This Week in Tech 1033 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. Jennifer Patterson-Tooey from the Verge is here, brian McCullough from the Tech Meme Ride Home and my favorite gastronomad, mike Elgin. We celebrate Towel Day with a whole bunch of stories. I think we set a record this week for the number of stories Apple's no good, very bad week. Why Android XR may be the future of smart devices and why Johnny Ive and Sam Altman really should rethink their marriage. All of that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1033, recorded Sunday, may 25th 2025. Our friend Zink. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we talk about the week's tech news. We have gathered an assemblage of eminent personal personages. Jennifer pattison tui is here. You might see her occasionally on tech news weekly, but she's also a smart home mama at thevergecom.

01:17 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
See, I combined them both hi leo, great to be here always a pleasure.

01:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. Did you have a good Mother's Day?

01:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I did. I have a lovely Mother's Day, thank you. We went strawberry picking and to the beach, so lots of fun Just say strawberry one more time for me. Strawberry.

01:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, strawberry, oh my, I made strawberry jam, did you really?

01:44 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I did. Oh. My gosh, I love strawberry jam. Did you really?

01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did oh my gosh, I love strawberry jam Right after strawberry rhubarb pie. Mike Elgin is also here. Hello Mike. Hey Leo, good to see you again, my favorite gastronomad blogger at machinesocietyai. Do you still do Mike's list, or has that been subsumed?

02:03 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, that's basically Machine. Society is the origin. It came as sprung from the Wynn letter, then it was Mike's List, then it was the raw feed, then it was something else and now it's Machine Society.

02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As the technology changes. Yeah, it's AI focused.

02:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, I've been doing this newsletter since the 90s. Holy cow, it's been a long time that's practically before the internet.

02:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, wow. But it's also here. The internet's favorite historian host of the tech meme rhyme rhyme home. Pop on the host of the tech meme ride home podcast. He's a professional podcaster, mr brian mccullough.

02:41 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Hello, brian uh, by the way, speaking of history, leo, didn't you have a anniversary recently and all that? So we had our 20th. Yeah, congratulations hard to believe hard to believe.

02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is also an important day in um, uh, I guess the geek world. It's towel day, may 25th, a day picked kind of at random to honor the man who said never be without your towel and don't panic. Douglas, adams and uh. And the great author hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, which I just have learned you have not read, mr mccullough I just started reading for the first time in my life.

03:21
Well, as I said, it'd be better to start with the bbc plays, because that was the original hitchhiker's guide. The thing to stay away from is any movie adaptation. They weren't great here. Uh, from the european uh space administration. Uh, a little celebration from an astronaut at the international space station to celebrate towel day.

03:48 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
She's squeezing a towel happy towel day from the international space station.

03:52 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Happy tower day to you all, is that her space hair or is that like regular that's?

03:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, no, that's space hair. All right, that's Samantha Cristoforetti, who is aboard the ISS during her Minerva mission for the ESA. Happy Towel Day, and I think I only wanted to start with that, because we all love Douglas Adams, I think, and it's nice to celebrate one of our favorite authors, who has long passed, sad to say, but his works live on. Jennifer Patterson, toohey, you have read douglas adams?

04:30 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
oh, I feel like, I feel like I've read it because I've heard so many so many quotes over over my lifetime, um, but I was just just the wrong generation for it, I guess.

04:40 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So yeah, can I jump in to help you, jenn? I'm not sure that I like it.

04:45 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Oh no.

04:47 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, so yeah, and I love, like Monty Python, I love what I feel like is similar.

04:53 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I'm a Monty Python girl.

04:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little Terry Pratchett in its tongue. I'm a huge.

05:00 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Terry Pratchett fan. That was what I was reading and I read reading every Terry Pratchett book. Yeah, I love Terry Pratchett. That was what I was reading. I read every Terry Pratchett book ever written as they came out. I used to go to his signings when he oh, wow, I know, I mean he was my, he's my man. Well, there you go. So it was like Douglas Adams was kind of like the next step, but I never got there. I just stuck with Terry Pratchett and a bit who?

05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is unfortunately now, but still good the good omens I know I still love his writing. I'm sad to hear his story, but what did you think of the series with michael sheen and, uh, oh, yeah, scottish? I prefer the book to be honest, obviously, but what?

05:40 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
the first, the first season was pretty good. The second season went off a little, but I I thought they did a nice job.

05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gaiman had a lot to do, worked with the series, so it was definitely his vision, yeah, but I just thought the book was so good.

05:53 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think there are two iconic works that have proven to be almost unrepresentable on screen, one of which is this one, and the other one is Neuromancer, which is now in the works, can't do it Well, Apple's working on it.

06:08 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So we'll see if they can pull it off.

06:09 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, it's with the sparkly vampire guy. Oh no, who's in it? Sparkly vampire? It's a pretty, you know, Robert.

06:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Pattinson Sparkly vampire Robert. Pattinson, please tell me, it's not in it but.

06:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think he's. Don't listen to me, I don't know who's in it.

06:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like they ruined the foundation although that's also unfilmable.

06:30 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
so, true, but I thought it was not terrible. I kind of liked it the series, even though it barely was similar to the book. But like I thought it was okay, it wasn't the worst thing I ever saw.

06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Many folks were fans of the Wheel of Time series, which is a thousand novels long. I've got news that Amazon has now canceled that after two or three seasons.

06:53 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Has anyone tried Murderbot yet on Apple TV?

06:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excellent, really Excellent, well you have to like Murderbot, which is a great Martha. Wells wonderful series of novels, but I think they've done a good job with it. I feel like they've done a good job with it, yeah.

07:09 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's a been been on, not translating well to screen. Being unfilmable is almost like means. The book is brilliant, right, because and that's what the brilliance of Terry Pratchett, in fact, the only place I've seen it really translate well actually is theatre. People have done a lot of plays of Discworld novels.

07:28
I believe that and those just kind of, I don't know. They bring it more to life somehow than the movies. There are a few good movies out there but nothing really captures. And with any really beloved book it's hard to justify, hard to bring it to life, because everyone has such a clear idea of what it should be that no one's ever going to be happy with it.

07:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No Hollywood craftsperson or actor can do as well as your own imagination, and I say it's always been my thing, especially with sci fi. To read the? Yeah, I definitely to read the sci fi first before you see the movie, because it's very rare that a movie is better than the book, and I would think that the play, because it requires some suspension of disbelief, still engages your imagination more than a movie does.

08:13 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I think that's the difference. Yeah, when it's on stage, you kind of have it's more of a participation between the audience and the show, rather than just being presented, which is what more the movie and TV adaptations do, although TV adaptations tend to do slightly better, I think, because they have more time yes, because that's always the frustrating part about a movie, a book, being turned into a movie, unless it's like a seven hour movie, um, it's gonna leave out so much and you're gonna be frustrated by that you can't turn a 10-hour yeah, hiker's guide into a two-hour movie.

08:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's absolutely true but that's why that's so, why it's so great that what would have been movies are now our series, uh, in many, many cases, and it's much better like, think of breaking bad as a movie. I think it was, um, that would be impossible, but I'm probably the only person, and let's see if I can throw this out there and see if anybody agrees with this, which you will not agree, but I thought that the movie Ready Player One was much better than the book.

09:10 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Oh see, I saw the movie, then read the book and I might slightly agree with you.

09:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to say something that's going to alienate our entire audience.

09:19 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I thought Ready Player One was excreble.

09:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was terribly written. Me too, leo, yeah, yeah, yes, exactly.

09:24 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's ready player one was execrable, it was terrible, me too.

09:26 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yes, exactly that's why the movie was better that's exactly right it was.

09:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It was so bothersome to read the prose, yes, that I couldn't enjoy it yes, oh good story, though you and I are both hated now ernest class beloved in the community yes, yeah, okay, hey, speaking of fantasy, how about this one?

09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
president trump says apple better start making its phones in the united states or else, um, he says he'll apply a 25 tariff, uh, just to the iphone, if, if, just to the iphone, if, uh, if, if apple doesn't start making the iphone in the united states, he, uh, he actually kind of threatened tim apple, uh, with this one, but I think he's fairly serious. Then somebody pointed out well, you know, there's other companies. He said well, also samsung and anybody that makes that product. Otherwise it wouldn't be fair.

10:28 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
OK, you know. Here's what there's. There's a big glaring problem. He's trying to push everybody around and force Apple to make the iPhone in the US so he can brag about that. The problem is that the 25 percent tariff would be much cheaper than an iPhone that was made in the United States.

10:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so it's kind of interesting because the goal is laudable. Let's you know, let's why. Well, I mean you could say we should bring manufacturing back to the United States. But I think a lot of people pointed out no american wants the job of assembling an iphone. It is a low-paying, uh grueling, difficult, long-hour job. So that's part of the problem. Uh, this is a very good.

11:16
So trip mickle published a piece in the new york times is trump's made in america iphone a fantasy? Uh, which kind of did a both-side ism treatment of this, treating it as if it were well possible. Some analysts say it'd be possible, but it cost two thousand dollars, to which I love this. Our friend over at Daring Fireball, john Gruber, wrote idiocy or jackassery. You make the call. He's not talking about the president, he's talking about Trump. Trump, mikkel. He said the answer should simply be yes, it's sheer fantasy. And you made the exact point that Gruber did too. It's not merely the 25% tariff. In order to make the iPhone more expensive to ship in than make in the US, you'd have to have a 200% tariff. In order to make the iphone more expensive to ship in than making the us, you'd have to have a 200 tariff you know, and there are two glaring problems with this whole idea.

12:14 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
One is that you know that people who don't understand how the world works, uh, like donald trump, uh don't appreciate the fact that the us has it made in terms of the balance of trade. The US does all the high paying consulting type gigs, the financial services.

12:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We design the iPhone. We do all that.

12:36 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And then other countries have child labor and they get the grunt work.

12:40
Yeah, to produce for us these, these relatively affordable gadgets which are amazing. And there's a lot of ugliness there. They're environmental problems, they're human rights problems in the manufacturing all this stuff, but in terms of pure self-interest. We had it made, we have it made. And he's gonna wants to dismantle that and bring the sweatshops to the united states, tripling the price of the iPhone so nobody can afford it. Like, what kind of plan is this? He just doesn't understand how good we've got it and it's just awful. And the other problem that he doesn't understand is he's systematically dismantling the soft power that prevents us from going to war with our rivals. If you're totally enmeshed with a country like China economically, their incentive to go to war against us is much lower. If you sever those connections, then well, might as well just invade Taiwan and let's bring on the World War III. So it's really dumb. He just doesn't understand international relations. He doesn't understand international relations, he doesn't understand the history of alliances and tariffs and he doesn't understand how the world economy works.

13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's awful yeah, it kind of puts apple over a barrel, but I don't think they have any choice but to. If he does charge a specific tariff to apple's iphones.

14:00 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But but which seems illegal, by the way, leo. Well, I said that on my show. I was like is there even a law that?

14:06
allows you to tax an internal, a domestic company or a tariff, ok, but the game theory on this is so difficult because, like, let's say, apple was like you know what? You're right, president Trump, let's bring all these factories over here. That would take a decade, right? So what does that even mean? So like when, when, when, finally, all of the iPhones sold in America are made in America? That's a decade from now, some of us will be dead, you know like, but don't look at me when you say that would you?

14:42
I mean, I know it's true.

14:44 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I was looking over in the horizon um he can't even make his red hats in the united states yeah, isn't that funny.

14:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're made in china the game.

14:53 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
The game theory I'm thinking about is also like, if you're apple, right. Like no one can do this in any reasonable way because you know like let's say whatever he. He said something about tariffs for europe, april uh, 50 percent tariff on the european union.

15:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That goes in effect june 1st. Between now and then, weeks between now and then, not even two weeks one week.

15:17 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So the point is is like you can't game theory this out because there's no way to know what will happen? Like you, I know. We know that tim cook met with him last week right, this was.

15:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said this the day after he met with tim cook. Right, and he has said several times, for instance, when he was in saudi arabia, he I mean he's been gunning for apple. He said it was in saudi arabia. He looked at jensen wong, he said nvidia's here, tim cook's not. He said tim cook has promised to to bring a manifest iphone manufacturing to the united states, which I'm sure cook never promised. Cook is in a very difficult position. He gave a million dollars out of his personal money to trump for the inaugural. That wasn't enough. Uh, is there any way out for apple on this? Or the or? And really, by the way, it's not apple, just apple, because what's apple going to do? They're going to pass as much of this on to us. Is there any way out for Apple on this? And really, by the way, it's not Apple, just Apple, because what's Apple going to do? They're going to pass as much of this on to us, which is not good for their business. But what else are they going to do?

16:13 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But even if Apple, so the Occam's razor thing is Tim Cook goes to the White House and does a press conference and says we're going to to, we're going to build the plants yeah yeah, in 10 years 50, 500 billion dollars whatever that's what it'll say, yeah that's what'll happen and that's what'll work, or also it doesn't matter.

16:35
Like you saw, all of the other countries sort of wait out the tariff thing. So like the the thing that when I say that it's impossible to game theory this out, it's you don't know, even if you give a pound of flesh or whatever. Or do the sort of make an announcement and go to the White House and have a press conference or whatever, like you don't know what's going to happen in three weeks or six months or whatever. So like what's the point of doing anything when it comes to these threats?

17:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And also I'm old fashioned. I think that if you bribe a corrupt official with a million dollars, you should get something in return.

17:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe it, just believe it. But this makes me wonder what the Qataris are going to get for their $400 million jet. But nevermind, go ahead, jennifer.

17:18 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Brian, I think your 10 year prediction is a little optimistic. I mean, it's not feasible to make iPhones in the country. I mean, they just we just the infrastructure would take a very long time.

17:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Isn't Brian saying you have to pretend like you're going to do it until that's what.

17:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm saying it's all about face.

17:40 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Right, it's put it, put on the put on the show, pretend, wait, wait until everything changes in six minutes or six months, because who knows what's going to happen next? Who's he going to turn his attention to? But the other thing is we've seen a lot of companies in the smart home space, which I cover with the first round of tariffs. A lot of companies did move their manufacturing out of China, moved to Vietnam and to other countries.

18:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what Tim's doing. In fact's what trump said. He said he's building all these plants all over india. I don't want him building plants in india that's what he said, literally that's a problem?

18:14
uh, so it doesn't. It's not. In fact, I think the worst thing you can do and this is I where it really went south. Apple said the tariffs cost us $900 million, and remember what happened with Walmart when they said we're going to have to raise prices because of the tariffs? Remember what happened to Amazon when the rumor was that they were going to start putting the amount paid to a tariffs in the pricing. Car manufacturers are going to put it on the sticker.

18:45
That is the sin, yeah trump said just let him eat tariffs right he, he doesn't want that to be clear to the american people what the tariffs are costing them. So when apple says this cost us almost a billion dollars, I think that was the sin, and that's that's when Trump got upset. Um, now, how do you? But? But more to the point, this is politics. The real question is what does Apple do?

19:11 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
but also they had to say that because that was in an earnings report like you have. Yeah, they can't deny it yeah, but you wait.

19:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you can do what some other companies have done. Microsoft raised its Xbox prices with that. By the way, not the way they got around is they didn't just raise them in the US, they raised them everywhere. See, it's not the tariffs, we're just going to raise it everywhere. And uh, which has you know?

19:32 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
it's a win-win because we make more money yeah, and the president doesn't get mad at us. It's sucking up to the president and greenflation, yeah, it's perfect it's perfect you.

19:42 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
You people in the UK are paying 200 bucks more for the next for the xbox because of our tariffs has anyone done the math in terms of since we know apple has more money than god like, what, if they did had to have, they could just do this yeah right, but like what with what's the? What's the math on that and for how long I could give?

20:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you back of the napkin math, because we know that their profit margin is is more than 40, so they could eat a 25 tariff and they're just their profit margin go down to 15 or 30 or 10 and then, how does wall street feel about that?

20:16 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
well, if wall street is intelligent, they know what the game, the shot is here. Well, they already.

20:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, after the president's announcement, they already hit Apple's stock by, I think, three percent. Uh, so Wall Street knows, and I think I think Wall Street's smart enough to do what we just did, which is say, well, that's not going to happen, apple's gonna have to do something. I think maybe they split the difference and they, because they do have a lot of margin right but this, that's not going to get trump.

20:45 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
What he wants, though, is it? So isn't he just going to keep pushing the number up, like he did with, you know, the initial trade war with china? I mean, are we going to get to 140?

20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yes, this has to be keeping tim cook up at night yeah, I mean, this isn't.

20:58 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
We've got to meet this challenge and then we'll be okay. This is okay. What's going to be the next challenge? How do we fit into this business model and ever-changing goalposts that we're going to, you know?

21:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ultimately, During his remarks on Friday, Trump warned companies against passing costs of tariffs off to their customers. I don't want the customer to pay, he told reporters. Really puts Apple in who's going to pay the consumer to pay, he told reporters, Really puts Apple in.

21:28 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Who's going to pay? Who's going to pay?

21:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
China. Everybody knows China's going to pay.

21:31 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
China's paying the tariffs.

21:34 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But I think you know the advantage Apple has is that Apple is way smarter than Trump and they have got to know that what all Trump really wants is credit or something. That's why they want the credit for forcing apple to do something it didn't want to do. So they just need to manufacture a press conference or a thing, a situation they've done it before.

21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they uh remember the. In his last term, tim cook gave a tour of the texas facility, implying that this was here where we make everything it's been there for years and it only made mac pros didn't matter, right, it worked our most powerful computer that has 10 000 customers.

22:17
But I feel like though this stuff works less well than it used to because I think the president has a people telling him you know, that's, that's right. That was just lip service. Remember foxconn's wisconsin plant, which they still haven't broken ground on? Um this? This has been going on for a while, but I think I think you won't hear me say this often. I think trump has wised up. Wised up, he's, he's, he's on to us. So, uh, this is a tough one, not just for apple, maybe for samsung, um, uh, maybe for every consumer goods manufacturer in the country. Maybe for all those robot vacuums you review, jennifer.

23:01 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, the one I reviewed last week went up $1,000 from one week to the next and they said because of the tariffs, but they're a Chinese company so they don't get yelled at by Trump. But yes, roborock vacuum was when it was announced, it was $1,899. And then when they shipped it or launched so you could buy it, it was $2,600.

23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That seems a little bit more than I'd be willing to pay for well, this does have an arm this is.

23:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
This is the one that scared your dog and this is the one that yeah, it's from. It's the roborock saris z70 and it has it's the first consumer robot vacuum with a mechanical arm that will reach out and pick up socks, and not that not that, that's the laser one. Oh yeah, okay that's also um yes also scary to dogs everything in my home, but yeah, here it is yeah, so the dog was. Actually he wasn't so much scared of it, he was been mad at it because it would.

23:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He likes to pick up our socks it's his job yeah, you see what ai is doing to the, to our canine friends but yes, this was um.

24:08 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
This went up a significant amount of money. It wasn't a thousand dollars, totally, so the it was 2600 to buy it today.

24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Last week it was 1899 you're lucky, you have a teenage boy, so there's an ample supply of socks sports socks everywhere. And yeah, it was it puts them away.

24:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It doesn't just pick them up, it does. That was kind of what I was excited about, because the whole picking up seemed very gimmicky.

24:36
I thought it was just pick it up, vacuum and then put it back, Put it back down. No, it designates different. You designate two different areas. That's actually a little Roborock bin that they send you so you don't have to use that, but it's sort of tuned to be able to find it and you can ask it to put socks and tissues is the other thing it can pick up. And then shoes you can ask it to put in a specific shoe storage zone, so like right by the front door or wherever you'd like to, so wherever you like to leave your shoes?

25:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Will it pick up dog poop? No, that could get really messy oh yeah, you wouldn't want to do that you would need a special attachment. I can't believe how expensive it is. Do you think there's a market for that?

25:15 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So yes, but maybe I mean at $18.99, it was actually kind of a bargain in the space, because the high-end Roborocks and the high-end dreamies are about 16 to 1800, so when it was only 1899 it was like wow, you get an arm as well for like a couple hundred dollars more than the other flagship, but then literally it vacuums and mops, and mops. Yes, but it will not pick up shoes so it's supposed to up shoes, but it did not do a very good job of picking up shoes, only light shoes.

25:47
Yeah, it's supposed to pick up sandals and slippers and then put those in specified areas and the whole concept. Whilst it feels a bit gimmicky in practice, one of the biggest problems with running robot vacuums in your home is that they do get tripped up by things that you leave on the floor, and also it takes it to that next level of being. Not only does it clean, but it tidies up, and Roborock says that they're working on more and more objects that it will pick up, but, as you can see, it did also try and pick up my rug, so it's still a ways to go.

26:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Was it trying to sweep dirt under the rug?

26:23 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You see now it was the tassels on the rug looked like socks. It thought the tassels were socks, exactly, and it has, you know, machine learning on board, so it recognizes certain objects, and I was able to tell it no, don't pick up the tassels. Oh, okay.

26:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you trained it you were able to train it.

26:40 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, and it is. I mean, this is a common thing I'm seeing with consumer products these days is that companies are releasing them kind of or in a beta form and adding more features and doing more testing once it's out in the, in people's homes. So a lot of these products, oh there it goes, picking up the sock. Oh my God, oh my God, it is. It's quite impressive when you first see it, and I was actually away for a couple of nights and I had it running while I was gone and my husband got it on video and he was like look, it's picking up, it's working, it's working. It was so excited. And then it went all the way over to the bin and it didn't. It dropped it next to the bin.

27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It, missed it. Wait a minute here, let's see's see, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait to the left, right, right, right, turn right.

27:27 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
No, where's it going? Go back. It's quite a slow process. If you are hoping this would clean up your house speedily, it is not going to do that it takes?

27:37
yeah, it it's, but it's being very precise um and it's worth it for the comedy it is and you can remote control it, so you know you can have go off and have battle bots as to your heart's content. Look, it did it. But it does, and you know you get you feel proud of it. You kind of want to give it a round of applause and that does a little bow and then tucks itself away. But it, yeah it, it's definitely. I mean, we've been waiting for robots to grow not grow, but to get legs so they can climb different stairs.

28:11
That would be a bit much. You know it's not hyperbole to say that. You know I would expect robot vacuums most robot vacuums to have some type of tidying up function in the next year or so. We're getting there. Yeah, it is this and it does. It does this. Doesn't work well because of the programming, but the AI right now is just not very smart, as you can see. It keeps avoiding that sock, so it would pick up on average one sock or clean, even if I'd left like 15 around. So, um, it wasn't hiding my house up, but the mechanics worked well, as you could see, slow, but they did actually work.

28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm excited for when this gets better but to me the ultimate test for this here is trying to pick up a flip-flop yeah and this it couldn't do.

29:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I had to do it manually.

29:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was not yeah, but what good is it if you have to fire up the app? I know and manually pick up this flip-flop. It seems like it'd be easier.

29:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
There is that your cat that's, yeah, that's boone, my cat and he tried to bite it he enjoyed the. He enjoyed the arm. He would try and like play with it. Thankfully the arm did not try and play back, so it was relatively safe. It has a lot of sensors on it so if he got anywhere near it it would stop moving yeah, one of these days you're going to find the cat in the sock bin so here's the real question on any of these is do you then have to vacuum afterwards?

29:42
So it we mean after the vacuum robot does it do a good job.

29:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They no longer have to vacuum.

29:48 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So, yes, for most, mostly this this vacuum in particular, and mop is is very good. Roborock is one of the better companies they produce.

29:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what killed my robot. Right, they're too good One of.

30:02 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I mean I've's still around technically. But yes, roborock and uh, d-bot ecovacs and dreamy have three chinese companies that have really kind of taken irobot's market share. But it is a very good vacuum, um, but you still have to vacuum like your stairs, you still have to vacuum in certain areas that it can't get to, um, and they don't do as good job on rugs as, say, like a handheld is going to do this almost feels like, um, like a proof of concept, sort of like that sort of works, and I just can't imagine spending 2600 bucks for it.

30:39
I'm sorry, no I would not um the vacuum. So there is a version of this exact vacuum, without the arm. That is 1600 or 1800.

30:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Still expensive.

30:49 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Which is very expensive. But it is a really good vacuum and a really good mop and it can take its robot mop off and then go vacuum your carpets and then it goes back and puts its mops on and goes and vacuums your hardwood. So it's got quite a bit more function than your standard Roomba. Or, you know, you can buy robot vacuums for $500, $600 that will do a perfectly good job, but you have to do a bit more manual intervention. This one is fairly autonomous, just very slow. You're still going to need to pick up after it, pick up before it runs if you really want it to clean your home efficiently.

31:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's just a gimmick, let's face it. What's the rush If it's working all night or whatever, if it's?

31:32 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
working all day. Exactly that's the thing. If you're out all day, it could.

31:36 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That's and that's just that was kind of the promise. If you're never, home.

31:39 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That was the promise of robot vacuums that they would clean up while you were gone. And then we all came and stayed at home for a long time. And then they, so they developed the AI obstacle avoidance so they can avoid obstacles and not get stuck and clean around them. But then what's? Then they're trying to solve this problem of okay, well, you didn't clean where the obstacle was, so the next step was okay, let's create an arm and move the obstacle and then go back and clean where it was. So you can see the natural progression. But at the moment, this is definitely feels gimmicky. I would not spend $2,600 on it, but the way robot vacuums have innovated in the last five to 10 years is quite astonishing how fast the technology has moved and how inexpensive it is. So, as I said, I think you'll see this become a bit more mainstream in a couple of well, probably less than a couple of years.

32:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like what we're doing really is supporting an industry that is getting towards robotics, but isn't quite where we want it to be yet.

32:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But moving towards the road you're contributing to this kind of thing and I go to Italy a lot. In Italy they have these. It's very common to see robotic lawnmowers. I think the biggest robotic lawnmower company is an Italian company and the idea the Elon Musk idea that a humanoid robot is going to be pushing a mop and pushing a lawnmower just seems so ridiculous. When you could have these special purpose devices that are being perfected slowly over time to the point where they're going to have two arms, they're going to pick up two socks at once and all that kind of stuff. The idea that we'd have a humanoid robot with an apron.

33:15 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, the single purpose, the single purpose robot or you know two or three purpose, like dual mop and vacuum, does make more sense. I actually did test. I just did a big piece about robot motors as well, which I just dropped in the Zoom, but they aren't quite there yet. They are in Italy because they have little tiny gardens.

33:41 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Ah, that's the secret.

33:43 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
In America. They really struggle with our garden sizes and different topology and different types of soil. They really can't handle sand. I live in the South. We have very sandy soil and they were constantly getting stuck. But I think they're about like five or 10 years behind where robot vacuums are today. So within the next five to 10 years they will be a lot more advanced and I totally agree with you, mike, that that's sort of the future of home robotics.

34:14
Are these single purpose or dual purpose robots that are doing specific chores for us? I mean, we saw the laundry robot for a few years try and, try and make it. It failed, but I'm sure someone will come back with a solution there those kind of chores that everyone is looking for help with and I actually read a very interesting article recently with a robotics expert at Stanford and she was talking about how human that can help with specific human tasks will be very in demand with aging in place, so for helping people in their home with specific things, especially in dangerous spaces like bathrooms or kitchens. So the more you can automate areas of the home that could be dangerous or difficult for people living on their own, the more you know that's going to be more beneficial in the long run than I think. The whole idea of an actual Rosie the robot is not only unlikely but also unnecessary. I think, yeah, individual it's going to end up being a cost.

35:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's going to be a cost thing because if you have 20 special purpose devices, each at $2,000, it's going to end up being a cost. It's going to be a cost thing because if you have 20 special purpose devices, each at two thousand dollars, it's a lot more than a ten thousand dollar robot that can do all of those.

35:31 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So this is going to be an interesting race well, the the prices will come down as they become commoditized and and perfected. Yeah, I mean.

35:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Darren. Darren Oki in our chat points out we do have quite a few robots. We have dishwashers, we have clothes washers. We do have some purpose-built devices in our house Already. Yeah, and they got cheaper.

35:51 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
They started very expensive and now they're much more affordable. And the same thing with robot vacuums, robot lawnmowers. For a while it was $9,000 for a decent robot lawnmower and now you can get one for a thousand. So it's definitely, you know, cost of the economies of scale. As the more people are using these, then you'll you'll find that they're more affordable. Um, but they are the world they aren't always yeah, they're not always. I mean, pool robots are the big thing right now.

36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did sure ces I mean, they were everywhere and they work because it's a very limited, constrained, constrained thing they have to do. There's no socks in the pool.

36:28 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
No, well, one hopes, but you know, there's a robot, at least one. It's not a robot, I'm sorry. It's an AI camera that looks in a pool underwater and can detect, using AI, whether somebody is drowning. That's great, that's brilliant, great, very great, that's brilliant, great, very great. I think that kind of thing is going to be really fundamental. It's only a human to save them.

36:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got to take a break. We're going to come back. This was a big week for AI. Microsoft and Google both had the developers conferences. We'll talk about agentic AI Really the two big announcements from both of them in my mind. We'll see what you guys think was agentic. And spectacles uh, we'll. We'll talk about that in just a little bit. You're watching this week in tech jennifer pattison, tooey from the verge, brian mccullough from the tech meme ride home podcast, mike elgin from machine societyai. You have a podcast now an AI podcast too.

37:23 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's right. Yes, emily Forlini and I talk about AI. We both cover sort of like separate areas of AI, so it's a lot of fun.

37:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We do it almost weekly, nice, so yeah it's a lot of fun, and if you go to machine societyai and subscribe, you'll get a copy of the podcast too. That's right.

37:39
You can listen to it right in the newsletter newsletter. Very nice, our show today. Thank you, mike jennifer brian, our show today, brought to you by our friends at out systems. They are the leading this is actually a really interesting story the leading ai powered application and agent development platform. But they're not new. They've been around for more than 20 years in the low code, no code space, right. So their mission from day one, the mission of outs, has been to give every company the power to innovate through software.

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40:00
Thank you so much for supporting this week in tech. Uh, let's see microsoft. I will start with microsoft. They were on monday. They built conferences going on in seattle. Uh, they I was actually very pleased to see them promoting uh, agentic ai and in, in particular, uh, the open source platform that came not from Microsoft but from Anthropic, called MCP and A2A. These are capabilities that allow AIs to go out and interact with other data sources. Pull them in to give you huge capabilities. I mean, sometimes they just talk about things like buying concert tickets, but it can be so much more than that.

40:43
In fact, there was a demo at the Microsoft Build keynote that was kind of blew my mind. A guy who is a chemist working in the Microsoft AI division showed how he used an agentic AI to go out to. He said, okay, we need a new coolant liquid that doesn't use PFAS you know forever chemicals that you know doesn't gonna it's not, you know, gonna poison the environment. So he gave it some parameters, it went out, it got scientific journals it did.

41:17
It used its agentic capability to go out, get information, then generated three candidate molecules, tested them, but not in the real world, tested them kind of inside the AI system and said this might be the one. They then synthesized it and at the demo they showed an Xbox motherboard submerged in this coolant liquid playing Forza and staying very cool and was. It was a very impressive demo. It all happened in just a a few minutes. He said here's the thing that wasn't just a demo, this is something we actually did and we came up with a new um medium, a new coolant medium. This is the microsoft discovery agentic platform, which is designed for scientists and researchers to speed up the scientific discovery process. This I was very impressed with.

42:08 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah it's going to be, it's a new world, yeah, in terms of this sort of thing. And well, this is the question we always ask.

42:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I you know. Sometimes people say, well, when's it going to be super intelligence or agi? But I think it's much more interesting when? When is ai going to help people come up with new things, things that no human has already? You know, not, not regurgitated human writing or paintings, but something that humans haven't done yet?

42:33 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, so, other than other than making up books for the summer reading lists, that was a funny one.

42:40
Holy cow, yeah, but, but yeah, I mean. So one of the things that's interesting for me as an AI writer is that I do enormous research on a very broad scope of what is happening in the world of AI, and 90% of it is this kind of thing. Generally, it's science like small breakthroughs, not necessarily agentic AI, but what I mean is that there's so many amazing things that are happening in the world of AI. Everybody in the tech space seems to be captured by the horse race between open AI and Google, et cetera, and that's really not even that interesting. I think that one of the most interesting-.

43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a horse race.

43:19 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We like horse races right, Exactly the horse race part, but it's going to be great when agentic AI is actually doing positive things.

43:28
It's also going to be great for hackers and all kinds of nefarious uses, but it's also going to be great when we have what Google calls the universal assistant. That's really going to change the world for people. But this sort of thing inventing new material, solving problems that will save lives this is going to be happening at a massive scale. Of course, it'll be like everything else, as life gets better and better and better because of these kinds of applications. People will get used to those things and will just think, well, the world is terrible, but actually it's going to be better than it's ever been in terms of in terms of, you know, detecting diseases that can be stopped before they actually become, before it's too late, like, you know, parkinson's cancer. It's going to go on and on. So it's going to be really uh, it's going to be a fantastic thing and I have the feeling that agentic ai is going to be the technology not agi as you say, but agentic ai is going to be the general use case that's going to make all this good stuff happen.

44:28 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I put a couple of things in the chat. I have the link here. Go ahead. The things that AI so far is great at is pattern matching, right.

44:35
So one of the things that I keep saying on the show that keeps coming up is what is AI about to revolutionize weather forecasting? Why? Pattern matching, right. And so we were just talking about the pattern matching in terms of finding, like, new compounds, new proteins, things like that, and so I've done half a dozen stories recently about how weather forecasting is on the cusp of being revolutionized by AI because it's against pattern matching. But then the second one that I did and people have been warning that this is coming for a while, I just put it in the chat is hey, what else can you do if you can code with AI? You can start to search for zero day exploits by using AI to run through code and find new ways to hack into things. So again, I guess my only point in saying this is right now, all we can be sure that AI is great at is pattern matching beyond any reasonable human capabilities.

45:36 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, yeah, that's true, but the specific thing that it's really good at right now is filling in the blind spots. So the example that Leo described essentially is there are all kinds of things that we understand and there are some materials or some chemicals or some things that we don't know yet. We could have discovered them, but we haven't. So we'll show you all the ones we've discovered. Show us the one we haven't discovered. Ai is great at this, this. It's also great if you're developing a report and you want to give examples for you know, and you can think of three you tell ai the three examples and it'll give you two more, and what ai does fundamentally is tokenize information and then make connections.

46:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now that's what we do also, is we make connections. But and we and you know this insight came to me when we interviewed ray kurzweil he said ai is looking. Now that's what we do also, is we make connections. This insight came to me when we interviewed Ray Kurzweil. He said AI is looking at a much larger batch of tokens than we could and can make connections that we might not be able to make. If it only were to do that, that would be incredible. This is the Microsoft Aurora 1.3 billion parameter Foundation model for modeling Earth weather. This is traditionally difficult to do. They do it with supercomputers because it's so chaotic of a system. I mean it's a good thing because we fired half of Noah, but at least we'll have the AI that could do the weather forecasting. I think this is very interesting.

47:05 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And, by the way, I hope no one thinks that I was being reductive by saying pattern matching. No, that's an important thing, isn't it? I mean I was being reductive in the sense like that's the lowest common denominator to explain how it's being applied. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point.

47:37 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I think, that's a good point.

47:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's a good point. I thought the the microsoft uh keynote on monday was quite interesting and I was impressed with the practicality of some of the things they've shown. We've seen so many kind of gee whiz things like sock picker uppers yeah, it's kind of nice to see something actually now you mentioned I should.

47:57
Since you mentioned it, I got to bring this up. Uh, 404 media was the first to catch the chicago sun times ai generated summer reading list that included a book by isabella andy and uh andy weir of the martian fame books that don't exist. Uh, and the guy who wrote this I mean, we talked about a little bit on our, our ai show, intelligent machines on wednesday. The guy who wrote this said, yeah, oh, I can't believe I missed it. He generated the list with ai but didn't check it apparently. But then, uh, jeff jarvis pointed out that this whole best of summer section was a generic section that was sold to newspapers all over the country.

48:42
One guy had to write the whole thing it really was just an ad, you know, insert into these newspapers and I guess he just felt like he had too much to do and he wrote the whole. Marco buscaglia wrote the whole 64 page section. 404 called him. Uh, he said I I do use ai for background at times, but I always check out the material first. This time I didn't. I can't believe I missed it. It's on me, a hundred percent. I'm completely embarrassed.

49:12 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, but it's nice to, it's nice that he's uh owning up to it. But you know who's really upset about this? The other journalists who work for the Chicago Sun Times, because they're like this is really messing with our reputation. Yeah, and we work really hard to fact check everything, do everything on the up and up, and this guy goes out here and and and it's like you know a leading story about how chicago sometimes uses ai. There's another one.

49:36
It wasn't just the sun times, it was a bunch of night newspapers yeah, yeah, right, yeah, so of course chicago sometimes gets the, gets the targe with the brush there was another, even more hilarious story that came out this week where a novel fantasy novelist, uh, published a novel called dark hollow academy year two.

49:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh was published by lena mcdonald don't tell me she left the prompts in she left the output.

50:01 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Not only did she leave the output from the prompt saying, but the prompt was she was telling the AI to copy somebody else's style. Oh, even worse. Yeah, so the output was. I've rewritten the passage to align more with Jay Bree's style, which features more tension, gritty undertones and raw emotional subtext. Anyway, what a disaster Published it in a book, leo.

50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How, how raw, emotional subtext. Anyway, what a disaster published it in a book leo in a, didn't even read her own book.

50:31
It's hysterical. I just think this stuff is so funny. Yeah, uh. So maybe this isn't cause for uh rejoicing that microsoft is going to build the mcp protocol. It's probably redundant to call it control protocol, a protocol, but it is built into windows to make agentic a o an agentic os. But, as the dev class blog points out, security might be a key concern here, uh, but you could see why you would want this, so that your you know your windows is smart enough to go out and and get information from a variety of different sources. But, uh, you also might see the potential for uh exfiltration of your own information, as well, right somebody?

51:16
microsoft says they're gonna just like with recall. They're gonna build in a lot of security. Uh, their mcp will work with anthropic figma and perplexity.

51:27 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Actually they I'm sorry anthropic figma and perplexity are integrating mcp into their windows apps I was gonna say there's a ton of people working on like the protocols and all the stuff for which I love, yeah, to work it's an open protocol, so that's a good thing right, well, you need, you need to do that. I mean, just like the web, like there's.

51:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If there's going to be 10 000 of these things, they can't all be one well, and I can't remember who pointed it out, but somebody pointed out, probably uh, on uh, intelligent machines or maybe mac, very quickly that the only reason these guys are cooperating oh, I think it was paul thurot the only reason these guys are cooperating is because nobody's dominant right yet, yeah, right yet. So they can't. They have to work together because they can't afford not to. Yeah, oh well, oh well, um, uh, I gotta take another break. We will come back and talk about Google IO, because they made a number of announcements. Uh, you're watching, uh, this week in tech mike elgin, jennifer pattison, tooey, brian mccullough our show this week brought to you by express vpn.

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54:23
By the way, continuing in the microsoft uh news, real quickly. Uh, the ftc has finally dropped their challenge to the activision blizzard deal months after it finished. The ftc just didn't want to lose this one. Uh, they, they repealed it. They went back to the courts three years after suing to block microsoft buying Activision Blizzard. The government finally said on Thursday okay, fine, okay, it's kind of sad they kept losing in court. They didn't have much of a case. In fact, the only case they had was that it was bad for the streaming gaming business, which is pretty much a non-existent business. At this point, microsoft President Brad Smith said we're grateful to the FTC for dropping this dumb case after three long years. Uh, you know, I don't know how you feel about the acquisition. It's done, so it doesn't really matter at this point. Uh, I though. Uh, you know there's they're also trying to to turn back the clock on meta's acquisition of instagram and um whatsapp.

55:38
Uh, that that trial wrapped this week with uh with meta's defense. Uh, they, so the government attempted to show that instagram. They brought in kevin sistrom, one of the founders of instagram, who said meta just tried to kill us. They bought us because we were too competitive and then they didn't give us any resources. So then they brought in the other founder of instagram to say, oh no, what's happened? Instagram could, would, would, are were only made better by microsoft's contribute or meta's contributions. Um, we'll see the case rested on wednesday. Uh, the judge now has to decide what. What's the what's the situation actually was brian acton, not the instagram founder, but what what's app founder, uh, co-founder brian acton, who said, oh no, my meta was great man.

56:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Meta did so much for us which is odd, because they were the ones that left meta.

56:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true right, because they were going to put ads on whats? Because they were the ones that left Meta, that's true. Right Because they were going to put ads on WhatsApp. They were pissed.

56:42 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
What's funny is that the United States is the place where Meta has the weakest monopoly. If you go to all my friends in Europe and elsewhere around the world, the vast majority of them only use Meta products.

56:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When we came down to oaxaca to visit with you and amira, your wife. What do we have to do?

57:03 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
we had to install whatsapp so we could communicate now a lot more americans are using whatsapp these days but, like you know, five years ago americans had never heard of it and everyone in europe used that as their main main thing. But I you know you have to use if you want main thing, but you have to use if you want to have friends abroad. You have to use Meta services. You have to use Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp or all.

57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Meta said after six weeks of trying to make their case to undo acquisitions made over a decade ago and show that no deal is ever truly final. And the only thing FTC showed was a dynamic, hyper-competitive nature of the past, present and future of the technology industry. Meta is a proud American success story.

57:50 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Do you think they're right? Do you think that Instagram and WhatsApp would not have succeeded without Meta behind them?

57:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think they were doing great. In fact, Instagram was an amazing story, right?

58:02 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But there were also a lot of. There was a lot of competition around initially. Around that time we saw a lot of social media startups and Instagram was did take hold, but there were, there was competition. Once Facebook Meta took it kind of all the competition just dissolved old, but there was competition. Once Facebook meta took it.

58:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Once they bought it, kind of, all the competition just dissolved. The thing that's clear to me is that meta was looking at Snapchat, they were looking at Instagram and they were saying they're going to eat our lunch. We are the dominant social network today. We won't be tomorrow if these guys continue to grow. They tried to buy Snapchat and failed. By the way, uh, they succeeded. They bought Instagram for a billion dollars. I remember when that happened. I thought there's, they had like 10 developers. I said a billion dollars for an app are they insane? But they, it wasn't insane, they were crazy like a fox. Because they were right, they were threatened by the success of instagram. I don't know if the government proved its case, but if you ask me, it's very clear that meta bought instagram to put a to take a competitor off the market. Yeah, right, and that's I. I mean if, if they're a monopoly in social, which they're probably not, that may be the hardest thing for the government to prove.

59:18 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, using that monopoly success to take competition off the market is illegal and also, if you look at how they did it, what was the name of that app that they had that they were looking at, uh, what the use case numbers were for they? They had that uh app that it told them what were the new apps that were being.

59:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, that were growing, um right I don't remember the name of it, but they were able to monitor that success right.

59:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
So essentially they knew that I mean one of the things that zuck uh, we know from the very first days, like going back to harvard was he watches what people do with his products obsessively like. So he knows you say you don't like me doing this, uh, introducing the news feed, but I know you do like it.

01:00:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You tell me you don't like it, but I know you do because I'm watching, yeah, yeah yeah, I was listening to an old twit like one episode 130 or something 173 I think was where they had just announced the news feed and the whole the whole show practically was how utterly unhappy all the facebook users were because facebook had promised this is going to be the place where you keep up with friends and family. Now you're feeding me all this stuff from people I don't know or care about, and people were furious, but meta refused to back down, facebook refused to back down and that's my point is that they have always or maybe Zuckerberg specifically has.

01:00:44 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
All I mean the company in general has always gone towards engagement. So it's all about the numbers, it's all about where they see what you do and they move in that direction. Right, yep, so right, if what we're talking about is we can see. Well, wait, we want people to be interact, we want engagement, we want people to be chatting with their friends. Well, chatting with their friends these days means messaging. Well, this app over here is doing messaging. We can see that. Grab it, if you know. Obviously, they copied a lot of stuff too, etc. Etc. I'm sure you've talked about this, leo, but isn't it been interesting to you the degree to which, in recent months, even it has become clear that Zuckerberg himself does not like the fact that Instagram and WhatsApp and other have become more successful than Facebook? Like, he keeps talking about making Facebook relevant again. Like is it too late.

01:01:43
Well, yeah, but your, your, your firstborn is kind of like. You're like, isn't that so funny that he's kind of pissed off at the same time? He?

01:01:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
said oh, vr is the next thing he put. At least he lost. What did they say? $10 billion. They lost huge, huge amounts of money. Now he's saying ai is the next big thing, right, and they're putting many, many billions into that what?

01:02:03 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
what has become clear is that Facebook just can't stand the idea of interacting with other people, and he believes that everybody wants to not interact with other people.

01:02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said most Americans only have three friends. Yeah, and we want them to have AI friends so they aren't lonely.

01:02:19 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yes, this is insane. But it's not just AI friends Like his, his, his, his vision is that people will create other fake users that will interact with people as if they're real users. And his other vision for for Instagram is that influencers will create a virtual version of themselves to interact with the poii-ploi, riff-raff, unwashed masses so they don't have to. And you know, it goes on and on. Like all of the innovation around, ai is all about replacing people with AI in terms of interaction. And then he wants to call that, you know, whatever keeps people's eyeballs on there for longer. He figures he can double his user base if half the people are fake. You know, it's just insane this is.

01:03:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is, uh, the future of ai. Have you seen? Uh, I think this is from vo. They can now make these. This was google announced vo3. They can make videos with sound. These, this is this is all ai watch. We can talk, we can talk we can talk we can talk with accents oh, I think that would be marvelous, yes, it is very fun.

01:03:25 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yes, it is very good this is all ai.

01:03:27 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's incredible yes, we can talk.

01:03:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yes we can talk, we can talk there's a, there's a better one out there, where it looks like it's from a. Um, like a B-roll that one of us would do at an AI, no, an EV thing like a car show, and you would not be able to tell the difference. Like this kind of I could tell the difference. This looks a little too. Oh, so close though, isn't it so close?

01:04:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here, let me find the one. Yeah, give me the link to the one, because I'm impressed by this. This is the news anchor, ones that had been going around with the um announcing well, there's an Australian radio station that's had an AI DJ for six months and no one knew. Everybody was shocked when they, when they, when they said that, uh, if I'm a filmmaker, I'm looking at this thinking well, I guess I don't need actors anymore.

01:04:28
Yeah, uh it's close enough link it's close enough that was all generated, so let me let me go to this xcom uh link here and I just to be clear for those of you uh at home, uh, this costs 250 bucks a month at present.

01:04:47 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So yeah, but that's not outrageous to make a movie that costs 400 million dollars to make mission impossible yes, but you, you, you, yes, I'm talking to you people out there listening. You're not going to pay $250 a month. I'm not going to pay $250.

01:05:02 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But Leo, just buy the robot with an arm instead.

01:05:05 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That would be get the robot you know, the reason I want you to see this one, leo, is because the one you showed it's still on Candy Valley.

01:05:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It still looks this one's not, you're saying this looks like I shot this this afternoon yeah, is this one with a vo as well? I'm, I'm, I'm going to laszlo gall's uh feed, so I'm gonna look for that. Yeah, right, right um, yeah, is that right? Maybe I got the wrong one he's got one follower, so that's probably not right yeah, probably not right. I can click the link.

01:05:55 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Just put it right on 100 line 100.

01:05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, thank you yeah, that's the one all right, let's see. Ladies and gentlemen, you be the judge. This is a what a car show, and this is AI generated. Is this or is it?

01:06:15 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
let's welcome to a non-existent car show. Let's see some opinions.

01:06:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean man, the acceleration is crazy. You look far, step on the pedal.

01:06:25 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's still a little. You were there.

01:06:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I mean you have to be looking for it.

01:06:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And it seems to be like the right car Look at the kid and the dad. I think the range is only going to get better. Why is he holding a cup of coffee?

01:06:37 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
like that and what did he put it down on cars anymore? Yeah, no more gas cars, hipsters, you can see.

01:06:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I'm kind of a agent by hell's angels.

01:06:51 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Maybe his name is hell's really great for families and for little babies, with all the safety features that these sus have, but what you're really seeing is that technology is going to be very, very important.

01:07:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this was the new video generation tool that Google announced on Tuesday at Google. Great to come to the conference, because my husband's going to buy it. See, mike, you say $250. Oh my God. Oh my God, that sounds like a deal to me. I love my muscle cars, but yes, it is. If you were professional, yeah, if you had to make clips of any kind, all right, that's enough of this car show, uh, yeah that looks very realistic it's very good compared to the things we were looking at and the people look real right.

01:07:30 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, you could see, you could definitely scroll by that in the facebook feed and be completely fooled by it. Um, I mean, there's a lot of stuff out there, unless you're looking for it, that's right, yeah, and there's it's.

01:07:42
I mean, I've, you've seen it already in social media like the car um the ev car fire at, was it, jacksonville airport, one of the airports. Last week there was a car fire and there were videos of this like in raging inferno, um, and in fact, if you actually watch the news, there was just a little bit of smoke, but people were just running with it.

01:08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't trust anything anymore.

01:08:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
No, you can't trust anything. And then the Pope. Have you seen the stuff of the Pope talking about Donald Trump? No, oh yeah.

01:08:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where did I see that? It's fake, huh.

01:08:12 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, oh yeah.

01:08:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's very convincing.

01:08:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You wouldn you wouldn't necessarily know that he was saying you know, I I was, I didn't like jd vance, I didn't want to talk to him. Can you see how I kind of turned away from him? And yeah, I mean, and he's very convincingly talking to this interviewer and it's like the only reason it really raises a flag is because when have you ever seen the pope interviewed?

01:08:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean honestly that's not something that's a good point. He doesn't do interviews, does he except?

01:08:34 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
but it was a full. I mean, it was very convincing. And when you, yeah, this is, and this that does lead into another story I think I don't know where it is on the run sheet, but when I was reading through, but about, um, the, the new law, about taking down, um, yeah, I actually took it out because so there's been.

01:08:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there's a reason I took it out. So Trump passed the take it down Act, which was passed in Congress by like I can't remember what it was. The senate passed it like 98 to 2, uh, the house passed it like 340 to 7 or something. It was widely supported, bipartisan support, because who doesn't think, you know, revenge porn is horrific and that social media should take it down as soon as it possibly can. It gives a social media, uh, 48 hours, uh, to take it down. Anybody can complain, uh. The problem with 48 hours is it's not a lot of time to vet something and it doesn't necessarily. It's it's non-consensual intimate imagery n-i-i. The problem is that doesn't necessarily mean revenge porn. It could be a picture of me in a t-shirt, it could be, and so the concern is that it might be used for censorship. In fact, trump said in his state of the union passed this because I want to use it.

01:09:55
He said use it because no one's been worse treated on the internet than me no one, of course, of course. So that implies that there is perhaps some intent to use it for censorship. Now I took it down only because, while I've heard the eff and tech dirt mike masnick and everybody say that I'm not it's not immediately clear how it would be misused. Because if it, if it's, if you complain about my tweet about, let's say, it's towel day, that's not non-consensual intimate imagery but it's opening a door, isn't it?

01:10:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
it's making? Yeah, I can see that there is a. You can see how it could be a slippery slope, and that's right.

01:10:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a I run a mastodon instance and I'm not concerned. It does mean that I have to monitor more than every 48 hours in case somebody posts something because there's you. I would go to jail if I didn't take it down for like eight years. So obviously it means but that's not a bad thing it means that social media has to pay closer attention. Well, the complaint is that 48 hours isn't enough to verify that it's non-consensual.

01:11:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But you know, I take down any truly intimate imagery anyway, regardless well, everything is a race to the bottom in terms of uh, you know costs, right? So if you're trying to save money and you're a social network or you're a you're a you know activity, pub, uh related, you're going to use ai networks? No, what you're going to do is, when somebody complains, you're just going to take it down, because that's, that's fast and well, that's what happens at dmca takedowns on on youtube, right, right, exactly and that's bad.

01:11:32
That's like you know, it's censorship. So the way to do this right is to dedicate humans to this and to thoughtfully consider every request and have a good policy and all that kind of stuff. But who has the money to do that? I mean the bigger the companies with the companies with the money, like Meta and Action.

01:11:50 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
They just got rid of all of it. I mean they used to do that, but they're going to get rid of it at a massive scale. Right, exactly the Verge reporters. Alison Johnson did a piece and she kind of tested some of the limits so it wouldn't let her create. I mean, there are guardrails around.

01:12:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but they're not very good but whether they're going to let's face it right.

01:12:26 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Whether they're going to hold up to. Yeah. And so what are we going to do with this AI content everywhere that is misleading and that? You know if my mum sees on her Facebook feed, she's gonna freak out. You know, if she sees that this is and the dangers of this misinformation that could so easily be spread are, could have real world repercussions, one of the things she I think she mentioned in her piece she tried to do was you call it a slop mongers dream. Yes, the boot was fun.

01:13:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These boots are not made for walking, but you can make AI do that. Any, we do it.

01:13:08 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But I mean it's, it's definitely a challenge. I mean, social media has stepped back, as we just discussed, from moderating. So we, you know now, everything, everything goes. But now we're getting to this point where you can create anything and everything goes. Is it going to be? No one trusts anything they see online, which realistically you probably shouldn't these days or is it going to be? You know, people are tricked by this and it can cause real world harm.

01:13:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So people will be caught dead to rights on video and they'll just say it's ai, yeah that's actually maybe more of a concern.

01:13:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can deny anything now, yeah, how do you know?

01:13:47 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
that's not real, not made up well, already, already, politicians which shall no longer be named because they've already been named enough will actually say something that you know, 50 cameras recorded him saying he'll say I didn't say that, right, I mean, politicians are gonna love this world where nothing can be believed and everything has plausible deniability. Every medium has plausible deniability, right all right time for another break.

01:14:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry to do this to you, but God, there's so many things I want to talk about today. It's still my intent to talk about Google.

01:14:28 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
IO, we kind of did.

01:14:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We kind of did. By the way, I just want to say that this is not me. I did not do that. I uh deny it all, every bit of it that's obviously you, leo, that's obviously. I wasn't there. It's a, it's a cartoon. Thank you, general tab for a fabulous simulated AI Leo. I do have to wonder, though, how long it is before. I mean, given that there are tens of thousands of hours of me doing this show for the last 20 years, how long before?

01:15:01
very easy, be easy, right, my, my, my whole sweat that all the time.

01:15:07 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Leo, you don't need to retire, you just need to have an ai avatar. I mean you see the story about the um ceo that presented his earnings with an ai avatar. I've been doing that. That was weird.

01:15:18 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I've been leo. I've been doing that. That was weird, leo, I've been doing that for three months. If you go to the Tech Meme Right Home YouTube channel, if you see my face on there for the last three months. Any video that's been up there is an avatar.

01:15:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you're lying, I'm not lying.

01:15:34 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Breaking news Wait a minute.

01:15:37 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's all done with hey Jen, but it's my audio. I write the script and whatever. I'm not listen.

01:15:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not sending anyone to the youtube page but this is true, wait a minute, wait a minute. Okay, so it's an audio podcast, right, right? So so on on youtube.

01:15:54 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
When I watch it on youtube, so let me go I, if you can't find a video, Well I can find it, let me just go to.

01:16:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
YouTube right and just search for tech meme ride home.

01:16:03 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
And then I don't know if I have a recent one that I can show you, but here like this one.

01:16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it realistic?

01:16:11 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, watch. So this is the Johnny Ive news from this week. I just sent it to you here in the chat uh well look here's a whole scroll of them. Which one yeah, okay, it's in the, it's in the chat in the thing I know, but I can't.

01:16:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't help put it in the rundown on 96.

01:16:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
If you look at 96, click on 96. And what are you using to do this? Hey, jen, so I, so you know how I do the the podcast every day, um, and I record a segment, so a two minute long segment right and so I upload the audio. I trained an avatar on me. That, by the way, that's not you, that's me 25 pounds ago, by the way well, that's, by the way.

01:16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A nice advantage is you can make yourself skinny. You're an ageless sex kitten.

01:17:02 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's beautiful. Well, no, no, that's me 25 pounds heavier.

01:17:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you're doing it in the wrong, you're not doing it right, I know.

01:17:11 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I need to train a new avatar, but so anyway. So this is one that I did this week. So this is the johnny ive um uh open ai news. So I upload my segment, which was like what a two minute and 30 second segment and then the avatar is all lip synced wow and and, of course, uh riverside, which is owned by spotify, just has a matter of course.

01:17:34 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You can do a whole podcast and you can say yeah, you know what, just give me the ai version. It will literally replace your actual voice with a voice created from the, from the transcript, and it'll have better audio and all that kind of stuff. And, of course, melania trump uh narrated right, right, yeah, I uh. That news came out this week, so she wants to be really close.

01:17:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're getting really close. Uh, well, I can't have ai read this ad because spaceship paid me good money to do this personally, so we'll give them any ideas. Oh, my god, that's mike elgin giving them ideas. Uh, jennifer pattison tooey from the verge. And brian mccullough not an ai avatar. You think that's sometimes. That's me now I'm worried. Can I take the wrinkles off? And uh, and maybe 10 years younger, maybe get the hair a little bit browner?

01:18:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
wait, I I take the eye bags off sometimes. Yeah, you can. You can do that with a bunch of ai stuff too.

01:18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm being serious, as long as I have wrinkles. You know I'm the real deal. How about that? All right, our show today brought to you by Spaceship. You know, last night around eight o'clock I got a frantic call from my daughter. She says I can't. I bought a domain name and I can't connect it to my Spotify is. I don't understand what's going on. I said oh honey, you didn't use spaceship, did you? She said no, next time you buy a domain name, abby, go to spaceship spaceshipcom slash twit.

01:19:16
You know, simple and affordable doesn't have to mean dumb basic only for beginners. Tech professionals would like simple and affordable too. Right, why wouldn't we? That's the idea behind spaceship.

01:19:28
This is the modern, the most modern, super cool, pioneering domain and web platform that takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names, and web platform that takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products like shared hosting, like virtual machines, like business email. So it starts with below market prices for domain registrations and renewals, and they have some really nice ways to deliver simplicity. For instance, I would have told Abby to use Unbox. It's a simple, simple, easy way to connect your spaceship products to your domain and configure it all in just a few steps. Couldn't be easier, and if you need some more help, you've got your very own ai assistant, alf alf, to make life easy, from domain transfers to updating dns records. In fact, she could probably just say hey, alf, connect my site to shopify, connect my domain to shopify. Alph would have just done it, because alf loves the stuff you don't. There's also and I love this a road map for exploring, suggesting and voting on new features and products, because spaceship really wants to be responsive to you it's customers, so you can go to the road map and you can vote on what's next.

01:20:38
Customers in the tech community can get what they really need. In fact, one of the things that came up in the roadmap and I want to talk more about this another time they've created a messaging system that uses your domain as your unique identity. So you got a domain name. People can voicemail, text mail, can video chat with you using your domain. This is brilliant. All came from the roadmap. Visit spaceshipcom slash twit, discover exclusive deals on domains and more. Spaceshipcom slash twit. I told my daughter don't call me, call Spaceship, spaceshipcom slash twit. You had a good story, mike, about CAPTCHAs. It's over. Oh, wait a minute, we gotta do Google IO. All right, we'll do one thing with Google IO and then we can move. We did do VO, right? What do you think about the glasses? So Meta showed at its last developer conference these Orion glasses, but they said these are years off. Well, google had a live demo of these glasses.

01:21:46
They say we're going to work with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to create spectacles with your prescriptions in them. They've got Samsung working with them. It's called Android XR. When we first heard about Android XR it seemed like kind of a speculative thing. Not anymore. You're a big Google Glass fan, mike. Uh, this is the next generation. It's return of the glass holes.

01:22:10 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We're coming back heads up display using a laser projection.

01:22:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was it, anthony? You, you actually had these. Was it x-real? What were the glasses? It was, uh, focals by.

01:22:19 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
North that Google acquired, like five, four or five years ago, but I think they're partnering with x-real. X-real is one of the partners.

01:22:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so it's a laser projection of a heads-up display, so it looks. It looks like regular glasses. Yeah, one, it's only on one lens, the one lens you can see things like notifications. They showed simultaneous translation. Yes, and that's huge um.

01:22:46 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So I'm a big uh ray-ban meta fan only because nothing else exists like it, and it's been frustrating that after all this time, other companies like google haven't stepped up and done something like Ray-Ban Meta. Yeah, I'm excited about the one that will show you the screen and, of course, you can also do two screens. That's more expensive, it's heavier, heavier use of batteries.

01:23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at this as you're walking around. It will show you directions on the glasses.

01:23:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
When you look down to make sure you don't step into a manhole, open manhole you'll still see the direction.

01:23:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll still see the directions, you'll still see an open manhole.

01:23:18 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's pretty great, but really what we're getting to. The easiest prediction to make in technology, and has been for like three years, is that we're all headed for a world in which lots of people a billion people will be wearing glasses that are connected to AI and you'll have what Google is now describing as a universal assistant. It's basically an AI chatbot that's agentic, that knows who you are, that knows your preferences, knows what you've done, knows how you talk, knows everything about you and will help you and guide you and give you advice and make sure you don't step into manholes. And part of this is generic things like walking directions, but a lot of it is just like you know generic things like walking directions, but a lot of it is just like you know you can spitball stuff Like what do you think about this?

01:24:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you know and it will, and this is what Do you do that with your Ray-Bans now, because you can talk to Meta.

01:24:10 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I do as much as I can, but it's actually better with perplexity. So, as you guys pointed out on Intelligent Machines, I think it was, and probably Twit as well perplexity has sort of hijacked the iOS. I'm an iPhone user and it's basically. You can put things on your reminders, you can book a table on OpenTable.

01:24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's agentic already. Yeah.

01:24:29 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, it's got aspects of agentic AI to it, but, more importantly, it's a better universal assistant, because basically it has a only on the iPhone, not on Android. It has more advanced things on the Android, but one thing it has on iOS is that it's persistent. So you can basically be talking to it through the Ray-Ban Metaglasses, by the way, so you can just. The Ray-Ban Metaglasses, among other things, are just a Bluetooth headset to your, to whatever's going on in your phone. Right, so right, with really good speakers on your temples exactly.

01:24:59
And so, with the perplexity, uh, in a camera interface going, you can basically just have it open and listening and you're just walking around. You're like hey, you know, uh, what about tell me more about that thing we were talking about two minutes ago and it would just pick up right where it was mike, mike, that's's the key right.

01:25:16 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That's the thing that all of a sudden, in the next five years, this is the new hotness in hardware. It's the fact that AI has actually made smart glasses a reasonable proposition at this point.

01:25:31 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Exactly, especially with the gentic I'm sorry multimodal AI, which is what Google's getting at here and which will be perfectly universal.

01:25:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can take a picture of something you don't have to take a picture. You say I'm looking at you. Do that now with meta right.

01:25:46 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
At some point I do We'll get to some point where we'll just have the multimodal AI constantly hoovering up everything you look at. I already do it with a special mode. It's an experimental mode called uh, called live ai. So if you say, hey, meta, start live ai, and it will just be looking at everything and you can say, wait a minute, I just passed a road sign, a couple of you know minutes ago what. What did that say? And it'll tell you uh, and and what's really interesting what about the privacy concerns here?

01:26:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because I mean, yeah, it's almost feels like today we have to either have privacy or good AI. You can't have both.

01:26:24 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, nobody cares about privacy. There was an app that came out recently, and I think it was Gen Xers, and basically it's an app that says we'll buy all of your personal data from you your location, your this, your that and the price is $65. And a huge number of people are willing to do this.

01:26:43 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yes, there's a lot of startups doing that right now.

01:26:46 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
yeah, yeah, but I mean already, if you walk around, everyone's got a phone in their hand. You don't know if their camera is going, you don't know if they're recording video. Everybody's being recorded all the time, and with glasses it'll be even more so. The difference is, with glasses it informs the other person that you're recording, at least with Ray-Ban Metaglasses. But it's going to be very powerful and I think it'll replace the smartphone within 10 years.

01:27:12 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But don't they? Right now, they entirely rely on the smartphone.

01:27:16 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Absolutely yes.

01:27:17 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I mean that live AI. How long does the battery last when you're in that mode? I mean there's once you start putting the processing power and and all of this technology into the glasses. Yes, on their own, you're going to really struggle with the, the hardware, software balance especially when you have the screen also, and so, and so yeah, that's what's holding it back right now is battery life with battery and also the capabilities that's generated.

01:27:42 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's up against your temples right, and this thing's getting hot yeah you need your phone, so it may not kill the phone.

01:27:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You may have a little companion in your pocket, right but?

01:27:50 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
but I mean, look at, look at the quality of photos in the last 15 years. Like the same evolution is going to continue, it'll get cheaper faster, better.

01:27:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think there's a problem with having to carry around a little computer in your pocket that ties no, it's not a problem.

01:28:06 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
What I think is going to be the replacement for the iPhone first will be a watch and a phone working together, so you have a little screen, you'll have a bulky thing on your wrist that does some processing power and has radios in it and all that kind of stuff, and this combination will be a great replacement for the iPhone, because you'll never have to take it out and look at it. You just have AI there helping you out all day. Well, that's why lovers Sam Altman and Johnny Ive have gotten together.

01:28:38 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It'll be made from aluminium. Aluminium.

01:28:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right $6.2 billion is the largest private acquisition in history 6.5. Sorry, openai bought what, they bought what it was IO. Aluminium it was IO. It wasn't Love From. Love From still exists, io.

01:28:57 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It was IO.

01:28:58 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It wasn't Love From. Love From still exists IO yeah.

01:29:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Johnny Ives design firm still exists. They got Johnny. They got Evan Hanke, who was another Apple designer. They got aluminium, don't you say aluminium JPT too.

01:29:12 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Aluminium. What did you have to? Train yourself to say it that way.

01:29:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Aluminum. It was a little bit creepy the video. Oh, a lot creepy.

01:29:24 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I thought the greatest thing was selling IO the day after IO. It's like steal Google's thunder. Why don't you?

01:29:34 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, the wedding announcement, this wedding announcement. This looks like yeah, or a purse announcement. I know it really does. No, we have.

01:29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Johnny introduce IO, yeah, the wedding announcement. This wedding. This looks like yeah, or a person no, no, leo johnny introduce that looks like that looks like the simon and garfunkel album cover.

01:29:45 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Uh, I can't remember the name of the album but, remember where they're.

01:29:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's in black and white and they're holding each other exactly like that yeah, maybe that was intentional, so I'm not going to play this video because please don't.

01:29:55 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, we don't need to, but but let me say this, leo, so we know a little bit about it from leaks and other things that people said, and there's three reasons why this is not going to go anywhere and why it's going to fail.

01:30:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what? So the idea was some sort of AI device that, Johnny, I would Right exactly.

01:30:11 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's not going to be a phone, it's not going to be glasses and it's not going to be a watch, but there's a problem. The first problem is they won't have a problem to solve. Ai chatbots are totally being commoditized and becoming ubiquitous. Every device we have will have AI in it, have AI chatbot in it. The second one is you can't be glasses for AI.

01:30:33 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
AI cameras. Look at what you're looking at.

01:30:35 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Speakers are an inch from your ear and and the and there's a screen is right in front of your eyes.

01:30:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Better than airpods, even right. Yeah, this is what you want. Plus, you want a heads-up display and you want audio, of course, exactly, and the third reason look, for some reason they're walking down the streets of san francisco, looking for each other this and they're not getting mugged, they're not getting this no this san francisco, it's. This is San Francisco, it's a safe town.

01:30:59 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Apparently, people saw this being filmed and it was all completely staged. All the bystanders and stuff were actors.

01:31:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, those are all extras.

01:31:06 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, because they're not going to let anybody get near Sam and Johnny. Yeah, oh, the. Simon and Garfunkel albums are in the Discord and my goodness, Is this how?

01:31:14 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
the guy really walks. It's identical.

01:31:18 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But here's the thing. It's supposed to be a pocket device. Look at those skinny jeans that Sam Altman is wearing. He's going to put another device into those pants? I don't think so, yeah.

01:31:28 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
At this point. I don't understand why everyone's trying to make another piece of hardware Because, like you say, we already. I mean the glasses make sense, but the phone or the watch? Why I mean? Because I think they were quoted as saying that this is going to be a device that you also put on your desk, along with your iPhone and your Mac. A third device. Why? Why, I mean, can I not use my phone?

01:31:53 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
When we say that this video is cringe, doesn't it remind you of the Humane Pin video?

01:31:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's identical yes, which was equally cringe and is now out of business.

01:32:03 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, it is going to be like that, right, it is going to be like a humane pin, or it'll be like Was this crazy?

01:32:08 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Did he overpay, like no? Okay, I don't. I'm going to push back a bit, but I'm going to give you a conspiracy theory that I don't necessarily believe in. You know how they're trying to convert into the for-profit thing. Yeah, uh, one thing that would help that happen would be to dilute the holdings which they did because it was 6.5 billion in stock. It wasn't yeah so the more you can acquire things, the more you can dilute, the easier it would be to transform, because then the non-profit arm would have less control.

01:32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, this was. This was the whole thing that elon did to kind of try to screw them was offer to pay 94 billion dollars for open ai, trying to set a market price that was much higher than reality. Is that right? Is that? That's the whole theory here?

01:33:00 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
but okay, so that's the conspiracy theory. But my real pushback is this um, okay, let's, let's buy into the fact that maybe humane pin didn't get it right, maybe smart glasses aren't going to get it right, maybe, uh, johnny's not going to get it right like he might not have his fastball anymore, who knows.

01:33:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, um, definitely doesn't have his fastball anymore, by the way I agree with you, he's never that fast anyway well, at least he was the guy who foisted the butterfly keyboard, exactly the touch bar, he was gonna say, but okay, so, but let's, let's.

01:33:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
If what we said when mike and I agreed that what has happened is that ai is maybe enabling a new type of hardware, form factor, right, okay, if you believe that, then the people that should be worried, the people that had the worst, the person that had the worst week this week was this week was basically Apple, and because, like they, johnny Ive is going, even if he doesn't have his fastball, to make a hardware, the hardware that's going to replace the iPhone. You have IO that is doing smart glasses. That is AI stuff. You have President Trump yelling at them. Tim Apple had the worst week.

01:34:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a terrible week for Apple.

01:34:18 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, because because, because bottom line is if you're right about this, if, if ai is enabling a new hardware form factor, who's the furthest behind an ai?

01:34:30 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
right oh god they're not even close, but but it's a huge failure on the part of apple, because this is a perfect category for Apple. Why? Because glasses are fashion and that's the business they really want to be in. Look at their watch bands. They really want to be in a situation where they're selling designs like fashion designs on a massive scale for very high prices. It's a perfect business for.

01:34:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple. You have to think Apple wasted so much time and money on the car. Yeah, one could argue, even Vision Pro didn't really forward anything. Perfect business. For you have to think apple wasted so much time and money on the car.

01:34:59 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, uh, one could argue even vision pro didn't really forward anything for them, the glasses forward the vision pro was like the space program that got you tang and all these other like uh follow-on benefits right and tang is a great business. It's a great business, but it's but it's like all the the stuff that the vision pro is like the ultimate thing that wearing all-day wearable glasses could do in 20, 30 years. So it's a good thing to have that engineering in place, I think, and also have the developers working on this kind of thing.

01:35:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so maybe they are not so far behind.

01:35:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
No, they are completely far behind.

01:35:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The play for Apple might be the smart thing to do. Might be what microsoft did, which was, instead of saying, we're gonna create ai is fire, fire.

01:35:47 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Steve ballmer, that was smart, right?

01:35:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, it won't be the platform for ai, that you will still want an iphone, but you will have grok and chat, gpt and perplexity and claude and everything else on the iphone and that will be the way you access it like search yeah, like search leo, do you still wear your b? I well, I thank you for asking.

01:36:11 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I have it right here um this is that. I mean yeah, this is it's gonna you feel like it's got to be something like that, right, it's going to whatever.

01:36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is prepper. I think this is the John the Baptist for the Jesus AI. I think it's paving the way, and I'll tell you why I'm wearing this. Not because I mean, look, right now I can ask it. You know, whoops, do you think apple is behind an ai? And it's just dumb, it's dopey, but that's not the point. It's also really slow.

01:36:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's going to get back to us, uh yeah, it's, the technology has got a lot of infrastructure.

01:36:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The reason I call it the john the baptist is it is right now collecting everything that I do, everything that happens to me. I am collecting in this database. It. It's already amassed hundreds of facts about me here. I'll read you some of the things oh are you sure?

01:37:12
well, it seems to. Here's it says we've generated. So it already has well over a thousand facts about me in uh, in hobbies technology, entertainment, health, food, politics, sports, general. But here's a few. It says please review these 81 facts we generated in the last day based on listening to everything you're saying and is it just what you say, though, or does it also hear like the podcast? Here's everything. It doesn't hear you guys because, you're not on speakers, but it when it hears.

01:37:41 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I was at a conference last week where someone had to ask um permission, consent that they were wearing yeah, this is highly illegal.

01:37:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I admit it, I'm in a two-party state. I'm, I'm screwed. So here's what it says Leo's rosie often experiences happiness and contentment when going downstairs. Yes, that's true. Now I get to approve these. I share playful and affectionate communication with my wife, lisa. It keeps saying that I don't know why I follow local petaluma news. Okay, yes, I, I enjoy engaging in conversations about family and community matters. A lot of these are dopey. Uh, oh I, I have a reformer for Pilates workouts at home, it's true.

01:38:22 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Uh, it recently got a haircut so this is, I think, where Google has such a leg up in the AI. Very good points they do because it they have or it has even said context that they even said that they admitted it that's context is what is needed to make ai work, and we so. For example, the b, our reviewer, um, our wearables reviewer v song, reviewed it and it had all these facts about her that were based on a tv show she was watching yes, it was.

01:38:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, it learned that that's old it used to watch tv and it would say you're preparing to take over the berlin cia headquarters.

01:39:05 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's like whereas google knows what's in your gmail and it knows that perhaps you know you are not an international. He is connected to my gmail. It's connected to my google calendar.

01:39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everything into it and we I interviewed on intelligent machines, we interviewed the founders and I mentioned this tv problem. They said, yeah, yeah, we're working on that and I think they figured it out because it hasn't done that in a lot in a couple of months but the history, I think that the whole sphere that google has especially compared to apple, I mean, apple could have that context if you give it access.

01:39:35 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, they don't want to, though do that this, yeah, whereas I think google and this is the case in the smart home as well, like the context is the most important element for they said 18. Yes, and they did they I think we know, more about you than anyone anyone else?

01:39:51
so if you don't mind, we can do everything for you. You know, who does know probably more about me than even google is Amazon well, they know what you buy, but they're trying very hard to find out more about you personally, but they don't have the same kind of access that Google and Apple does, because here's an article phone this was a little scary to me from uh, this is from the Guardian.

01:40:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What I discovered when I asked Amazon to tell me everything my family's smart speaker had heard. Now I've had Amazon Echoes throughout my house since they came out. There is apparently now this might only be in Europe, but there is a link well hidden that you can download everything that Amazon knows about you. It says I requested and I suspect this is a GDPR thing yeah, I requested all the available data using an almost impossible to find link which, when I clicked it, brought me to Amazon UK. He got an email a couple of days later containing links to gigabytes of information, every purchase I've ever made, records of every page turn of every Kindle book I've opened. Every moment of prime content I've watched, measured by the second and every audio and transcriptions of every interaction we've ever had with our Echo so you can delete all that.

01:41:11 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It sounds like they had not done that. You can like. You can just say to it a delete what I just said.

01:41:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most people don't right. Most people leave it there, right?

01:41:21 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, that is, but Google would have a lot more.

01:41:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm actually wearing this thing intentionally, so it will collect all that. If I could connect it to my Roomba, I would.

01:41:31 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
This goes to what Mike was saying earlier. What is the value of privacy? Do we need privacy? Do we want our data to be private? Are we prepared for the trade-offs? For what benefits are we going to get if we are giving up our privacy? I believe we should not give up our privacy, but I do believe that we want the benefits that we could get from this type of interaction with AI. So where do we find that balance?

01:41:57 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But the reason you value privacy is because you know what you're talking about. The problem is that the public is just the I know what I'm talking about, but I don't value my privacy. Well, you also value your publicity. You're a public person, right? But seriously, people don't understand the implications of you know, of their privacy.

01:42:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a question you understand concrete things like give me five bucks and I'll you know would somebody who doesn't give up their privacy be at a disadvantage in this new ai enabled world over somebody like me who's given it all up yeah, for sure they will.

01:42:36 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I'd have a huge advantage, wouldn't I? Well, starting with biometrics, I mean, at the end of the day, as you know, this arms race between hackers and crackers and so on and people trying to keep secrets, see this ring, this ring.

01:42:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it knows everything about me, including my blood glucose, because I'm also wearing a continuous glucose monitor. Right, this is the Oura Ring, but there are a number of these devices.

01:42:56 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Your insurance company wants that data, Leo. They probably already have it.

01:43:01 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
This is where people are going to learn about the value of keeping your data private, Because right now we have these terrible phishing scams that we're seeing everywhere. You know the UPS scam where my dad texts me like twice a week. Is this a link I should click Because they're out there and they're getting more and more convincing phishing scams. But now, when you have all this data out there available, if people can get hold of data about your home data, about your blood glucose, if these phishing scams are just going to get more and more sophisticated and people are going to get to the point where something is going to happen that is going to make them realize that there is too much of their data out there, and that is why you need to protect yourself. I was just on a panel at a Connection Smart Home Conference last week and moderating a panel about data privacy and AI, because AI needs data right. This is what to make AI work. For us to do what we want, to achieve these kind of personal assistant aspirations, they need our data. But if you're putting this data out there I mean there was a gentleman on the panel who is an insurance agent speaking of insurance and he creates packages for people to protect them against their data being hacked or being used by companies. Because one thing he started to see is people getting so much of their data fished that they're able to actually take out second mortgages on their homes. And then you one day show up and you've no longer own your home because so much information is out there and available. And this is what happened to the Graceland estate.

01:44:48
Right, there's more and more data. We think it doesn't matter that our data is out there. We think it doesn't matter that someone knows that our smart home knows that our lights turn off every night or that we've locked our door and armed our security system, but that's telling someone that you're not home. So I think that value in our data. People don't realize how small little things, like how many steps you took or how much glucose you have in your system, can tell so much about a person, and once AI has that information, they can recreate you. I mean, this is not just about an avatar of you. This is like a digital twin of you. Imagine what someone could do with that.

01:45:31
And that's where it gets scary and that's where we really need to think and stop and think hard about what we're doing with ai and our data, because it's a slippery slope and there could be some really serious consequences I wonder if it's possible.

01:45:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am, by the way, the poster child for right, the person who is giving every possible bit of information away, and, you know, every once in a while happened. The other day, I accidentally put my Apple password on the screen and before the show was over I had to change it. Um, but I think it's. I wonder if it's possible to have opsec in such a if, if and maybe the companies have to help us with this. For instance, I have a lock on all of the credit reporting agencies, obviously, so nobody can take a mortgage out.

01:46:19 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Um but how many people do that? I mean well, no, but that's the thing, is it?

01:46:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
possible to balance, because I want to give ai everything so that I get the benefit of that.

01:46:30 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, but here you go. So this is. This is why ai is perfectly inevitable as a completely ubiquitous technology in everyone's lives. The defense against all this will be AI driven. Our AI universal agent will go out, go through all our stuff, will give it permission and it'll figure out where the surfaces are that can be hacked, where our data is that's vulnerable, where our passwords are being reused. It'll figure all that out for us and we'll be able to, hopefully within a reasonable amount of time, say, yeah, go fix that. Yeah, and but again, or protect me or you know, be watching.

01:47:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have the perimeter, uh, guard the perimeter actually.

01:47:10
This is why captchas no longer work and we're going to talk about that just a bit. You wrote an article about it. I saw another article. Uh, captures are it's over, thank god. Yeah, I hope we're talking tech with uh mike elgin it's great to have you from machine societyai. That's his blog, his newsletter, uh, his podcast with emily forlini. Uh must listen absolutely. And we'll talk about gastro nomad too, a little later on, because that's a fun thing. Uh also with us. Jennifer Patterson too. She covers all sorts of things, mainly home automation at thevergecom. That's why she calls herself the smart home mama. And your cat, your kitty cat, was sitting there for a little bit over there, but I guess.

01:47:54 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, he was meowing, though he made his way out, so on, a break sorry, I wish I could get my kitty cat we.

01:48:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bought a little bed so he could sit right on the desk next to me, but she won't sit, so uh mine likes to just sit right on you, yeah, in fact, earlier in the show he was walking around, but I don't mind that I think that's the difference between us and CNN.

01:48:18
I want your animals on the show and your children Also with us. From the Tech Meme Ride Home podcast, the internet's historian, brian McCullough. Always a pleasure to see you, brian. Thank you, as always. Thank you, leo.

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01:51:00
Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming gave us a great review. He used the Azure engagement. He said it gave it five stars, saying quote we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. Yes, I bet it did.

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01:52:12
Mike, wasn't the first thing I'd seen, actually, about the problems with captchas. Yeah, um, I saw a european blog prefixeu talking about ticketing. So this is a particular problem. Um, you know, there's a lot of scalpers going on uh, raising the prices of tickets. Companies that sell tickets really are trying to figure out a way to prevent these you, these bots, from buying tickets at great capacity. He's got a little history of captures, yeah, but he says there's a problem. There's no capture out there right now that AI can't solve faster than a human can, right, not to mention the accessibility issue, because you've got to make them accessible.

01:53:02 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah Well, researchers from ETH Zurich published a paper back in September that found that Google's reCAPTCHA version 2 could be solved by their AI 100% at the time and humans hit about 71% to 85%. So the bots do better with CAPTCHAs At proving they're human. That's the test. Yes, they're better at proving they're humans than humans are, and so it's obviously obsolete. Now, recaptcha version 2 is what we're talking about. There's a reCAPptcha version two is what we're talking about there. There's a recaptcha version two, three, which you never see because it's invisible and behind the scenes, but it's harder and more expensive I see it occasionally.

01:53:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the one where you get the check box from no, no, google, or from uh oh, that's not it.

01:53:46 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Well, both the check box and the you know.

01:53:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you should show me the buses, you know no, no, I'm not talking about that where you have to do anything, just the one that says are you human? And you go.

01:53:54 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, that's also version two.

01:53:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, both the checkbox and the and the mailbox because it's using what it knows about you to say yeah, you're not acting like a human but.

01:54:05 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But this is the most common kind because it's it's, it's a. You know, 200 million people a day use these.

01:54:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate the damn motorcycles thing. I can't find another bridge to save my life they also don't know what a motorcycle is, Like a Vespa.

01:54:17 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
it's not a motorcycle. I just hate those.

01:54:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I also, by the way, feel like I'm training AI every time I use it.

01:54:25 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yes, you feel that way because you are training AI. That's what it is. It's unpaid labor and, in fact, a study by University of California at Irvine found that users collectively spent 819 million hours, and that's approximately $6.1 billion in wages that they never paid. So, basically, you're a slave to the Google. You know AI training and visual machine learning, and you can't get around.

01:54:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It can't get around. What's? What's captcha 3 b3?

01:54:57 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
capture 3 is invisible, so it just basically looks at behavior.

01:55:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't actually see that one so you never even have a checkbox, it just exactly, but.

01:55:04 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But even websites that use capture 3 often use capture 2 also as a fallback, because capture 3 is more difficult, it's more expensive, it's harder for people, it can also give false negatives.

01:55:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It can say you're a robot when you're not, because you've never been to that site before, or you know you've.

01:55:21 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You know you're not behaving like a human all the time exactly, and I I find capture two to be particularly vexing because basically what I do all day is I open websites and read stuff and I'm also abroad.

01:55:33
So in Europe I, you know, I'll use a VPN. I'll typically keep it running because I have to go to my bank, I have to do all these things. That, where I have to pretend like I'm in the United States and it considers using a VPN to be suspicious behavior, will therefore throw up more captures. So it's like I have spent so much money to have a super fast computer that doesn't slow me down when I'm doing my thing. And then here google is saying here find the, find the scooters right and I just want to strangle their scrawny little necks and, um, it's, it's quite vexing and it's obsolete, and so I think it's it's good that that we need to move beyond CAPTCHAs we haven't yet. Well, how.

01:56:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But what do you propose in its place? Don't we need to distinguish Maybe not Maybe with MCP and A2A out now? We don't need to distinguish between bots and humans.

01:56:24 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
But that's the thing We've set up, a thing that's designed to prevent bots, but bots are better at getting past that system than we are, so it's obsolete. Throw it away. It's useless. Now we live in a new era where AI can just blow past this stuff and, in fact, if you recall, the first indication there was a problem was when somebody gave some AI. Remember this? A couple years ago. They gave AI a problem and it hired a human right, so because we're cheap exactly anyway. So it's.

01:57:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's obsolete and terrible and we need something else you know what else is obsolete and terrible, and we are getting rid of it. The penny, yes, the trump, when he came into office, ordered and one of his many executive orders ordered them in to stop making pennies. The reason is it costs 3.7 cents to make a penny. Most pennies end up in your drawer or in your car seats or anywhere, but in the actual circulation, treasury lost 85 million dollars making a pennies last year, so they've. They said all right, we're going to stop making pennies when we run out of those blanks. By the way, the there's only one company in the world that makes the zinc blanks that pennies are made out of and they're the ones who've been keeping the penny alive all this time. They, uh, they actually have a website to save the penny because it's it's a, it's their business. Um, let me see if I can find it was like what I don't understand artisan zinc a-r-t-a-z-n zinc yeah uh, they're gonna.

01:58:14
They're gonna have to find new business yeah, I, I don't know.

01:58:20 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You know it's like it's 85 million dollars, a lot of money yeah, but what?

01:58:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but what do we really need pennies for?

01:58:26 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
well, I mean, so people can have flexibility in their pricing for people, for little mom and pop shops that they don't want to round up around down five cents. They want to charge 23, you know a dollar, 23 for something you know they, should they not be able, to do that.

01:58:41 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
But mike, honest, honest to god, uh, and maybe this is a coastal thing, but like um, who's using cash. Oh, I wish you could eliminate there's the other thing.

01:58:54 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's like there's this sort of conspiracy, uh of circumstance that's essentially making cash illegal or unusable right, which puts everything, makes everything digital, which makes everything kind of vulnerable right and makes it more expensive because everything under $5.

01:59:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Where are you located?

01:59:16 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Brooklyn.

01:59:16 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Brian Okay. So you're on the same coast as me, so I'm in the South and we always get cash. In the summer we get a stash of cash. You want to know why.

01:59:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why? Because of hurricane season.

01:59:35 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Hey, by the way, I have cash all the time, but what I'm saying is is I'm getting to the point where and again, again, I'm acknowledging Coastal when I don't pay for something that's, too, anything under $5, I always try to pay cash because I don't want to have to pay the upsell that the bodega set, you know. Right, that's another reason Right, right so, but but they, I get looked askance now if it's like, why are you not paying with your phone?

01:59:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I pay with my watch for everything. It's like you're not actually giving them money.

02:00:01 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
You just tap this thing and you walk away so even even if it's, if, even if it's a two dollar again coastal bottle of coke or whatever like it's, it's like they want me to pay with my tap to go.

02:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would imagine most stores don't want. Yeah, so this is the site. By the way, uh, americans for common sense, we conduct research and provide information to congress and the executive branch on the value and benefits of the penny. It's paid for, of course, by artisan, the company the one company in all of america that makes the blanks that fuel this whole thing. And uh, americans for common sense at penniesorg has lost the battle. Even though 68 of americans support keeping the penny, 76 of hispanics and african americans want to keep the coin. That kind of backs up what you're saying, mike.

02:00:59 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
It's used in bodegas and small stores and I would start with the proposition that what is the reason to get rid of it? Uh, besides the cost of the fact that it costs more than a penny to make a penny like, what is the reasons besides that there really aren't any?

02:01:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you're right, 85 million is nothing in the US budget.

02:01:18 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
We have a $27 trillion economy. What's 85 million bucks? It's nothing.

02:01:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you're in the save the penny group.

02:01:28 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's going to cause problems, isn't it? I mean, if you go to the artisan website.

02:01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They say welcome to the future of zinc. Wow, uh. And here, by the way, here's the picture of the guys who founded artists. And wait, let me see if I can find it. Oh, it's, where is it? It's on the site. It's like a hundred years ago. There's a bunch of guys sitting around with beards. Uh, how you can unlock zinc's potential for your business? We have answers. Let's talk. Yeah, leo, let's find out. Let's. Excellence is just the beginning how can zinc help?

02:02:04 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
podcast here? They are there. They are here they are.

02:02:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are the original zinc guys. Yeah, don't they look like they're thinking what? How can we make some money? I know pennies well. Remember pennies used to be made out of copper, but copper got so valuable that they stopped making them out of copper a long time ago. There's zinc with it.

02:02:25 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That was a real. There will be blood. I drink your milkshake.

02:02:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I drink your milkshake. I drink it up, I drink your pennies. Um, well, here it is 1998, the us mint calls artisan becomes the sole supplier of us penny blanks, and the rest is history. So is the penny. Apparently, you know, mike I. This is what I like, mike, because you're the first person I met who said let, yeah, let's save the penny and you make it you make a good point. Yeah, why do we want to get rid of it? What's wrong with the penny?

02:03:04 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
they got rid of lots of bits of the currency in england.

02:03:07 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I think they got rid of any we have, yeah, the half happening, shilling two pence trumpets a bag.

02:03:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, canada got rid of its pennies and they're doing great, so, yeah, you don't need pennies. In fact, I think australia didn't you get rid of the pennies too, darren. I think australia got rid of the pennies. Uh, all right, here's a depressing story I won't read. The newark airport crisis is about to become everyone's problem this is fascinating story. It's so good oh, lord, not that I wrote it but um on my site.

02:03:51 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It's a great story. My son is about to get and start training to be a pilot, so I found oh, that's cool a commercial aviator that he's.

02:04:01 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, he's 17, so he's we're applying for schools now, so I'll see where it goes just last week I went to a cousin's graduation for from from brandeis and he graduated aviation. He's got a commercial pilot's license at the end of university.

02:04:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's really cool.

02:04:16 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's. All he wants to do is fly big planes.

02:04:18 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Emery Riddle is actually quoted in this. That's one of the ones my son's looking at going to.

02:04:22 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, that's a good one.

02:04:23 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Arizona, it's actually Florida. There's one in Arizona and one in Florida.

02:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Better weather in Floridaida better weather in florida and arizona for flying.

02:04:39 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That's why all the sort of southern states have a lot of flight schools. Well, my wife says we're not. We're not getting an airplane anytime soon. Not if you want to fly into new york. I wouldn't.

02:04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, apparently the problem at newark is really the problem with americans.

02:04:45 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Air traffic control system yes uh so what happened in new york is getting the the brunt of it. And yeah, and wasn't it?

02:04:54 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
because they shifted like geographically outsourced it all. Yeah, no, no, no it was, it was. Newark is now part of the Philadelphia Zone and it used to be part of the New York City Zone, and that, specifically, was what happened to Newark originally.

02:05:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Beyond that, go on, leo radar contact loss we lost our radar um stay on the arrival and maintain six thousand.

02:05:17 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That's air traffic control saying I can't see you for whatever reason. You don't hear it from me. Further, you can expect that a write down one and call comal tower 119.8 if you don't hear anything from me further, because?

02:05:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you may not, because this isn't working so well. So apparently the air traffic control system we have is from the 90s.

02:05:44 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Held together by strings.

02:05:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And held together by chewing gum, wrappers and strings.

02:05:48 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I swear there's the picture in this article that looks like the last newspaper I worked at, the last print newspaper like 15 years ago. It looks like the basement with all the screens and computers wired together and there was a guy called Dizzy that used to keep them running with staples and zip ties.

02:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the FAA's radar, satellite and flight data system. It's called Stars Light. This is from a 2007 Radeon brochure.

02:06:12 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Go to the next page. Yeah, go on, click that button.

02:06:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not. This is a little. Look at my server rack looks better than that. That's terrible.

02:06:22 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Wait, the Sun computer kind of scared me a little bit too. Look at the floppy.

02:06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What are those floppies? What the hell's going on here?

02:06:31 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
You know what we need. We need Elon Musk to go and fire people in radar maintenance.

02:06:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that didn't help either.

02:06:39 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
It sounds like this has been a problem for decades. It's just that we're seeing, because of this recent focus on air traffic safety, for obvious reasons, of terrible news stories that have happened the last few months. Every time there's an incident now it's making headline news, so it's really focused attention on what has been an ongoing problem. I mean, there's a quote in here about how they had to use their $1.4 billion repair budget to stretch over $5.3 billion worth of repairs that needed to be done to this system just to keep it up and running. I mean, this is, you know, it's definitely been held together by string and glue and there's a disaster waiting to happen.

02:07:24 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
There was a New York Times interview, was it last weekend, with somebody Maybe it wasn't New New York Times, but with an actual air traffic controller, which again is you know, that's one person, or whatever. But uh, dude was like, listen, I don't want to fly. And uh, we're burned out, it's crazy. And he's like the fact that this has gotten attention is the first time that money has been thrown at it in the last decade that I'm aware of.

02:07:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yikes, yeah has been thrown at it in the last decade that I'm aware of yikes, yeah, yikes, uh. All right, let's take a break and uh, and just kind of think about that. What is it? What is the fix? By the way, a doge obviously didn't fix it.

02:08:07 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Um what the what the fix is is is somebody to come in and say we're going to redo the entire system from scratch with a big thing using next generation technology. The problem is that and I'm really coming off like anti current administration and I'm sorry for that for those of you who don't like to hear such things but the solution will come online after Trump's term is over.

02:08:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they don't care he doesn't care.

02:08:36 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Well, they've been working on, I mean, they have been trying to implement new solutions, but they're like 10, 15 years out because they're such huge.

02:08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I presume that in 1990, this was state of the art, right, that trackball? Oh yeah, that was the best you could get.

02:08:49 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
That was the best trackball they had. Yeah, that was really good. Those floppies are the fastest floppies.

02:08:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've done it before. Admittedly, we did it 45 years ago, but maybe we could do it again. I mean, obviously you'd have to put it online side by side, you'd have to test it, you'd have to spend many, many billions of dollars on it, yeah, but it's going to be done.

02:09:16 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
You can't keep going.

02:09:17 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
The way we're going. It's like it has to. It's just going to be a long time.

02:09:19 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I mean, it's not something that can just be fixed overnight and you know it will.

02:09:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Decades of lack of investment. A big crash.

02:09:24 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Ai, yeah, it's gonna fix everything.

02:09:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll fix it. Yeah sure, all right, I want to take one more break. Uh, there there's still so many stories. For instance, uh pocket went out of business, which is sad. I liked pocket. And then kevin rose says I'll buy it, kevin, of course uh bought dig back from uh, the people who bought dig, kevin and alexis ohanian kind of it's funny because kevin's found a dig in the beginning. We know kevin from our shows. Of course alexis ohanian founded a dig competitor later called reddit the tag. Together they're kind of exhuming dig and bringing it back. And then kevin, you know, just jumped on it. He said we love pocketed dig, happy to take it over, um, so we'll see. We'll see what happens um, um so we'll see, we'll see what happens?

02:10:14
um, it's funny. I did not know this, but Peter Rojas, who's also been in the show many times he was the founder of gizmodo and gadget we had him on in those days is the senior vice president of new products at Mozilla. I didn't even know that. So Mozilla is the one shutting down a sun setting.

02:10:30 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Uh, pocket but they haven't relaunched dig right, I paid five dollars or something you you fell for it, did you? I did yeah, but. But so but do is dig? Is is new dig here?

02:10:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't been told no, dick is not here. You paid five dollars to participate in the, in their discord, or whatever. Yeah, yeah, planning for the new dig.

02:10:50 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
That's it yeah, why not? Hey, leo, I'm in the news business, right, I gotta, I gotta know these things which apparently I don't well, yeah, what do you know?

02:10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what have you learned for your five bucks? Nothing yet, will you? Will you let me know when it, when it happens? Uh, I, I kind of feel like uh, a little responsible for this, because kevin used to be on the show all the time and, uh, he was getting you know dig three was the current version he was getting gamed a lot and stuff and I made some suggestions for dig four, which promptly killed it, and I even have a shirt that said I killed dig four. But, uh, I'm responsible, but I don't know if I am.

02:11:32 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Uh, anyway, I have some some interest I did for the internet history podcast interview an engineer that also claimed they were involved in that and it was a it was a catastrophe yeah yeah, I don't really, I don't think it was really my fault. No, I don't think I'm trying to let you off the hook I do have the t-shirt, though.

02:11:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a good shirt. Uh, more to come in just a bit. But first a word from our sponsor story block. Oh, if you have ever used and I'm talking mostly enterprises here a legacy cms, you know, in fact, when the verge started up, when it was uh, what was it called? My, our Next Thing, or something like that. The whole thing that Nilay and the gang were trying to do was create a great CMS, a great content management system. So the writers would like to write that it would just kind of facilitate the whole thing.

02:12:25
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02:14:16
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02:15:01
Try it today. Storyblockcom slash twittv-25. And use the code twitt25. Twit listeners will get 20% off for the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. That's storyblockcom slash TWITTV-25. And the code is TWIT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus plans. Plans s-t-o-r-y-b-l-o-k dot com slash twit tv dash 25 with the offer code twit 25. Story block yeah, that's the way. That's a way to do it. Uh, on, we go with the show. Uh, very nice. By the way, I'm really thrilled to have you, brian and jennifer and mike on the show.

02:15:57 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Mike, you're in the us, weirdly enough yes, oddly enough, I am uh for a couple of weeks. We just got back from sicily. How did that go?

02:16:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that sounds so cool so, for those who don't know, mike does these, mike and amira do these incredible gastronomad adventures.

02:16:15 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
Yeah, what we do is we go to a place we all live together, maybe 10 people or so, and all day, every day, we do secret, surprise things around food, we go to farms, we go to dairies, we go to restaurants, we do cooking classes. We do all kinds of amazing things, a lot of which are, you know, completely unexpected, and we do them in the most beautiful places in the world like provence and now sicily, oaxaca, mexico city, etc.

02:16:42
And it's just such an antidote to the modern world because we go to traditional places, stay in traditional houses, we don't see tourists, we just uh, live the way life ought to be lived, uh, dining outside when we can, and it was just it's drinking the world's most fantastic wine. It's. It's really so much fun fantastic.

02:17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I can vouch for it. We did the oaxaca adventure a couple of halloweens ago, a couple of yeah, uh, dia de los Muertos ago, and it was so much, that's right, and that was so fun to have you on it and uh, yeah so so Fortnite is back in the App Store. Is your 17 year old excited about that, jennifer?

02:17:24 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
he's 17, so no oh, he's past Fortnite.

02:17:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yes, oh really, oh really.

02:17:29 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Fortnite is like the 9, 10, 11.

02:17:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're kidding really Okay, I feel so old.

02:17:38 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
He gave up on Fortnite probably about three years ago. We've talked about this before what he went to, but I'm too ashamed as a parent so I'm not going to say it. Wait.

02:17:47 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Well, I need to know because I've got younger kids. Was it Call of Duty?

02:17:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No Grand Theft Auto. Well, I need to know because I've got younger kids. Was it call of duty? Um, we know grand theft auto?

02:17:59 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
oh, he's got to be excited because grand theft auto 6 comes out in a year. Yeah I know so excited. He'll be in college, though, so he probably won't be playing video games, oh so you guarantee you dropping grades that month.

02:18:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's good. All right, just something to look forward to.

02:18:09 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
I love your optimism, though he'll be in college, he won't be playing video games.

02:18:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he'll have grown out of it by then.

02:18:15 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Oh no. Well, I mean yes, I think he will honestly, because he'll be flying real planes, so he won't have to.

02:18:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true.

02:18:26 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That's more fun, isn't it? Yeah?

02:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but hey, listen, and oh, that's interesting.

02:18:30 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I know it was so much fun because my husband's so anti-tech and he was like so upset about him getting into video games, even though we built his PC together. You know, we tried to do it all. That's good, you know. And then it's the old adage that we all heard growing up you know, playing video games you'll just rot your brain, it'll get you nowhere. And now we're all hugely successful in tech. Um, but now you know this is it's interesting to see the, the next generation, what they're going to take away from the experiences they've had the creator kind of economy. I know your son, leo, has taken a a new path that's based around social media.

02:19:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like he was very lucky.

02:19:11 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I mean, I wouldn't recommend this path to anybody but it does open you know it's interesting, but I'm excited that he you know, that's what inspired him to become, one of the things that inspired him to become a pilot, and there were that's really cool yeah yeah.

02:19:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
John C Dvorak used to say his kids were better drivers and did better on the driver's test because they played driving games when they were young. I'm not sure I bought that, but simulator is very accurate. I mean, that's an intentionally very accurate way to fly.

02:19:42 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Hey, listen, as a 47-year-old, I'm more excited about the new Mario Kart than anything. Did you order a Switch 2? Absolutely, are you going to get it on the well? Well, not only that, all of my friends from high school, all the other 47 year olds all we care about is mario kart.

02:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so oh, I really. I have not ordered a switch too, because I can't figure out how to get through the now I, I, I put in with nintendo. I don't have one yet, but no, yeah, in fact you'll have it. What in a?

02:20:10 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
week soon. Well, but no, but they haven't even sent me the email yet. They're supposed to because, by the way, all of my stupid 47 year old high school friends play mario kart online all the time and we're supposed to be grandfathered in for having played online all the time.

02:20:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, because you have to have 50 hours of online of uh switch play. Believe me, you got that. Huh, I was trying to. I played in the during covet. I played uh the um, what's that silly game? But uh for a uh animal crossing for for most of the first year of covet, but I don't know if that's going to count towards my 50 hours no, because you got to be online with other people.

02:20:54
Yeah oh, you do. Oh, yeah, because I asked for I, I put in, but I haven't gotten an email, so I don't know what the, what the?

02:21:02 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
story is, fortnight must still be the big hot thing for the younger.

02:21:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's funny because apple at first refused Epic's application to put Fortnite back in the store and the judge said okay, first of all, you don't need me to work this out. But if you don't work this out in a week, I want the name of the person who's responsible for keeping this from the store. Within 24 hours, fortnite was on the store.

02:21:32
So, I guess Apple realized that they were running a pretty hefty risk. I don't think tim cook's name would have been on that list. Uh, speaking of gaming, gabe newell, the founder, uh, the ceo of valve has decided that he doesn't want to let elon do this picture this picture is really wild. He doesn't want elon to have all the brain implants, so he has a neural link competitor. Here's a I I hope publicity still of gabe newell getting a hole drilled in his head with what looks like a black and decker drill anyway in the caption that it was staged oh, thank god, he tends to

02:22:12
get a hole drilled in his head. It's not so far-fetched though. Uh, elon's neural link had a robot that would drill a hole in your head and implant the thing, the electrodes. Now we make fun of it, but it's also at least in elon's case, it was used to to help a paraplegic be able to communicate. So I mean there are some, there's some valuable to be able to communicate. So I mean there are some, there's some valuable uh uses for this, for accessibility, um.

02:22:36 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
This is the AI device that Johnny Ive and Sam Alton will come?

02:22:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope not. Anyway, starfish neuroscience and, uh, they plan to produce their very first brain chip later this year, year, okay, okay, uh, a, I I actually like this idea infrared contact lenses that let you see in the dark even with your eyes closed, because it's not sensing light. Visible light, sensing infrared radiation it's light, but it's not visible, unlike night vision goggles, they don't need to be powered this is from the journal cell and they let the wearer perceive multiple infrared wavelengths and because they're transparent, they're also heads up displays. You can see both infrared and visible light simultaneously, although the infrared works better with your eyes closed. How about that?

02:23:33 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
wait, wait what wow, that's just yeah, wow is that wild?

02:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's pretty wild because it goes through your eyelids. Wait, say that, it goes right through your eyelids uh, so your eyes closed yeah, the eyes. Closing your eyelids eliminates the visible light most of it, but the infrared, I guess, still goes through. Wow, um, our research opens the potential for non-invasive wearable devices to give people supervision they did promise us self-driving cars and maybe x-ray vision they use nanoparticles that absorb infrared light and convert it into visible wavelengths.

02:24:14
That's a really wild idea. I mean, I don't know what they're, what you're going to do with this, but imagine at some point you could have put in contacts.

02:24:21 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It would let you see in the dark I can think of things you could do with that, but uh, military mostly.

02:24:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, I guess if you're seeing infrared, what you'll see is heat, yeah, and so you'll see animals and humans moving around. You won't be able to see walls what I mean.

02:24:39 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
What if you slept with these in your eyes closed? And you have great dreams like sleeping with your eyes open, wouldn't it?

02:24:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I guess wow, uh, now there it. We're still a little ways away from this being usable. The contact lenses currently can only work with radiation projected from an led light source, but they're working to increase sensitivity so they can detect. So it has to be pretty bright infrared yeah, light anyway, I thought that was cool, fascinating, fascinating. Yeah, science, you know, science, science, eyes closed Speaking of science your spit is going to Regeneron, all right.

02:25:23 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals is Speaking of keeping your data private?

02:25:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, actually this might surprise you, but I deleted my data from 23andMe and it turns out I really probably didn't need to, because the court appointed a privacy Ombudsman. And uh. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which has acquired 23andMe, which filed for bankruptcy in March for a surprising 256 million dollars, says they will continue to offer DNA, dna testing, uh, but I think they're also are interested, as any pharmaceutical company would be, in the data itself, not in your individual data, but in the connections between various genetic traits and uh and physical issues and so forth is there a meaningful difference?

02:26:12 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
have we learned that, like all data can be?

02:26:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, yes, which is why people were concerned. It's why I deleted my spit. But, um, you know they're actually. I read it. So they say we're not gonna. Don't worry, that's what they say. Don't worry, gonna. Don't worry, that's what they say. Don't worry, uh. Regeneron uses dna for research. Has developed treatments to prevent blindness, asthma, several forms of cancer, ebola and covet 19. They said purchase of 23 me will strengthen its research into new drugs to treat serious diseases.

02:26:48
Did you read, by the way, the article in the new yorker about chinese babies and adoption? I don't. This might have been a brand new article. I didn't put it in the um rundown, but it's related to this. It turns out that many of the adoptions you know it was a real, it was a huge uh wave of them, um, a couple of decades ago. In fact, I have several friends who adopted a baby from china, mostly girls, because of the one child per family rules. It was, uh, it was, they were told. Many of these babies were abandoned, uh, on street corners and and so forth. Turns out not so much, not so fast, and the way we're finding this out is through 23andme. You knew there'd be a connection.

02:27:40
This is the article the chinese adoptees who were stolen. As thousands of chinese families take dna tests, the results are up, ending what adoptees abroad thought they knew about their origins. Now, many of the people whose children were taken away during this period and that's what it often what happens they were actually taken from the families or even stolen from the families are too poor, too illiterate to do 23andme. But there's a US organization that is getting DNA tests from them and then compare and then helping others find their family.

02:28:18
And they talk about a student at Purdue who got an email from 23andMe saying that her kit came in and we found your father. She said it's at the top of the list of you know, there's a relatives tab right and it's found cousins of mine, the top of the list, joe jong ji, born in 1956. The report said you inherited half of joe's dna predictor relationship father and she was one of the many girls adopted, uh, in the last you know 20 or 30 years from china. She was told by her parents that her parents had given her up to an adoption agency. But it turns out she was essentially stolen from joe chang chi and he has been searching for her ever since, took advantage of these agencies in the us got his dna collected, hoping that this exact thing would happen, that his daughter would look and and find her I mean it, it with 23 and me.

02:29:24 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
As long as you hawk one up and send in the tube of saliva, that happens almost automatically. They'll send you an email saying we found your sibling, we found your, your offspring, and it's it's uh amazing.

02:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For people who don't know what happened to their loved ones, this is like quite quite a story, it is it is, and it's also, uh, a very sad story because we're learning, uh, the origin of many of these children that have been adopted, uh, from china. Many of these girls have been adopted from, from china. One of these girls have been adopted from china. Anyway, worth reading. It's in the new yorker. Uh, just, I guess, yeah, may 23rd it just came out in this week's new yorker the chinese adoptees who were stolen, um little tie-in to 23 and me, um, good news, us solar has generated more power than hydro in 2025. Yeah, rising demand still outpaces the growth of renewables in the US, but the growth is good. Not so much in China, where solar's growth has not been enough to offset rising demand. Natural gas still the biggest source, and there's a big 18 coal, which is problematic, uh, but solar, hydro and wind represent a pretty good chunk now of our energy budget.

02:30:43 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Renewables only one only one thing that can happen, and it's all about the math what's that? It's going to get cheaper. Yes, once it's cheaper, it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter, Like it's not a political issue anymore. It's just cheaper.

02:30:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, economics rules in the long run, yeah, yeah.

02:31:13 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
One of the things I'm really excited about is California. The state of California is exploring the use of covering water canals. There's a lot of water being moved around in California, especially into Los Angeles, where there isn't nearly enough water locally to support that population, and so these canals are just open waterways, they're artificial rivers and they're talking about just putting solar over them. So the first thing that's great about this is this is available space, it isn't taking away somebody's farm or whatever. And the second thing is that great about this is this is available space, that isn't taking away somebody's farm or whatever. And the second thing is that it shades the water, reducing evaporation, right, and so this, these, these benefits looks like it's completely going forward and they're going to be covering miles and miles and miles of canals in california with solar panels, and I think this is just the best idea I've heard in a long time well, except for lasers in the home well, that's a good point, right, that's a good point jennifer pattison too.

02:32:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He says I let lasers power my smart home and I don't want to go back jennifer, I want you to know I did this story on my podcast this week.

02:32:14 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Oh, you did. I did yes Before.

02:32:17 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
I knew, I didn't know you were on the show this week, so no, why don't you tell me?

02:32:21 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
tell us about the story.

02:32:24 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Tell Jennifer what happened. Guess what? If you have lasers that shoot at things, then you don't have to worry about them being recharged. If you have laser shooting at the things, wait a minute.

02:32:38 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
What is this? The long dreamed of charging wirelessly through the air thing Power it's in my home, it works.

02:32:52 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It works.

02:32:52 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yeah, wait, leah, you didn't know about this. I was so excited about this Power's power.

02:32:53 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
It's in my home, it works, it works. Yes, wait, leah, you didn't know about this.

02:32:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm so excited about this. Well, I might have seen the article, but go ahead, tell me all about it.

02:33:01 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Yes, so it's a company called Y-Charge. They first launched many, many years ago at CES. I think it was 2018.

02:33:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember seeing them. Yeah, I'm thinking this is stupid. I think it was 2018. I remember seeing them, yeah.

02:33:10 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I'm thinking this is stupid.

02:33:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not possible to send enough juice. This thing takes 15 Watts to charge. How are you going to send that through the air?

02:33:22 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
This is the key for the smart home is the smart home has many low powered, battery powered devices, Low energy use, battery powered devices like smart door locks, which was what I was testing in this article. This is actually a consumer product that you can buy. It's the Alfred Smart Lock and if you scroll back up to that picture, you can see the door.

02:33:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, right now I have to take the batteries out of my lock every once in a while, Right?

02:33:51 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
And so this is, you know, the use case right now is this door lock, and if you zoom in on the picture you can see the 700 sensors on my door and you can laugh at me. But at the top there is keep going. There you go.

02:34:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, my God.

02:34:06 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
What are you doing? The life of a smart home reviewer.

02:34:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like there's an eruption of some kind, some sort of skin disease, happening to your door.

02:34:18 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But that's beside the point, but I just might make you laugh. But the door lock itself has a modified receiver on the back which is a photovoltaic, modified photovoltaic panel On this part, on this part. So at the the top, you see how it's a little chunky. On the top there's a. There's a better picture of it further down in the story. I'm fascinated by all those sensors though you have. Is that all for?

02:34:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
burglar alarms. What is that for?

02:34:45 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
yes, um, but the top, it'll charge your toothbrush too. Yes, go back, go back. Sorry um, anthony, but at the top there in that picture oh, this picture, no, no, no, no.

02:34:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The one with the, this one here, where?

02:34:58 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
this is great audio. There you go. Do you see the the thing in the ceiling?

02:35:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there's so much to unpack in this photo. Taking my crazy. Is that a?

02:35:08 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
laser. That is the wide charge device. It's mounted in a ceiling light panel, so a fixture yeah. Fixture. Thank you, so you can just swap out an existing light and put this modified ceiling panel, so it's now dark in your entryway for everything except the lock, which is blinded by lasers.

02:35:28
So, and what it's? It's wireless power transfer, so it's transferring power to the back panel on the smart lock. And so I tested this lock for over a year. The first nine months I just used the device to power it, and it was so. If, as you, if you're familiar with, if you have a smart lock, generally, if you're lucky, it will go about six months without needing to be replaced.

02:35:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How long my car goes before. Yeah, yeah and some it's more like three.

02:35:56 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Some can go a bit longer, but it's it's annoying. It's a it's an annoying thing to have to do to change the batteries out of your smart lock. It's not something that most people are used to doing with general locks, but so when you upgrade to a smart lock, it's an added annoyance anyway, is there anything else we should look at in your house that we've got?

02:36:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
talking about privacy, so there's all sorts of weird things. What are all these sensors for?

02:36:20 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I test smart security systems and then also those are all door door monitors yeah, door contact sensors, and then also for things like you know, when you open the doors, the lights turn on.

02:36:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can use them for home automation, um yeah, yeah, I remember stacy higginbotham's family used to hate it that she was always so the, the, the white church, this could be the same thing with your toothbrush yes, so you need a little base station that's gonna, and you have to have a light that's aimed at it.

02:36:46 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Basically so there is, in the ceiling of that bathroom, another one of those devices. Um, so this is the downside is that there aren't many products that work with this, but right, the idea being, especially in the smart home there are so many low-powered devices.

02:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is. This is the lock.

02:37:03 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
That that's me, but no, I know we see you. This is the lock um, and then and then. There's another picture further down that shows the receiver on the back there so that's wait, is it universal?

02:37:16 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
is it shooting everywhere?

02:37:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, it's shooting at that thing, okay yeah, it's.

02:37:21 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
And then there's a lithium-ion battery, especially modified in the back of the door lock because it's being trickle charged.

02:37:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not really getting a lot. How much power is transferred by the laser? So well it's going to be milliwatts so they didn't give.

02:37:35 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
They're quite cagey about specific details for um proprietary reasons. But they say the receiver is able to transmit. Um, they have two different types that can transmit 100 to 300 milliwatts. Okay, to the device, to the lock, to the battery, in in there so it's a trickle charge yeah, it's a trickle charge, but it kept it at 100 for nine months so it never dropped.

02:38:00
And then I tested it. I took it out and tried can you see the laser? Is it visible? You can't, and so when you walk through it it immediately cuts off. So it's infrared, obviously.

02:38:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Power don't wear those contacts with this, though, because yeah, I was thinking about that yeah whether.

02:38:17 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
But yeah it, but I mean there the issue is it was. It's very expensive and it cost about 1200 to install all of this in my house and all it is charging is my lock. Um, what, what we need is more. You see, there's the device plugged in. And you know we need more devices that could be powered by this, but there are many, so like things like smart shades or those smart sensors on my door I have, that's actually the biggest pain in the butt.

02:38:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have automated shades and every more often than I'd like, every few months, I have to go around and charge everyone. Yeah.

02:38:52 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
So if you had one of these, it could power the shades that would be good. But the other problem is this basically required an entire sort of redesign of the product to allow it to be charged. So there are still a lot of infrastructure issues that are preventing wireless power in our homes. Unfortunately it's not like because it's the big difference from, say, key charging or Qi charging. Key charging is the kitchen wireless power standard and then Qi charging I'm sure most people are familiar with your phones. That's all contact based.

02:39:25
So, this is over the air and they have grand plans. They say that you know, at some point you might be able to charge higher power devices like smart displays, maybe even phones, but at the moment the best use case in the home seems to me these sort of lower powered, battery powered devices that we increasingly have more and more in our homes, where the amount of e-waste you get having to replace standard batteries constantly in your devices there's just it's pie in the sky in terms of being able to actually buy products that work with it. This is the only commercial consumer product you can buy right now, which is the Alfred Door Lock, and you have to sign up for a special, better program to get the Y-charge device. But I feel like the future. If there are more companies that would partner and use this type of power, it could be. It's exciting, I think it's exciting.

02:40:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's unusual, let's put it that way.

02:40:23 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
I am a slightly unusual use case in that there are many things in my home that are powered by batteries, but like robot vacuum, for example. Example, if you could have a wireless charging device keeping the robot vacuum powered as it goes around your home, then you would definitely come home to a clean house, especially with no socks in the way.

02:40:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jennifer Patterson too. He writes about these crazy things at the Verge. It's so great to have you thevergecom and, of course, every month we have you on tech news weekly too, and it's so nice to see you, jennifer, thank you for being here today. I really appreciate it oh, always a pleasure.

02:40:58 - Jennifer Pattison Tuohy (Guest)
Really enjoy chatting with you guys. It's nice to nice to be here.

02:41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's been a while so it has, but I don't know why. We'll have you back soon. Uh, that's all I can say. Brian mccullough, same for you. We love having you on. He's at the tech meme ride home. You can watch his vr visage for his ai visage on his youtube channel he looks happier than there.

02:41:21 - Brian McCullough (Guest)
Yeah, I I don't know what's happening to the video, but I I can still hear you. That's the good thing about ai it never.

02:41:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It never pauses, it just always keeps on going. Well, I love you all thank you brian, great to have you on the show. Appreciate it. Mike elgin l? Uh, don't forget his uh newsletter and podcast at machinesocietyai. And, as always, I have to give a plug, since we talked so much about the evils of ai, to your son, kevin, who does this incredible product called hello chatterbox, the smart speaker that teaches coding skills and teaches kids how to embrace ai without fear.

02:42:00 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
And since I was last on twit, there's been a lot of movement in this area. Oh yeah, an executive order by president trump that all schools have to embrace.

02:42:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ai that's true, or as they. As they call it, they're a1, but it's the same literacy a1 literacy yeah.

02:42:17 - Mike Elgan (Guest)
So don't, don't take any chances. Uh, get some steak sauce and also teach ai literacy. No, but this is something that's clearly important and kids need to learn, I agree. And that's what chatterbox does it teaches them what ai is, how to use it, how to use it responsibly, and it does it all with total privacy. So it's the only smart speaker you can legally use in schools. So it's it's a great product and it's a great mission that his company has it.

02:42:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What I like about it demystifies it. So kids, you know. This is why I I don't think kids need to learn how to code or learn you know how to build a computer, but it demystifies it. When they do so they kind of understand that it's not some magical being. Uh, it's just programmers writing this stuff and you, you could be one too exactly, it's not a person, it's yeah it's not emotions and feelings right.

02:43:05
It was built by someone just like you and they really learned that because they build it exactly that was the epiphany steve jobs had, where he said you know, the world was made by people just like me and I can change it if I don't like it. That's right. Thank you, mike, thank you jennifer.

02:43:22
Thank you, brian. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do twit every sunday afternoon two to five pm pacific might be the evening for you. Five to eight, eastern time might be the middle of the night for some of you, at 2100 UTC. But if you wish, you could watch us live, because we stream it on YouTube and Twitch and TikTok and Xcom and Facebook and LinkedIn and Kik and if you're in the club, you get to watch the stream on Discord, because we also have a lovely club Twit, discord, discord where you can hang out day and night, talk with our hosts, talk with each other, watch special programming. That's where we do the streams for the keynotes now, because we don't like being taken down and Apple's done that to us a couple of times. So the WWDC keynote will be June 9th. Mike and I will do that in the club. We did the Google I I o keynote on tuesday, the microsoft build keynote on monday all in the club, plus special events like stacy's book club, the ai user group that meets the first friday of every month. That's coming up pretty soon um chris marquardt's photo workshop. We did a great thing on friday and if you're in the club, watch it on twit plus feed.

02:44:32
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02:45:14
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02:45:53
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