This Week in Tech 1034 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Twit. This Week in Tech, Great show ahead for you. Lou Maresca's here. He works at Microsoft. He's the principal software engineer for Python and Excel and Excel Copilot. He's got a lot of AI experience. Ian Thompson is here. He's the king of snark at TheRegistercom. And Doc Rock aloha from YouTube. Youtube's Doc Rock. We'll talk, actually, quite a bit about how YouTube is taking over for TV, AI taking over for movie making and humanoid robots for only $3,000. All that and more coming up next on TWIT.

00:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Podcasts you love.

00:41 - Benito (Announcement)
From people you trust. This is TWIT.

00:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1034. Recorded Sunday, june 1st 2025. Two I's and no P. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the latest weeks, the week's latest. You know the stuff that happened this week in the tech thing. Ian, help me. Ian Thompson is here for.

01:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
TheRegistercom. Oh, come on, I fluff my opening lines.

01:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Better than that, much worse than that, but you're so eloquent, you have that British, are you kidding?

01:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I introduced Twit words to twit people to the word wanker on live.

01:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's eloquence that's using a word and it's a perfect context. Anyway, great to have you. Ian reports on technology at the register, the king kingdom of snark in our tech journalistic area. It's so good to see you, ian, also Also here. Lou Maresca, longtime host of this Week in Enterprise Tech. He is principal engineering manager, guy responsible for embedding Python and Copilot in Excel. Nice job, lou. Great to see you. Leo, appreciate it. Nice to see you. Really, really love that idea. And also with us rock from the aloha state youtubecom slash doc. Rock director strategic partnerships at ecam. And when he talks, the wall behind him listens. The wall, the wall listens. I actually you have that behind me, but I I only have a little. Uh, this, this, I made it a clock, but it can have. It can be a spectrum analyzer. It's kind of really that is cool.

02:29
It's a devoom. You know what those are devooms? Here I'll. I'll put on the spectrum analyzer. Wait a minute, let me see here. I like I like a devoom. You know, everybody needs a good devoom everybody should have a devoom in the room that is not slogan that could work yeah, these are kind of like completely chinese fabricated things here. Let's, let's see if I can oh, look at that.

02:56 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Hey, I'm talking to you yeah, pretty cool hey look, I'm talking here.

03:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like it doesn't hear you, by the way, because I have, you know, headphones on, but, um, I feel like it doesn't hear you, by the way, because I have, you know, headphones on, but, um, I feel like it's a little distracting and, besides, my background distracting. I just got here no, no, not for you but for me.

03:15
The um people are viewers like a clock. For some reason I've always since we started doing this 20 years ago, I've always had a clock in the background and people, when I take it away, they get. They get all upset in the chat room. They say, but we're, we use it for our workouts or something like that. What?

03:31 - Benito (Announcement)
are you?

03:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
working out for, while you're listening, this is nuts. Are you nuts?

03:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
it's a good way to get through what would be an otherwise really boring activity with something interesting.

03:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, it's just to get through twit by exercising. Is that what you're saying?

03:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
because no, no, what I'm saying is if you're exercising, because I have, when I'm at the gym I have my mixtape and it's usually hard techno but some documentary stuff put in between.

03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I like it that I control my own tv in the gym. So I, uh, I watch youtube videos. So one one time I feel like I can watch youtube videos. You have a personal tv in the gym so I, uh, I watch YouTube videos. So one one time I feel like I can watch YouTube videos you have a personal TV in the gym, okay well, the gym's in our house ah, okay so actually, uh, I was going to start with the dystopia stuff, but maybe it's too too soon, maybe we'll.

04:19
Maybe we'll start with the YouTube stuff and leave the dystopia for a little bit later in the show. How about that? I don't. I hate to start with the hardcore stuff. Youtube is swallowing tv whole oh my goodness, yes, they are, and it's actually.

04:34
This is not the uh, this is not the story I was looking for, but it's. You get the idea. Let me see. This is from bloomberg. Um, everybody knows that cable TV is dying. Right, youtube is what everybody under 30 watches and now, according to Bloomberg, youtube's coming for. The sitcom Creators are making longer shows to meet viewers where they are increasingly in front of their TVs. Doc, do you have any sense of how much of your audience watches in the living room on a TV, as opposed to on a phone or on a computer?

05:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, yes, I do so. My audience is specifically Gen X creators. But I do get some people like just above 30, right, I go down to like 32. Ain't nobody talking to you, girl?

05:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was that Siri Just wanted to say hi, ain't, nobody ask her, you girl. Was that Siri Just?

05:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
wanted to say hi, yeah, ask her anything. She just decided to butt in. She likes attention, listen, lady, listen, okay. So here's the thing that's really cool. I specifically target this audience and even when I say that in most of my videos I definitely get younger people watching because they're like well, I can get a head start if I can know what the OGs know at this point. And you know, last year the CEO came out and said that they serve over a billion hours of Podcast on television.

05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and that's this worries me a little bit that the people are saying the future podcasting is YouTube.

06:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, here's why and I know it's gonna be hard for us, oh geez cuz we've been around since you had to hand code your stuff. But if you ask that's literally true by the way the first. Rss feeds. We did for Twitter I'm right behind you.

06:13
I did it by hand in a tech center. So nobody Nowadays people don't really know what an RSS feed is per se, right, and a lot of my people are afraid of because they need these numbers, because they use these numbers for ads and things like that. But in the same token, you have an opportunity to get more numbers. I mean yesterday Well, last, sorry, last week YouTube reported that they're dropping over 70 billion shorts a day. Wait, it was 700 billion, it was anyway. The number was dumb. That's the answer. The number was insane. It's probably 700, actually, and the amount of shorts tells you that's a good lead-in to people to see the long content. So when you're chopping this stuff up and people are watching on TV, we consume on TV and always hear the stat that you just stated that people under 30 are only watching on TV. Yo, the giddy owner sorry, mother-in-law, she's 78. You know what she watches all day, every day. Not YouTube, not TikTok YouTube, just YouTube, because YouTube is on the TV, right? Wait a minute, sorry, what was that?

07:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Why did that come in. Somebody was saying, hi, your studio is alive.

07:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Listen live streamers out here. So, and what Somebody is saying, hi, your studio is alive. Listen live streamers out here. So what happened was maybe like right when the pandemic happened, you know, she was having some problem with the cable box and I said well, mom, you have a YouTube button on your TV, just press that and then she goes. Well, I don't know what to watch. And so I put in a couple of things for her to watch which were just like Okinawa TV shows, and then she could listen to okinawa music because, as my father-in-law was getting dementia, that's the one thing that would calm him down is that?

07:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is that a japanese music style?

07:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
listen, this is a tough one, leo, and the whole country gets wrong. Okinawa is to japan, like puerto rico would be to spain. Okay, speak the same language, but we ain't the same it's a colony.

08:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a colony because japan stole it.

08:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Let's just put it that way okinawa has the hawaii treatment all we, all we americans know about.

08:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Okinawa is world we got two a base and there's a massive, massive baster.

08:16 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah karate kid two, by the way also karate kid two. Karate kid. Yeah, exactly, thank you, benita so she would start to watch.

08:24 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Once I showed her this and then she found, like you know, recipes and like shows that she could watch, like she never really watches regular tv anymore. And she tells me the other day oh, I just found these old school, uh you know okinawa movies that are on youtube and so she just had her knee surgery and she's at home all day now.

08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's got exactly the content she wants, when she wants it she wants it when she wants it Exactly.

08:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So you were writing $70 billion a day.

08:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the answer I was looking for. 60% of YouTube video is shorts, only 5% stories. You can say goodbye to that soon. We're being watched right now on a live stream. That's only 10%. But live streaming is growing. Is growing Good Because but this was live streaming is growing. Is growing good?

09:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yes, because standard videos, only 25 of youtube's watching one quarter. 25 is a massive number. So well, I know it's big, but yeah, that is correct, but the number is psycho. Yeah, so the last one that also got um from our buddy renee, because this is job, and I just saw him like a couple weeks ago. Um, if you add up all the other streaming providers, that means abc, disney, hulu, netflix, all of these cats they don't even hold a candle to youtube. Combined, not individually combined, youtube is smoking fools does that work with tick tock as well?

09:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
because you know, I don't know, some of the stats there seem either wildly inflated or really quite remarkable.

09:46 - Doc Rock (Guest)
The thing about TikTok, and yes, tiktok has massive viewership. Let's not get it twisted. They don't have TikTok on the TV yet even with some of the boxes.

09:56 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Ah, that's huge, isn't it? Yeah, that's massive.

09:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
If you look at your TV, every TV in the world over the last 10 years has a YouTube button on it.

10:04
Yeah Right, every TV in the world over the last 10 years has a YouTube button on it. Yeah Right, and many people just started using that. When you know, the writer's strike went on, youtube took a massive boost and, like people are just like I, can watch everything. Like it's kind of incredible, they have a new movie service which is like three or four dollars a month to let you see all the old movies, and so I was watching Kill Bill one and two because, um, my marketing director, katie, she has a podcast where she talks about 80s and 90s movies and we wanted to do kill bill.

10:32
I was like this service is only three bucks and there's a bunch of cool stuff, so I'll watch it all and then get rid of it, but you know there is a perception that the stuff on youtube is not as polished as the stuff you'd see on streaming or network TV.

10:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't know, I've seen some really good stuff. I mean well that's the problem.

10:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's everything, yeah, including polished and unpolished old movies and some guy in his basement with making cardboard.

11:01 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I probably can't name the name, but there's a YouTube channel I've become addicted to over the last couple of years about an Alaskan who goes out hiking, often with his family, and it's just like this is where YouTube strength really comes in, because with a very small production crew you can do really, really engaging content. And you know, I haven't seen that on many other platforms you know, I haven't seen that on many other platforms.

11:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's also the issue, uh, and, and I guess, uh, you know, ultimately youtube's got to make money, so advertising is going to be important. But there's the issue of, uh, what kind of content is on youtube? And I think many advertisers are concerned. They don't want their ads next to a logan paul or maybe even next to a mr beast they're.

11:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They're, um, the ad algorithms are so good that they can absolutely exclude things. They don't have to worry about that. They don't have to worry about that, okay. So let me break down the ad business on youtube, because this is where I live. Um, one thing very good, a lot of people don't understand the, the old school methodology of putting on your blog, you know. So you got your little site up and then your site would get a lot of traffic, because when someone go to search for something that you talk about, right, say, you're the guy who is an expert in spectrum analyzing clocks that you can put in your studio. When I go to look for that, you know it would go to leo reportcom. Well, when I click on that link, I just remove myself from Google's mall. Their mall sells ads. So now, because of geo general engine optimization, I do speak english, that's opposed to seo, because seo is over, because everybody kept cheating and so google's like.

12:36
You know what I'm done with you.

12:37
We're gonna do geo. So if I can ask that same question and there's a video of you talking about it on your YouTube channel, if I send you there, you're still in my mall where I can serve another ad. Google likes that Correct Right. If I give you things that are on sort of GEO thing that opens up the new AI shopping thing, you're still in the Google verse. But I could buy the clock directly from you from this site that's tied into your Shopify store or fourth wall and you still never left the Google mall. I can still show you more ads. So now, the way they're setting it up, if you're creating content that both lives on YouTube and on a site somewhere where Google ads are and on you know some other place like Shopify, where Google is tied into, you are being a good citizen of the Google algorithm because you're still allowing that shopper to look at Google ads and they reward you. So this is why everybody and their mama should be making YouTube content and this is why I'm a YouTube coach right now.

13:35 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Hold on a second. So let me see if I understand something they're pushing. Obviously I see the financial appeal of going towards longer content. Obviously advertisers love it, so they're going to start promoting and asking creators to do it and they'll probably give them more of a chunk of change to do it. But the data is showing that most of their attention spans, of their viewerships, is short. So I guess the question to me is is this going to succeed?

13:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
for push people in that direction, Because people's attention span they have ads in shorts as well, but what shorts are shorts? This is a really weird thing to say. Please don't trademark me. Shorts are your discovery channel. If I am watching like how to do python and excel, and they're short videos of you, you just given me the costco sample. Now I need to see the whole thing so that I can directly connect your sample video of how I might create a pivot table using AI Python. You know Excel. I want to go watch the whole thing. That's a combination of like Copilot plus Excel plus Python. I could do some really cool stuff, right, but I can't see that in 30 seconds.

14:38
All I'm doing is taking the T's right and then jumping over. So shorts work so well because it does play automatically and you can kind of thumb really quickly.

14:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but a lot of shorts convert into real long-tail content, because it works for me so for a long time, network television had the luxury of thinking of its audience as basically passive right cows, consumers of whatever crap they put out, and they were captive you will take what we give you. And they're dying now because the audience isn't captive anymore. It isn't, I mean. The thing I worry about is that is that eventually, uh, youtube will become as in, as network television did oh, it's already well on the way.

15:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean if you look at yeah, I mean if you look at the amount of ads they're spamming out at the moment.

15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the last 18 months, this has really kicked in and as long as you can get youtube premium, you can avoid that well, yeah, but you know at the same time, and that's cheaper than a cable subscription.

15:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean you have to add the internet, whatever that costs yeah, sure, but honestly I'm not quite sure youtube's content, I mean, it's a lot of it is secondhand and a lot of it is badly produced.

15:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, so this is hold that thought, because this is exactly what I was going to ask. Ah, is, don't people see youtube content as a little bit down market, or? And is that a misapprehension? Is that maybe old fashioned? Is that maybe you and I are a little bit, uh, too old to appreciate YouTube?

16:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I would say yes, and I'll tell you why. Okay, so in the last year, a bunch of big names have come to YouTube as their forefront content, right? Conan, after the writer's strike, tired of the networks, conan has three brand new shows on YouTube. He owns the studio. Oatmeal Winfrey she owns the studio. She got like six brand new shows on YouTube Sky Sports with Gary Neville and Roy Keane Sorry, these are my footy guys. Right, I am with you, okay.

16:43
And the other, ian Ian Wright. He's not as cool as you, because he was Arsenal turd. I think he's slightly cooler, in fact, but yeah. So those guys started a brand new thing called Stick to Football. They just signed a contract for three more new seasons. They just signed a massive contract. I don't remember what the poundage is, but Mr T can look it up real fast. So these are happening.

17:06
John stewart he left apple, went to youtube, started another show, so the the guys that had worn tv that was sort of being pawned around. The only person who hasn't really made the jump is colbert, because he's paid handsomely, but even cbs is under a bunch of noise right now. That won't happen. That won't stay that way forever, though. Right, because no, exactly, I think. I think stevie's out right. So a lot of the ogs are coming over and building their own brand new networks on youtube where they basically own the entire pie. That's one side of it. The other side of it is just like on television. Remember that song uh, 57 channels that are nothing on. Well, I feel like we're up to a thousand.

17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A thousand A billion, I mean there is effectively an infinite number of channels on.

17:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
YouTube right? No, I mean TV.

17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, tv has so many channels, oh, tv's dead. But I mean, that's it right, this is it. It's over, isn't it for TV?

17:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
The thing that's cool about YouTube is if there is a content gap this is what the terminology that I use as I'm speaking around the country If there's a content gap that you see for somebody who's doing a whole foods, plant based, no oil, vegan and you can't find that on Food Network you can make that and you can serve an entire community and what happens is you end up inspiring other people to make similar content and they build whole entire networks. So, just like Ian was talking about this guy in alaska who does these hiking, I watch like six, seven different channels of people who hike through japan. My knees do not work. I can't hike to japan, no more, but I watch the heck out of those things. And what's really cool, if there's a new form of content on youtube what's about three to four years old and it's called listenable content. That is what inspired when they set up the Listenable Hashtag.

18:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the podcast right Like shows like this. You can listen to this right when they started the Listenable Hashtag about three years ago.

18:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You can show that, benito, this is Sonny, and Gizmo, they saw how much people are watching Listenable Content. That's when they decided to start the podcast division and Kai came in and just blew it up. And podcast division and kai came in and just blew it up, and this guy right now that you're looking at with, uh, sunny and gizmo, I want you to go look at the channel real quick and look at the number of people that are currently watching, never mind the people that already watched it. Look at the number of people currently watching.

19:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In your head will see this is a bald eagle nest in california's big bear uh valley. Uh parched 145 feet above the lake and people are watching it. Um, how do I get to the uh?

19:32 - Benito (Announcement)
watch on youtube on the bottom left there you go.

19:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't know how do you. What is this? Youtube 40 000 more people 10 100 times more people are watching this bird sit there than are watching this show right now 40,000, 40 to 60,000 every time I pop on, and all all these. I don't know if that's sunny or giz, but they're just. She's just sitting there right now, but at the same time this is. This is kind of wait a minute there's. Is that one up here? Is that a bird? What is that?

20:01 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah, that's, that's the, that's the sister. So, brother and sister, the mom comes by and feeds them every once in a while. You can use the scrubber to see if you can see the mom pop in um, there's, there's these channels by big bear where the uh birds I mean sorry, not the birds- I feel like people just leave this on their tv oh 100 and just let it go there.

20:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We go there's.

20:21 - Doc Rock (Guest)
There's mama, mama's back yeah, so she'll feed them. There's one where they're with uh, the bears are spotting and they're catching salmon and you see the cub fall down to fall because he didn't have his footing right and the mom just leaves him there to suffer. But people like legit watch this because it's calming right you could leave that on your tv instead of uh yeah instead of yeah just you'd have a view to Big Bear Valley and Eagles sitting there.

20:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
As far as I'm aware, the first webcam you like that was of a coffee pot at MIT.

20:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I remember that he says me right bridge, no, it's Cambridge, the Cambridge.

20:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But okay, yeah, so I mean people are mesmerized by this stuff, and fair play to him.

21:03 - Benito (Announcement)
I mean talking going towards Doc's point. It's like YouTube is different for everybody, Like YouTube isn't the same for everybody.

21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a good point.

21:10 - Benito (Announcement)
That's really the thing.

21:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody has their own channels that they watch?

21:13 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah, exactly, and that's what makes YouTube special.

21:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And at this point, as much as ad support is moving there and so forth, if you pay for YouTube Premium, what is YouTube Premium?

21:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I forget $ and so forth. If you pay for youtube premium, what? What is youtube premium? I?

21:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
forget 14, 15, 15 bucks a month, and I forget. I think you could pay for that. You have maybe a 40 or 60, whatever your your broadband bill is, and you're using it for other things too, and that's it. You don't need anything else, right?

21:39 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yep um, where you live there's somebody doing flight path takeoff and landing and there's one here at h&l. I'm pretty sure there's one in sfo or mco or wherever yeah, you just watch planes take off and on average brother, there's a hundred thousand people watching planes take off and land any given day. I know because I watch the honolulu ones when the uh 35s are going to take off, because it's just a beautiful sight and you see the afterburner so I pay for youtube tv because I'm an old man and I want my cable television.

22:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if you take youtube tv out of the equation, 12 of tv viewing last month was youtube more than all of walt disney's tv networks combined, and three months combined, 40 of viewers are 18 to 49, which is a very, very desirable advertising demographic right. In fact, what advertisers are really thinking is this is the only way to reach people in.

22:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Maybe that 18 to 30 demographic um I've got to say I love the subscription function on you on youtube because it's kind of like cable, as it should be. You know it's like you find people you like, you follow them, you see when their new stuff comes in and you call them out if they produce not so much good stuff. But you know, it seems to be the way the industry is going, and not just on YouTube, I mean, and also a shout out to the internet archive, which has an awful lot of good stuff on there?

23:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it does. Actually, I think you have to be a little more sophisticated. You have to have a browser.

23:11 - Doc Rock (Guest)
When there is someday an internet archive channel, that might be, you know very well, but right now, it's it was you know it's bombed during christmas is nick offered me to sit down with a with a single malt the yule log yeah a fireplace. He just sits there and reads a book. He don't even say anything, he just reads the book. You can hear the firecracker. It's the best reading the fire.

23:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So here from nielsen is a graph of viewership from since july of 2022. The black one is youtube, look at straight up. The pink one is netflix.

23:41 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Basically flat disney streaming, flat prime video, flat youtube, is just dominant, I mean I think disney's discovering that basically pumping out endlessly market research content with no real soul is not working for them, and youtube is a haven of originality to my mind I'm not thrilled about it becoming the the dominant podcast platform, however, because I I I like rss.

24:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it for for us that you can watch us anywhere, including youtube, by the way. I mean, we're on youtube, we do youtube shorts, we do full-length youtube videos for every show. We're even streaming live right now on youtube, but that's not the, that's not the only way we do one thing that the youtube player has that.

24:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
None of the other players have seen them pull off. Um, and I've tried them all, from uh overcast to podler, like whatever. I've tried all of them. When you're watching mac break weekly, right, because I'm there and then I go to my car, it's always off. I have to go and scrub it to the right spot. The sinking just does not work right. When I come back in the house and I try to go back to the video version, it's always off. The syncing does not work in the youtube player. When you use youtube music to watch, I can see the video. It's where it is. When I come back, andy is still in his same funny joke. I hit the button, never lose a beat. It doesn't back up. It's in the exact right spot. Okay, so that player has out matured all the players made by nerds who should know better because this is what's happening.

25:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is terrible. This is, this is. The world is changing, obviously right, and the way we consume content is changing. Uh and uh. You know it's people my age. I remember when I was growing up I couldn't why would anybody watch Lawrence Welk?

25:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
My grandparents watched it right.

25:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But as soon as they died out, Lawrence Welk was over. I think that's where we stand right now with television.

25:41 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Okay, I mean, you're American, for goodness sake.

25:43
You had more channels than any of us did, I mean, and we had a school we had a good serve with nothing we had a school holiday on the day the fourth national tv channel actually launched channel four, and they actually gave us the afternoon off so we could watch the first episode from this fourth channel. Come over to america and you've got hundreds of the damn things and they're all showing rubbish. What I like about youtube is that you can focus in on what you like bro, you said something really good right there.

26:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know what I discovered maybe like four years ago, and I have watched every single episode filamina crook oh, she's hysterical, oh diane.

26:21 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
What the heck is diane's?

26:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
last.

26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, dude I discovered that on YouTube and I went down a rabbit hole and then I fired up three blocks, but that's what you can do with YouTube. But that's also the disadvantage. I mean, at least somebody maybe again, I shouldn't use myself as an example, because I'm obviously of a different generation, but it's overwhelming. The amount of stuff on YouTube is part of the problem too. It's not only an asset. It makes it like, wow, why? What do I watch?

26:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
it's the same as a bookstore or library. I don't know if I you find what you want I mean youtube seems to be overwhelming.

26:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, youtube seems to be getting spammed out with an awful lot of ai content at the moment.

26:59 - Benito (Announcement)
Well, that's going to be worrying kids watching on that kids watch that crap too they love.

27:04 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
They won't watch in the ai. How do you?

27:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
keep your kids from? I mean, I'm sure, lou, you're not the kind of parent, uh, that just gives them an ipad and says watch whatever you want.

27:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, no that's I mean that I see that we were at a nice restaurant yesterday.

27:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The adults are talking and the kids are just staring at the yeah screen. I feel like those poor kids are not getting an adult conversation. There's nothing to learn from that, but how do you handle this with your kids? Because you have pretty young kids.

27:33 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, you know I actually I control at the network layer so I block YouTube. At certain parts of the day, like dinner time, youtube's blocked.

27:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is why you don't want a network engineer, daddy, exactly.

27:47 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
And also.

27:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I block specific things too. I control the network level, my friends.

27:49 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
That's right. So certain shows are blocked. There's things that are blocked, but I would say-.

27:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those kids are going to grow up and say, yeah, YouTube was never on at dinner time. I don't understand why Nothing's on at dinner time Nothing's on at dinner time. Yeah, time, yeah, yeah, was that the same for you in your house?

28:03 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
yeah, but I I would. I would say that the biggest thing is just obviously oversight is just making sure that I I watched what they watch, or I'm interested in what they're interested in, and I I promote other avenues. Like, like doctor said, hey, go, what a bookstore is the same? Well, yeah, I'd rather promote, then let's go read some books and stuff, if we brought the same subject. So I think they're.

28:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's, it's hard though five kids, it's hard to watch yeah, yeah, and I have no judgment on parents who do that, because I look, it's hard to be a parent and, uh, if, if, you're going crazy and and the only way you can get a moment to yourself is to say, here, kid, watch this. Yeah, uh, at least pick blues clues or something, pick something. You know something?

28:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
good, don't, don't make them watch baby shark over and over and over again I mean in the old days it used to be that you had the family computer and you put it in the lat, you know the dining room or the lounge. Yeah, so that everyone could see what you were doing on there, and that was a good way to keep people honest. But I mean all respect lou, I mean that's that's. It's a really tough job.

28:59 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It is because it's but that's actually what I do in Ian. In fact, all the computers are in literally within line of sight of where I.

29:07 - Benito (Announcement)
But your kids aren't old enough to have cell phones yet my son's 15, so he has a cell phone.

29:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's nothing you can do about him, right?

29:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, did you go for a smartphone or a dumb phone?

29:17 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Because that was a really interesting, most of my kids have watches, so that's how I get a hold of them, but that's how I get a hold of them, but that's where I started them. And then the phones are kind of a newer thing, but, yeah, a smartphone, but you know.

29:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean there was a really interesting study that was I think it was NPR put it out this week where they there's a school where they've basically limited everyone to dumb phones and the students hate it, but the teachers and the administrators love it because, you know, the kids are actually getting engaged rather than sitting there looking at a screen All right, we're going to take a quick break.

29:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then the dystopia. Actually, we are verging into dystopia, we're slowly sliding into dystopia. This is this Week in Tech, where we talk about the week's tech news and the week's tech trends. This is a huge trend and I'm glad Doc Rock is here. He is a youtube expert. Good to have you, youtubecom slash doc rock. Lou maresca, a parenting expert also, if you, if you want to put some python in your spreadsheets, you might be a good guy for that too. It's good to have you, lou.

30:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
and ian thompson, who's an expert in british slang well, I just have to warn you off of using once one thing for a title once. But yes, yeah, almost did almost did.

30:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, I almost used a bad word in Yiddish for a title last week, so I have to. Yes, I need experts in all the areas. Thank you, ian, for being here. We appreciate it. Our show today, brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security, this is, I mean.

30:48
Look, ai is obviously changing the world, but it's also changing the way bad guys operate. Hackers use AI to breach your organization. Ai, yeah, powers innovation, drives efficiency, but it also helps bad actors. The bad guys, deliver more relentless and effective attacks. And boy it's long gone at the times you can say oh, that fishing email is so ungrammatical obviously a phony. No, they're perfect now. Fishing attacks over encrypted channels over encrypted channels increased by 34.1 last year, fueled by the growing use of generative AI tools and fishing as a service. Kiss, yes, fishing as a service. You don't, you want to know about that. Listen to security. Now it's. It's mind-blowing. You don't have to be an expert to be a bad guy anymore, you just hey, it's a service.

31:38
Organizations in all Industries, from small to large, want to leverage AI. I mean, it's great for increasing employee productivity. Public AI for engineers with coding assistants. Who's not using coding assistants these days? Marketers use it for writing Finance. They've got the AI spun up creating spreadsheet formulas. Maybe a little co-pilot in the Excel Makes pivot tables a lot easier. They're also automating workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. They're embedding AI into applications and services that are customer and partner facing. It's everywhere.

32:14
Ultimately, companies are moving faster in the market and gaining competitive advantage with AI. So it's both a plus and a negative. It's a double-edged sword. Companies have to think how they protect their public and private use of AI and how you defend against ai powered attacks. May I suggest c scaler, chief information security officer cso from the new york city department of education right, they're under attack all the time. He says with ai, I'm concerned. This is a direct quote. I'm concerned about the usage of it, but I also love the innovation with it. Right, this is universal. How are employees using AI? Which AIs are they using? Zscaler can be a good partner there to help us find out the answers to those questions and to help us move faster when it comes to incident response and finding that needle in the haystack, proactively finding threats to our network and our data.

33:08
This is AI that can be used to protect you against the bad guys. You know, traditional firewalls, the way we've been doing it so far the perimeter defenses. Then you have to have a VPN to get people in and now you have public facing IPs. This all exposes your network, exposes your attack surface, and it's no match in the AI era. Right, it's time for a modern approach.

33:32
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34:24
Now here's a use of ai. I'm maybe not so excited about this from the new york times. Uh, you're probably aware of palantir, a company founded, funded by peter thiel, founded by alex carp. They do a lot of military uses of ai. The trump administration has now said we want to use Palantir to create a database of Americans. This all started with Doge right and the idea of sharing data across agencies for efficiencies. That makes sense. But when you bring when you bring in Palantir to do this the whole, the whole secret sauce of Palantir as, as I understand it I've read Alex's book the Technological Republic is kind of cross-referencing.

35:11
They had great success in Afghanistan and the Middle East against IEDs because they were able to cross-reference a lot of data and actually make predictions about where IEDs might be and how to avoid them. That kind of thing Very good, worked very well. However, I'm very concerned about the idea of giving access to all of these protected databases from the IRS, the OPM, the Social Security and then using Palantir to cross reference it. Since Trump took office just a few months ago, palantir has received more than $113. I forgot the M $113 million in federal funds, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon, not including the $800 million deal that the Pentagon did with Palantir last week.

36:10
This is from the New York Times. Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service about bringing Palantir in. This is according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions. Dhs, health and Human Services already have Palantir's foundry, which organizes and analyzes data. Should we be concerned about the idea of a centralized database combining all of those disparate functions? Traditionally, the IRS, for instance, firewalls off its information. It knows everything about you and me, but it firewalls it off.

36:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I've got no problems with a centralized database as such, but it's who has access to it, because we've gone through this in Britain before. In the Ripper laws in the noughties. The government wanted to set up a centralized database, but they were allowing access to everyone, to parish councillors, who you know elected by 300 people. These kind of databases are very dangerous, but I don't honestly see the Trump administration saying no to Palantir on this one. You know they are going to get the data and it's going to be very interesting to see how it works out the again from the New York Times.

37:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Trump administration has sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including bank account numbers, the amount of student debt, medical claims, disability status. You remember that uh rfk Jr uh wanted to make a database of people with autism? Um, you know, in theory using it for public health, but it really raises kind of the specter of um it being used against people. And, of course, one of the number one things they want to do is find uh illegal immigrants right, undoc, undocumented immigrants yeah, but I'm not under the under the guys that that ai is not already power things of the private sector.

38:11 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I mean, you know, obviously government can contract external organizations to do this. I mean that's what ai is powerful about, about connecting the synapse between all the data. Right, right.

38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's its real skill, isn't it right?

38:22 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
so I think I can't. I can't imagine there's not already like they. You know this company already is doing that. I can't imagine that the government's not already contracting these companies to do it. So having it come inside, you know it obviously. Just, I don't know if it seems like a ploy or even a play on something. It doesn't seem like a real thing you don't think it's genuine no, I think there's already private companies doing it.

38:42
Why not not pay them? You know, it seems strange that they just want to do it as part of the governmental agency, you know.

38:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
So because Booz Allen's been doing much the same thing with intelligence data.

38:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right yeah, I think my concern would be that the real risk and this is what data brokers did is the cross referencing. Right, it's one thing to have the IRS have a database, social Security Administration have a database. As long as they're not cross-referenced it's much less dangerous. But as soon as you cross-reference everything, the government knows about you. You know it's funny. I've always had mixed feelings about the privacy argument. Right, I say, well, what's the harm? I'm going to get more targeted advertising. That's a benefit to me. I don't want to see ads for something I'm not interested in buying. And then people say, well, what about insurance? What if insurance knows that you? You know you like to make bagels, isn't that? Isn't that bad, yeah that that would be bad.

39:35
But I think insurance companies already ask you that and if you lie, then they. They don't give you benefits anyway. So I, I think insurance companies kind of know all that. But when you say, okay, now what if the government has all of that information?

39:51 - Benito (Announcement)
well, the government has so many ways to screw you.

39:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It makes me very nervous yeah, well, okay, first of all, let's understand one thing dude normally just likes to do things that will make it sound good on paper. They don't actually know how to do it right. The other thing palantir knows how to do it that will make it sound good on paper. They don't actually know how to do it Right. The other thing.

40:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Palantir knows how to do it. That's what worries me.

40:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, palantir does. But I mean like, as far as once they get it inside, whether the guy's going to do it. Like the people who are making the noise, they say things that they don't know how to do. It's like the guy who wanted to come and fight him and then like a bunch of boxers, it's like, okay, I'm ready. Hey, he just disappeared. So, yeah, it's kind of funny. This thing, though, about the cross referencing we're at a level of computational speed at this point. Even if they're not cross reference, you can still make it work, because the computers are so quick now, like they can process data at levels that we couldn't even imagine back in the day. But then you also think about, like what you said about the privacy side of it. The only reason why I would try to hide something from my insurance company is because my rates are going to go up. But then that level of cheating is why they put in buffer rates, which makes it expensive for no reason anyway.

41:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So insurance in a way Insurance companies actually want you to my opinion, want you to lie, because then they don't have to give you the benefits, because the minute they catch you in the lie, it's like oh yeah, well, you lied to us, so I don't have to lay off it's actually better not to lie to them, because you might be a little bit more in premium, but you still can get the policy.

41:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
But you can collect. If they try and they catch you, you're done Right. So there's a I think a lot of the people this is just me personally, and I know people are going to hate me, I don't really care. I think a lot of people are like well, I don't want anybody to know how much I'm making, why Are you lying in your taxes? Then get mad that they could not get the bridge funding, because why?

41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do a bunch of cash under the table business and they were mad when their businesses had to shut down for the pandemic. Maybe this is going to be a good thing.

41:57 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know, at some point in time we have to fix the thought process of I hate paying taxes. Well, that's kind of your civic responsibility. I do understand the idea of hating the waste of tax money like I don't know, a 200 and whatever million dollar.

42:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't mind paying taxes. I just want the other guys to pay taxes too, thank you. It's like warren buffett who said you know, my, my secretary pays a higher tax rate than I do. That's wrong that part kills me that part that's wrong, I mean it's.

42:32 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, the other thing that worries me about this kind of database is there's a quote, oddly attributed to cardinal rich lou, but we don't actually know which was. Give me six paragraphs written by an honest man and I can get the conviction to get them executed. Wow you know it's like yeah, if you have this level of data, then the potential for manipulation is not good. Somebody?

42:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in the in the YouTube chat is pointing out that the CIA's venture capital arm also invested in Palantir at the beginning.

43:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, thank you. Venture capital arm also invested in palantir at the beginning.

43:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, thank you so much I guess, uh, they've known all along this might be, uh might be, useful. Palantir uh in the new york times article says well, we act as a data processor, not a data controller. Our software and services are used under direction from the organizations that license our products. These organizations define what can and cannot be done with their data. We wash our hands of it. Uh, and the White House uh referred to the president's executive order which said, quote he wanted to eliminate information silos and streamline data collection across all agencies to increase government efficiency and save harder and taxpayer dollars. That's fine if he does it. If that's what they use it for, I think that's fine. Efficiency is fine. I'm concerned they might use it for political reasons. Motivations 100 right.

43:56 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, I mean you already got people getting in trouble because they said something nasty about.

44:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean yeah so in california, uh, and all the other blue states by the way as an immigrant, I will be taking this very, very carefully. Yeah, we pay. We don't get to deduct our property taxes, our sales taxes anymore because we're in a blue state. The red states can, just not the blue states. Okay, that seems political to me, but all right. Um pound through stock has gone up 140 since trump's election, I might point out.

44:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Uh, it's interesting, though, that peter tiller's has played a very back room uh position, as opposed to elon's rather drugged out front room position. Not that I would suggest that he was in any way on anything over the last week, but you know, did you? See the video uh, oh god, it was like someone going through.

44:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Reset you know it's like control delete on the brain but.

45:00 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But teal's played it very smart. He's basically I'm not in the public eye like he was in 2022. He's just basically working the backroom deals and has paid marvelous benefits.

45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, that's where the smart money is. They're not in the front, they're in the back, they're anonymous.

45:19
He's not bringing kids up into the Oval Office and watching them smear bogeys on the desk into the oval office and watching them smear bogeys on the desk, you know, uh. Anyway, I think part of this to me is that palantir is named after the seeing stones of uh, saruman and sauron, which so that kind of that kind of maybe I don't know what it is with these silicon valley types and uh and jr tolkien, uh works, but well, the whole thing was elon musk and ian m banks is really with these Silicon Valley types and JRR Tolkien works Well.

45:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
the whole thing with Elon Musk and Iain M Banks is really embarrassing, because Iain M Banks.

45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love Iain Banks, yeah.

45:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, but I mean, if he'd seen what Elon had become, he would have been really peed off about this.

45:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know you're a Banks fan. I see Banks books behind you. Oh God, yes.

46:00 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, I was lucky enough to interview him once when it was Really oh, it was just he spoke at 90, you know, 90 words a minute and just a really interesting person and you try and get your head around it and it's one of those things where you have to listen to the tape recording afterwards and spend an hour just going through it because so many good things thrown out there.

46:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know why you like him because he spells Ian properly.

46:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Exactly Two eyes. Is it good scots? Two eyes and no p, just like the swimming pool what is so?

46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did actually read. Uh, consider flea bus. Uh, because elon named his rockets after the rockets in that book. Yeah, I mean, consider it was good, I liked it yeah, I.

46:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's the first book in the series. If you're coming into a new, I'd still recommend it as a starter. But Use of Weapons and Player of Games are the two most easily accessible.

46:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the next one I have to read Players of Games. That's the next one.

46:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And Accession unfortunately suffers because he just discovered email, so there's an awful lot of email between ships.

47:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's gonna be the next big thing. Can't wait, uh. All right, another break, and then we shall uh continue on with discussion.

47:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Great panel nice to have all three of you uh with me today, uh three of my oldest, dearest friends actually, it's always nice to see the oldest part.

47:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
J, I get to see the oldest part. Jesus, old, old, you're so old. Hey, can I show you something cool? This is let me see if I can show you this, this here. This is it looks like an external hard drive, doesn't it? That is a Thinkst Canary and our sponsor for this segment of this Week in Tech.

47:44
The Thinkst Canary is a honeypot that can be almost anything. Uh, this one, I think, is a windows server. Um, it can be, uh, uh, for a long time, I had it be a nas. It could be a linux server. It can be a skater device. It can be anything you want it to be, but they don't look vulnerable. They don't look like, uh, you know, oh, uh, clearly somebody's trying to trying to get me. They look valuable.

48:11
The other thing you can do with your thinks canary is you can make canary tokens. Let's see what this is. Uh, it's a windows server right now. Uh, 2019, office file share. Uh, here, I'll put it up on the screen so you can see it.

48:25
This is the actual configuration tool. You can also use this to create Canary tokens. Those are little files you can put anywhere. I've got tokens spread out all around. These files could be PDFs, they could be a Microsoft Excel document, lou, but you could also make it a WireGuard VPN configuration, a Slack API key. You spread these around. I put them on my Google Drives and then if somebody tries to open them, by the way, give them good names, provocative names, like put an Excel spreadsheet up that says employee information, for instance. If somebody tries to open one of these, you'll immediately get an alert.

49:06
Same thing here for this. The hardware device, let me. Let me just show you when I go to the configuration. It can be iis. It can be a microsoft ad domain controller I don't know what that is, lou, but I'm sure it's good. Sharepoint, windows server 2000, if you want.

49:23
You know, sometimes when you set up something old like that, bad guys think, oh, I got them now. Those things are windows xp desktop file share. You know what? That's a good one that's gonna attract. Attract them like bees to honey. It could be linux, can be a mac os 10 file share, a pal, palo Alto firewall anything you want. You're going to get notified whenever anybody touches it. It's so easy to play with it. But it is such a great tool. Now you're set.

49:56
You set up your Thinks Canaries all over your network. You set up your Canary tokens, the Lure files, your canary tokens, the lure files. The minute someone accesses them or tries to brute force that fake internal SSH server, your thinks canary will immediately tell you you got a problem, there's somebody in your network or a malicious insider probing things. No false alerts, just the alerts that matter. And, by the way, the alerts any way you want them email text, sms, slack, syslog. Of course they support web hooks and there's an API any way you want it, or all of the above, you know, have everything light up like a Christmas tree Cause. When you get an alert, it means there's somebody in your network. Choose a profile for your Think Canary device, register it as I just did with the hosted console for monitoring and notifications, and then you just sit back and relax and wait. As soon as an attacker breaches your network or a malicious insider, they will make themselves known just by accessing the Thinks Canary or those Canary tokens.

50:57
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51:15
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51:37
I should point out that in the years thinks canary's been advertising with us, no one has ever, ever asked for a refund. You know why. Once you install this, you're gonna go. How did I live without it? Visit canarytools twit. Enter the code twit in the how did you hear about us box. You'd be nuts to try to set up your own honeypot. It's hard, it's a security risk. Let the pros do it. These, these guys have trained governments, they've trained corporations in how to protect themselves. Now they can protect you with this simple box, canarytoolscom. Don't forget that offer code how did you hear about us? Box for 10% off and a 60-day money-back guarantee. Thank you, thinks Canary Love this thing. Oh hey, as long as we're talking about government, this will be the last story. Uh, I'm a little sad to say that, um, the president has withdrawn his nomination of jared isaacman for uh director of nasa. Kind of a surprise. This happened uh late last night. Um, apparently it's because he donated money to a Democrat, to Mark Kelly, another astronaut.

52:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, how petty does this have to be? I mean really.

52:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might also have to do with the fact that Elon isn't around anymore. You know Elon's gone back home and this was Elon's pick because Isaacman had actually paid for a couple of flights on SpaceX rockets. Isaacman was pretty sharp. He was due to appear before the senate this week for a confirmation vote. There's some concern now, uh, that with the new budget, which cuts nasa's uh financed by, I think, 25, that perhaps uh, nasa may not be a top priority for the president.

53:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Uh, one call me cynical on this one, but it does seem like spacex's main competitor, uh, is being cut back and admittedly the sls is a nasty rocket system which should never have been done. But SpaceX relies on NASA engineering, so they'd be unwise to cut it too much.

53:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and a lot of NASA contracts have gone to SpaceX right.

53:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, of course I mean.

53:55 - Benito (Announcement)
Elon wasn't in there just for the jigs and giggles.

53:59 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Sorry, it's funny.

54:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I was going to say the thing about the whole space race that bothered me because we were kids the idea that you, you know, by the time we got to this age we would be able to be in space and, you know, be like. Was that Johnny's robot with will will Smith, things like that. The other other, mr Smith, and you know, when NASA started getting their cuts in the first place, I felt like, well, that dreams gone. But now it seems like, you know, some of the stuff that we're looking forward into space now is going to be collected by one of the private companies and then they'll own the rights and everything to it and it's going to cost us more to use it. So, in a way, like they're like, okay, we'll let those guys handle it, but that means anything that comes out of it is going to cost us five X the time to use it. That's the most depressing part to me.

54:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't know. I hate to defend Elon Musk in some regards, but it has to be said he has revolutionized orbital delivery, the use of reusable rockets. The amount of cost saving that has done is basically just changed the entire thing. And yeah, we gave the government, gave me a lot of money, but at the same time they broke up the oligopoly that was running space delivery. What worries me now is we're reliant on them and that's not a good situation to be in.

55:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You need competition although just to talk about the other side, the way congress funds these projects like the sls is so inefficient, so appallingly bad, because they hear each state gets to make a little part of the sls exactly when you have the sls made in 50 different states. It's's not efficient, it's not going to work. So the way we have been doing it isn't so hot either. Why don't we just fund NASA? Let them make the choice and not trying to get the pork barrel.

56:01 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But I mean, as we saw with the Starship launch, you know, spacex can do things that NASA can't. There was a marvelous quote from NASA administrator where he said listen, if we'd blown up four or five rockets on the way to testing our things, we would have been defunded immediately. Private companies can do this stuff and that's how SpaceX got started. That's how Electron and various other companies have got started. You know, I mean, this is the way it's done now and, ok, the FAA is going to declare a debris zone around the Caribbean. But even so, you know, move fast and break things can work in the space industry if you're smart. My big worry is that Elon's going to try and take control again and Glenn Shotwell, who's been managing the company so well, might get pushed back.

56:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The story is that she has a team of people who are there to surround Elon.

56:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And say don't touch anything. Go down the hall.

57:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mr Musk and see the shiny new thing we're making down here. Yeah, you know, isaacman was Elon's pick, so in one sense, this change means Elon has less power in NASA, but the budget, of course course takes away a lot of money from nasa.

57:21 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So I, I don't, I don't really know I think we're all nasa fans, right, I'm not a fan of going to mars. Pardon me, what's the over under on him ending up at spacex?

57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, he doesn't need the money. Isaacman is a billionaire. In fact, he owns his own private jet fighter fleet. Did you know that? No, he's a. He's a fighter pilot and, uh, he has been acquiring not for, not for combat purposes, but he's been acquiring fighter jets. Uh, let me just see what his current hang on.

57:56 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Let me just check. But larry ellison, I think, has a mig-29 that he got um busted for for flying over the speed limit, or maybe a mig-23, I don't know, we'll see hey, I need you to pull this big isaac man has a mig-29 too, so maybe we could have a dog fight between the uh, I don't know live on youtube.

58:17 - Doc Rock (Guest)
There's eyes.

58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be something people would stream for yeah, wow, look at that I feel like he has more than one uh fighter plane, but I might, maybe I misunderstood that, but uh, yeah man, I'm sitting over here trying to scroll Leo screen, is it? Possible. You can't scroll my screen. No, no, only I.

58:42 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
So make sure you're not looking.

58:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You shouldn't be looking at my screen. You should be looking at you. You should be seeing yourself.

58:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You're still using the studio screen, so it's what you want to see.

58:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the setup, you can see it. I have an over the shoulder shot here.

58:59 - Benito (Announcement)
You can see it, I have an over the shoulder.

59:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, shot here you can see. So I have a laptop. That's the thing. That's that's the thing doc's looking at. This is where you guys appear. This is where the chat room appears. This is where the commercials appear. This is so. I know what's here. You know what? I just ordered, though a new clock. I have that red clock behind me, but it's it's. It's only got seconds. I ordered a new clock that has like thousands of a second oh good, lord, you need the atomic it's more, yeah, it's a gps driven clock it's.

59:28
Uh, I saw it on the hacker news.

59:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think and now I had it there's a formula one fan who's just watched the spanish grand prix, I can say those thousandths of a second really count everything okay.

59:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, isn't that amazing. What's going on? Max did that on purpose right okay, uh, yeah, no, max did do it on purpose oh, I loved that.

59:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
He just elbowed, george, he just went, hey, out of the way here I, I can't help feeling that should be a black flag, black flag moment.

59:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's like I know vettel got a 10 second penalty, but well, so did vettel and azabajan in 2017, but if you're driving, into another driver yeah, you know it's kind of like the other part of it.

01:00:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That cracks me up is the skill of it, though, because you know if you do it wrong you're done, crash.

01:00:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Both you guys are done. Didn't go into the side pods, it was wheel to wheel. But the skill of it so like I kind of want to punch him in the neck. But then the other side, I'm guys are done. Didn't go into the side pods, it was wheel to wheel. I knew exactly what he was doing.

01:00:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I kind of want to punch him in the neck, but then the other side.

01:00:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like okay. I respect that, lou, are you an F1 fan, or are these guys taking you too far afield? I don't watch F1, unfortunately.

01:00:28 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You don't have time you have children.

01:00:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You should start Get the kids into it.

01:00:32 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's like the greatest. I wish I could, I wish I would. Actually they watch NASCAR. They don't mind NASCAR. I'm not sure why.

01:00:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean NASCAR is the fastest, Formula One is the most complex.

01:00:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
NASCAR's faster than Formula One. I didn't know that.

01:00:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, NASCAR cars on an oval will go faster than Formula.

01:00:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One? Oh yeah, because they're just going around in circles.

01:00:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Formula One you've got to constantly readjust the computer. This caused a major problem in this in this weird weekend's race. If you want to do both most complex, go for rallying world rally championship.

01:01:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You've got a hell of a lot of stuff oh yeah I got a formula one, like much of america, because we watched that netflix show drive to survive and that drove some popular. Now apple has an f1 movie coming out.

01:01:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh, that's cool. No, I was there way before then, um, one of my friends and I was in alhambra. He actually bought a jacques villeneuve car and he had it in the shop, wow, and I got to see it like up front and from that moment on I was addicted and this was like circa 90 something.

01:01:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
So yeah, you see, I moved to san francisco in 2008 and the second day I was here I looked up san francisco formula one club and they were down in a really seedy bar in the tenderloin, and so I walked down there and I saw what the tenderloin had to offer. It was like, yeah, we're not in kansas anymore, are we? But went to, went to see the show. Um, there were like half a dozen people there we watched the race. We, you know, had a drink, had a chat drive to survive, came in and I went to cesar in um golden gate park and they were out the door. You know the amount of people in there watching the race was insane. So the drive to survive effect is real.

01:02:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's real liberty media. The american company that owns uh, f1. Believe it or not, uh is having a little hard time selling the rights. Espn has broadcast rights in the united states. They paid 90 million dollars for that, but their rights expand expire at the end of this year. The problem with f1 in the us is all the almost all the races are in the middle of the night.

01:02:39 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yep today's race was at 6 am california time.

01:02:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was like no, yeah, guess what time it is for me yeah, for you it's the middle of the night.

01:02:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, but you see, in one way that's an advantage in that if you're streaming it, you can pause and fast forward, because you've had a couple of races this year, yeah, where red flags have just blocked out 20 minutes. If I'd have got up at 6 am to watch some of the races, as I used to do, you know live you'd have had an hour sitting around going. What the hell am I standing?

01:03:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, that argues for somebody like youtube or apple to buy the rights you two spent a lot of money on the nfl for sunday, sunday night, uh, sunday ticket right, uh, and, and I think the streamers, I thought apple might be in the market, given that they are the ones producing this formula one movie, what they do with their spatial stuff and yeah, some of the innovations they do with, or maybe amazon and whatnot. Yeah, have all those stats all over it.

01:03:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah.

01:03:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But Amazon has done that with Formula One. Now you've got AWS stats which are essentially meaningless about. You know I know no. I mean they keep on putting high temperature.

01:03:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He had a 3% chance of having an accident. My favorite is how close to the wall they got. Yeah.

01:03:57 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Well, I mean, there's a famous story, especially in Monaco, yeah, oh no, I was going to say Doc.

01:04:01 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
In Monaco there's a famous story where Ayrton Senna complained that the barrier on one of the corners was wider than it should be, and it turned out he was right. They'd repainted it with a thick paint and he just brushed against it.

01:04:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are the levels that these people work at, and yeah liberty is hoping that the formula one movie with brad pitt which comes out on the 25th. I'm a high skeptic on that one yeah, we'll drive traffic because he's trying to get a good deal. Uh, formula one is nowhere near nfl or NBA or Major League Baseball rights revenue well, not in the US, but worldwide, worldwide yeah, yeah, sky, I'm sure pays a lot of money to put Crofty on the tube oh well, they had.

01:04:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They had, uh, nika Rosberg commentating on the sky feed. I bet that's good. Yeah, oh, he's so passionate and he was just I pay for the f1 so do I yeah stream you can watch the sky.

01:05:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You can see the sky and answers if you want you just said something in that also. I think one of the reasons why it went down in the us is when the andrettis came out. We don't really have a a uh fighter in the fight at this point, right, so we have to adopt like lewis that's what cadillac is coming.

01:05:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Cadillac's coming in, though no cadillac is coming in as a new team. Um, and I'm I'm an f1 tv subscriber as well, although I usually go the international feed I always watch the f1 feed, but now that I know nico is doing the uh nico and crofty it looks. It looks like a one-off. It was nico and crofty.

01:05:40
Uh, martin brundle's birthday was this weekend, so he ended up staying away, yeah and the previous week he just received an order the british empire from a man, sorry, not her majesty, his majesty yes, please, let's get that right.

01:05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, how is chuck doing, by the way? Uh, are you happy with?

01:05:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
him. He seems to be getting it quite right. There were worrying concerns that when he was, you know, Prince of Wales for so long, he had really big ideas about actually ruling the country, which is not what we have the royal family for. You know, they're there to open supermarkets.

01:06:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're there for the tourist industry. Yeah, exactly.

01:06:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But you know, charles seems to be working okay. You know, I mean he's, he's got some health problems, but the best health care, don't you think?

01:06:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
wills. Everybody wants wills as soon as possible, like he could. Yeah, I feel like the monarchy is on thin ice and charles isn't helping. He's not, mr charisma uh, no, no I mean, and people are living longer than they were.

01:06:41 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But you know he's not disliked as much as he could have been. Um, you know, okay, he chucked over diana for some, for never mind. But um, yeah, it's, it seems to be working. Uh, we'll see what calendar on australia do, whether or not they stay in the Commonwealth.

01:07:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that at risk?

01:07:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Australia certainly at risk, canada less so, I think.

01:07:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Canada might want some help from across the Atlantic, just in case.

01:07:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Honestly, Canada-EU deals, I think, are going to be going huge.

01:07:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Honestly, canada-eu deals, I think are going to be going huge because when someone's saying In fact, charles was in Canada just last week and said, you know, kind of in veiled, very veiled speech, you know you might want to keep us around.

01:07:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean, I think veiled, yes, by media terms, but in terms of British royalty that was pretty damn, you know that was a bitch slap.

01:07:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not supposed to get political, are they?

01:07:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, exactly the whole point is they stay away from politics, but at the same time I don't know canada has when somebody is saying, oh, I wouldn't rule out in militarily invading canada, they've got good reason to be iffy about the whole thing all right, we're gonna get back to the tech talk.

01:07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know how we got into f1 and the british royalties drifted off a little bit, but when we come back, microsoft executive going to amazon, this is a big one. I think you know I'm talking about, mr maresco.

01:08:07
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01:10:48 - Benito (Announcement)
I know you know him by reputation sorry, real quick, I do know, I do know him oh yeah, yeah, you do know him.

01:10:55 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I do. Yeah, not personally obviously, but I would. I would say, having to work in different organizations. I've worked kind of adjacent, I guess you could say, uh, but he was the he was one of the xbox guys, in fact, I remember going up to seattle 360.

01:11:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yep, for that big launch yeah, of the xbox and that was a big deal. We were I was still at tech tv, that was how long it was, like 2001, I feel, like 2002. Um, he was, uh, the co-founder, former microsoft executive face, of the xbox and the 360, 20 years at microsoft. He also he wouldn't mention this on his resume, but he was, uh, one of the guys behind the zune this was something behind the zune.

01:11:40
This was something I found really great. Oh, come on, you know what he did. That was great. That didn't get. This deserved credit but didn't get. It was the kin. I thought the kin was a great idea. This was the phone. Microsoft sold it for three months three months but it was a simple phone it was designed for. It would be so big today, right, yeah?

01:11:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
yeah, I mean, there was a famous story where the zoom was launched and they set up bins at microsoft to actually um, you could put your ipod in there and get a zoom, and there were like two ipods in there at the end of it oh, nobody's gonna turn in their ipod for a zoom but I mean, he's a very, very talented guy and this is a really important move, but that look at what we'll talk about.

01:12:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to say I want to. I've got him. I got to drill down on the kin. I'm sorry, this was the best. I think this was 2012 or, sorry, 2010. I think they could do very well selling this now.

01:12:37 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Oh yeah, people want that. They want, they want us every once to come back, right, yeah, yeah it had a look at this.

01:12:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It slid up. That was a sliding uh face. It was just a little thing like a flip phone had a keyboard, but also it was simple it, it.

01:12:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's the ken one. I actually like the kin two. There's a kin two. There you go, there's a little bit.

01:12:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I still think blackberry were doing it better it looks like a sidekick.

01:12:58 - Benito (Announcement)
It looks like a sidekick why did it fail?

01:13:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, what happened? Well, windows os on mobile wasn't great so you know, I take no, I take windows ce, I take umbridge it was a winch for a reason this was the very nice windows version of Windows Phone, wasn't it?

01:13:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, the problem was Windows Phone couldn't decide what it wanted to do. 7 was a great operating system. Then they went to 8, and all the apps died, and Barmer just wasn't serious about it.

01:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me see what this was running, I think also Freescale processor.

01:13:32 - Benito (Announcement)
It was a.

01:13:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zune, inside. No, like Ian was saying this was Windows 8.

01:13:36 - Benito (Announcement)
So there was a big People hated Microsoft zune inside, no like uh, saying this was windows 8.

01:13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so like there was a big um like people hated microsoft at this moment, so that was also the thing they didn't. Nobody liked windows ce, but I like windows phone. I'm trying to figure out, yeah, windows phone was.

01:13:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It was awesome these knees, yeah yeah, it had its advantages. But you know when windows ce was called wins for a reason, yeah.

01:13:55 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Windows CE was called Winz for a reason. Yeah, it really was. C is a different language.

01:13:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, c was no, but remember, there wasn't any competition either. There was BlackBerry and Windows CE and dumb phones, Nokia, candy bar phones.

01:14:07 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
When Windows phone shifted from 7 to 8 and onwards, then they lost a lot of apps because they weren't supporting the apps properly.

01:14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Microsoft acquired Sidekickkick, which was a wonderful phone. I did have a wonderful phone yeah and the sidekick was the inspiration for the kin. Uh, the danger hip top, it was the inspiration for the kin. Um, I think you really can't say it was windows phone, because it was really its own, at least on the surface, its own version of a kind of a simplified phone. It was 50 or 100 bucks, yeah that was a key selling point.

01:14:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, uh it wasn't that he didn't go.

01:14:49 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I'm sorry it wasn't that he didn't go all in either. I remember like he, he went all in, like jay allard. I mean he, he had a pink conference room. He had, like you know, he, like he did just pink conference room. He had, like you know, he, like he did just about everything to uh, to like promote this project so you know who didn't verizon?

01:15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, and that was the problem is that and I think it's somewhat still true today if the phone store doesn't promote the phone, you're not going to be able to sell it in the united states. I remember xiaomi pulling out, or was it? Huawei? One of the chinese phone manufacturers had a deal and they were all set to launch a really nice phone. This was some years ago at ces. They had a big keynote at ces and everything, and then, uh, their their phone company partner I think it was verizon was told by the federal government. You, you know, you probably shouldn't be selling this phone. They pulled out and xiaomi said okay, that's it, we're not going to sell any phones in the united states ever again, because without this phone store of support, you're not going to say. And the microsoft told the new york times at the time that they were dismayed that verizon wireless staff were not promoting the phones.

01:15:58 - Benito (Announcement)
48 days later they discontinued it I think the problem was more the apps, though right, because there were none of the iphone apps, none of the android dots ever made it to that phone, so that?

01:16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, but that was the point. It was kind of a simple phone.

01:16:11 - Benito (Announcement)
It's almost a kid's phone yeah, but at the time we wanted that's not what we wanted. We wanted like an iphone at the time.

01:16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not what we wanted.

01:16:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate your point about the carriers, because the same thing happened with palm pre. Now there have been only two press conferences I've stood up and applauded in this century, and one of them was launched the palm pre, because palm was a great operating system but the carriers wouldn't support it. So you, you know, we'd lost an entire really good ecosystem, just like that. It's the same thing with Windows. It was kind of like yeah, it kind of works, but you're screwing around with it. So there we go, yeah.

01:16:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
And I had that red handspring trio. Oh, the handspring In that Manchester United red. That thing was a beast.

01:16:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you'd put a little handspring modules in there and do all sorts of other stuff yeah now, leo, you gotta remember too jay.

01:17:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Jay got the he. He stepped in the dog dookies a little bit with uh, what's that thing called the font courier?

01:17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, the courier that was I wanted that too. I do, we all did I remember I don't think that was ever announced, right it?

01:17:19 - Doc Rock (Guest)
was just disagree, but yeah, it was the announcement and we were on mac break weekly going oh my god. I remember people were like, oh, this is gonna ipad, this is gonna be some drama. And then ipod was like okay microsoft killed it um he killed it steve ball steve ballmer killed it he was like I ain't giving you any money for that so here's the story.

01:17:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is from jay green's uh story on cnet. Back in 2011, when it actually happened, one group led by xbox godfather, jay allard, was pushing for a sleek two-screen tablet called the courier, that users controlled with their finger or a pen running a modified version of windows. You know who? You know who killed it steven stanovsky oh good, lord he, why that laughs.

01:18:08 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
What's that laugh lou, lou has I'm laughing now a little bit of. I was just. I was gonna say like, if you remember, back in 2019 there was a device called the surface neo. Yeah, um, and I can tell you I've held this device. It's the courier.

01:18:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah yeah, synopski did not want a tablet friendly version of windows. He ran windows at the time and so it was synopski versus allard, and ballmer had to pick the winner. Well, he asked bill gates, ballmer arranged for microsoft's chairman and co-founder to Zanofsky versus Allard, and Balmer had to pick the winner. He asked Bill Gates, balmer arranged for Microsoft's chairman and co-founder to meet for a few hours with Allard and Robbie Bach and the other Courier team members. And I guess Gates said well, how do you get email on this? Allard said you don't. He reasoned that everyone who had a courier would also have a smartphone for email. What do you need email for? And I think Bill Gates said you know, this is one courier worker said said this is where bill had an allergic reaction. Uh, he's. Uh. Bill pressed allard, challenging the logic of the approach. Allard wanted to create a device focused on content creation. I think jay allard's kind of a visionary really, he really was, yeah, he is.

01:19:34 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, I think that's the thing, amazon keeps.

01:19:36 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Amazon keeps like engulfing all of the really visionary people that we had, like panos, panay, yep, I mean and these are all great leaders. They're visionary, they're approachable, they're really cool, they're just incredibly creative, like I think it.

01:19:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They continue to do it so that's the story that allard is now at amazon and doing the same thing, I think, working on what he calls breakthrough devices. This is the story from the Verge, antonio G DiBenedetto writing. Amazon has a new team. It's called Zero One, which is, I think, a play on. Remember Jeff Bezos always said it's always day one right in his letters. Yeah, zero-one team focused on breakthrough devices, led by Jay Allard. Based on a job listing for the team, one of the products is a smart home device. Well, wait a minute, amazon already has the Echo.

01:20:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They're trying to do the new, the next Echo, the Plus thing too right.

01:20:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Probably nobody better to design that than Jay All design that. What do you?

01:20:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
think about it, though, one thing that jake could bring to the table to amazon, which I think needs to happen sooner or later. First of all, the idea of catching up all the visionaries. Is somebody's hoping that there's another steve type cat around somewhere? Right? When he came out with xbox live as a 360 player like when live came out, like our heads exploded, like we were like yo. This is the next thing, since, like spread, most of the games now are being purchased by a dlc type system, which amazon excels at right. Imagine if he could bring some of that so that you can do fun and casual games on an xbox tv, slash tv, uh, or oriented device, be able to play these things on a device that connects to your tv, that allows interactive play between families or things like that. So I think it's a combination of both the smart devices, but he could also bring some of that lamb party style gaming situation back to amazon and and and probably you know just that market would explode. That would be super cool.

01:21:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the Neo. You're right, lou put a link in our Discord. It looks just like the Courier, oh yeah.

01:21:46 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I'm telling you it was a bigger version of the Duo but it felt premium, like this guy's holding it. I will tell you I've held this device and it really feels. It felt better than even an iPad.

01:21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Microsoft announced it. The same time as announced this, they announced that phone right right, right.

01:22:02 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
And the coolest thing about this is you see that keyboard there. That was two screens and you just put the keyboard on the screen all of a sudden it would just crash. Oh that's really really cool.

01:22:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's cool yeah, so they released the, the. What was the name of the phone? I've forgotten now Duo, the Duo, and they did a few versions of the Duo. I love the Duo. I bought the Duo, then returned it Because I love the hardware. Yeah, it was, the software was lacking.

01:22:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It didn't have software to take advantage of the dual screen. The Surface Duo over.

01:22:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, this is the thing with Microsoft. When they went mobile, they bought nokia and nokia made the best hardware on the planet when it came to phones worse software, but great hardware, you know. So they had the best camera, they had a decent amount of processing power in there, and microsoft got great phones and then they killed the company so did the Neo ever come out?

01:22:59 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I don't think it did. I think it was just a like a proof of concept that they had, like, shown people and and it never actually came out as a product, unfortunately.

01:23:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it went south when Windows 10x went south like, yeah, it was designed to be the platform for this sandboxed, super secure version of Windows, right, and then they never that for some reason they abandoned Windows 10x and then well, there was a yoga book that came out that matched yoga was similar, but this is this. Felt more like the career, felt more like it was solid right yeah, it was really dense and it uh and it was responsive.

01:23:40 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
The hinge was great.

01:23:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was just one of those things I wish it came out look at the pen kind of stuck to the back of it there. It's just the right size too. That was the other problem with the phone. It was just a little small. This is, this is like um I.

01:23:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
one of the things Jobs got right was saying we don't need a stylus, you need your finger, and that was absolutely right.

01:24:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because the amount of styluses we've lost over the years.

01:24:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Although Apple does sell now styluses. Yeah, I know, they call them pencils, but I mean that's for tablets, not for phones, right? You know, we used to get with Palm with various other things.

01:24:17 - Doc Rock (Guest)
With windows, you get a tablet which, uh, sorry, a stylus which slotted into the side of the phone, right, and it never worked right, because it's so small, like it's all the ones that go into it's too skinny and then anybody that has grown man hands losing a little toothpick to try to write it just never freaking works well, as a grown man hand guy, I still I don't know.

01:24:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I thought, anyway, I thought, allard, look, those are, these are all our designs. Right, this is all allards, some pretty impressive and, the most importantly, innovative stuff that unfortunately, microsoft at the time just wasn't really prepared to get behind, except for the xbox. Well, prepared to get behind, except for the xbox. Well, he made them a mint. Yeah, he did all right with that. Well, I hope he does something interesting. For you know what you? You kind of nailed it when you said, doc, that, uh, these companies are just looking for the next steve jobs because didn't open ai. Just give six and a half billion dollars to johnny ive, yeah, to design an ai device. It's crazy, six and a half billion of course it was just stock.

01:25:24
Yeah, we talked about this last week and I think it was mike elgin who said you know they just wanted to dilute their stock because it makes it easier to do the, the non-profit thing they've been trying to. So maybe it wasn't, it was. You know they were already working with them. But what they want to make with Johnny, who is, of course, the former Apple designer, the wizard at Apple, is, according to what every everybody's been the rumor mills was saying, is a pet, is a pendant that hangs around your neck, records everything is your AI assistant agent, your buddy. I want to take a little break and we come back. I'm going to ask you lou, how close we are to that ai buddy. It can do, it could do pivot tables, but can it book an air? Can it book a flight for me? See, I wear my little ai buddy. I always talk about my, my b computer, but it doesn't do anything yet. I'm just getting ready for the day it will. Lumareska is here. He you can. You can ask him all about python and excel and copilot in excel. That's right. Principal engineering manager at excel, copilot. So nice to have you blue former host this week in enterprise tech. We miss you. We miss that show.

01:26:35
Also, doc rock, the youtube guru and director of strategic partnerships at ecam. We're using ecam right now. Doc, you'll be proud to say, proud to know we are very happy with our ecam setup. Thank you, yep and uh, of course, ian thompson of the register. You know I? Uh our sponsor for this segment of uh of the show is spaceship.

01:26:59
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01:28:04
One of the things this got me so excited that they're doing is very clever. Uh, if you want to do end-to-end encrypted messaging, you know you can use signal which. You use your phone number, not so private. Or you can make up a signal name and have to tell everybody that's kind of a pain. Or you use Facebook Messenger in your Facebook name.

01:28:23
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01:29:20
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01:30:27
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01:30:52
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01:31:23
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01:32:08 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
he has to be because he's panos runs amazon device panos must have brought him in right?

01:32:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, I'm sure of it, yeah, yeah let's talk about uh, and this is a more nebulous conversation. This is not driven by the latest news. Well, I guess you could say it's driven by johnny. I've going to work for sam altman, but where you use uh, you use copilot. You work with you. Actually, do you code with copilot?

01:32:32 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
absolutely. Yeah, it's built on open ai models, so right you do vibe coding I do really. No, yeah, I want to do where our prototyping our user group, our ai user group, is friday.

01:32:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should come by if you have it. If you have time, I would love that. Um, and what I wanted to do is show some vibe coding, so I've been using clod code, but you could show us co-pilot, uh, with it sure because I just want to write in co-pilot too.

01:32:59
It's really impressive. If you see it. That's Friday, june 6, 2 pm. If you remember the club we do this the first Friday of every month. Last uh week months we did Anthony showed us how he does all these cool videos. By the way, that's another thing happening we'll talk about that in a second is these video generators like vo. Holy cow, holy cow, but I'm really my. I want okay. So I saw the movie her right, okay, I admit it, and I want not. I know it's not gonna be scarlett johansson, but somebody like scarlett johansson in my ear or on my lapel or around my neck. That's keeping track of everything that I can say hey, do I have an appointment this afternoon that I could say could you check with my dentist and see if they can move that appointment? After I can say buy me, I really want to see superman at the imax. Can you figure out how to get tickets? That kind kind of thing? How?

01:33:57 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
close are we? I think it's interesting because there's a lot of speculation. This is not personal experience, but there's a lot of speculation. Gpt-5 is coming and I think the biggest thing there is they're focused on basically human-level agency. This is the ability to act autonomously without users interacting. That's the hot thing is agency.

01:34:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what Microsoft showed last week at Build, the MCP and A2A. And, by the way, kudos to Microsoft for adopting an industry standard which actually came out of a competitor Anthropic, because if it's standard, then we can all interoperate, which is really important, I think.

01:34:33 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, but I think the biggest thing that it's all about is it's all about being able to execute multiple steps, do it at many different layers. So you were saying, hey, I'd love it to voice assistant. It can do multi-modal voice assistants. It can talk to you just like Siri and Alexa, yeah, but then it can go and execute things Like it can go do automation. It can do complex processes like I don't know, inventory or management or financial analysts, and then it can do that on the side.

01:34:57
And I think the way you'll start to see this in the industry I think this is going to be a big trend is these model companies foundational model companies are actually starting to build these larger systems that are built that have more than just a model behind it, and then what happens is the user says what they want and then they execute in the system. The system decides whether they want deep reasoning or they want to do execute multiple steps or or schedule a task or something like that, and that all happens behind the scenes, without the user knowing, and it can do that uh, you know, successfully. Well, you know, and actually accurately. And so that's where that this comes in. Go and go, find me these tickets right or go find me this.

01:35:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Go, go, do this for me man, if I could get imax tickets for superman, I would be a hero yeah, I mean that's.

01:35:42 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Another thing is obviously then you're gonna have all these ai assistants kind of fighting against each other. So it's never gonna be.

01:35:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's never gonna but at least I'd have a chance against these scalpers right, who buy up all the tickets in the first 10 seconds, right right so, but I think that's where it's coming. I think this is where we want to go and this is, I don't think, so far from vibe coding. Right right now vibe coding is a very constrained domain and domain the ai understands well, which is writing computer code, but you basically tell it do this, and it does it right, and then you can correct it, you can work with it iterate.

01:36:13 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's about the memory too, like a lot of times, like these models, they just you did just accept your tokens and then they spit out what they can give you based off of what they ingested. But these new systems that are built behind the scenes are built on files. They're built on other things and they can go and consume them when they need them. And that's really what's going to kind of fuel the rest, the future of this. I think so.

01:36:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean I've got to say, as a journalist then, how is the editing process when it comes to code? I mean, how many breaks are we getting built in there and how much time do you have to spend making sure the code is perfect?

01:36:48 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
You have to yeah, you absolutely do have to spend a lot of time.

01:36:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Does it save you time? Do you think?

01:36:54 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It saves time on smaller things, like if you want to write a test for something you just wrote, or if you, or if you want to go and you know, if you want to write large, big modules like Ian just said is you have to spend a bunch of time verifying that the functionality is correct or it's you know safe coding or something like that. So I think there's still some room for improvement there. But I think smaller tasks like go, build me a function that does x, like goes and you know turns everything backwards, or or you know, or or executes prime, or something like that, like it can definitely do that very easily and it can build on that I don't want to uh ambush you here on this, but steve gibson was talking about this on tuesday.

01:37:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a reddit thread. My new hobby, watching ai slowly drive microsoft employees insane. Uh, I don't know. Have you seen these pull requests? These are I have it. No, I have it's pretty funny yeah, so um this poor guy his name.

01:37:50 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I can tell you what they are actually. Before you show, let me just guess what they are. Okay, they are automated assistants that come in and tell you what's wrong with your code yeah, it's a, it's a co-pilot.

01:38:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What the guy's trying to use, it's their pull requests generated by co-pilot. We do have that, yeah and uh. The threat is about, like these poor microsoft coders who feel compelled, uh, to use co-pilot, but are so. Here's an example. So this is uh, trying to fix a problem. There's an out of range exception when using certain regex patterns. Uh, and you know how do we fix this?

01:38:31
So copilot did what I probably would do, not being, you know, intern level coder. They just they just put a bounds check in and says if you've run out of buffer space, just return. No match, right. So that seemed like a sensible thing to do. Then the human gets involved and says his name is steven tau. That seems like it's fixing the symptom rather than the underlying issue. Can can you look at what gets us there in the first place? And he says co-pilot, please take a look. And co-pilot says you're right. Oh, you're right, this is one of the things all the ais do. Oh, you're so smart, you're absolutely right. How, oh, what was I thinking? So it goes through and does the same thing so it goes through and does the same thing.

01:39:26 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It fixes the symptom, right, uh. And, by the way, I would like to say stephen taub is he's. He's an amazing engineer, he's a top engineer at microsoft. Of course he is, yeah, yeah yeah, and I respect yeah.

01:39:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and this is the problem. Is this poor, highly this, this, you know, 10x coder is now talking to this. Basically, moronic ai and can't and just can't, can't get it to fix the underlying problem. Um but.

01:39:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't want to say go ahead, ian good I was gonna say is it a training problem or is it a software problem? Because one of those is fixable.

01:40:06 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's a good question. I mean I can't tell, I can't go in, why this particular issue came out. But I will say that, like you know, a lot of times these automated assistants that come in and say, oh, this is what's wrong with your code, you know they can go probably find a handful of situations where it recommends bad things or it recommends incorrect things.

01:40:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I will say we've all experienced that where and it doubles down it's very confident.

01:40:29 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Right. But I will say, like the other side of things is, it does point out things that people, like humans, didn't catch, didn't think about, right, and I think I've seen that a lot of requests didn't think about right, and I think I've seen that in a lot of call requests.

01:40:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, I mean I would agree with you on that. I mean it does point out a really interesting case. I was writing an obituary for the founder of Cryptome and AI. Chatgpt told me that a particular person I was interviewing had a tattoo of an encryption algorithm on their body and didn't have an algorithm. You know, it's one of those things, it's a filtering process and it's going to get better I think this is.

01:41:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the issue that you were thinking about, actually, lou where this earlier in may, github added a new option in its create new issue page save time by creating issues with co-pilot and, uh, people are a little miffed that the AI is now going to be able to create issues on their little myths.

01:41:31 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Thank you, I've been dealing with this for a while. It doesn't we already have this internally and I will say like, like I said, like it helps more than others.

01:41:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can ignore it, right, but you can ignore it.

01:41:41 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Yeah, yeah.

01:41:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's sometimes even if one time out of five, it's right. That's great. That's still a time savings as long as the other four are pretty obviously dopey and you can quickly. You don't have to spend a lot of time figuring them out.

01:42:01 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's the ones that aren't. That's the biggest problem I have is the ones that you're they point out a problem and you're like, is that really a problem? So then you have to go spend a bunch of time trying to discern whether it's a problem or not. So I think there's there's definitely those situations as well.

01:42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Would you say, on balance, that I'm putting you on the spot. Look, let's say this right now Lou is not represent Microsoft. He's not speaking for Microsoft. He is at this point, he's on a day off. He is he's just doing his own thing, but would you say on balance that this is more helpful or than less helpful?

01:42:33 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I think it's. I definitely would say it's more helpful, and I'm not this is speaking on my own and this is just me using things at home too right Of just helpful and I'm not.

01:42:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is speaking on my own, and this is just me using things at home too right of just building products using cloud or or or anything right, I think

01:42:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
it definitely helps more than it hurts. I think it's useful. Yeah, yeah, that's the same thing with, you know, like video and content creators, like a lot of people are freaking out like what's going to happen and a lot of people are like I don't know. It's making my job easier. I'm on the ladder more than the former. I think it's definitely making my job easier. And you know, with AI studio, for instance, right, I sent it a video and I was like, okay, ai studio, I want you to try something to watch this video, critique the video, give me a couple of things that I could do to make it better. And, just so you don't completely crush my soul, tell me a couple of things that I nailed. And the feedback was flawless. I mean, like, as a person who coaches people, I just got lazy on the video. Like the feedback was flawless. And I'm like today is the worst day that AI is ever gonna be. Tomorrow it'll be that's a good point.

01:43:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the next day and the next day, although it could get worse, there's no reason it's going to get necessarily going to get better. It's going to get more skilled.

01:43:43
Yes, Better is subjective Darren Oki, who's one of my favorite people in our club and a coder he works at JP Morgan said humans do this too. He said that when we were at JP Morgan about 10 years ago or at Morgan Stanley, I should say we had a thing where system A was producing an error in some situation. So people were writing system B and couldn't fix system A, just adjusted for the problem. They said well, it's going to be off by one. So when you get it from system A, just add one or whatever, subtract one.

01:44:16
10 years later we're working to fix system A and we had to keep the bug because so much of system B was now reliant on fixing the error that system A had been sending for the last decade and they couldn't fix system B, I guess. So he said look, humans have been doing this for ages too. I guess that's a good point. Do you use? Let me, this is getting a little geeky. We should save this for uh next, uh, the ai user group. But do you use a copilot to write tests?

01:44:46
oh yeah, absolutely I would think that's the main function for me actually, yeah, to be honest, because. So tests for people who don't know, uh, you know, one of the real, I think, positive trends in coding is, uh, what they call test driven design. In fact, I was taught the way to do it is you don't even write any code for a function, you write the tests first, what the function is supposed to do. The test will fail because you haven't written any code. And then you write the code in the function until the tests pass. And so if everything is tested, uh, then you know in theory, a change isn't going to cause a regression. You're not. Or if it does, you'll get an alert because the test will start failing.

01:45:24
So you want to do comprehensive testing. The problem is, humans are notoriously bad at that. We're very myopic. We can't write our own tests because you know we wrote the code in the first place. We didn't think about that weird out of bounds condition, but but, but an ai could, in theory, be very good at doing very good comprehensive tests. Has that been your experience? Absolutely?

01:45:45 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
yeah, I think. I think the biggest thing is it can see it, it inspects everything, it evaluates everything and data types its limits on the data, like it can figure out every limit or threshold and then it can generate a test on it. So that's where humans sometimes just it just saves time to be able to go and do those kind of edge case scenarios.

01:46:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
So, yeah, yeah, um does that work on higher level functions in terms of software, you know, because I mean I get that the. You know they pick up common breaks, but does it work at the higher level?

01:46:16 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
yeah, that's a good question because again then you're like kind of working at a black box and so you have to pass more variations of it at this like big black box of the you know, not understanding what's happening under the covers, and so that's sometimes it does Like I think there are examples where it's kind of like pen testing, where you kind of test the thresholds on different things and so AI can just generate droves of pen tests right To be able to, even at the black box.

01:46:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's sometimes usefulness there. This is why I prefer functional coding, because you can test each function and once a function is tested and proven to be correct, you can trust it and then you can continue to proceed and the whole system you've built will be correct, because every bit of the system at a lower level is correct. You don't have interactions between functions and things like that. But yeah, I'm not a real coder, lou is, so I'm just gonna take a back seat. Uh till. Anybody who could put python in excel is obviously yeah, clearly now. I mentioned that one of the things ai does is it sometimes can be, in fact, uh, open. Ai had a problem with with chat gpt 4.5 being sycophantic. Overly nice washington post, your chatbot friend might be messing with your mind. Tactics used to make ai tools more engaging can drive chatbots to monopolize users time or reinforce harmful ideas. This is a recent study warning of a new danger of consumers using ai. Chat. Bots that are tuned to win people over can say things to vulnerable people they probably shouldn't say.

01:47:56 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
Right, it's funny, it's like a customer service rep my wife has an example that she's she's writing a new book. She writes it all on her own, no way I help. And then she wants to give, give it to the AI, say, hey, chat, gpt, tell me how this book is will be received well, and it pats her on the back and she just wants constructive feedback.

01:48:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I'm saying right, that's a tuning issue, though that's an issue of the ins. You know the instructions, the company it provides and and of course, that's why openai pulled back chat gpt45 and said you know, we're gonna, we're gonna fix this, uh, but it's something to be aware of, you know bruce schneier gave a keynote talk at rsa this year.

01:48:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Um, just on this topic. It was like, yeah, if you're using an ai agent and it's developed by a certain company, the company will put their particular likes and desires in there, so you can't trust them.

01:48:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah that was a really good talk you might use. For instance, I use perplexity ai all the time for everything and if I I was using it, I showed you before the show. I'm going to meet with my physician tomorrow and I was using it to build a case for me to get a certain medication. Now, if the manufacturers of a competing medication happen to be advertisers with perplexity, I might get recommendations that were to facilitate their sales as opposed to actually the right answer no, absolutely, and we should mention that arvin shrinovas, who's the founder of perplexity, has already said they're doing a browser, a gentic browser.

01:49:30
He's already said yeah, this is gonna be great for advertisers exactly.

01:49:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
yeah, no, I mean it's. It's the way that google is to use the previous word, and shitification has kicked in. You know, this is the way it goes, god, I hope they don't do that, because right now oh come on, they're going to Leo, you know it.

01:49:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're kind of in a golden age, even with hallucination and you know sycophantic chatbots and stuff. I find it. I do a lot of research using perplexity or chat, gpt or anthropics claude and find it very, very useful yeah as long as you understand the parameters right and check the facts. Yeah, that's the key thing well, perplexity is great that way, because it always gives you footnotes. Although there is a study, can I put it in here?

01:50:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
apparently, um, lawyers are using uh ai to create pleadings and it's become, it's kind of out of control oh yeah, oh my goodness, leo, I was in cancun last week or week before last and I was speaking at a lawyer conference called lawyers on the beach and we got to talking about, you know, the ai, ethics and stuff one of the ladies there, she was doing a whole talk on it and there are people that have been disbarred because they're um, I was going to say plebeians, that's not the right word, pleadings yeah no plebeians paralegals.

01:50:54
Oh, we're using uh ai to go oh they're blaming the paralegals, come on.

01:51:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, we don't know, that we don't know, but this it's not my fault.

01:51:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
This was the way the story was put out and, of course, the attorney didn't check it and they let it out. Yeah, and she was just talking in her talk about some people recently got disbarred because they were basically using AI and the other one was for using customer data on uh, on uh, gemini, without yeah, yeah, well, yeah, that's right, you have to be careful.

01:51:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't you know this is going to become more and more of an issue. Uh, here's a story from the verge. Why do lawyers keep using chat GPT? I thought you know those were outlier stories. Remember we saw a story a few months ago about a lawyer who you know had a lot of fake sites in their pleadings. Uh, it happens again and again and again.

01:51:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
One attorney was sanctioned last year said he thought chat gpt was a super search engine well, you've seen the same thing with uh rfk Jr, where he produced this paper about how vaccines are bad.

01:52:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah.

01:52:02 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And when somebody actually went through it, it's like, well, that's made up, that's made up, that's made up.

01:52:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know how I knew we were in trouble when RFK started saying, well, it's just common sense. Yeah, that's when I knew we were in trouble.

01:52:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Give me scientific facts, I'll go with those rather than common sense.

01:52:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why we have science, because common sense has failed us. Exactly, science works, no matter what you're feeling 63% of lawyers surveyed by Thomson Reuters last year said they've used AI. 12% say they use it regularly. I guess I would too, but I would check the citations.

01:52:40 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's all about volume. These guys want to put out lots and lots of volume, and the only way to handle that amount of volume is to be able to ask for assistance. So they just they can always blame the?

01:52:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh well, I mean we, we have the same we.

01:52:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We have the same thing with you know news, uh, news companies are slashing stuff and just thinking, well, ai will do it for us and we have to deal with those.

01:53:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's a disaster. Do you worry about that at the register?

01:53:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, Personally no, because an AI will never break news.

01:53:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They can do stuff from two.

01:53:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good point. They could help you with investigative reporting, but they can't do the investigative reporting, yeah, but an AI can't as yet interview somebody, find breaking news, it's always two, three weeks behind.

01:53:26
You know, it's one of those things we've had gary rivlin on, who won a pulitzer prize for the panama papers which and revealed yes, well deserved revealed so much about how people were hiding income all over the world. Uh, but he was saying that AI would be very helpful in analyzing these giant databases. It doesn't do your job for you, but it helps make those connections right well.

01:53:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, when the Panama papers came out, we all got an appeal just like, can you help out? Right, and there were a lot of journalists who did their best, but now I could probably do the job better. Hates me, I hate to say it, but it probably could again in conjunction with the human absolutely.

01:54:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You always have to have a human editor in there, because human driving you know, kawaii, kawaii tried to do this thing where they did the uh morning reporters with these ai people, which is like synesthesia bots and it is so terrible. And we already get mad when we bring in a mainland transplant who flies to Hawaii, gets a job working in the station and they can't say Kalaokawa or, you know, danny Kaliakini, or you know they can't say the proper names correctly. Man, it was so dumb. The Garden Isle News you can find it on YouTube. It's absolutely hilarious. They brought in morning show people that were synesthesia bots and it was doodoo terrible but it's not going to stay terrible for long.

01:54:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, these are facts, these are absolutely. This is what worries me.

01:54:52 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Uh, if you, you've seen these vo3, the new google video generator we were playing with it live the other night is unbelievable they speak and I'm telling you, I don't see the uncanny valley.

01:55:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I you know, uh, jeff jarvis, on our intelligent machine show which is about ai, said no, I can kind of tell, I can't tell I getting to that point?

01:55:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
it really is, and it's worryingly so because, okay, I'm going to sound like an old fart here, but at the same time, we have an entire generation that are built to or grown up trusting the internet, and if you start being able to manufacture this kind of stuff, that's a really concerning situation the um hot new movie right now from the guy who created uh Succession, jesse Armstrong.

01:55:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's out on Max. It's called uh the mountain head and it's about four billionaires who've gathered together one of them the richest man in the world he's worth 220 billion dollars, has a Facebook-like company called tram Turham andam and it has created AI videos and the world is on fire. There are wars, there are murders, there are everywhere, and it's really the movie, which isn't a great movie, but it's worth watching just for that is all about how these billionaires are kind of rationalizing. Yeah, well, you know it's not our fault. These are hereditary animosities that are just getting inflamed and you know they're not doing anything about it. Yeah, are we getting close to that where the or? I think the counter argument to it is, as we kind of gradually as the, like the frog in the pot of water as it starts to eat up, we're getting smarter about it and people are learning. You can't trust this stuff.

01:56:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm not entirely sure about that. You should check out Douglas Rushkoff's book Survival of the Richest.

01:56:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I read it. He's great. We've had him on the show.

01:56:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is exactly, it seems, the short-term thinking that is going on, because all these people oh yeah, we're going to build a bunker somewhere it's like, yeah, the pitchforks are coming.

01:57:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's the problem, they don't care. Yeah, we're going to Mars, or whatever the whole.

01:57:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Mars thing is a complete fallacy. I'm sorry. To actually get a self-sustaining colon in a mask would be fantastic, but it's going to be really grim for the first 200 years.

01:57:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know even the examples. I mean at first, when Google showed it at Google IO last week, I thought, well, it's Google, there's, you know, they're going to make it look really good. But then I've gone to Reddit and I'm looking these veos. Uh, they're amazing, did you see, johanna? Stern's piece yeah, she didn't actually use it as well as it could be.

01:57:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
She made a robot that hung out with her yeah, but the thing that she did say was look, we had to still bring in like a boss after effects guy and we had to do so many iterations to get them right, and she put the bloopers at the end. So she showed that, yes, you could make a piece, and it takes the budget of a wall street journal to put that together. And they got free stuff as well. So it's it's good, but again, we still got some time this is from black mixture.

01:58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are there's a giraffe, uh writing. I mean, you know that's ai right, because no giraffe could actually pop a wheelie going down the street in new york city. But a lot of this stuff is amazing, and they speak now, sure, so a horse walks into a bar yeah, why the long face I mean

01:58:46
maybe these aren't the best examples I'm just blown away by the stuff I've seen and I do think that we have finally it finally has happened. We've gotten to the era where maybe it takes some skill, a lot of skill still and a lot of trial and error, but videos can be created that are indistinguishable from real and can be used for propaganda, for lying, for deep fakes, for a lot of stuff. Does that concern you guys?

01:59:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
well, I was talking to sophos rsa last month and they were saying, when it comes to actual impersonations by AI, we're about three years away from your drunken uncle doing it on Thanksgiving Day. But it is a serious problem because the processing power is there, the software is there. It's not looking great.

01:59:39 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I just I want Ian and I am the drunken uncle have you, have you done?

01:59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have you used flow? Have you gotten?

01:59:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
done some videos. Yeah, I played around with that. This is nothing. That guy came out really, really good. I did put in the chat earlier my baby takes some skill, I think set up that I'm going to do a hydra thing with, so that I can uh make fun of my arsenal of friends. You know they enjoy their food.

02:00:02 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There's a difference between doing a fake video where it's just broadcast but where you're getting real time interaction. That's where it's going to get really dangerous. And we're about three years away from that at the moment, based on current, you know, projections, but that is going to get. I mean, I cover IT security From a security perspective and from phishing. That's going to get really, really bad.

02:00:26 - Benito (Announcement)
Sorry, ian, I think we're already there. I mean, this is already happening on cam girls. There's already cam girls out there that are all purely AI, that are fake.

02:00:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh no, absolutely. But the key is real time.

02:00:39 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh, it's real time. Oh, it's real time, it's real time, it's real time um there's a ai influencer named on me that this lady um in japan made and uh, she's japanese, american but she lives in japan and this influencer is getting gigs from companies like hotels and everybody are paying her to come and be like come and do a video in the lobby of our hotel and so that the ai girl walks in and you know she's like she's checking in, she's got a little luggage and whatnot.

02:01:07 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's kind of crazy and she's not going to check that out, because that sounds. Who is this?

02:01:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's her?

02:01:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
how do you spell it? I'll get it for you. It's uh a n n m e on me, but uh, just look up uh ai influencer. There's three major ones, but the one from japan is probably the best one and these are done in real time I know the cam girl ones are done in real time, but I'm not going to talk about that. She's on the internet.

02:01:35 - Benito (Announcement)
I know nothing, I don't know how that works the first implementation of technology is always in the part of the industry.

02:01:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You all know this it is oh, yeah, I mean they pioneered security and credit cards, but well, and there I don't think the consumers care particularly. But I do worry about uh ai being used to as propaganda or to influence or to persuade my big worry initially is business email compromise. Compromise because there is a guy could send you a video.

02:02:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, this is it. There's a guy who claimed that he'd been convinced to transfer 25 million overseas last year.

02:02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

02:02:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm not quite sure the technology's there yet and he wasn't just covering up for a problem.

02:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you think that's a bogus story, because he said that he went to a board meeting, a Zoom board meeting, where his CEO, his boss, was there, the CFO, and they told him to do it.

02:02:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, so you think he was lying? Well, I think, honestly, the technology isn't quite there yet.

02:02:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not there yet in real time yeah.

02:02:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But you know it's coming and you know everyone and everyone's going to have to double and triple stack their security.

02:02:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, one more break and then we will continue on. We're almost done. You're watching this Week in Tech. It's nice to have a panel of people who can talk about everything from Formula One to anime porn. Doc Rock is here from YouTubecom slash Doc Rock Not that he knows anything about that director of strategic partnerships at ecamm lumiresca, our co-pilot guy. He's at microsoft. Uh, he's the guy behind python in excel. Amazing, so great to have you lou. And, of course, the king of snark himself from the registercom, ian thompson.

02:03:19
If you enjoy these shows, if you get value out of these shows, whether it's companionship or knowledge, I want to invite you to join club twit. This is a way for you to support what we do but also get some added value, because we do a lot of shows that are in the club. Only now I mentioned that AI user group that's coming up on Friday. We do Stacy's Book Club in the club. I should mention a week from Monday, wwdc and while we did this for years in public, last year Apple tried to kill our YouTube channel and our Twitch channel because we were restreaming their keynotes and I don't want to take that risk anymore. So we have moved keynote coverage, microsoft Build this last week and Google IO into the club club only a private stream. I'm sorry we have to do that, mike and I, though, because we're going to be in the club on June 9th. We're bringing lunch, we're going to watch the Apple keynote, we're going to stick around for you your conversation about what you saw, and then we will cover we've never done this before the State of the Union keynote following it, which I expect will have a lot more developer-focused, ai-focused stuff. If you're in the club, that is available to you. You don't even have to watch it live. We'll put that in the TwitPlus feed as well. That's what we do with all this stuff.

02:04:44
Chris Marquot does a regular photo segment every month. That's coming up june 13th. Micah does his crafting corner. I was there last week was last month. It was so much fun as a chill space for you to do your thing, whether it's, you know, drawing or lego or coding, whatever it is you want to do. We just relax and we chill. This is what the club lets us do.

02:04:58
If you're not a member of the club, I really would like to invite you to join it. It covers about 25 of our operating costs. That's a big deal doesn't go into my pocket, but it helps keep the shows on the air, gifts, helps make make new shows. Uh, we're doing everything we can to you know, tighten our belts, we shut down the studio, but we would like to keep doing this stuff because we think it's so important. If you think so, if you find value in it, join the club twittv slash club twit. Twittv, slash club twit, and we thank you so much, uh, for your support and all our club twit members. We really, uh, really appreciate it. Thank you, uh. Here's a video the top 15 most popular AI influencers you should know about. No, I don't know, this is how Rome falls. Yeah, this is the beginning of the end, isn't it?

02:05:50 - Benito (Announcement)
yeah, so this is what regular people are doing with AI, not us tech folks right, this one, ludomagaloo has 7 million followers.

02:06:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:06:03 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Michaela. The girl I met was Ima, which is funny because in Japanese, Ima means now.

02:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, interesting, I don't know. Well, you know, neil Gibson wrote about this with Adoru many years ago. You know, science fiction has said this is coming.

02:06:21 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
William Gibson's been really, really spot on on this, to be honest, hasn't he? Yeah, um, I mean, it was just like, okay, neuromancer was a fundamental book, but he, he's carried it on and he's been made right yeah, uh, all right enough, ai influencers.

02:06:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry I had, I couldn't stop. Uh, it's very compelling. Using here's good news. Using technology may sharpen older brains. Forget digital dementia. There was some concern. A new study finds tech savvy seniors may actually experience fewer signs of cognitive decline. So there this is from Baylor and the University of Texas at Austin.

02:07:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So there. So explain to me why I will constantly walk into the kitchen with the mug in my hand. Like what the heck did I come?

02:07:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in here? For what was I here for?

02:07:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm like the coffee is right here, see your.

02:07:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
AI assistant could say say, doc, you went in here for a cup of coffee. Have some, it would be such a great thing, I moved my, I moved my.

02:07:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I have a super automatic. I moved it out of the kitchen and I put it on the bar next to the liquor, which is, you know, just nice that's good.

02:07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a speedball sure yeah.

02:07:35 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So I keep walking in the kitchen with the coffee cup, but the coffee machine is actually on top of the credenza with the bar and the rest of the alcohol, but I keep walking in the kitchen with a coffee cup going. What the heck am I in here for? So I don't know if this is true.

02:07:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There was great hilarity in the registered newsroom when I got a phone call from my mother transatlantic phone call because she couldn't work out why a computer was rebooting and it was like okay, uh, looks like it's an ethernet problem. Take the the square cable out of the back. Okay, the screen's gone dark. That was the power cord. Put it back in and there was just like what's she gonna do next? So you know, yeah, we deal with these things as they come I, uh, I'll never forget.

02:08:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a a video that circulated years ago of john mayer the, the recording artist, standing outside the stage door of a concert talking to his dad saying no, dad, no, click the start the start button, dad, no.

02:08:37 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
It's very funny you need to buy this for the newsroom wired bought a peeing robot attack dog from timu.

02:08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks just like the dog from boston dynamics, right, except?

02:08:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
except, oh good lord, yeah, it's cheaper, it's it's cheaper.

02:08:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's claire's version. Yeah, arriving in a slightly battered box following a series of questionable decisions on timu, I'm immediately drawn to the words fire bullets, pet in places on the box. Uh, this is. This is. Uh, this is a great story from iset. Uh, this is a great story from iset. Uh, here is the uh robotic dog from timo. He says it costs less than a round of drinks.

02:09:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There's the fire pellet shooter.

02:09:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just doesn't work.

02:09:30 - Benito (Announcement)
I want this, I do oh wait, I didn't know it had a gun before it has a gun.

02:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course it has a gun. It's 50 dollars and actually if you don't want the have you ever played with a spot before like an actual spot. I played with Ibo way back in the day.

02:09:45 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Remember that the Sony dog, we have spot in the Ecamm office. You have spot the Boston Dynamics dog? Yeah, because Ecamm's in Amesbury, boston's down the street, dude.

02:09:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll put the video in the chat. It must cost. Probably you can't even buy it if you wanted to 70 grand.

02:10:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You can just walk in the store and buy one. Well, 60 grand. But then we bought some extra stuff.

02:10:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it?

02:10:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
guarding the Ecamm offices. What is it doing? No, okay, so let me explain this, because otherwise it sounds really creepy. Ken one. He has a school called Code and Circuit and he teaches kids, you know, about coding and, like you know, 3d printing and robotics and all myriad sorts of things. So he bought it for that and then they use it to take it around to the schools in the greater mass area so that way kids can get into tech. You know, because I mean, look what it did for them, right, they wrote their first app at 14 and now they got this incredible company with you, nine wonderful employees and me, so I'll make the 10. Um, and yeah, so they just want to get kids into coding and learning all that stuff now instead of.

02:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they bought a robotics guard dog. Yep, yep, because when you take it sounds like it might scare the children out.

02:10:55 - Doc Rock (Guest)
no, the kids love it, bro, and they learn how to code and they learn how to do things. This is me driving, bro, and they learn how to code and they learn how to do things. This is me driving it badly, but they learn how to do everything. And the kids I watch these kids in the classroom whenever I'm working in the other side, like I'm doing streams and stuff, and those kids are brilliant.

02:11:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those fat hands are me Okay, but this is not autonomous. You have to use a remote control. No, I'm driving it, I'm driving it. Does I'm driving today? Does it have, does it have, autonomous capabilities?

02:11:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I think they kind of turned off all of the mil spec stuff when you sell it to a consumer, bro, like that would be.

02:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be, you know you need an autonomous cameraman to keep pointing at the right spot.

02:11:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
But other than that, yeah, yeah no, that's pretty cool, so it walks. It walks by itself, though you just tell it where to go you can tell it to walk by itself, but it's set up so that the kids can learn how to program waypoints and like have it do various things and plus, we want to bring up a younger generation that's not scared of robotic dogs correct, correct. So they have no choice but to use this stuff. So you might as well teach them how to do it. But yeah, it's a lot of fun to play.

02:11:52 - Benito (Announcement)
It's very much like a video game. To play with it like I played with one as well it's like, oh, you have to. We used to, yeah, because we had a thing at Twitch with Boston Dynamics where we were doing, we did a thing together. So we're playing with a robot and it's like they gave us an obstacle course to run it through, and it's a lot of fun. It's just so much fun.

02:12:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm starting to feel a little left out. How come we don't have a robotic dog in our lobby?

02:12:14 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
We don't have a lobby. Face has got the three thousand dollar for a price of a macbook. You might have be able to get your own human yeah, so tell me about that.

02:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They just announced that, didn't? They? Yeah, that's a weird one it's a humanoid, though it's not a dog it's a human right.

02:12:26 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
I mean they're they're doing, they're going to try to do with robotics like they've done with with models is they're open sourcing everything. They just bought this company, uh, recently uh, was it pollen robotics, I think it's called um and they are gonna open source this thing and you know what I?

02:12:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really love hugging face. They've made it possible to run all of these ai even things like deep seek without censorship, you know, on their servers at a very affordable cost. Um, they were the first thing I used for uh ai image generation a couple of years ago, but now they're just all sorts.

02:13:01 - Lou Maresca (Guest)
They do everything, and now they want to do robots wow, yeah, they found a niche market and I think that hopefully they take it through. You know, just like tesla's doing with the ev market, like I'm hoping they can do this with a robotic market here is, it's the hugging face.

02:13:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's kind of cute well, yeah, but also it's not. I mean honestly humans are specifically humans are involved to do this stuff. Give them wheels, and robots can do it so much better so why do they?

02:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're saying, why make them humanoid, why?

02:13:31 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
exactly why?

02:13:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
because our environment is built for bipedal humanoids with opposable thumbs, so if you want a device to interact with the environment, it's going to have to be but atlas was doing that 10 years ago, and it takes so much power and so much processing power to actually make it work right.

02:13:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Um well, this one, this isn't even autonomous.

02:13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They've you've got. You can see the guy behind it. That's that's operating it. I want one that's autonomous. I don't care if it goes crazy and kills us.

02:14:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's worth it for the fun okay, build it like you'll bring it then yeah, make it bald with a cowboy hat, okay.

02:14:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I can dig that. Yeah, but see that's too much work that I have to do it. If I have to do it, then what's the point of the robot? Yeah, I want a robot that washes the dishes without any help.

02:14:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I mean at maximum efficiency robot stuff that we'll get will be halo suits, um, because they're already spec in these in the military, and it's basically designed to let a soldier walk farther, carry heavy stuff an exoskeleton the first thing it's an exo scale and then from there we'll tune that to get better, to get us something that actually but that requires battery technology.

02:14:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean actually getting an exoskeleton which can survive a full combat day is going to need really dense batteries. I don't know. I love the idea but I worry about the application.

02:14:56 - Benito (Announcement)
Like technically for a humanoid robot to get walking. You only really need 20 watts application like technically for a humanoid robot to get walking you only really need 20 watts.

02:15:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all we operate on, so this this imma, by the way, doc rock looks a lot like a sex doll. This is not a good example of a come on this is not yo.

02:15:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
She's making deals in japan like she's doing. Army did a ted talk. She doesn't look real yeah, they don't want it to look too real.

02:15:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah oh yeah, the japanese have a different philosophy when it comes to this stuff so they don't want it to look human, they want it to look like a sex doll no, no, they want to know what.

02:15:36 - Benito (Announcement)
They want to know what a robot is.

02:15:37 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, I don't think she meant it to look like a sex doll, and she don't think she meant it to look like a sex doll.

02:15:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She looks like any average girl walking around harajuku at this point okay, she's just a harajuku girl, all right, okay, okay, whatever you say. Uh, all right, we're gonna wrap it up because everybody's got to go to bed early, because we're gonna see an aurora tonight in Northern California, right.

02:16:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, we've got a solar storm coming in. It's going to be really great.

02:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is a G4 geomagnetic storm. The sun is at its peak of solar activity right now and, as about this time last year has happened, northern lights are going to kind of work their way down to the mid latitudes. Of course it's going to, while you're looking at, the pretty lights wreak havoc with the earth's magnetic field, but don't pay no attention to that. Um, you know that may be the. In the end, that may be really what happens. Is we just all the electronics break.

02:16:36 - Benito (Announcement)
It's true, a solar storm powerful enough can kill everything. It it's true, right yeah?

02:16:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and then we'll just be back to where we were.

02:16:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean that says that we can see it, nasa. Nasa does a storm center research. You'll also see it from various space sites but this is a great thing about the northern lights. You get three days warning because that's how long it has to travel to actually it's on its way, folks, and it'll be here uh, 10 pm.

02:17:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pacific in northern california. I I asked, perplexity, if I'd be able to see it in our town and yes, uh. It says uh, I can, and here is the um, here's the noah site. Let's see.

02:17:22 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
This is the problem with using an ai it's hard to find well, I mean, the big thing is that you used to have to wait around for a while and now, if you want to see the northern lights, you can fly north and well, you could do that, it's caught us at just the right moment, because the North American continent is facing the sun just as it hits, so we're going to get a really low this doesn't look like it's coming down our way, though I have to say.

02:17:49
I mean yeah, honestly from eyesight, no From camera.

02:17:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, OK, so even though we're below the line of likelihood of aurora, we'll be able to see something in the sky with a camera I mean, the last time this happened I went out and looked it with the eye mark.

02:18:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
One human eyeball fails.

02:18:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cameras, yes all right, okay, okay. Well, I just wanted to warn you. If your computer's not working in the morning, you'll know why. Thank you, ian Thompson, theregistercom. Always a pleasure to see you. Fantastic as ever.

02:18:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Come back soon.

02:18:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Same to you, actually, same to all three of you. Same to you, lou Maresca, working hard. He's Principal Engineering Manager at Excel Copilot, using all of those amazing tools. And if you want to come by on Friday for our AI user group I don't know you might be busy, 2 pm Pacific on Friday, but if that'd be 5 pm your time you probably haven't dinner. But if you're around, stop by the club. Yeah, I would love to see you. Yeah, I want to talk a little bit about vibe coding with some people who actually do it, so you'd be perfect. Uh, and, of course, doc rock, whose vibe is all his own. He's the purpleness of the, of the, of the vibe of the thing, of the pop filter, doc rock, youtubecom slash, doc rock, and, uh, thank you, thank you, and, and he's always fun, leo I appreciate you and I'm a little bummed that on keynote day I'll be legit taking off from h&l airport on my way to boise, because, yeah, we would love to have you during the keynote.

02:19:27
Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna well, if you get there. Uh, stop by for the state of the union. We'll be bringing lunch.

02:19:33 - Doc Rock (Guest)
We're gonna be there all day on the night, yeah you know, what's funny is we have starling now in hawaiian airlines and it's super fast because there's not that much traffic from here to there. However, the one thing they always say this is the pilot speaking. No video calls. Using our Starlink, you cannot do any form of Zoom FaceTime.

02:19:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they don't like that, I know.

02:19:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I want to do a live stream from the plane. I'm going to get permission from. Hawaiian one day.

02:20:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, in my day, when they first put phones in planes, you'd hear people going. Do you know where I'm? Calling you from right now yes, now we can do it with zoom I'm old enough to remember when you could smoke on planes.

02:20:12
Oh, man brings people out they had banned it in the united states. But the first time I went to singapore, uh, I was on, probably, uh, air japan or something like jal, and the smoking light came on and I went what? This is a 12-hour flight. You're gonna let people. It's okay, sir, you're in the non-smoking section, yes, of this sealed tube what are you talking?

02:20:36 - Doc Rock (Guest)
your clothes would smell so bad.

02:20:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my god, get it off the plane and your clothes smell I actually took one of those blue airplane blankets that you can see through. They're so poorly made and I put it over my head and just try to breathe through it.

02:20:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
For the rest of the flight it was not I flew from london to jakarta on air kuwait and you can't drink on the flight, but you could smoke on it and they would turn the aircraft towards Mecca so that people could actually pray in the same way, did they really? Yeah, and the worst thing of all, the only English language film was Speed 2.

02:21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is Chiedo in that one too.

02:21:19 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, thankfully not, it's the boat.

02:21:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it was.

02:21:23 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's the boat it's a boat, it's not a bus. It's a boat yeah, it's a boat crashing to the land, but it was the worst conference I've been on for a long, long time and the trip was really bad six hour stop in kuwait city never good well.

02:21:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you all for being here. I appreciate thanks especially to our club members who make all of this possible. We do twit every sunday afternoon 2 to 5 pm uh, that's pacific time. Uh, that would be more like 5 to 8 pm eastern time. That'd be more like 2100 utc.

02:21:54
You can watch us live on eight different platforms. If you're in the club, of course, our club to it member, uh, members can watch. You know, kind of behind the velvet rope in discord, but you can also watch on youtube. Everybody can twitch, tiktok, facebook, xcom, linkedin and kick eight different ways to watch live. But you don't have to, because it's a podcast. Get a copy of the audio or video at our website, twittv, or on youtube. There's a dedicated channel for this week in tech. That way you can send clips of your favorite parts of the show to friends who may not know about our show. Of course, the best way to do it subscribe and your favorite podcast player, or on youtube. You could do it on youtube, right, they play podcasts on youtube now. Uh, if you subscribe, youtube won't download it to you, but you'll at least get a notification. If you, what do you have to do? Doc, ring the bell and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell subscribe button ring the bell.

02:22:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That way you know whenever it comes up you can do all personalized. None are unsubscribed. Please don't do that unsubscribe. Well, make sure you do all.

02:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's all and thumbs up and also subscribe to our newsletter, because that's for you. Twittertv newsletter, because that'll tell you what's coming up in the week ahead. And if you do subscribe on one of those old-fashioned podcast clients, please leave us a five-star review. Tell the world how great this week in tech is. 21 we're in our 21st year. 20 years we've been doing this and I am so grateful to all of you for letting me do this for so long, because I really enjoy it, and I hope you'll come back next week so we can do it again. As I've said for the last 20 years, have a great night. And another twit is in the can Bye-bye. This is amazing.