exactly, exactly, bad news from panama good news for the caymans the situation in malta isn't great, but yes, uh.

03:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I had enough money to sock away somewhere in some hidden tax Haven, but I'm afraid I uh, I have to pay tax on all of it. Um, so you know who is in trouble, and big time is Apple computer. Uh, judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers blasted Apple, saying you lied to me. This was in the apple versus epic case, uh, which, by the way, apple pretty much won, except for one little bit.

03:57
Uh, the judge ordered apple to let developers, app developers, show you a link where you could go to buy something without giving apple 30. You know, use the kindle app on your iphone. It doesn't mention you can't buy books in the kindle app because it doesn't. And apple won't let them say you could buy it on amazon and you'd be able to read it here. That wasn't allowed. The judge said no, no, you gotta, you gotta allow outside linking, you gotta let developers have other methods of making purchases outside the app store and you gotta allow them to say something about it. Uh, apple the judge wrote despite knowing its obligations there under under the court order, thwarted the injunction's goals and continued its anti-competitive contact conduct solely to maintain its revenue stream. One of the things Apple did was they said okay, well, you can have another store, but we're going to still take 27 percent it's malicious compliance.

04:56
You know I mean malicious compliance was the exact right term for it. Uh, in her ruling the judge said an apple executive, alex roman, who's vice president of finance quote this is the judge's words outright lied under oath. She said that cook sided with his finance team instead of another apple executive who had phil schiller, who had advocated that apple comply with the injunction. She wrote again this is the judge.

05:25 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Cook chose poorly that's a polite way of citing it.

05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow. Apple has said we strongly, of course we strongly disagree with the decision. We'll comply with the court's orders and we will appeal. Now complying means there's suddenly a wide open opportunity for third parties. Fortnight, for instance, instance which is from Epic Games, which is kind of the source of this whole lawsuit, says we're going back to iOS next week.

05:56 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out, because Apple is I'm trying to think of a suitable analogy but about as protective as a grizzly bear about her cubs when it comes to their 30% cut. So, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how they play this in the courts.

06:14 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Well, I mean, they're embarrassed, they got a scolding by a judge but arguably, economically it was the right decision. You know, like, oh, OK, well, sorry, and you know, eventually they'll change it. And meanwhile, what kind of penalty will there be with all this? You know okay, you didn't listen what's the financial cost of not doing. And arguably, they are going to end up winning, despite them violating the court order, Because, okay, eventually they'll change it, but they've made all this money in the meantime. Yeah, violating the order no, I mean it's.

06:48 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I kind of like the scandinavian view of taking fines, where you base on revenue, uh, and personal order, um, whereas this, I suspect, if they get a fine it'll be at a cost of doing business.

07:02 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Fine, right, right right, make it hurt.

07:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it will be interesting to see, though, if there's a flood of apps changing, updating, new apps like Fortnite. Coming back to iOS, I imagine at this point there'll be a flood. Maybe not, though. Maybe people have, kind of speaking of the cost of doing business, kind of gotten used to the fact that Apple's going to take 30% and live with it, you know.

07:25 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Well, I mean, who's going to go up against Apple? The thing is, there's a limited set of apps that are kind of like Fortnite or Roblox, say, that are kind of apps within apps stores within stores, Definitely. You know, the 30% commission really dates back to the iTunes music store, when Apple was selling 99 cent MP3s and it barely covered the credit card cost of processing that transaction. So originally Apple wasn't making much money but they just kept the 30%. I think that 30% is the wrong number in this day and age. I think 0% is also the wrong number.

08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's some amount of money. Yeah, I mean credit cards charge three or 4%, right?

08:08 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
As long as there's actual responsibility, because one of the things that Apple did and Google play did very less work, very worse was if you buy from us, from the official store, you're probably not going to get malware, and that's something Apple has done very well.

08:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
android is less. What is the word probably worth, though? Right, yeah, probably true. Yeah, there has been malware in the apple store, right? Yeah, there's been now when malware in every store, but you know at least it's better than buying from a third party is there less in apple store than there is in the google play store?

08:43 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
In my experience, yes, okay.

08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's a little safer than Google.

08:48 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
A little, but there's no such thing as 100% security, and Apple have proved that.

08:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it didn't hurt Apple's quarterly results. They came out on May 1st, on Wednesday, and they did very well, so well that they're in fact doing a $ billion dollar stock buyback, which is one way to prop your stock price up. We don't really report on finance in this show, because it used to be illegal 30 years ago, but such is life. What used?

09:14 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
to be legal Stock buybacks.

09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still legal. Of course it's legal.

09:21 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
No, it used to be illegal.

09:23 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Oh, it used to be illegal, I think in the 70s.

09:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It changed Is that a Bill Clintonism?

09:27 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
No it was Reagan in the 80s. Basically, they eliminated any kind of penalty for stock buybacks because it would apparently let small companies buy back into their stock and the rest of it. In terms of how it's worked out for intel in particular, where they were spending huge amounts on stock buybacks to keep the stock price up, it's not gone well yeah, the thing is in silicon valley too, like these.

09:56 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
These companies are issuing so many shares to their employees as compensation. They kind of have to do stock buybacks just to keep things like, even to keep from diluting their shareholders.

10:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's a good, that's a good.

10:08 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You're going to see some level of stock buybacks and it's a arguably a more tax efficient way of kind of returning capital to shareholders than dividends.

10:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, but they do both, of course.

10:20 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, no, and you know, and that's a change. You see more companies issuing dividends, but yeah, apple, apple has no problem generating cash and I want to. I want to flag that they're doing almost a quarter of their revenue off of services now, which is remarkable.

10:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now this might be the last great quarter for Apple, because of tariffs are going to hit pretty hard, I imagine, in the next few months. Oh, come on, no.

10:48 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Apple's going to get you know a pass on this Exemption as they did in 2018 or 2017? Yeah, Absolutely, you think. Why are you so certain about that? Because Tim Apple is sucking up to Trump.

11:01 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, it's simple as that.

11:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's just like. So it is ego. Get it on. Apple stuff mostly ships from China, which has 145 percent tariff. They thought they were doing the smart thing moving manufacture to Vietnam, which is now paying 46 percent tariff. So they said, oh, you know what we're gonna make all the new iPhones in India? Yeah, that's it, india and I. I think there's still a pretty hefty tariff against India, um, but look, they had a great quarter. Uh revenue is up seven percent year over year. Um. Ipad up 15 year over year. Iphone up two percent. You don't expect huge growth in the iPhone, but still a growth. Services up 12 percent um. Apple had a very, very profitable quarter. But you know, uh tariffs, of course, the big question mark on the horizon a second big question too artificial intelligence.

11:56 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
You know I mean they were far ahead of most companies, uh with with Siri, but you know they are. They keep on fumbling the ball. I mean it, it's what? Two and a half years after Chachi PT, and they keep fumbling. I mean, maybe I'm not saying Tim Cook chose poorly, but maybe some of that 100 billion should have gone to training models and kind of not being behind on AI. I mean, apple's still Apple. They have a billion, whatever phones out there, and they could be late and still win.

12:27 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, I think Apple's going to do what they did with Google, in that they're going to take the best available option and integrate it in. They haven't bothered to develop it much themselves, so it's just like okay, right. It's kind of like the iPhone scenario they weren't the first to invent the smartphone, but at the same time, they did it better than anyone else. I think they may do the same with AI.

12:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You wrote? When you wrote AI Valley, gary, was Apple still considered a player in AI? They already started to go downhill.

13:02 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I just came out right yeah, I mean, you know they, they were, they were also ran um, though I actually, in an epilogue to the book I kind of said what I just said, that you know, apple is apple, just I. I could say the same about google, right, I mean they were far ahead of ai, but then you know, kind of were too scared to put out their uh chat bot, um, but they fumbled, they did all these silly things like the uh the llm, uh the chat bot would suggest. You know, put a little bit of gasoline on your spaghetti sauce to add spice elmer's glue to hold that cheese on the pizza eat a rock a day for your minerals.

13:38
Um, and you know so, every time they stepped on the stage in 2023, 2024, they fell flat on their face, that's true look at gemini, it's top three. I mean, yeah, the chat gpt is winning. But you know, gemini is right in the race because they're google, they're the front door for a lot. It's also still early.

13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still early days, so you can stumble in the first uh to do a kentucky uh derby metaphor. You can st st stumble in the first few furlongs, but you've got to come back right. Apple. Apple feels like you know it'll be very interesting. Wwdc is coming up june 9th. So the first uh hearing they've had was this quarterly results. That you know, I think. I don't think they said anything of real importance, but wwdc will be fairly important. They've got to convince developers at least that they are a player in this game. Uh, google has already said we, we got a deal. Senator perchai said we've got a deal with apple, we're gonna, you're gonna, see a gemini in uh, in apple intelligence soon. That's maybe what apple needs to do is is go out to people like openai, microsoft, google and say hey, can we, can we borrow a cup of ai while we're still cooking our own in the back here?

14:44 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
They had kind of deal with open AI for-.

14:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, that's right ChatGPT.

14:50
The question is how well they'll integrate it, because right now the way it works is, if Siri can't answer something which she pretty much can't ever, they'll give you an offer at Apple Intelligence. They'll give you an offer and Apple intelligence, although to to go to chat GPT, although you know now that I think of it, I wonder if the general public we're paying close attention to this. But I wonder if the general public is aware my son just bought a new iPhone 16. He said cause I wanted the uh, I wanted the AI. He said it's really cool. So maybe the general public still is happy with gen Moji's and uh image, playground and the kind of.

15:27 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
The general public is generally fearful of AI. I mean, you know Right, they don't want too much. Yeah, pew did a poll last year and the majority of people were fearful. Like less than a third were excited.

15:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interesting, Interesting, so it doesn't really in the real world hurt Apple.

15:44 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Yeah, I mean getting back to your point where it's just very, very early. Like you know, those of us on on shows like this, we're paying a lot of attention, but you know they still have time and the.

15:53 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
The iphone's market share is so high you know, especially in in the us and other other western markets, that they could bea king maker in ai. So if they tightly integrate gemini, for example, that could very well give give google a much needed boost against opening.

16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh that's an excellent point. That's an excellent point as uh in the words of uh, to paraphrase open with winfrey, a billion iphones in your pockets y'all. Um yeah, just that market share is enough to probably put them back into the game, anybody right?

16:26 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Same with Amazon. Amazon is you know they were Alexa, they were early on AI and they're far behind, but you know they have the reach.

16:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who's the frontrunner now, Gary?

16:38 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
OpenAI Still. I mean by far. Well, two things. One by far and away ChachiBT, it's what? What? 400 million monthly users? I'm like something like that. No one's even close like for a while. Anthropics clawed seem like oh, it's catching up at for coders I think claude is pretty hot right yeah, I use cloud, I love it.

16:57
Most journalists, most writers, I know love claude. But you know, popularity wise, and yeah, and beyond that, open ai, they're, you know they're in everything, right, I mean they have text to video, text to audio, they're, they're, they're offering a full range. So, you know, right now, open ai is, is ahead. Um, you know, their problem is that they don't have a extra 100 billion lying around like an apple or microsoft and stuff is expensive and you know, they just raised 40 billion dollars and they're probably gonna have to raise another huge sum like that, tens of billions, within a year or two it is an expensive uh business to be in without any, without much revenue.

17:36
I? I should correct that. I mean, you know they made three and a half, four billion dollars last year, yeah, but that's nothing. Well, because it costed, you know, nine billion or ten billion last year, yeah, but that's nothing.

17:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, because it costed you know, nine billion or ten billion to make three billion. That's, yeah, you can't sustain that too long. I mean, I'm not a businessman, but I think that there seems to be, uh, you need to do something. Uh, well, very it'll, it's very interesting. This is a rare uh judicial spanking for Apple. I don't know what will happen to the uh Apple executive who's who's accused of lying by the judge. You're right, gary, they didn't. The judge didn't say anything about fines or punishments or anything. She just said you got to do what I told you to do, so knock it off yeah, he might get a raise yeah, yeah, who knows?

18:22 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
and the judge cannot, um, the judge cannot on her own engaging criminal contempt proceedings. She has to refer that to the department of justice. So it really kicks over to the trump administration. Oh boy, to see if they're and they have. Um, they uh probably don't want to be opening a lot of contempt uh proceedings these days yeah, no kidding.

18:45 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Well, and as we said before, you know Timmy was a good boy. He showed up at the inauguration. Apple or him, I don't know gave a million dollars or whatever, and you know they've been playing footsie. It is so interesting, like it's such chump change to the likes of Apple to play to Trump's ego and just be on his side. I mean, mean you could be angry at, you know, an amazon or an apple for playing this game, but on the other hand, for a million, a few million dollars, you know, you, you, you couldn't it isn't expensive, is it?

19:14 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
yeah, no, I mean, it's the same thing with the british prime minister, kia star starmer, who came over. It's like we're giving you a second state visit. You can address parliament. This has never been done before. Totally playing up to his ego. Yeah that's.

19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That seems to be the key for anybody uh playing this game. All right, let's take a little break. We've got a great panel, we've got lots to talk about. Uh and uh, gary suddenly found out at the beginning of the show that this is going to go on for hours and hours. And so I don't? You already knew this. Uh, I, ian, and I know Ian knows it and I know Owen knows it. But we will try to make this as painless as possible for you, gary.

19:52 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I'm so glad I'll try not to use the word endless. How about that? It feels?

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that way often. It feels that way often, but this is your opportunity If you want to get some trail mix, maybe a gallon of water get a tent whatever you need, a cup of tea is probably a good idea.

20:10
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24:07
Uh, as the speaking of court cases, uh, google has lost now two court cases, one over search, one over advertising. We're still waiting for the judge to come up for uh, with remedies. Uh, in the search case, uh, google has now said uh, I mean, there are a couple of proposals coming from the us uh department of justice. One is cell chrome. We talked about that last week. It's not clear how that could be done. Another would be to open search up to third parties.

24:40
Senator pachai testified in the remedies hearing that Google. If Google were to share how it does its search with rivals, it would be quote a de facto divestiture of the company's search engine. Like by doing this, you would be basically cutting our legs out from under us. And you know what? Maybe they're not, maybe they're right. At the same time, it does seem like the perfect remedy. Selling chrome is not a good remedy. Mozilla uh, just yesterday, said if they were to cut off our payments, you know, google, one of the considered remedies is it will stop paying apple, mozillazilla, samsung all that money to be the default search engine. Mozilla said if they cut off those payments, we're out of business. We, we, rely on those payments. It's going to be hard for the judge to find a reasonable way to remedy this.

25:37 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Yes, I love the idea of giving access to the data. You know, I mean, the one of the legs up and they have a lot of legs up in ai is for ai search is they have just just so much data, because what 90 percent of what percentage of people use google for search and that generates all this data and like so training a model. That's such a huge uh advantage. Open ai approached google about, you know, paying a fee for access and they refused, which of course they did unless a judge was going to order them. So I think that helps be a great equalizer. I mean, the advantage you have if you're a wealthy company is the money, but another advantage that any established company has over a startup is the data. You know, a dorm room startup won't have access to the same kind of data that a Google would have. When I'm thinking about a solution, I'm thinking somewhere around there, thinking ahead to. You know, ai search is the next big battlefield, or it is the battlefield now, and the data access would be kind of an interesting solution.

26:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But Chai said the proposal on data sharing is so far-reaching I'm quoting this is from Bloomberg Law is so far-reaching, so extraordinary. It feels like quote de facto divestiture of search.

27:01 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, it's interesting. I mean, Bruce Schneier gave a very good keynote on this this week and he was saying basically you have to have trust and integrity in an ai search engine, and I'm not sure anyone trusts google, to be quite frank yeah, it's funny, larry page, when he wrote the very first document, the page rank document, said trust was paramount and that's why we can never accept advertising.

27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, how long did that last. They backed down on that a little bit, a little bit later, Not even not so much later.

27:41 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
But who? Who do people trust? I mean OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 to be a counter to Google, specifically to, you know, the profit motive. Ai is too essential to humanity to leave it to the profit motive. You know they pretty quickly, too, drop that mission, that vision. And you know trust and safety is taking a distant second at OpenAI. So you know, I think across the board there's a trust and safety issue. I joke that AI just had really bad timing. You know, innovation is innovation.

28:08
It came out when it came out, but you know when it ended 2022, distrust of big tech I mean Google, but you know any of the companies Meta, et cetera was really at an all-time high. And you know, with AI, it's like personal agents they're going to know our personal information. We have AI. It's like personal agents. They're going to know our personal information. We have to trust them. You know AI, it's going to. You know we're going to lose our Apex status is the smartest entity on the planet. So there is a big trust issue and you know it's like that was a big issue in 2023. It was less of an issue in 2024. Now it seems a non-issue. So it's not just Google's problem, the trust and safety issue yeah, and it is.

28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It also is the issue that these court cases have taken so long, um, that Google's already kind of already almost out of business with compared to open AI. I mean, I don't use Google anymore. I I think a lot of people have looked at Google and said, yeah, that's just not doing the the job it used to do. I've replaced it with kagi and perplexity ai and, frankly, prefer them. But chrome.

29:09 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know chrome is still driving a lot of people to, you know, to google it's like 80 or 90 percent of the search market.

29:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, browser market right and interestingly open.

29:19
Ai was one of the parties that said we would gladly take chrome off of was one of the parties that said we would gladly take chrome off of they wanted to buy it right, yeah, yeah, I don't know if that's fair, but had a little threat as well. Uh, maybe, maybe, gary, you should pay attention to this. He said uh, we, the justice department's proposal to share data is so much broader than the digital markets act, the eu law that requires google to share some data with rival search engines, he said but nevertheless, we have slowed down the features we're able to launch in europe because of the digital markets act. You're, this is, this, is this is the? The kind of the sub rosa pleading that a lot of these companies are doing like, and really the aim is not to the Justice Department of the judges, to the president. You don't, you would ruin it for a good American company. We would be, we would be hurt. Look what the Europeans are doing. You don't want to do that here, do you?

30:19 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
well, they don't want any solution.

30:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So whenever that's true it goes down.

30:23 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
You know you lost the case. You were declared a Monopoly. You're abusing your Monopoly power. What's the solution? Like, yeah, you're not going to be happy, but I I'm old enough to have lived through the Microsoft trial and we saw a federal judge say we're going to split this company in two. Gave that order and it never happened.

30:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so you know, but that's only because microsoft went to the bargaining table and got a consent decree and did actually have to give in quite a bit to the government.

30:50 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Everything but the vestiture this is exactly what's going to happen again. You go down, you kiss the ring yeah, hey, whatever money is done and you carry on, you negotiate some sort microsoft has always said, though, that that had a chilling effect on us.

31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's pretty clear that, because of that consent decree, companies like Google did emerge as competitors to Microsoft.

31:14 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I'm all for competitive markets, but at the same time they've got to be applied equally, and I guess we're going to be talking about certain acts later on. But I mean, for goodness sake, competition is what makes tech great, and we should encourage it. Opportunities.

31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's what Bloomberg Law says. The government wants Google to divest itself of the Chrome browser license, some search data to competitors and stop paying for exclusive positions on other apps and devices. That's the Applezilla, samsung payments. It has also asked. The judge made a extend the ban to Google's AI products, including AI assisted Gemini, which the government says were aided by the company's illegal Monopoly and search. So they want to go after the AI as well. Google says urana, that would hurt american consumers and the economy and weaken american technological leadership. You wouldn't want to do that, would you? What should the government ask for, though, if it can't ask for that? What I mean?

32:16 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
clearly, google needs to hire a lawyer from brooklyn the youths happen to like google.

32:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what you're, no, but seriously, what is a remedy that the government could ask for? There's? Nothing that google's gonna say is okay obviously stop the payments.

32:33 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I I mean, I was naive, I had no idea until it came out in the trial. And they're paying, you know, 20 billion here and 20 billion to apple every year I mean that's, that's a sizable um that's a big chunk of the services

32:46 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
right right, yeah, yeah, seriously, when you're saying 20 billion to one, I mean, I mean, just wrap your head around that for a second.

32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's believed that it's hundreds of millions to mozilla, but that's enough to keep firefox alive without it. See, this is the problem, there's this side on this without it. See, this is the problem. There's this side on this. You know add-on effect that if you stop the payments, the only credible competitor to the Chrome engine is gone yeah, I mean, that's not what you want.

33:15 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Even Edge is built on chromium right now, you know everything is brave.

33:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Edge, vivaldi, opera they're all based on the blink engine, the Chrome yeah.

33:23 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I mean, but it's. It also suggests that the you know, the business model of browsers is completely dependent on Google, like if Safari and Mozilla both depend on Google search payments, right, then you don't have a browser without that's a good point.

33:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's not a credible competitor anyway, yeah. It's kind of like I think I believe am I wrong, that it is a bad thing to have a monoculture of browser engines?

33:50 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Absolutely, it's Google way too much power. Well, I mean, we saw what happened with IE3. Basically, Microsoft absolutely slammed that market and to my shame, I did work freelance PR for Microsoft at the time. But it was basically we have 90% of the market, why would we bother to develop? And the same thing is going to happen to Chrome. Hopefully something better will come through, yeah.

34:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The browser is the dominant way people use their computers nowadays. Right, yeah, but that's about to be, garyary, would you agree?

34:24 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
disintermediated by ai uh, I mean it's gonna take longer than we think, but yes, yes, yes, yes, especially agentic ai right open.

34:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai now is proposing that you just let it do all the work and yeah, I mean, this is a pet peeve of mine.

34:41 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
agentic ai yes, it's coming, but 2025 is not the year of agentic AI. First off, it's supposed to be like your personal agent, your personal assistant that knows you. These things have a really hard time with memory from session to session to session, so if it doesn't even really know your preferences month in and month out again, it's going to be an amazing thing. Just not this year, and this is going to be a much slower transition, um, than I think most people.

35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you don't. You don't think it's a good idea, for instance, to give your visa card to an ai and let it do all your shopping for you.

35:17 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
You think that might be a bad idea yeah, that was, that was in the news this week.

35:22 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
that was a nasty one, I mean, that's the dream.

35:25 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
That's the fantasy, like, hey, I mean, you know, the idea of AI is to get rid of this stuff we don't like to do. Instead of me spending half a day on Expedia looking for hotels and paying and buying or gifts for so-and-so, it's just not there yet. I mean sure, I mean I guess that's putting the apparatus, it's putting some of the infrastructure in place, but yeah, I, I. Ai is not good enough. It's to to to do what is being promised to me. This, the year of the agent, is about. We've raised hundreds of millions or billions in venture capital and we have to say something.

36:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've monetize this somehow. Yep, couldn't worry more yeah.

36:05
Visa, visa's calling it, uh, the Visa intelligent Commerce initiative. Uh, they plan to work with open AI, microsoft Anthropic perplexity and Mistral, ibm, samsung, ibm Samsung and the payment company Stripe, to allow your AI to use your credit card, letting autonomous AI models control your credit card to make purchases ranging from groceries to clothing, on its own, based on your budget and preferences. How is this different, though, from me saying to my Amazon Echo, hey, echo, I need razor blades. She then says what's your pin? I say the pin, and she buys them. That's kind of the same thing, isn't it?

36:49 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Another, example is Stitch Fix, where, instead of you trying to figure out what's going to look good, you just say send me an outfit, and Stitch Fix sends you a box and of course, you can always send them back, right?

37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have to keep them.

37:03 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And presumably an AI, ai powered shopping service would have that same guarantee. Hey, if we screwed up, you just return it. You know to kind of already have in the world of e-commerce, like easy returns are kind of an accepted, you know an accepted practice, but I think you would have to have you know, like no questions returned, if the AI is buying stuff for you.

37:29 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I mean the trust issue here is so huge. You know what was 1994, 1995, the year of the internet, and five years later, the year 2000,. 90% of the deals that were consummated over the internet, someone was writing a check, putting in the mail and sending it. People didn't trust giving their credit card over the internet. It just takes time, and I imagine AI is the same thing. Yes, in five years, whatever down the road, we're going to have trust, but people aren't going to trust it for a long time. So to me it's Visa taking these early baby steps.

38:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does happen pretty quickly, though. I mean I to me it's visa, taking these, you know, early baby steps. It does happen pretty quickly, though. I mean I still have relatives who say you can't use a credit card in the internet. But and I remember it wasn't that long ago I'd get calls on the radio show is it safe to buy stuff on the internet? And I would tell people it's safer than giving your credit card to a waiter and he disappears to the back, yeah, uh, but and that happened within a matter of a few years people, kind of except for my relatives, got used to it. And now I mean, does anybody say, oh, I'm not gonna use a credit card online?

38:32 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
well, no, I mean you have an internet credit card, one with a strictly limited credit limit, that you use just online, and the rest of it.

38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that how you do it?

38:40 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
yeah oh, I just give them my regular visa oh, I, I've done that for, uh, almost a quarter century, yeah good on you guys are the two that I was talking about with the pound but as as silicon goes, a new power node survive. You know, it's one of those things and the irony is that credit card almost never gets, uh, stolen. Yeah, almost never gets stolen, right, right, almost never gets stolen, right, right. And so all of my online payments are, you know, knock on wood, like they're happening on an interrupted Meanwhile.

39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The card that I use in physical stores, you know, actually I'm I'm being a little facetious because I I use a company called privacy which is a long time sponsor they're not anymore, but they were for a long time and they give you individual card numbers linked to the merchant so that only the merchant after the first purchase can continue to use that card. And they also give you one-time cards. That used to be a thing. What happened? All the credit card companies used to do that one-off. Here's a one-time only credit card number and, as far as I could tell, nobody does it.

39:41 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Maybe it was I think, uh, I think city bank uh city bank.

39:45 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I think discovery might still do it, but it must be an expensive thing I mean, it does freak me out when people take your credit card and take it away from you and it's like you could be running that through a skimmer right now.

39:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah well, every time you go to a gas station, you could be running it through a skimmer that's.

40:01 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Oh no, you always toggle, even atms. You always toggle the thing just to see if it's loose um oh yeah, shake it a little bit yeah, just to see if it's loose, I mean maybe we've had skimmers here in petaluma little old petaluma on the gas.

40:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Many gas pumps have had skimmers on them, that's right leo, you're absolutely right, it's much safer over the engine.

40:22 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I've literally had a waiter. You waiter, give a credit card. I was a little tipsy at a jazz, a Sunday brunch, your champagne brunch, and next thing I know there's hundreds and hundreds of dollars of charges.

40:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, whoever thought bottomless bellinis was a good idea? Really, endless mimosas, that is a terrible idea. Well, but nowadays, I don don't know, more and more I'm seeing the waiters come to your table right with the thing and you you never give them your card. Is that becoming more common? I don't know. I see that a lot. It's very common in the uk is it, yeah, europe?

40:57 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
they've done it for years right, yeah, exactly, chip and pin. Yeah, exactly, this is the thing. America has this chip and signature thing. It's just like nobody looks at the signature. I could write Donald Duck on there and it's still passed the bill.

41:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was selling my son's car. He left to go to New York to open his restaurant and he left the Tesla for me. Thank you, and and I was. I had to get a power of attorney to sell his car and I was looking at his signature. I had to get a power of attorney to sell his car and I was looking at his signature. And I mean, he's 30 years old, but obviously they never taught calligraphy or even handwriting in school, because his signature is like this. It's worse than Donald Trump's. It's like this.

41:47 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
So you know, I mean, if I'd had to.

41:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I could have easily duplicated his its cripple. I say bad parenting there. But is that bad parenting? Okay, all right. Well, you have a 13 year old, wait till your son's 30 years old. Then you tell me okay, okay guilty secret time.

41:58 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Um I white. I write my wife's name on birthday cards to my family yeah, she doesn't have time to sign them, so yeah nobody can't tell actually I remember reading a handwriting expert saying bad handwriting is harder to forge than good handwriting well, this is interesting from the spam perspective, because now we've got gen ai coming on spam, they're doing all the grammar and syntax exactly right anymore, exactly so now you know you're looking for mistakes as a sign of human beings rather than yeah, I got a perfect phishing email yesterday.

42:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know, I have all my own domains, like leovillecom, so there's no administrator. And I got an email from leovillecom, from you know, admin at leovillecom. Your password is expired, need to renew it. Everything was perfect, not only the grammar but even the from address. I had to go deep into the headers to figure out where it came from. I knew there was no way it was going to fish me because I own the site. There's no admins, I am the administrator, the administrator, but and I got it for not just one site but for a half a dozen of my sites, all of which you know. You go to, I can, or who is and figure out what sites are who and what the administrator email address is. It's an easy, easy phishing scam, so don't fall for it, kids.

43:18 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
But I mean, it wasn't obvious.

43:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They buried it. I mean, they were re.

43:21 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It was well crafted no, I mean, this is the point. You're smart and you check it back. But if the average person clicks on the link and sees, you know, microsoftsupport spelled slightly wrong, whatever the rest of it, they're gonna get caught.

43:36 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
They're very good now yeah, welcome to the future. Ai means that you know phishing, etc. All these scams. They're just much better. I mean, you're, you're right. What you're now looking for is the, the humanness of it, like there might have been, you know, one little tiny mistake.

43:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If it's too perfect, you need to be suspicious well, as we get older, uh, and as we get more single and difficult to get dates and we can't go to those, you know tinder apps, uh, the romance scams are taking over and i'm'm gonna tell you something to watch out for when you get to be my age with romance scams. Just a bit Gary rivlin's here his new book, by the way, excellent AI Valley. It's kind of a history of AI which is nice up to the present and we really enjoyed your conversation on intelligent machines. You can go back, folks, a couple of weeks and find that I thought gary's so smart, we got to get him on twit, so it's nice to have you and you've been touring around it right, uh, you, you've been doing readings and stuff yeah, I was just in dc.

44:35 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Uh, this week I was. Actually I did a podcast with newt gingrich.

44:39 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
What good, what he's still alive, okay actually.

44:43 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
and then he went to alab, alabama, for some Trump event and like how did you keep from throwing up in your mouth?

44:48
I don't know I mean I'll give him, I'll give him credit, like I remember I was working for the industry standard in the late 90s, 2000. And you know he had been kicked out of Speaker of the House at this point. But you know he came in to talk about the internet and it was really interesting. So a group of us spoke. I was with him and I was there. Half the stuff that came out of his mouth was brilliant and the other half was just insane and ridiculous, which is sort of Newt Gingrich's thing. He just talks so fast and good ideas come and awful ideas come out. But he's always been interested in tech. So we didn't talk the current state of politics and what we both think of mr trump. Uh, we talked ai. It was. It was actually fun. I had to get.

45:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty easy. He's a smart fellow, I mean there's no question he was the contract with america, guy right, and in some ways you could you could say that that was where trumpism began was with newt gingrich well, there's an entire book out um saying that essentially, you know Gingrich in the 90s kind of broke US politics.

45:50 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
This idea that it's a death match between one side and the other and there's no compromise and to do a compromise is to, you know, sell out your position. You know that was. You know Gingrich in the 90s.

46:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, but you could be smart and be wrong as well, right.

46:10 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean honestly, gingrich did co-authored a very good book on the effects of a nuclear weapon exploding and doing electronic disruption on pretty much every device. So I mean, yeah, weird bloke, but had some good ideas.

46:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was his training? Was he a physicist or a scientist? He was a teacher.

46:33 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
He was a professor in economists I can't remember what his time was. He was a historian, so you know he taught in Georgia before he became an elected official.

46:42 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, it was interesting because I I I looked up and wrote a couple of articles about electromagnetic pulse disruption and the the book they wrote actually was probably pretty accurate. If you do a full disruption over the us, you're going to lose 90 of the population within 10 years.

47:02 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
It's interesting reading. Can I tell my favorite? Can I tell my favorite new gingrich story?

47:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know we're yes we were supposed to go to a break, but this is much more interesting.

47:12 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Go ahead remedies for google. So somehow on leo's dating. And now I'm going to tell my new gingrich story. Yes, but it's um, I'm happily married.

47:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, I am not dating I was just I was using myself as an example, but I know I I am not dating. We just want to make that clear.

47:28 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Your wife will be disappointed to hear this. So I had a book. The Plot to Get Bill Gates came out in 99, and it was translated into Chinese and I heard from the translator I get this email. It was who or what is a Newt Gingrich. This email, uh, it was who or what is a newt gingrich which? Well, this is for fun. Today I don't know what is a new game or what I can't really explain exactly the right pronoun here it does sound like a harry potter character, but or a newt, it's an animal.

48:01
What is it why capitalize the?

48:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
N, I'm sure. I'm sure he's not named after the whatever. Is it a lizard? I don't know, I don't know. Anyway, yes, gary has many books, including the plot to get Bill Gates. Ai Valley is the latest and you can find out more at GaryRivlincom. G-a-r-y-r-i-v-l-i-n. It is very. I really enjoyed it. It was a really great book, so highly recommended if you want to kind of catch up on what's. How did we get here? It's a good question. Also with us the wonderful Owen Thomas from San Francisco Business Times. Always great to see you. It's fun we get to see the seasons change through the office windows.

48:45
In the winter it was bare and cold looking. Now it's starting to be spring in San Francisco.

48:51 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Springtime in San Francisco.

48:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The sun is coming out and also we never know what the weather's like, because Ian Thompson lives deep within his lair, his book-lined lair.

49:03
It's great to have you as well our show today brought to you by our good friends at out systems. You've heard. You've heard the old uh conundrum every business has to go through it build versus buy. Well, I've got a third way for you out systems, the leading ai powered application and agent development platform. For more than 20 years, the mission of out systems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software.

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51:06
Visit this is such a great idea. Visit out systems dot com slash twit to learn more. That's outsystemscom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support of this Week in Tech. All right, I was going to talk about real-time deepfake frauds, so this is a great story from 404, joseph Cox, by the way, with the loss of the daily dot, we were talking about this before the show I think, uh, you used, you were, you started it, you were a first executive editor, right, owen? Uh, and of course, uh, that's right, the new owners of the of, of one of the best internet publications, have uh decided to go all AI and just fire everybody, because that's worked really well for Sports Illustrated and other publications.

51:58
It's not a bad idea, but hey, on the other side it is cheap.

52:03 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, no, I'm sorry, you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It's as simple as that, you know it's a really stupid idea, because if you're looking for journalism, then you go to humans. If you're looking for a quick sub, you know a quick estimate of what the news was. We might be wrong we call it hallucination, but we're actually wrong Then you go for AI.

52:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well it's crushing 404 is a really good example. A bunch of people who were they were at the defector right uh, samantha cole, joseph cox, jason kiebler, who we've had on the show it was the verge. Yeah, oh, they were at the verge okay, no, uh, not the verge defector weren't they?

52:43 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
no, they, they, joe cox, came from vice, vice, that's right a bunch that's right.

52:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was motherboard, that's right. Yeah, uh, keebler was at motherboard for years. Uh, sam Cole, uh, joseph Cox, emmanuel Myberg, anyway, very talented journalists. And they said, well, why don't we just do it ourselves? Yeah, and 404 was born and I really want to give them credit. People should sign up for their newsletters. They should, uh, they should, um, you know, pay for I don't know if they have a subscription thing, they have a podcast.

53:15 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean they do. I shouldn't be pushing this because they're a competitor, but at the same time, I respect joe.

53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and we I want to support them because this, honestly, is the future. In many ways, this is the future of online news gathering, sad to say, is kind of fund it yourself anyway. A great story. Joseph cox wrote this one. The age of the real-time deep fake fraud is here and he did a lot. He did a lot of good legwork on this went to a telegram group. This is a video from a telegram. It was shared on telegram. He's redacted it to take the picture of the nice older woman out. She's on the right there. The fraudster is in the upper left hand corner and he's using real-time software to change his look to a handsome gray bearded old guy talking to this lady, saying how beautiful she is, and way more gorgeous and more beautiful than you were on the photo you sent me and she's loving it.

54:16
She's eating it up. Uh, warm your warn your elders, your friends and your family. Uh, because it's gotten very easy, apparently, to do these real-time deep fakes. He talks about a group called Yahoo Boys fraudsters. Typically based in Nigeria, they traditionally use Yahoo emails as part of their scams. They've now broadened into a all manner of schemes. Joseph writes before we couldn't do some things. Now we can do them, including generate in real time pictures of people who are fake remember it was just princes, you know?

54:56 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
yeah, that's exactly what this is take the prince scam, you know, fast forward it into the age of ai if you were wondering who still has yahoo emails in this day and age, now you know now, you know, I was thinking the same thing, uh, same thing with celebrities.

55:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, deep fakes of arnold schwarzenegger, uh, sylvester stallone, mike tyson these aren't real. They were endorsing products that they didn't know anything about. Uh, I don't know if there's a whole lot you can do, frankly well I mean sorry up to you

55:31 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
no, I mean in 2023. You know joe rogan was seemingly endorsing something he did in tom tom hanks. I mean, the surprise for me with deepfakes is I was convinced it was going to turn upside down the 2020 election. I was convinced it was going to turn upside down the 2024 election. I guess now we could say it's finally here, although that makes it sound like I'm wishing for it. But you know it's finally here, although that makes it sound like I'm wishing for it. But you know it's just this idea that a tool for good is a tool for bad. You know, AI can do extraordinary things, but it's a really powerful tool for bad guys as well as people who mean well.

56:05 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I mean it's interesting. I was talking to security folk at the conference this week and they're kind of like, well, yeah, do it, but it's really not economically viable unless you've got a good revenue stream from it guess, guess what?

56:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, exactly yeah so you want to make money.

56:24 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
The best thing to do is to con older people well, honestly, younger people are, quite, you know, adept at being conda as well, I suppose. Well, I mean, one of one of the things that's really come through is that, you know, we have the first Internet generation, people who were born with the Internet and they trust it. And until you get verification, then trust is going to go in a very bad way. I can't help feeling.

56:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you worry about that kind of thing, you might have been encouraged by uh melania trump's take it down, act it uh. The idea was. The idea was good, which is to uh criminalize uh deep fakes used as revenge porn. Um uh you know um illegal content uh and and make it possible to get it down quickly, giving social networks 48 hours to remove it. Well, congress has passed it. Boy, did they pass it by a by a vast majority, I think. The senate was 98 to 2. Congress was similar uh and the. It's on the president's desk right now to. To my knowledge, he has not yet signed it. He's as sharpy as busy elsewhere, but he has said he will shine, sign it. Worse, he said I like this law. I'm gonna use it myself because no one's been treated worse on the internet than I have that's the problem I?

57:47 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I'm sorry I could rant about this for hours, but this is sopapipa all over again and the Democrats have basically voted in the very tool that is going to kill them. It's ridiculous.

58:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
EFF says, despite major flaws, it's passed. I mean, it's one of those things where if you don't look too deeply or you don't consider too deeply the unintended consequences, it seems like a perfectly sensible law. Uh, here's what the eaff says is problematic 148 hours. Uh, that's such a quick turnaround time. I think about, for instance, my you know, we run a twit forum at twitcommunity. We run a mastodon instance at twitsocial. I think about that if somebody were to put something uh up on on the mastodon site, even if it came from somebody else's mastodon site, uh, and there were then a complaint, I would have 48 hours to take it down if I didn't check every.

58:48 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean, that means I have to check every day now for those kinds of complaints, but I mean this is why Facebook and Google are in such support of this, because it's like, hey, yeah, we can do it. We can do it, our competitors can't. So, hey, this is great for us.

59:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So why is it a problem? Though I mean, look, I want to take down as quickly as possible revenge porn or deep fakes, Absolutely yeah. I mean mean that's fine, why is it a problem?

59:16 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
well, because I mean, if you're a small website, you know, uh, you know you've got to be monitoring your forums the entire time plus 48 hours doesn't give me a lot of time to verify exactly that complaint, right is it really uh?

59:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know what's going on.

59:33 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
You have to make a judgment. I mean, for example well, I'm just going to take everything down.

59:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I get a complaint, it's going down immediately.

59:38 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'm not going to take a chance right which, yeah sorry oh, and I just wanted to say it is always marginalized communities like the lgbtqia community um, whose content is like qia community, um, whose content is, like the first to be targeted right under under regimes.

59:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is a very broad definition of what should be taken down right, potentially any images involving intimate. What is intimacy? I don't know, intimate or sexual content? Um, it's not a very narrow definition. There are no safeguards against frivolous or bad faith takedown requests as there are with the DMCA. We've seen the DMCA vast, horribly misused, absolutely, and it has remedies.

01:00:23 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Well, I think specifically of the meme of Trump and Putin kissing each other, which you know was a form of Internet protest against. You know, Trump and fair use, right? Yeah, Completely legal. Yeah, each other, which you know was a a form of internet protest against.

01:00:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, trump and fair and fair. Fair use right.

01:00:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, completely legal yeah, no, I mean, you know, clearly, commentary on on their, on their relationship, um, but because, because of the nature of that meme, it could be taken down, as you know, arguably intimate it you know trump could say it's revenge porn and the trump administration.

01:00:54 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
No doubt trump sort of promised when he spoke about this act, says I'm going to use it, and you know we see what happens. He does a threat and lots of law firms and tech companies etc.

01:01:06 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
They buckle down yeah, it has been interesting to see the universities going against him. But yeah, I mean, he said himself I'm going to use this. It's just, it baffles the mind that this.

01:01:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike Masnick on Tech Dirt says it is blatantly unconstitutional.

01:01:23 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it violates the.

01:01:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First Amendment.

01:01:26 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean, masnick is one of the few writers on the Internet that I will read, and, ok, disagree with him 10 percent of the time. But he internet that I will read, and okay, disagree with him 10 at the time, but he's spot on on this. This is going to be actively disturbing. This is citizens united for journalism so just to be, clear.

01:01:45 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I mean the question I had go ahead. No, please, gary you know, I I mean, I've done the research and this is not something I I I've written about, but like on paper, I think we all agree this is a really good idea. Yeah I mean, take down non-consensual yeah yeah, and, but where did it go off the rail? I mean, ted cruz was the main sponsor, so I guess I'm answering by saying just that.

01:02:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But but it was very bipartisan. I mean, so was amy klobuchar.

01:02:08 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I mean, it was very bipartisan where did it go off the rails? It just made so much sense when I heard it. It's like when I first read the headline so good that that's a sensible, a lot of bipartisan congress can do something. That makes sense. But then you read the fine print and you realize like, oh, this is a terrible idea. I'm just wondering who got involved. Well, I mean, maybe they came up during this conversation. Like you know, google and meta say like, hey, this is great. We, we've got the infrastructure we can handle this. The our, our competitors and would be competitors cannot handle this. But I'm really curious how this ended up. You know, kind of snatching. You know, defeat from the jaws of victory is what's the expression.

01:02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know like it seemed like a really good idea and yeah so here's what masnick says um, the bill's vague standards, combined with harsh criminal penalties, create a perfect storm for censorship and abuse. He says we already have systems to handle non-consensual intimate imagery online. There's nick mick's take it down system, yeah, which we've talked about before. Stop nciiorg has every virtual virtually every major platform, from meta to tick tock to porn hub, participating in coordinated removal efforts. Uh, he says these systems work because they're precise, transparent and focused on the actual problem. But apparently working solutions weren't exciting enough for congress. Instead of building on these proven approaches, they've decided to create an entirely new system that somehow managed to be both weaker at addressing the real problem and more dangerous for everyone else well, no, it's exactly the same problem that we have with section 230, you know it's.

01:03:43 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It sounds like a great idea get rid of it, make everyone accountable and in practice it's an absolute nightmare, and I think it's the same to take it down. This is going to be weaponized, and not in a good way yeah.

01:03:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the very fact that donald trump at the state of the union address said I'm gonna use it kind of tells you something. Uh, unless there's a lot of non-consensual, intimate imagery of donald trump floating around, I maybe there is.

01:04:11 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I well, I mean okay, this weekend. The guy has said that he's not sure if it's his job to uphold the constitution right, he's unclear let's be frank about this he was asleep during the oath of office.

01:04:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Obviously I don't. Yeah, he's an older man, I don't blame we're talking someone.

01:04:28 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
A few gargoyles full of the short of the full cathedral, but yes, anyway.

01:04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, it could be we're worried about nothing that this won't, you know, uh, materialize as a censorship tool. I think there is some legitimate concern that it will. 98-2 in the senate, 409-2 in the house.

01:04:50 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I can't believe the democrats voted in, just didn't it on. That way, it's just, they're cutting their own throats. They really are. This is going to be used against as a censorship tool, as the ffo said it's.

01:05:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what. It's unfortunate because it the way they get votes on things like this is say, well, it would be a shame if your name were associated with the inability to take down something so horrendous, as you know, whatever, uh, you know you close it in the garb of uh, you know, a completely sensible plan to protect young women well, it's the four horse, the four horsemen of the info, uh, four horsemen of theolis it's not easy to say the Four Horsemen of the Infocopolis.

01:05:36 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
So you've got organized crime, drug dealers, child abusers and women. Well, actually, pretty much that's it.

01:05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Think of the children. Think of the children. Anyway, we'll see what happens. Maybe it's a Tempest in a teapot and nothing bad is is going to happen. It is not yet the law, but, uh, it will be soon, right? Yeah, it will be, uh, very soon, all right. Well, as long as we've offended all of our republican listeners, let's keep going. Um, white house was very upset with amazon. Uh, there was a report since denied that amazon was going to itemize the cost of tariffs in anything you purchased on amazon. Uh, the white house this is punch bowl news reported this, I think inaccurately. The white house called it a hostile and political act, to which jeff bezzos immediately apologized, said we weren't going to do it. We're never going to do it, it's not going to happen, don't worry. I think it's a great idea. We know that, uh, auto dealerships plan to put a line saying tariff costs on car stickers, or at least they've said that they would like to do that yeah transparency is always a good idea.

01:06:51
I don't think there's anything wrong with that yeah, how are your consumers?

01:06:54
yeah, and then know what's going on it's kind of telling that the white house says no, we don't want anybody to know how much those tariffs are going to cost. It'll be obvious when the cost of your iphone goes to three thousand dollars. I think that'll become pretty uh clear. Kickstarter says we're going to start uh ask, allowing kickstarter projects to ask for more money. It's. They have a new tool I don't think the white house is going to like this called the tariff manager tool, which will let kickstarter because a lot of kickstarter caught stuff, let's drop ship from china, right? Creators will now be able to charge an extra fee after the campaign ends. This is uh, by the way, 404 media doing some good reporting once again uh, so that the kickstarter projects can add charges to the fully funded projects because of tariffs see this makes me think this is going to go badly wrong for consumers and we're going to see a lot of bogus tariff fees.

01:07:53 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, where like maybe maybe it's imported from a low-cost country, but they slap on a, you know, they slap on a big it's an opportunity.

01:08:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a um an opportunity, an enhanced profit opportunity it.

01:08:07 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It reminds me of how every restaurant in san francisco, um, uh, you know, still charge. They have a little surcharge on that.

01:08:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, tries to, tries to get away with charging an sf mandate charge.

01:08:18 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, the health charge yeah, based on that's, based on a, a, um, basically a local health care law that was completely outmoded by the affordable care act, doesn't really, you know? Oh, that's funny yeah there's a small set of of restaurants that might, you know, might, be paying a little more in health care. Um, really, under the aca, most of those businesses would be paying the exact same.

01:08:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, interesting but they've done that also with new minimum wage costs and every restaurant in town not even san francisco has a little, and you know, an extra six percent added to cover the cost of living the thing that really grips.

01:09:02 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
The thing that really grips my muffin is when you go to a self-service checkout at the supermarket and they're asking would you like to take 15, it's like, for what?

01:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the robot all the work doesn't? The robot deserve a little extra. Come on, don't be such a cheapskate, ian mine is the resort fee.

01:09:24 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Like oh, I hate that resort.

01:09:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Las vegas is the worst for that now, and to his credit, president biden did under the at the ftc, and lena khan under president biden did it's do something about those extra fees? Right, all right, but did that get overruled by the new administration? Is that well?

01:09:42 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
they, they gutted, uh, the cfpb which would have, you know, been enforced that yeah, most of this. So get ready for more overdraft fees from banks. You know, I think these tariff surcharges are going to be in the same category of junk fees and you know, enforcement of consumer protections does not seem to be a priority in this administration.

01:10:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft is raising the price of Xboxes from $599 to I'm sorry, from $499 to $699. That's the xbox x. The series s is being marked up 80 dollars. Uh, this to account for uh tariffs but they're also doing it internationally.

01:10:21 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
They're spreading the cost.

01:10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, so also in the uk, europe and australia, which don't have 145 exactly everyone else gets screwed.

01:10:29 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
You know it's just like wow mean, as Owen said, this is the chance to raise profit margins, raise prices and blame on Trump.

01:10:38 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah right, and not calling it a tariff surcharge is clearly the political way to go. Microsoft is being smart here.

01:10:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. You know the question is they call in their quarterly result. Amy Hood, their CFO, said it's it's tariff uncertainty. That's all.

01:10:54 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Oh yeah, and their quarterly result. Amy Hood, their CFO, said it's tariff uncertainty, that's all. Oh yeah, right, nothing at all to do with padding profit margins, we're uncertain.

01:11:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know. We don't know. Actually, ups, the United Parcel Service, says they're going to cut 20,000 jobs. Now, that's partly because Amazon is is reducing their deal with them, right?

01:11:16 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
but I have to also think it's because of a reduced number of packages being well, when you go from 30 christmas presents to two christmas presents, you only need two dolls.

01:11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you need more than two dolls for?

01:11:28 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
yeah, it's, that's loud says the bloke with a picture of his kids sitting on a pet lion but there's only one lion now come on. Well I mean, but this is serious because I live in the bay area and I sail in the bay and the amount of cargo ships in oakland at the moment is pretty much zero can you see?

01:11:52
you can actually see it. Yeah, I mean, I'm used to six to eight ships being docked in in the Southern Bay and there's nothing there. And I've got friends in Seattle. There's nothing there. There's a supply shock coming and it's not going to be good. If you haven't bought your tech now, you're too late.

01:12:09
Port of Los Angeles says shipping volume uh is going to go down 35 percent this week yeah imagine if you're a trucker and that comes through, or if you're a longshoreman and you know, and la is where the, the goods from asia come in.

01:12:24 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oakland is where a lot of the um, you know the shipments go out, including tesla uh, you know tesla cars from the Fremont factory. The Port of Oakland is a natural.

01:12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's really two-way right. Because China's also upped their tariffs, we're in a trade war.

01:12:43 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Wine from Napa, agricultural products from the Central Valley they're all getting slapped with tariffs on the other side. So it's not like we're imposing tariffs and the rest of the world is just sitting back and taking it. Yeah exactly.

01:12:57 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean it's just. I mean, okay, Tesla got out this week because they're now 85% domestically produced, but the rest of the car industry at the moment is completely up the spout because you know they take their parts in from everywhere around the world you know the uncertainty is the right word, because it could very well be that a call to the white house next week will change everything.

01:13:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, it's just unknown, and. But uncertainty is not good for business, right? I mean. Worse is, is the certainty that you're gonna have to pay under 45. But the next verse is I don't know that you're gonna have to pay under 45 but you can't.

01:13:37 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
The next verse is I don't know what I'm gonna have to pay, but you can't make long-term investment decisions based on someone in the white house deciding okay, they're my friends now, they're my enemies now. You know it's not fundamental to good confidence I.

01:13:48 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I saw a quote from a european politician uh to the effect of we can't make our decisions based on the whims of voters in wisconsin every four years yeah, that's the long-term problem, right, is this?

01:14:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this? It's not going to end in four years, it's. It's a problem.

01:14:05 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
The united states itself is a problem uh well, there's also the problem that we've you, that we've created a system where if you have access, if you're Tim Cook representing Apple and you could get exempted. It's kind of up for bids. It's like, what are you going to do for me? White House says, if we're going to do something for you, that's a different kind of uncertainty. It's a rigged system. It's the kind of thing we don't want. We want a fair system, but instead it's like we'll go to the White House and we'll give money we have given money, so we'll have access, we could get our exemption.

01:14:39
It's not just cars either. I mean just it seems everything we make in this country is you know, some parts are from overseas. You know I was listening to reports about you know the toy industry and stuff for you know babies, carriages and that kind of stuff. I remember a few years back there was kind of a temporary baby formula shortage and people freaked out. I'm just trying to anticipate, in the fall coming into the holiday season, kind of the freakout, because I'm imagining, unless something radical changes in the next month or two, that is what we're looking at. I have no idea how that's going to play out, but I just can't imagine it's going to be pretty because people are going to be really, really upset. We in america, we like our stuff, we like our full shells, we want our 30 dolls, or at least we want the right to buy 30 dollars, if we want to buy 30 dollars I'm seeing over your shoulder your left shoulder gary a book you wrote in 2011 about who does benefit for this.

01:15:34
It's called broke usa, but there's a poverty industry in the united states yeah, you know I, I was just fascinated after 2008, the subprime meltdown that you know, it's like the the start of it, or early on in the sub-private views. It was poor people and banks were getting rich off poor people. So I had this idea. Like I, I was fascinated. Payday lenders, check cashers, pawn brokers, etc. These businesses that their business models to get rich off people with no money, which makes no sense. But there was, like back then, like five or six payday lending companies that were publicly traded with multiple billions of dollars in in revenue. In fact, there's a funny thing that a a banker wants a hundred clients with at least a million dollars. A payday lender wants a million clients customers none of whom have a hundred dollars kind of amounts to the same thing in the long run, doesn't it?

01:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, and, of course, who shut all of those down? The cfpb? Shut all of those down the cfpb, cpfp and uh, when he shut down the cpfb. So I have a feeling this might be back. You might want to re, uh, you might want to revise and reissue broke USA.

01:16:42 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I mean, there's so many ways we could talk about Elon Musk's you know conflicts of interest, but you know one of the first things he did I put up a tweet something like delete cfp, get rid of the CFPB, and you know, gutted it. That was one of the first things uh Doge did and like guess what? You know, xai whatever he's calling it wants to get into financial services yeah, who stands in the?

01:17:02
way, and you know it just, and in fact the CFPB had a number of cases. There's a lot of complaints to the CFP about tesla and you know so he was as we're, as as we're.

01:17:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot of complaints at the uh and nh national highway transportation and safety administration. And oh look, what just got cut by doge is the autonomous vehicle division of nhtsa no, I interviewed someone about this exactly.

01:17:28 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Um, this is dan o'dowd, the billionaire who's got a grudge against Tesla. But he's absolutely right. You know, full system driving doesn't work. So they're basically gutting the regulator and saying, yeah, fine, you know, make it go. We know it doesn't work, but we still want to do it.

01:17:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why?

01:17:48 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
should you.

01:17:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, look, I can understand the kind of the philosophy, the anti-regulatory philosophy.

01:17:54 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, but are you going to entrust your life to a system without? Lidar, that's the problem Without LIDAR there are some regulations.

01:18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need Food and drug regulations, safe driving regulations, seatbelts yeah, doge. According to the Verge, elon Musk's doge ties could get him out of two billion dollars in potential liability. It's not just tesla, it's spacex, it's neural link 2.37 billion dollars. This is from a senate report, of course from the democrats, but you know. So take it with a grain of salt. Democratic staff for the senate homeland security permanent subcommittee on investigations. Grain of salt. Democratic staff for the senate homeland security permanent subcommittee on investigations probing the impact of musk's relationship with trump and the creation of doge. Doge may not have saved as much as they promised. He promised what? Two trillion? Yeah, we're saving maybe a hundred billion, but what we are saving is a lot of money for elon musk's companies well, I mean nasa.

01:18:52 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Look at the nasa budget this week. They've it's been cut 24 and they're like, okay, well, we're just gonna have commercial companies do this. Now, which commercial companies guess?

01:19:02 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
which rural broadband. So I think the biden administration put 40 42 billion dollars into rural broadband for, you know people who don't have access. That's been paused and now they're saying, huh, why don't we use uh, starlink, uh, who owns starlink? I forget? Kind of thing like and yeah, I mean there's some logic there. Right, it's easier to use, you know wireless and you know uh dig trenches and do um broadband, but it's really expensive, like I don't know well.

01:19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, furthermore, once you put in the fiber, it's there for a hundred years. Uh, elon, you're going to continue to pay month by month, and the price is not set by anybody but Elon, and if you're a Ukrainian soldier, then it might be turned off with a win.

01:19:52
Yeah, trump is also cutting almost half a billion dollars from the CISA budget, and this is this is spite. This is spite. Cisa's director in 2020, brian Krebs. Chris Krebs, I'm sorry, was asked about the election that Trump, of course, said was stolen. Krebs famously said it was the most what do you say? Most reliable election, fairest, fairest election ever.

01:20:22
Everything worked perfectly well. Sisa did its job and and the election results are real uh, of course. Uh. The president immediately fired krebs and now has not only written a letter to pam bonnie at the department of justice saying we need to investigate this guy, he just, total spite, revoked his global entry.

01:20:45
It's, it's pathetic, it's just pure spite and, and honestly I believe, cutting half a billion dollars from the sisa budget, which is, by the way, only three billion dollars comes not because this is waste and fraud or whatever, but just as a way of saying you know, spite, it's spite, but it's also insane like it's a mistake.

01:21:05 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Yes, we need to fortify our cyber defenses. We need to do risk assessment. You know, I just have you noticed that China, russia, north Korea, there's a few countries out there that are trying to break into our systems and mess us up, or our governments, and you know, it's just. I don't understand. I mean I do because we're explaining it. It's so short sighted. It's so short sighted.

01:21:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the president's new budget says the cisa programs are a hub of quote, the censorship industrial complex. To violate the first amendment, target americans for protected speech and target the president. I mean it's admittedly because, no, no, no, they didn't like what they said in 2020, but it's, it's totally part.

01:21:46 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean, they even got rid of the volunteer council. Now it had its faults, because this was basically big tech companies advising Cesar about how to deal with security threats. But these were volunteers and they're just like yeah, out with you, out with you. Oh, I spoke to somebody this week and they sat down with Cesar and all the old guard are gone. You've got a lot of very young, enthusiastic people, but a lot of the knowledge has been lost and it's not going to work out well for america.

01:22:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, doge has another uh proposal. We'll talk about it in just a moment. We're going to take a break. Gary rivlin is here. It's great to have you, gary. Author of ai valley. Gary rivlin, uhcom. Ian thompson from the registercom it's always a pleasure learning new britishisms all the time. I think you're starting to make some up, I'm not. I don't want to say anything, but I think you're starting to make a.

01:22:40
I mean, I haven't said wanker all session, oh and, uh, also owen thomas from the san francisco business times. Great to have all of you here. Our show today brought to you by Drata. If you're leading risk and compliance at your company, you're probably wearing 10 hats at once managing security risks, compliance demands, budget constraints, all while trying not to be seen as the roadblock that slows the business down. But GRC isn't just about checking boxes. It's a revenue driver. It's good for you. It builds trust, accelerates deals, strengthens security. That's why modern GRC leaders turn to Drada, a trust management platform that automates tedious tasks so you can focus on reducing risk and scaling your program. With Drada, you can automate security questionnaires, evidence collection and compliance tracking. You can stay audit ready with real-time monitoring. Simplify security reviews with Drada's Trust Center and AI-powered questionnaire assistance Instead of spending hours proving trust. Build it faster with Dradaata. Ready to modernize your grc program.

01:23:53
Visit dratacom slash week in tech to learn more again. Dratacom slash we can tech. Know this, just we can tech. Dratacom slash we can tech to learn more. We thank drata so much for supporting this week in tech. Well, here's another. I'll give you one more story from mike masnick's at tech dirt, and this one actually gets me. I'm gonna turn. Beat red the, the, the f, the, uh. The ftc is going after wikipedia, yeah, or fcc. It's brendan carr, isn't it? Uh, saying that wikipedia's editors are biased and spreading disinformation? Oh no, wait a minute, it's ed martin. That's who it is. Well, I don't worry so much about him that you know. Dc us attorney ed martin, who is a problematic person in many other respects, has now, is now investigating wikipedia for, uh, I don't know what disinformation. He sent a letter to uh. It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation, through its wholly owned subsidiary, wikipedia, is allowing foreign actors to manipulate information and spread propaganda to the American people.

01:25:22 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
What are we talking? Hugh Grant here, yeah he's apparently editing Wikipedia.

01:25:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What's the response to this, besides the fact that this is exactly what the First Amendment prohibits, which is government intervention in speech?

01:25:38 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, have you ever read the conservative version of Wikipedia called Conservopedia? No?

01:25:43 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
No no.

01:25:44 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Seriously check it out. It's absolutely hilarious.

01:25:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Martin demands to know about Wikipedia's editorial process, how it handles trust and safety. I mean, this is a real threat to one of the best things that ever happened to the internet.

01:26:04 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Yeah, wikipedia, it is a gift to the world, but this weaponization is going on across the board. I mean we could talk about Brendan Carr, the FTC, and taking on media outlets with threatening to the government's threatening to take away their licenses. You know nbc etc. Uh, cbs you know for doing their job. Like I don't like fox news, I'll complain about fox news, but I don't think their license should be shouldn't be censored.

01:26:25
Yes, yeah, but you know, so it's across the board and by the way if you want to go after somebody for disinformation.

01:26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Xcom is full, full of bots representing China, russia, north Korea, every possible Saudi Arabia, iran, every possible dictatorship. Nobody's saying anything about X.

01:26:48 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I mean, I wonder if the Wikipedia thing is, let's go look at Donald Trump's write up and you know how to fix that. Well, no, what they say about the 2020 election? Trump didn't like it. So, yeah, wikipedia. Wikipedia is on the enemy's list.

01:27:02 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And because Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit, they're all.

01:27:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe they're also bringing the tax status into the conversation, which which they're also trying to do with you, by the way speaking of illegal, that is blatantly illegal for the, for the executive branch, to then tell the irs you know, revoke harvard's uh tax status, revoke it's specifically the tax code that the the rest of the executive branch cannot talk to the irs about blatantly illegal okay, I mean, let let's be frank here, we've gone past the.

01:27:36 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's blatantly illegal.

01:27:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I guess you're right, you know I mean it's basically a foolish objection.

01:27:42 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
We're gonna do what we're going to do and you're gonna have to live with it and it's. It's a very disturbing situation, I have to say, but you know, we're in a post-truth and legal justification environment at the moment carl bode writing for the verge. Brendan carr's fcc is an anti-consumer rights trampling harassment machine he's done a massive reverse ferret from about four years ago where he was all for freedom of speech and the rest of it, and now it's like actually no.

01:28:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think we need to bring these people to heal it's always been about freedom of speech for me, not for thee.

01:28:19 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, right, yeah, as long as you're saying something we like, you have freedom of speech, yeah I mean, I mean try, try discussing cisgender on x and see how that far that gets you, you know, trump sued uh, cbs for what?

01:28:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
20 billion dollars, saying he didn't like the edit they did of of kamala harris's interview on 60 minutes. Uh, probably that. I mean there's no merit, legal merit to it. It is blatantly illegal. But because cbs is trying to merge right now an eight billion dollar merger with skydance yeah, they have some leverage and I think experts think it's likely that cbs will settle no, look at zuckerberg and you know, and, and he said what he's reworded check for 25 million dollars, yeah, yeah, uh to to trump individually.

01:29:11 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
It was like it's the most blatant play. We call it the most blatant payoff you can imagine. But then we could talk about others that are just as blatant as crypto. The Trump fail me as crypto thing. Like, oh, let's take $75 million to someone. It really just is a payoff.

01:29:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:29:31 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I used to get okay. I came tos in 2008 and I even then it was kind of like you've legalized bribery and called it campaign contributions. But at the current state, this is just.

01:29:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is third world stuff it really is, and I would expect a court would probably throw out this the trump's lawsuit against cbs. But it doesn't matter if they've got leverage through. You know the merger right Right. If they can threaten the merger, then it doesn't really matter what the courts might say If there is an illegality.

01:30:04 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
And it's a rational decision. You know I was talking about it before. I could write a check for a few million dollars and make a big problem go away. It's worth it. It didn't quite work for Zuckerberg. He wrote his $25 million check and a million or whatever it was for the inauguration and you know Matt is still on trial, but you know, maybe they'll back off.

01:30:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's face it $40 million to Mark Zuckerberg. Not a big check, did you see? Oh no, not the helicopter skiing thing.

01:30:33 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Million dollars to mark zuckerberg, not a big check. Did you see this? Oh wait, oh no, not the hell, not the helicopter skiing thing.

01:30:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so this is from uh sustainability times, which I don't normally read, but I gotta tell you, apparently mark has two yachts, not not just one. He has two yachts, one called launch pad, the other aptly named wingman. He wanted to go helicopter skiing in norway, but the norwegians have very strict laws about helicopter skiing and about landing helicopters in this pristine north and so forth. So he got around those laws by sailing his, his 300 million dollar 387 foot yacht launch pad and its support vessel equipped with helipad wingman, 5300 miles to svalbard so they could be a floating base for him and his family for heliskiing. They were able to heliski in essentially a completely isolated region very close to the arctic circle. Up in svalbard the boats are still in svalbard area. Uh, can you imagine? I mean, I don't know what it costs, it doesn't really matter but to to sail two super yachts 5300 miles and now, now, just for the purpose of taking a helicopter up to ski down. I don't think he's worried about a 43 million dollar. Fine, let's just put it that way I read.

01:32:00 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I read a story and a friend of mine worked on on on the island for six years and there's one rule there you have to have a gun with you at all times because polar bears are wild on there and I couldn't help thinking, you know, just for one polar bear, life could have been a little better yeah, he, uh.

01:32:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's done this before. Last year he sent his yacht to Tahiti but never managed to get around to the vacation, so it just went down there and hung around a little bit. Now it's up in svalbard so what's this worth?

01:32:35 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
200 billion, or I mean meta stock has kind of got up down remember what bill gates said when he got past a couple of billion.

01:32:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said after a certain point, it's just infinite, there's nothing you can't buy.

01:32:48 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
You see, I've always liked joseph heller's quote when he was, uh, speaking to a fellow author at a conference in New York and he said I'll have something these people will never have enough. And it's as simple as that, you know, it's.

01:33:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then why don't they act like they have enough?

01:33:04 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And yet Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan have stopped funding a school Exactly Very close to their home in a poor community in the Bay Area. Absolutely shameless.

01:33:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they say why they stopped funding it? They?

01:33:19 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
get tired of it. Changing priorities, I think, is the line, yeah, the standard buzzword.

01:33:26 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's just like, yeah, we've got the PR we need from this, so screw them.

01:33:30 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And the Chan Zuckerberg initiative has basically pulled back on anything uh related to social justice. Well, no, I was in the.

01:33:38 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I was in the press conference when they announced the chan zuckerberg uh initiative and they're like we want to kill. We want to have cures for all major diseases within 10 years. Yeah, how's that working out?

01:33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's just, it shows you, maybe, and it teaches us to be a little cynical. When companies announce these big initiatives, are they announcing it because they really care or are they announcing it because, at the moment, it's politically expedient? Because the minute it's not politically expedient, they pull the plug on it. They they move with the winds. They're going to do what's best for them and their company, not for anybody else.

01:34:15 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's a tax dodge. You know you're basically giving a whole bunch of your revenue over to charity. It avoids taxes and you know you can, you know, write the rest off but mark zuckerberg is still very mad at apple.

01:34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Interview, uh, with ben thompson over at stratechery um, he, he says that facebook and and mark are deeply bitter about apple's policies. Uh, a number of the things where they've just said, okay, you can't do those things where we, we think would be valuable. This is, mark, the direct quote, which I think to some degree contributes to some of that dynamic behavior between our company and theirs. You don't like apple then?

01:35:01 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I can't remember one bit. I want to see a cage match between cook and zuckerberg las vegas, I, I know mark studied.

01:35:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know martial arts, but cook looks like a wiry guy. I don't know it's like 100 gorillas. I mean one gorilla versus 100 men.

01:35:20 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's like, it's tough, it's a conundrum yeah I don't know I suspect cook could be a tough cookie as it goes.

01:35:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But he seems. He seems kind of wiry and yeah well, I mean it's interesting.

01:35:32 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
So uh zuckerberg was asked about you know kind of their approach to ai and why they went open, and you know that I know why they didn't want to be the 10th. You know uh llm, you know competing, but you know what he said was we want to own the environment. He doesn't like that. He was beholden that Facebook, his various apps are beholden to Apple, and so even if he's not going to make money on his open source chatbot, he'll control the environment and at least he will control his own destiny. So yeah, it sticks in his craw to the tune of many, many billions of dollars in the context of AI.

01:36:09 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, it did. The context of ai? Yeah, it did. We have come to a certain situation, though, where you know it's like somebody has multiple billions of dollars and can act a hissy fit, basically, um, you know, and go up against apple and go up against trump, it's he was very I thought he was surprisingly candid frankly with ben thompson, because, uh, maybe this isn't something he should have admitted.

01:36:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thompson asked him about open source AI. This is the quote you're, I think, referring to Gary. We're not building it. Mark said so that we can open source it for developers. We're building it because it's a thing that we believe we need in order to build the services they want. We want. We want, not they want. Open source means something a little different, I think, to mark than it does to the rest of the world, and there's some question about whether llama is really open source.

01:37:02 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I guess open weight or maybe more like yeah, you can use it locally if you want but what happened to the idea that you know, if you built your business on open source, you have a kind of moral responsibility to oh, no, no, no, to intern?

01:37:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
open source? Neither. No, google doesn't believe that with chrome, in fact, global admitted, you know, we really, I mean, that's ours, it's all google employees. Chrome would die without us. Uh, android, same thing. No, these companies, it's all about uh profit?

01:37:36 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
yeah, pretty much. I mean, honestly, under american law then corporations have a duty to their shareholders to maximize profit, no matter what the cost.

01:37:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, mark said uh, there are a number of ai revenue opportunities. One is business messaging, um, and of course they own messaging with WhatsApp to to a great degree. Uh, he says I think there should be very large business. They should be very large business ecosystems in their own right, and the way I think that's going to happen, we'll see the early glimpses of this, because business messaging is already a huge thing. Yeah, I guess they missed buying slack when they could have yeah, I mean it's.

01:38:19 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's interesting that you know, now the antitrust people are looking at instagram and whatsapp and the rest of it and buying up the competition. Um, he's suddenly making it playing a different tune, as it were.

01:38:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Put it that way meta did release uh or actually really isn't a release. They updated the meta app that you use with uh, their ray-ban glasses, to be now a kind of a social network, but I don't. It's just a feed of ai images. It's the last thing in the world that I would really want, but I guess the only good thing about this is they're keeping these images off of Instagram anyway, uh, which is probably a good thing.

01:39:05 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Zuckerberg is not really hit it yet with AI, like in the 2023 their. Their whole idea was I don't even know what to call it like a personality, so they had, you know, snoop Dogg, you could talk to a character. They used his voice. Your sports bro was Tom Brady, you know. Again, you'd hear their voice and you could kind of just go chat. You know they paid millions and millions of dollars for the licensing and you know they pulled the plug on that after a year. 've tried different things. They they have the reach. You know, right, I mean, they have billions of people on their various apps and AI is right there. So I guess they have a lot of users, but they haven't figured out yet. To me, messaging that's just throwing something else at the wall and hoping it.

01:39:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's probably accurate.

01:39:52 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at how the metaverse crashed and burned, you know, it's just like yeah, he's kind of given up on that, hasn't it yeah? I mean I, I don't understand what's going on with that. They've burned they've literally burned billions on this and nothing has come of it well, I would say nothing.

01:40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a. Here's tiny workers creating a giant sushi roll oh right, well, that's well that ain't nothing. Uh, here's cats running their own luxury fashion store. I mean, what more could you, could you? Yeah, you know it's kind of sad when you look at stuff like this. Here's donald trump in the Popemobile. It feels a little by the way his name is.

01:40:38 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Pope.

01:40:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Deportes.

01:40:42 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's kind of sad to think that the rainforest is burning for this stuff. No, I mean it's sorry. No, go ahead, Go ahead. No, I mean, it's just so much of this stuff is basically recycling and reusing. It's a tremendous waste of resources.

01:41:00 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
And you know they're talking about like by 2030, we're going to have a doubling in the amount of data centers out there. I mean what just happened this week in Spain and Portugal.

01:41:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, a giant blackout. Oh yeah, what was did they ever find out?

01:41:15 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
why it was a transformer fire.

01:41:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, they say grid oscillation.

01:41:23 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I don't know what that is. I have a friend in Portugal who's somewhat involved with it and she said that basically it was two big transformer fires happening at the same time and it just kicked the grid over and it's fascinating how people dealt with it. Some people were stuck in elevators, some people were stuck in trains, some people weren't able to work, which in Spain is not that bad.

01:41:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The good news is it was not, and they were pretty able to rule this out as cyber attack, although that I live in fear of that at some point.

01:41:59 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, I mean, as a reporter, when the EU said it is definitely not a cyber attack, that was like a Chinese military parade of red flags, because you can't say definitely, sure, it wasn't, yeah, yeah, I'm sure, sorry, anyway.

01:42:15 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I'm just convinced that this is our future, that we, in the US at least, we're not anticipating the great demand, in large part because of AI, but generally speaking, on the electrical grid, and I'm assuming these things are going to unfortunately happen more often if, because we're not planning for it, whether there's yeah, you know, this huge taxation on the system with, you know, ai every, every query, you know, just takes up so much energy. It's going to grow more and more popular as it becomes more and more useful and so I dare say thank you.

01:42:51
so I you know I'm I'm convinced that you know there are going to be these outages without some planning, and I'm pretty skeptical about our ability to plan for this.

01:43:02 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I couldn't agree more. I mean the fact that we're still building building data centers in Arizona rule places. What the hell is going on with that? It's possibly the worst place to build them, apart from the tax breaks.

01:43:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That wasn't the only threat I was worried about. I also believe that Chinese hackers and others are living in our grid, just waiting for an opportunity to trigger a failure. So we've got two threats.

01:43:27 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean vault Typhoon proved that. I was talking to somebody this week and he was like in December. He confirmed a story which had originally been reported a couple of weeks ago by the Wall Street Journal that basically the Chinese negotiators in a trade contract said yeah, we're behind Volt Typhoon, we've been surveilling your systems, just as you've been surveilling ours, and deal with it. It's Basically, america is not quite as powerful as it thinks it is but we have cso oh wait, oh, laughing, all laughing whistling past the graveyard.

01:44:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think is the uh, the phrase. Let's take a little break, we've got more to come. I want to get you out of here by 4 30. Is that going to work for you, gary? Can we, can we, can you keep?

01:44:11 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
you at 4.30?.

01:44:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm here for the duration. All right, gary Rivlin is here. We've just lost Ian Thompson. He's turned off his camera. Owen, go ahead and put up the placard with a picture of you not moving and we will take a little timeout.

01:44:24
You're watching this Week in Tech. So glad you're here this week, this episode of this Week in Tech brought to you by our friends at Coda. I love seeing the team come together to make this show happen. What I don't love trying to keep track of all the information and data and projects we're working on across dozens of platforms, products and tools.

01:44:47
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01:45:58
Uh, good news elon musk has gotten out from under his ex debt. The wall street banks which lent him 13 billion dollars have sold off. Well, actually, I guess it's not him that's out of the out of the woods, it's the wall street banks. They sat on that 13 billion dollars for quite a while, but it was smart to do so. They have been able to sell almost all of those loans at 98 cents on the dollar. So, uh, that's, that's that morgan stanley bank of america. Five other banks all lent elon musk money to buy Twitter a total of 13 billion dollars. Uh, by the time the deal closed, x wasn't worth quite what he'd paid for it, and those, those poor banks were stuck with those loans for a long time. But of course, x's fortunes have turned around in a new era and they're able now to get out of them. Go ahead, yeah.

01:46:56 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
The thing that's amazing to me is if you completely ignore how Musk has mismanaged X as a business. Fundamentally, these loans should have lost value because of just the change in prevailing interest rates.

01:47:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and they did for a while, they got down about 65 cents on the dollar.

01:47:15 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I mean they lost a lot and so the thing that really saved X was that Musk assigned a roughly 25% stake in his AI startup, xai to X. Therefore, kind of like basically bulking up theAI to X, therefore kind of you know like basically bulking up the balance sheet of X.

01:47:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it wasn't really the political incline, it was the fact that he was able to merge X and Grok.

01:47:44 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I think that was much more relevant to Wall Street's view of the value you know the value of X debt Interesting.

01:47:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, it's all a bet on ai becoming worth something instead of the great what it is right now, which is a great liability on the right.

01:47:58 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Basically, you know, will xai be able to issue more shares, find, find someone to buy them and then retire the debt with the, with the proceeds.

01:48:06 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
That's the bet and xai right now is, at least on paper, it's valuation.

01:48:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's like 60 billion dollars, so it's worth more um than x right, and since that 13 billion dollar loan is worth 15 billion or something, I mean they've now had xai buy x with this paper valuation right, yeah, right I mean this is back all over again, but I mean in terms of uh in of Wall Street, then holding debt for two and a half years, that's a massive liability.

01:48:39 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I'm sure they're very, very keen to get rid of that.

01:48:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, where most of the SpaceX employees live, next to Boca Chica, his launch site. They've renamed it to Starbase Texas. You now live in the Starbase. Elon is very much into sci-fi. Obviously it wasn't a big, you know not that many people were. Only 283 people were eligible to vote on the renaming of the town and you know the people who actually live there, and almost all of them were spacex employees. So it's pretty much a given, uh, that the city would be renamed to starbase. A new city in texas is cameron county, near the boca chica beach launch site in the gulf of america. Oh, they said the gulf of of Mexico. I'm sorry, excuse me, verge, it's, it's the Gulf of America, please, right um, what's the advantage?

01:49:40 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I, I, you know, I, I saw that story. It's absurd, right, I mean. But what's the big advantage for Musk? Well, I have a town.

01:49:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
when the future is written in the year 2830, they'll be able to look back and say this is when Starbase was founded, I guess we've seen this before, though, with Disney.

01:50:03 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Disney bought up huge areas of Florida under a variety of shell companies. They got City Incorporated.

01:50:11 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
They have the right to run a nuclear reactor and an airport out of their own territory, so I guess he's just doing the same thing and it's, it seems to have a lot to do with, uh, with beach closures, essentially, uh, there's a texas law or texas bill under consideration that would let a municipality in the city.

01:50:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, because you remember there were a couple of launches. Uh, I think was the falcon heavy that spewed debris all over the beach at boca chica because also across the west indies.

01:50:44 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
But yeah, yeah and shut down a few other things but and and the other big thing I bet is housing for his employees. I think that a city probably would be easier to influence in terms of, you know, permitting houses who gets to be the mayor exactly?

01:51:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are you implying that?

01:51:03 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
two hats, two hats.

01:51:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wears many hats uh, jeff bezos not to be left behind. He owns very many hats.

01:51:09 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Now you can have the mayor hat sorry, there's a lovely comedian's comment when you're putting too many hats on. And Gary just nailed it, it was just.

01:51:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amazon is deploying the first Project Kuiper internet satellites. Jeff Bezos' plan to compete with Starlink of SpaceX 27 satellites now operating in low Earth orbit. So Amazon finally it's been much delayed link of spacex 27 satellites now operating in low earth orbit. So amazon finally they've been it's been much delayed able to start building its constellation of satellites. They would intend to have 3 200 satellites um in the sky. Uh, the fcc uh agreed that, uh, it could do that as long as it got 1600 in orbit by next summer. Obviously they're not going to be able to do that, but they did get an extension from the FCC. By the way, what do they call? Uh, call these?

01:52:01 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
this, uh, constellation of starlink has over 7 000 already I was gonna say I mean it makes a lot more sense than putting katie perry in august in orbit.

01:52:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It does it's not as good a publicity stunt, but it's more useful I mean from a register headline point of view.

01:52:33 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It was fantastic, you know um.

01:52:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, jeff beatles's thrusting erection goes into I will point out that it is circumcised.

01:52:46 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I I will say that yeah but but the amazon's uh, amazon's network and starlink uh apparently have kind of undisclosed or underreported environmental problems when the satellites burn up on reentry there.

01:53:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is new evidence that this is problematic. Yeah, oh, who's that?

01:53:05 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh, this is Fitzgerald Quimby. He was complaining about being ignored.

01:53:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, mr Quimby a good looking pup. Is he a full grown or is he a baby?

01:53:14 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
He is a senior dog adopted from Muttville, a rescue operation here in San Francisco that is kind of indirectly funded by Larry Ellison, oh wow.

01:53:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I didn't know he was a dog lover.

01:53:27 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh wow, I didn't know he was a dog lover.

01:53:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's not but he bought out Dave Duffield's company PeopleSoft, and Duffield went on to donate to a lot of pet-related causes in the Bay Area.

01:53:38 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
So thank you, dave Duffield, and thank you Larry.

01:53:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And thank you, mr Quimby, it's nice to meet you. Another story from 404. This was a shocker. Researchers secretly ran a massive unauthorized ai persuasion experiment on reddit users. If you've ever visited the change my view subreddit, you know that's a place where you would post something like I think I really think that, uh, that if you're gonna launch a rocket, it should have the thrusters on the back and then change my mind right. Normally the responses are from other redditors. In this case it was from the university of zurich, which ran bots that would answer more than a thousand that were posted more than a thousand comments over the course of several months. The bots posed uh as experts in the area a black man who was opposed, for instance, to the black lives matter movement, someone who works at a domestic violence shelter. One bots uh suggested that certain kinds of criminals should not be rehabilitated. All of this is an experiment to see if the bots could be persuasive. By the way, they could.

01:54:54 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
We've seen this. We've seen this before. Do you remember 2013? A couple of researchers said that, yeah, we work with Facebook. We put negative messages out and positive messages out and we've been able to change people's minds about certain things. This is disturbing stuff.

01:55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's certainly not ethical right.

01:55:13 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I was going to say the same thing, arthur. It just obliterates any kind of ethical line. And, by the way, to me, this is one of my big fears about AI that it's going to be used to manipulate people. As the story points out, it was very effective far more effective than humans at changing minds, and you know, I mean getting people to think differently is a good thing, but I'm worried about AI manipulating people and it's going to know us so well and it's going to understand how to push certain buttons, and so to me, this is what the canary in the mine kind of thing Like. I think this is going to be a way.

01:55:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai is used a lot in a way that makes us really okay by advertisers, I mean, in all sorts of ways to manipulate our behavior there's a long history of highly unethical and yet amazingly useful studies being performed, most of them from earlier times when the ethics weren't as well established. Uh, on on, you know, like the stanford prison experiment and so forth. Um, I think, I think it's good we learned this, that ai can be persuasive, more persuasive than humans. Now, it's a shameful way to learn it and, by the way, reddit says they're considering legal action against the university of zurich. Um, and yeah, that's a. It was a valuable lesson, wasn't?

01:56:32 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
it. So what are we gonna? What are we gonna do with it? I mean, well, here it's yeah go ahead.

01:56:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh no, here in san francisco they, uh, they just opened up a storefront in union square, our retail district for world, which is oh yeah, you can get your I was there on they have, they have orbs. Yeah, ian did you get scanned.

01:56:49 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Are you kidding, sorry?

01:56:51 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Are you a bot? How do we know If you didn't get scanned? How do we know if you're a bot or not?

01:56:55 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well no, I deliberately didn't. I went in there and it was hilarious because at launch event they're like oh, we're building Apple-like stores. It was like somebody just got home depot to build a little wooden thing and put these orbs on there and they're offering 16 bucks for your iris scan.

01:57:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, go to hell because well, all right, so people did it obviously right.

01:57:20 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, they were saying there was a massive rush of people. I sat outside that store for 20 minutes nobody like there were like four people going out and two of them came.

01:57:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was gonna sell a pint of my blood, but I think I'll come in here and scan my iris instead.

01:57:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I, just I. I think that they, they are figuring out how to market this, though, which is, you know? I mean I I scan my iris for clear yeah, so, and that's how they're marketing it. They're saying this is just like tsa, pre-check, like don't PreCheck, don't you want to get things faster and feel fancy?

01:57:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I mean the company says it doesn't store images of your iris, just a hash.

01:58:00 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
No, it doesn't, and they're correcting that. Basically, you get the iris scan, you get the face scan as a backup. It connects via Bluetooth to your phone. That builds a blockchain ident, but at the same time, they're entire pitches because you're human. But you can sell the accounts on to other people and the best use case that have come up for this is games, dating and social media.

01:58:25 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
So should Reddit basically use world to verify all its uses? Yeah, there you go, that's better than a CAPTCHA, I mean that obviously stops the unethical AI experiments, but it raises all kinds of new questions.

01:58:42 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
What's the thing? Sam Altman is behind. This is it? This is it. Okay, this is it.

01:58:49 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
No, sam Altman's behind it. Um, they're basically trying to build a. They've got 12 million people signed up, so another 7 billion to go. But you know that's that's beside the buy. Um, you know it's, it's an interesting idea, but I just don't trust the source. You know it's like I'm not going to give my identity to sam altman.

01:59:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's kind of like I mean, look, we had the same problem in the us. Nobody wants a universal government id card either, right, but it feels like there is a case to be made that it would be nice to have some. You know something? Estonia has a digital id card uh, in fact, I have a stony digital identity uh card, because you could buy it as a foreigner as well. It seems like there it's not a bad thing to have a way of proving not merely that you're human, but that you are who you say you are. Authentication is a big problem right now identity theft, I mean, you know.

01:59:44 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
I guess we could have a Mission Impossible movie where Tom Cruise has this fake Iris, so I guess you could crack this. But you movie where Tom Cruise has this fake iris, so I guess you could crack this. But it reminds me of our earlier conversation. It's like on paper it sounds great. But I'm with Ian. I'm just not trusting the folks who are collecting this information. What happened with 23andMe?

02:00:03 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Oh, it's save and save. Oh, we're declaring bankruptcy. Tough shit, Absolutely yeah.

02:00:09 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
No, I mean I'm with you.

02:00:09 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean, if you, if you could do this in an open source, easily verifiable format and people chose to do it, I'd be fine with it. But at the moment, handing this over to a commercial company, as you pointed out, the 23 and me, no, just no right.

02:00:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting they're not using it as uh authentication of your identity, just merely that you are a human that.

02:00:34 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
That picture that you're putting up right now is from the fort mason event. They're a lot less stylish inside the store on union school it's not as pretty, huh yeah but it's permanent right, they're going to continue to keep it there, are they oh?

02:00:49
yeah, no, they're going to keep it in San Francisco and five other cities Nashville, a bunch of others and they plan to get 7,500 orbs around the US to try and get people to sign in. But at the end of the day, it doesn't offer anything particularly that you couldn't get elsewhere. It's just basically somebody saying I'm going to scan your iris and this is your corporate ID and unlike you, Kevin Roos of the New York Times was perfectly happy to scan his iris. I am deeply disappointed.

02:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kevin thinks that the AI is in love with him. He's, he's all in on the AI thing. He says he got. You don't get cash, by the way.

02:01:32 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
You don't you get world coin yes, you get a coin right right you get 16 worth of world coin, which is worth 16.07 dollars in actual currency.

02:01:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As long as the currency so ruth said he got 39.22 world coin tokens. Oh really, at today's price is 40.77. He also says I'll be donating them to charity once I figure out how to get them off my phone.

02:01:56 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, a lot, of, a lot of good that's gonna do you well, I mean, this is the whole thing.

02:02:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The biometric data is sticky as all hell and right you know well, I we gave 23 and me my spit. Uh, he quotes a, a social media influencer named hannah stocking, who said what am I hiding anyway, who cares take it?

02:02:17 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
all, and why do you have curtains in your house?

02:02:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
take it all I, you know, full disclosure. I've mentioned this a lot, but you, joanna stern, just did a piece at the wall street journal about uh, theless, pin the plod note. And this, the BAI device which I've been wearing since January, like her, and it's collecting all my conversations, oh no. How did the permissions work Leo what happened?

02:02:47
It's funny After the Wall Street Journal. Well, I'm like hannah stocking uh, I don't care, take it all. What what's funny is, um, after the joanna stern article came out and and quoted lawyers who said you know, you might want to consider if you're in a uh two-party state or one party state. She is in new york and new jersey, which is a single party state, but I'm in california, that's a two-party state. So b put up a little notice saying hey, you know you should ask for permission before you record anybody well, well, limitless does not save recordings, it just uh analyzes them and then uh sends them off I'm sorry, I'm married to a paralegal.

02:03:29 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
From a discovery perspective, this is absolute nightmare territory, uh well, okay, I'll just just to reassure you guys.

02:03:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It can't hear you because I'm wearing headphones, so it, it can't uh, it can't uh tell you, but here's, here's what it's recorded from today episode at the end of the day, so that a million people, yeah and it's recorded.

02:03:46 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Right, we recorded it. Yeah, you're right, I don't care. Uh, here's what it's recorded from today.

02:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're just publishing this episode at the end of the day so that a million people can watch it? Yeah, and it's recorded, right? We recorded it. Yeah, you're right, I don't care. Here's what it got from earlier today. Leo expresses excitement about Verstappen's recent racing performance and speculates on the potential of upcoming drivers, while also engaging in personal discussions about family, tech updates and various life topics with participants.

02:04:06 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
They've started taking other people's names out of there, I think no, no, I mean, this is why I've stayed off social media all day, because I've got a Grand Prix to watch. I'm not gonna tell, but you know who got a poll. Right, I know who got a poll. Just don't tell me anymore. You don't know anything.

02:04:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, well, I don't know who won the race.

02:04:23
I watched the first five laps and they really, I didn't even watch that, so I'm excited. I'm excited. Uh, let's see what else it also does to do's. So here's it's. What's funny about the bee is it's a lot more organized than I am. It will often say things like make a list of all of the ideas that you talked about today on this week in Tech, and I mean I'm not gonna. I'm not, it's done. Organize and review the spiral bound piano books picked up yesterday, incorporating them into your practice routine review and finalize the custom knife order details discussed with Jeff Jarvis. I don't know. I don't know why it says that, including design, design specifications and potential collaboration. It is um it is interesting.

02:05:09 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean, this is exactly what Bruce Schneier was talking about in his keynote at the RSA conference in terms of we are going to get AI agents. They are going to be biased because they're built by corporations who are designed to maximize profits. So you've got to have a real trust and verification thing on this. So be very, very careful.

02:05:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I know I'm handing over a hell of a lot of information yeah to somebody I have no idea.

02:05:35
I mean, I've interviewed the founders, but that doesn't mean anything, and I don't know where they're, what they're doing with it. My theory is, though, that someday this will be very because this has been recording everything that has happened to me since January that when the AI gets better, it's going to have a treasure trove of information to work on. It knows that I visited morty's cat adoption lounge yesterday. That's pretty good a day of playful banter, thought for plans for new cats and humorous problem solving but why would you give that information to anyone else?

02:06:06
well, in order to get it for myself.

02:06:09 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Hmm I have to get somebody else to analyze I've been attracted I. I've been attracted to these. I don't have a particularly good memory exactly if I didn't write it down, I'm not really sure exactly, and so I I am attracted. I I do wonder about kind of couples where, like you said this, I didn't say this you know, it was my hope that I would be able to use it for that purpose oh, yeah, right unfortunately not that accurate yeah, and right, lisa's gonna let that go no, I haven't dared.

02:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I have a recording of our conversation. I'd like to play it back for you now. Actually, she's usually right.

02:06:51 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I mean, I can understand it from a work perspective If your manager says do this, you do it and it screws up, and then this is, I didn't tell you to do this and you can play it back to them. But at the same time it seems like an enormous amount of information to be giving out for very little gain.

02:07:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would like to stay married. I'm just saying I am not going to use this to win any arguments. Let's take a little quick break and final. Actually, we've got some interesting technological breakthroughs coming up in our final stories. You're watching this Week in Tech Gary Rivlin great to have you Ian Thompson and, of course, the wonderful Owen Thomas. We've got Thompson and Thomas and rivlin and me. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security. You know we were just talking about this.

02:07:40
Hackers are using AI to breach your organization, to craft fishing scams, and I mean. Ai powers innovation and drives efficiency, but it also helps bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. Phishing attacks over encrypted channels increased by 34.1% last year, fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools and phishing as a service kits. Yes, phishing as a service. It had to happen right. Organizations in all industries, from small to large, are leveraging AI to do some really good things Increase employee productivity with public AI, engineers and coding assistants, marketers with writing tools, finance creating spreadsheet formulas you know instantly. They also businesses also use it to automate workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. We're seeing ai embedded into applications and services that are customer and partner facing. It helps a business move faster in the market, gain competitive edge, but it also opens you up to attack. Companies need to rethink how they protect their private and public use of AI and how they defend against those AI-powered attacks. It's a double-edged sword.

02:08:58
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02:09:28
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02:10:23
We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech and our wonderful panel and our final few stories. We wrap things up. Uh, did you watch the Kentucky Derby? Journalism lost. Journalism lost as it has been all along. So it was. It's a weird story because in 2016, somebody used AI to pick the winners in the Kentucky Derby and it picked all four of them, or all five of them like the first five places. It was incredibly successful. Didn't do so well this time around. They used the USA Today Network. Asked co-pilot microsoft. Say that was their mistake. Is that what you're saying?

02:11:14 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
well, I'm sorry, in the list of ai it's not number one in your mind is not number one, no, it's probably not even number three.

02:11:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They they gave it, uh, the latest odds, the predictions, the race factors. They uh asked co-pilot to simulate the order of finish for the kentucky derby field. In this projection, journalism won, of course it was the favorite, uh, so maybe it wasn't such a brilliant pick. Didn't win in the long run, right, uh, it's number two pick did, and sovereignty was an 11 and one pick. And did win. Uh, the ai also thought that rodriguez would come in. Do you say come in third in a horse race what is up with these horse names?

02:12:06
rodriguez scratched sandman, burnham square luxor cafe. I know, aren't they great? I think they're short, for even longer ones, though, right they must be.

02:12:16 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
But I mean, las vegas is full of bankrupts who think they've got a system. I know, and this is exactly the same thing anyway, I did not, uh, do so well.

02:12:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, in 2016, it was an online swarm intelligence platform that made the correct prediction. I don't know if that I don't even know what that is. I guess it's kind of like an ai named all four top finishers in order, so people got real excited. Uh, apparently each app. Gpt also picked journalism according to fan duel sovereignty, which a horse co-pilot predicted would finish second, came in first, and journalism came in second. Well, that's not so bad.

02:13:00 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It just got the order reversed well, the one you're losing the money, though it's pretty bad oh yeah, if you're placing a bet, co-pilots pick for fourth place.

02:13:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sandman, they finished in, or it finished, or her she finished, or I don't know what. It's not answer. Sandman finished in 18th place.

02:13:18 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Okay, that's a quick trip to the dog food factory there. Yeah.

02:13:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Burnham Square, 11th place. Luxor Cafe, 10th place. Yeah, so it didn't. It didn't really do all that well. Um, an online racing publication, also got in the act. They asked a quote trained AI LLM tool for their predictions and it was completely wrong. So, uh, it did pick journalism as a second place finisher, but everybody else is completely off, so don't. I guess the moral is don't use ai to pick your horses well, I mean, the bigger, the bigger.

02:13:54 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
More serious point here is like we're using ai for all things that ai should, shouldn't be used. Yeah, one of my favorites. Like someone in 2023, a conservative to make a point about woke ai, you know, kind of gave I think it was chat she beats he. But one of the large lab, large language models, you know, you know type out the N word or 1 million people die and of course that's absurd. You know you would do that, a human would do that. But like, why are you going in for your ethical question? You know, go ask the, you know the ethicist of the New York times magazine or something. But this is the bigger problem with ai. Like, like you need to figure out what it's good at and what it's not good at, what you should rely on it for and what you should. And still, you know it's not a hundred percent reliable.

02:14:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know picking horses to win plays their show well, come to think of it, the exact worst thing to get ai to do is predict the future, because ai is based on everything that's happened, up to the point that it was training happened. Right, it's not. How would it know the future?

02:14:54 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Yeah, and you know I actually know horse racing some and you know I've I've lost, um, and you know it's. You know it's it's based on like a lot of human factors, like what's the weather conditions, and you know kind of like you could study how this jockey or that jockey has done. So you know there's kind of stuff an ai would be good at. But anyway, it's kind of fun that they did it. It's revealing that it was no good at it. I'm gonna guess with 2016. It was probably more or less the favorites that won, and so it was able to protect one, two, three, four, five. Yeah, you know because, like okay, well, that's, you know how do you win the ncaa men's basketball uh tournament? You pick all the favorites I guess it makes sense.

02:15:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I don't play the horses, but if you pick the favorites, you would win more often than not than than random. I guess, right or no?

02:15:44 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I mean, if you believe in moneyball and baseball, right then yeah you know, all of that is statistics.

02:15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you should ask what the horses on base percentage is.

02:15:54 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Well, my point is if it's a statistically based analysis of how past performance shapes future results, Ah, there you go. If we think that works, then AI ought to be able to automate it.

02:16:08 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
You're talking like a prospectus well, I mean, if you're playing the ponies, you look at the form, you look at what the the horses have done before, which ai would be great at. But, as gary points out, if it's raining on the race course, well you can add that, though, can't you?

02:16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you could say, oh, and by the way, it's muddy, so pick a mutter. I mean you could give it. It's really a question of not giving it all the parameters. If you gave it all the information, would it do a better job if you have all the information, why do you need an ai?

02:16:38 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
you should be able to figure it out, because it because an ai is smarter than I am all right, here's ai, for what I would use ai for in this case is to set the odds there you go right. I mean it's sort of like based on past performance. Well, it's paramutual, don't?

02:16:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean again, I don't know anything about it but don't the odds? The odds are affected by how the betting's going right.

02:17:00 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
The front runner is based on how many people picked it and and what the bookmaker is willing to pay.

02:17:04 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Well, they start off with odds and they shift them up it's parimutuel.

02:17:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, as the, as the, as the bets come in, the odds shift right, right, yeah, oh, but that makes sense.

02:17:13 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
They have to start, you have to set the, or you have to set the original odds.

02:17:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah yeah, right, that makes sense. Uh, I don't know if this is good or not, but a quantum message has traveled over a record-breaking 158 miles of standard fiber optic cables in Germany, making the first time coherent quantum communication has been accomplished using existing telecommunications infrastructure without requiring expensive cryogenic cooling.

02:17:47 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, I mean it's, and it's still going to take a long time to get here I need an answerable.

02:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need an answerable. Well, I mean it's.

02:17:55 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's kind of like one of those things. It's like fusion is 10 years away. Quantum, you know it's. It's yeah, okay, they've made a really good step forward on this, but at the same time, in the real world it's probably not going to work for another three to five years that's a bold prediction.

02:18:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm very good, pretty optimistic, yeah, and journalism is going to win the kentucky derby next year. I I love it. Journalism came in second. That's pretty much the story of the story of this week that I.

02:18:28 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I saw the title for the show and I was like, yeah, go for it.

02:18:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike Waltz apparently has abandoned Signal for an even less secure third-party version of Signal. And how?

02:18:43 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
do we know?

02:18:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because somebody took a picture of him using it at a cabinet meeting.

02:18:48 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Honestly, all credit to the reuters reporter reporter that did that and got that shot. I've been in contact with the company that's running it.

02:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, there's a lot of signal. What's it called signal tm? It's like a third party um, it's.

02:19:01 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's basically run by a company called s marsh that bought the israeli company that built the app.

02:19:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an archiving app, so yeah, so it uses the signal protocol in transit but then saves because apparently mike waltz who has since been fired, by the way he thought that the problem with using signal was promoted to.

02:19:21 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I'm sorry, promoted promoted.

02:19:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, apparently he believed the issue with the signal app was that it did not preserve the records well, it was the 1950s federal records act.

02:19:34 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Is perfectly clear on this.

02:19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wasn't the only issue, but it was one of the issues. The other issue was he included the editor-in-chief of the atlantic magazine inadvertently in the chat. That's another issue, separate issue. I'm serious.

02:19:48 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
As a journalist, I read that story and I was, like you, lucky lucky.

02:19:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know jeffrey goldberg scored didn't he, yeah, absolutely tell a message, or tm signal, is a fork of signal that allows you to archive the messages. But, of course, if you're archiving the messages, they're archived in clear text.

02:20:08 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, it's not a fork of Signal in itself. It's an add-on app which sits on top of Signal, and they've got like a hundred other apps that they can sit on top of and record them.

02:20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which brings home.

02:20:22 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
the problem of using Signal is that on your phone it's in clear text, so it can be archived by something like this is a problem that we've seen with lawsuits over the last five years is that people don't auto delete their messages on signal. It is a perfectly good end-to-end encrypted messaging system, but if you don't delete your messages and someone grabs your phone and gets access to it, end of story well, that's what happened to Corey Lewandowski when he got indicted.

02:20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He had been using Signal which was encrypted, but he'd been backing it up to iCloud, which was not. And, by the way, that's how I learned, anyway, that iCloud is not private, that Apple has the keys, because it showed up in the indictment.

02:21:11 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
The thing about Signal I love is it was created by a guy called moxie marlin spike, who is a profound, was an anarchist and also a sailor which we have something in common but I mean, he created a, basically a, an unbreakable encryption system. They ported, ited it to WhatsApp in a rather bad way, but now US government is using it.

02:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, they're not supposed to, but they're using it.

02:21:40 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, it's not listed on FedRAMP, but let's face it, everyone's using it.

02:21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is not FedRAMP improved. That's really important to keep in mind and as long as we're talking breakthroughs and I have no idea how important this is or not, but it comes from Tom's hardware that of course Chinese uh computer scientists have been somewhat inhibited by United States restrictions on chip technology, so they decided to do their own. A Chinese university has designed the world's first silicon-free transistor. A research team from Peking University created a two-dimensional low-power GAFET transistor. It's a wafer-scale, multi-layer, stacked single-crystalline 2D 2d gaa configuration uses no silicon, which and it's faster, by the way, in lower power than traditional silicon transistors. Goffett stands for gate all-around field effect transistors the next evolution after mosfets and finfets, which you've probably heard about, but to do it without silicon is big news, and they did it because they didn't have access to the latest 3-nanometer chips. They claim this new GAFET transistor is both faster and lower power than the 3-nanometer TSMC processors. It uses bismuth oxycelenide as a semiconductor instead of silicon I mean you said they claim, which is very accurate that's the big story, isn't it?

02:23:17
yeah?

02:23:18 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
but at the same time, yeah, we're cutting china off from high-end. You know um tiny animated stuff, but they'll find ways around.

02:23:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're putting billions into this it confirms what I've always believed, that sometimes restrictions are good for creativity right yeah, deep right yeah it's why poets write haiku and sonnets.

02:23:40 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's not that it's easier, it's that it's harder yeah, but I I think we need to remember there's a whole infrastructure around uh chip production and packaging that you know oh, I don't know if this is that same you know question that we had earlier, uh about, uh, you know, quantum messaging.

02:23:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it going to be a product in the next three to five years? I don't even. I don't even think that. But clearly china because it can't get a uv lithography from the united states, uh is investing heavily in creating a new kinds of processors, which, which is probably good for everybody well, I mean, yeah, I mean you're right.

02:24:17 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Oh, and in terms of packaging, this is a massive issue for the chips, but I honestly think china is is getting away with it. They're they're doing really good stuff no, I mean they.

02:24:28 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
They will figure out the value chain.

02:24:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, eventually, and finally about it finally, from ian thompson, the one interview question that will protect you from north korean fake workers. We've, uh we talked about this on security now, and quite extensively, which is there are two reasons the north koreans uh want to get into our companies. One is they need hard currency period. They need, you know, the north korean currency is not as valuable, let's say, as the dollar, but also it's a great way to infiltrate these companies and hack them. Uh, and it has turned out that in many cases, you think you're hiring a remote worker who's based in Texas, when in fact it's some guy out of North Korea. So you say, ian, that we found a way to detect these bogus infiltrators.

02:25:22 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, we found a way and we destroyed the way. Basically, it was one of those marvelous moments in press conference where you hear the quote and you think nailed it.

02:25:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This was at our sack. This was at the rsa conference on monday.

02:25:38 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, so basically, uh, from what the from the data I've been seeing jenny still, he was talking about this, a bunch of people were talking about it About one IT staff person is being hired a day who's working in North Korea. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, but the question that CrowdStrike suggested that you would ask was how fat is Kim?

02:26:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do the North Korean imposters say if you ask them how fat their dear leader?

02:26:10 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
is OK. Their families are on the lines, they're not going to say anything. But unfortunately, now this question is out there, then they're going to be told to lie and it's just like. It's OK, your family won't be killed. Your, you know, your grandparents won't be starved to death. So it's one of those things where you need surprise for this to work.

02:26:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In other words exactly, exactly now.

02:26:32 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I'm wondering what the situation is in china. It's just like does xi jia ping look like winnie the pooh?

02:26:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you know, it's just there are things, there are probably things you could uh, you could ask yeah yeah, I mean, it's it.

02:26:45 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It's just the scale in which the north koreans moving into it jobs is something. Over the last couple of weeks I've been doing a lot of stuff on and it's really terrifying Because, with the ability of AI to spam out job resumes and bogus LinkedIn stuff, they're taking millions out of us and also putting it workers out of a job we had a great p.

02:27:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I could remember the source of the story on security now, where a guy decided I know this guy's a north korean imposter, but I'm going to. I'm going to continue with the conversation and what's interesting is that they used chat, gpt, they use AI in the conversation, so you'll ask them a technical question. There'll be a pause. There'll be some typing and then they will come up with a perfectly crafted answer from chat, gpt or some other AI wouldn't American job applicants do the same thing though?

02:27:45
yeah, I wonder. Come to think of it, uh, the crowd strike uh executive. Uh, he's the uh, he's the uh. Senior vice president in the counter adversary division, adam myers. Uh said one of the things we've noticed you'll have a person in poland applying with a very complicated name and then when you get them on zoom calls, it's a, a military age male Asian who can't pronounce the Polish name.

02:28:11 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
It was astonishing quite how badly this is managed, but I can see how it works if people don't do personal contact, you know. I mean, the one thing that was really interesting was they were saying if somebody, actually, if a North Korean actually gets this job, then you've got three or four people behind him who are doing the coding to help him out.

02:28:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right.

02:28:31 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
You've got four people working on you know one person's job and they get rave reviews. You know they get promoted within the company. Yeah, and we've seen this before it's a really good way to get in there. They steal the IP that they they want and then they ransomware the company what happens if you ask deep sea how fat kim jong-il is?

02:28:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you get shot, let me just ask a perplexity.

02:29:04 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
I've always wondered if perplexity would uh, not, eel eels his father right, uh, oh, 308 pounds for uh for the sun there's a story that the British intelligence agencies used to work out what Kim's mood was by how much brandy he was importing and how much pornography he was importing.

02:29:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a bizarre tale this is interesting perplexity knew I meant Kim Jong-un and said no, no, you mean Kim Jong-un. He's 308 pounds, 5'7 or 8. So not a good weight. No, unless you're an NFL linebacker, in which case we'll take it.

02:29:47 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
He had his uncle executed by anti-aircraft gun, which is generally not a good sign of mental health. No, talk about spite.

02:29:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gary, you've been very patient. You did not know ahead of time, this was a three-hour marathon. You've done a great job. He is the author of AI Valley, which I really sincerely, highly recommend A great history of ai, taking us up to the present. So if you're curious about how we got here, uh, this is a great book, uh, to read, with lots of interesting anecdotes and stories. You did a fantastic job. What are you working on next? You want to?

02:30:22 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
uh, still, still promoting it, thinking of, uh, just crypto, just uh. Obviously you talked about the griff, but just what? It means that we're taking regulators off the beat, whether it's the consumer, financial protection bureau, the sec, the justice department. Like there'll be no regulation of meme coins and stuff. That just kind of like merging my tech with my broke usa. I like it.

02:30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, yeah look forward to it. Meanwhile, ai valley. Microsoft, google and the trillion dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence just entered, just came into the bookstores about uh, two weeks ago five, six weeks ago yeah, oh yeah, march 25th, yeah, yeah, yeah, very nice, a really good book, highly recommended.

02:31:04
You start you kind of the. The centerpiece of it is a reid hoffman uh, who is a connector and uh and a perfect guy, the founder of linkedin perfect guy to uh use as kind of your basis, and it was really just a fascinating story. I really, really enjoyed it. So thank you for being here, gary, I appreciate it.

02:31:22 - Gary Rivlin (Guest)
Oh, my pleasure.

02:31:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a lot of fun uh, it's always nice to have a pulitzer prize winner on the show. I think you're probably our first. I don't know, are you working? Yeah, I know that's good. Are you working on that Pulitzer Prize there, ian? Maybe you'll next.

02:31:36 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Actually, I'm working on a nonfiction book.

02:31:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It turns out that a you were writing a novel the last time I talked to you.

02:31:43 - Iain Thomas (Guest)
Well, it turns out, an ancestor of mine started London's first electric taxi company in 1897.

02:31:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we're going to see some things yeah, wow, I'm not going to give any more away, but it's, it's pretty good. Yeah, we'll see, sounds good, very nice. You'll find ian's work at theregistercom and, as often as we can, on, uh, our shows. Thank you, it's good to see you. It Always a pleasure. Owen Thomas is the managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times. I wish I didn't see the link until too late. You have a story in the Business Times, a business journal, about a privacy czar being assigned to the 23andMe case.

02:32:26 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yes, that was from our biotech reporter, ron Lutie. I was going to pop in with it. Uh, we were talking about 23 and me. I think it's a a positive sign that yes when you know when your personal data is kind of in play, as it is, in this bankruptcy. Um, it's not going to just be kind of handed over to any buyer. Uh, that there's going to be some scrutiny. It's too late.

02:32:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I already deleted my spit, but that's uh yeah at least the courts are uh good, paying attention, yeah, taking taking a stand will the czar have the ability to say, okay, you can buy this company, but not its data?

02:33:04 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I think that is the intent. The judge has proposed appointing this SAR. There's not a SAR in place yet just to be clear.

02:33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good. Well, we'll follow the story at the San Francisco Business Times. Bizjournalscom slash San Francisco. Thank you, owen Great to have you my pleasure.

02:33:22
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