This Week in Tech 1038 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. Daniel Rubino's here from Windows Central, Dan Patterson from Blackbirdai and Patrick Bejan from France. We will talk about Xbox gaming, Microsoft's secret strategy, why Meta changed their name and why they're offering hundreds of millions of dollars to AI researchers, and what the big, beautiful bill could mean for your wi-fi.

00:25
All that more coming up next on twit podcasts you love from people you trust this is twit this is twit this week at tech, episode 1038, recorded Sunday, june 29th 2025. Wu Wei meets Wu Tang. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news with all my favorite people. I realized I was thinking this today. I feel like every Sunday, I'm going to a party, and we're you know, a cocktail party with really smart people. Sunday, I'm going to a party, and we're you know, a cocktail party with really smart people, and we're going to hang out, we're going to talk about interesting stuff, and so you know, thank you, benito, for putting together a wonderful panel for our cocktail party today. Daniel rubino is here. Editor-in-chief of windows central.

01:21 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I almost said magazine no, we were never a magazine never a magazine some of some of the other future sites have been magazines, but you're smart not to be a magazine.

01:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's true, yeah, windows central, that's all it needs to be the central place for windows. Great to see you, daniel, also here from france. And it's not because he's a conehead, it's not patrickcom who's staying up late. France, he's actually it's already monday.

01:48 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
In france it is almost uh, I still have 44 minutes until it's monday and I'm melting already thank my, my computer is heating. It's just, you know, it's getting all the heat under the desk and and it's rising up. I'm, I'm, uh. Yeah, I don't know if I'm gonna make it to the end of the show, but I'm gonna do my best, leo, all right just I'll, I'll blow on you, try to cool it off.

02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, also wonderful. I have dan patterson here from blackbird ai. He's director of content there, long time journalist for CBS and elsewhere, now doing content for a very interesting site. That is not an AI site exactly, or is it?

02:33 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Well, we use AI, but we also use humans. We call them narrative attacks because it's like a cyber attack. But the use of deepfakes or misinformation or disinformation to attack, uh, like a cyber attack would.

02:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So um, I guess you'd have to use ai to kind of it takes it. It takes an ai to find an ai, I guess yeah, and we have some.

02:55 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You know you can, you can, anyone can use it. I I always say I don't want to log roll just for our products, but you can use it just to develop yourself.

03:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have already signed in.

03:03 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, it's free for uh individual user yeah, yeah, uh, it's compassblackbirdai, uh, and it will check, it's, it's. I don't want to call it a fact checker. It's not a fact checker. It provides context. So anything you see, that is, you have a question about any link, any claim, if you hear somebody say the sky is green, just check it and compass it's. It's a pretty useful tool. So smart, yeah, and humans you know, we the blackbird blog. You can read um what we do, it's all it's. It's humans, humans and it's made of humans.

03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I love it. Yeah, blackbird blog is called the raven, I love it. That's only one kind of blackbird. Uh, there's also the maltese falcon, I believe. Uh, all right, I don't know where we should start. I was going to start with politics, but then I thought you know blood pressure, so let's start with the xbox. We actually, before the show I wasn't planning this, but we started having a very interesting conversation about xbox game pass and what microsoft has done with their game business. And Patrick, you do, you still work at the gaming business?

04:09 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
no, I uh left Blizzard Entertainment, which is now a Microsoft company. I left them over 10 years ago to launch into this uh wonderful career of being a podcaster.

04:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, really you're full time very nice.

04:23 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, I've been for 11 years now and it's working out great. Curt NEWTON it's amazing. Francesc CAMPOY but yeah, I follow the gaming industry very, very closely and I do shows about the gaming industry and, of course, it's a passion of mine, and the really interesting thing that's happening with Microsoft and the Xbox right now is that they completely fell flat on their faces with the Xbox One and the Xbox Series X. Unfortunately, and even though they bought about 17 gajillion studios for the longest time, they didn't manage to put out the games that would motivate gamers to buy their consoles, so of course, it didn't sell. And now they shifted to this strategy of. Of course, they bought Blizzard and Activision and Bethesda and like a gajillion studios, as I was saying, and so they have a huge amount of games which are everywhere, amount of games which are everywhere, and now they're.

05:26
They fell into this strategy of having Xbox everywhere, which is leading to the potentially really interesting thing, which is Windows 11, but get rid of all the crap that you don't need for gaming. Make it into a TV able interface, which is essentially a console interface, and stick it into a box. Call it an Xbox. Add some backwards compatibility stuff so that all your old games are compatible and sell that as the next Xbox console. But the really interesting thing, if they end up doing that, is that they could license this OS and, just like with the PC market, tell manufacturers just go nuts, make consoles as well, which gives them the.

06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They kind of are implying that by saying everything's an Xbox. That's one of their taglines.

06:13 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, well, what they're talking about with that is that they want to say you can stream from anywhere you can play on. Pc and it's kind of diluting the brand, I feel a little bit they're overdoing it a little bit.

06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, if everything is something, then nothing is anything, yeah, kind of or something, I don't know.

06:29 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But that licensing opportunity with Windows as an OS adapted to a console experience, means that they could potentially get a wide variety of different systems, of different hardware. That would benefit from the large ecosystem of different manufacturers and kind of find a back door back into the living room because the Xbox currently the Series X and S are not selling well enough to be an interesting proposition for developers. But if they manage to make this massive, you know this massive development, this part of the industry, and they end up being in the living room again, of course they wouldn't get every. You know the console business is based on 30 commission on everything you sell once you have the install base with, you know it's a lot like the iphone.

07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh business model. Exactly, it was the precursor to that, probably.

07:35 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But if they have windows then people could install steam and could install everything. But it's better to get you know. But it's better to get you know. 30. I mean, if they get 20% of the sales on that ecosystem which is in the living room and they get 30% of that, then it's better than nothing. If the console disappears as a console and they're going to be selling a lot of their own games on those devices where they don't need to pay 30% if they have consoles in the living room. If they don't, they have to pay 30% to Sony and Nintendo. But if somehow they manage to get their consoles, their hardware, into the living room, then they can also be in the living room and have an outlet there. Preston Pysh.

08:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jr Daniel, how important is PC gaming to Microsoft's Windows business? Is that a big part of it? Daniel Schmachtenberger, yeah it. Pc gaming to Microsoft's Windows business Is that a big part of it?

08:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, it's huge. It's their strongest angle here. Actually, is PC gaming Interesting? Yeah, and what they're really trying to do is knock down.

08:35
So right now the issue is you have consoles right, and what I mean by that is the development for a game on console is technically not the same as a development for a game on PC, so you need to convince studios to target both right. And then, of course, there's more than that. They also got to target PlayStation and maybe Nintendo, right. So how do you get developers on board to doing this, especially since they've been pushing this thing called Play Anywhere for a few years, which is, if you buy a game for Xbox, you get the PC version for free, and it's a great incentive. But it's hard to convince developers to do that right if there's no install base. But what they're trying to do at least from our reporting from Jez Corden, and that's other news that's come out is that they're trying to blur the lines between PC gaming and console gaming, and by that I mean by the development tools used for this, which could also mean a translation layer, akin to what SteamOS does with Proton and converting PC games. And so, in doing this.

09:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
they wouldn't even need that. If the next Xbox runs on Windows 11, then just develop it for Windows and you're good, you have a console version as well.

09:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, the only issue there comes up is like licensing and like how that gets handled. But yeah, I mean that's. The point is that they're trying to reduce the barriers for developers targeting these systems. And you know the other one is like handheld gaming is becoming really big now because the hardware technology, from processors and battery and everything is getting to the point where this is actually feasible, where we can actually have handheld gaming systems that deliver the performance and graphics that we want and can play these first party games. And so you have all that.

10:17
You have streaming, of course, worked well to just regular TVs or to your phone or even to handheld games. Like. Handheld gaming systems can both run the system like the game directs, which is awesome, or you can stream and get even better quality graphics, but at like, you know, a fifth of the battery life because you're not doing the processing on the device itself. So they you know, it's true, you know, patrick's right, they were pushed into the situation from a point of weakness, but from it they've been able to sort of one read the room, right. You know? I know Leo pointed out like the idea of like streaming and a subscription service is not new. It's where everything has been going, but they were the first to really sort of push it for gaming gaming. And now Nvidia is there. Of course, they have GeForce Now, which is a really impressive system too.

11:07
So I think they have a strong chance of making very interesting proposition in coming years, especially since it's going to be mostly platform and hardware neutral. And that's gonna be really cool because it means, yeah, you can have it on a console in your living room, you can also have it on a handheld that's in your bag, you can have it on your phone, you can have it on your laptop. I can tell you they're really going after ARM64, specifically Qualcomm. They're making their games. They're really targeting, because that's kind of a weakness too right now. It's like, well, can you game with a Qualcomm chip? And you can. They're very powerful. They're working on that too. So they're going to really knock down those barriers and I think it's going to really work out for them in the end. It's a stronger position, I would say, than Sony has, which is console, and now they're like, okay, we're going to do a handheld too. But they also have a mixed history on this. Right, it's not like Sony is a slam dunk when it comes to hardware and all this technology either.

12:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Play off your strengths right. That's what you should do either. So pay off your strengths right, that's, uh, that's what you should do. That's yeah, that's exactly. The irony of this is I've always been team xbox, which, of course, is contrary to the market. But uh, the irony of this is one of the first xboxes I bought had a pass-through for your tv set. It was designed to be a living room device.

12:17 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It was designed yeah, they actually wanted you to use it as your set-top box well, the reason bill gates okayed uh the the xbox is that they were seeing, uh, sony with the playstation three, was it two or three? They were thinking, well, this is the computer in the living room, right, and bill gates, of course, didn't know anything about gaming, but when he saw that it, he thought it could be a threat, uh, and be the computer in the living room, and he thought we have to be in that market. Of course, that never turned out to become an actual family computer in the living room and just 25 years later, patrick just you know, Daniel, to your point about particularly streaming in GeForce Now.

12:59 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Although Microsoft does have their own Game Pass cloud gaming streaming platform, have their own Game Pass cloud gaming streaming platform, they also, in the previous regulatory environment, had to or said that they would be open and you can stream all of your Game Pass apps through GeForce Now. And this ties in again, Daniel, with that handheld gaming push. Those Snapdragon processors have become really capable in the last couple of years and I'm sure that Microsoft is looking at that environment along with handhelds and cloud, along with AI that can enable this, Although we talk a lot about consumer mobile. But it's an opportunity for Microsoft to kind of get back something they lost with the mobile revolution.

13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It also sounds like the end of the discrete GPU. Do you still need an NVIDIA card or a Radeon card? Yeah, they haven't had Do they work with ARM Daniel or no.

14:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Technically no, but there's no also technical reason why they can't. It's just that nvidia is kind of the gatekeeper right now. Right, yeah, technology well and they've got bigger fish to fry now with ai. So we also know. Nvidia, for fact, is going to release an arm 64 processor.

14:20 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
So oh, is that is that? Are you really huh that? Huh, that's really interesting.

14:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're coming into the market.

14:27 - Benito (Announcement)
I got a question Isn't this like a golden opportunity for Mac to just jump in here and just kill everybody, because everybody's got a Mac?

14:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't have developers.

14:35 - Benito (Announcement)
No one has a Mac, but all they have to do is, like they have to figure out a way to get games to work on.

14:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mac, because everybody's got a Mac and they don't support Unreal. Engine which is what all the developers are using no, but they do.

14:44 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Now they have a really powerful I forget the name, but they have a really powerful Metal. No, no, no, not just metal, there's also Unity. Well, unity is the engine that goes-. No, but they announced it last year and it went almost unnoticed, oh God.

15:03 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm sorry, because on a hardware level, what does it do?

15:06 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
what's like powerful like proton right. Essentially, it enables windows games to uh very easily they did.

15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They snuck that in. There's an emulator that they can do and it makes your windows games run on mac I think, I don't think the support for that that got support.

15:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, and they have.

15:23 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The thing is they. It's so weird. The mac is so weird they now have. It wasn't the case, uh, you know, 10 years ago? But they, they now have everything that they need to be a serious contender in the games market except for developers, not the case.

15:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Or the developers, internal will and maybe even the market, yeah well they've got the will.

15:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The real problem is apple makes a lot of money on casual gaming.

15:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, right, yeah yeah, so they could triple a gaming for them, but they want it.

15:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They definitely want it years ago.

15:53 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I used to uh back in the intel mac days oh hi, sorry, my kiddo just broke in here.

15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, let me see. Well, you shouldn't put her on camera, but how old is she now? How old is she? Yeah, three, oh.

16:07 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, hi Did you have a fun adventure with your mama.

16:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're having a BBC moment right now. Yes, she's wheeled her way into the room.

16:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So just for context, for people listening who might not be aware how big each of those markets are the mobile market is 50%, revenue-wise, of the entire gaming market, wow. And the PC market is 25 and the console market is 25. Okay, so when we talk about Nintendo and Sony and Microsoft with the Xbox, all of that together is 25% of the market. Pc is as big as all of that and, again, mobile is as big as both of those together.

16:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it just pride that makes companies want to participate in the AAA market?

17:01 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Oh, in the console market. It's a very captive market. It's a lot of money. You get 30. So this is how the console market game works. You make exclusive games that are really good that you can only get on one platform.

17:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what Sony has done so well. This is what Sony does. This is what Nintendo does.

17:22 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And this is what Microsoft failed to do with the what and this is what microsoft failed to do with the xbox. Unfortunately, they didn't have system sellers that's how you call them, um and once that's done, you sell as many consoles as you can and you have an install base and and once the install base is there, you take 30 of every single thing, that thing that other developers sell on your console and that has been turbocharged with digital distribution and microtransactions and seasons and all of those. Playstation made more money in four years of PlayStation 5 than all of the previous generations combined combined. So it's a lot of money still and there's no reason, like no one would willingly abandon a market like that if they, if they had a strong contender contender there.

18:20 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I also say with the PC market. It's. It's a completely different piece. You know, addressing what Benito was asking about with Max. I think we all have to. With the PC market. It's a completely different piece. You know, addressing what Benito was asking about with Macs. I think people have to understand. With PC gaming, it's not just the fact you're running it on Windows. Pc gaming is its own genre and by that I mean like, okay, you could have a Mac and you could play a video game on it. That's not a gaming PC. A gaming PC is something where you can have rgb lighting, any believe me, I understand this more than most people, daniel, but like what I'm saying.

18:51 - Benito (Announcement)
What I'm saying is that like that's. This is a whole new marketplace for for the, for games, for game developers, like everybody who has a mac that doesn't have a pc is a whole new market because gamers already have pcs. Anyone who's seriously?

19:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
interested in gaming has a PC already.

19:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
JOHN MUELLER. It's like video editors. As much as video editing can get good on PC, the Macs are still going to be king for video editing and content creators. Wherever I see video YouTubers, they always have Macs, and sure some people will use Windows to get in that. But that's just a Mac world. But it's just like that for gaming. If you're already into PC gaming, you've invested in all that hardware, all the accessories. There's like so many different.

19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a culture more than just a hardware platform.

19:39 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, 100%, and it's hard to change culture.

19:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's hard to do, yeah, and it's hard to change culture. That's hard to do, yeah, as Apple knows well, because it's Apple's culture that's kept them on top from their point of view.

19:51 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, not to make the whole show about gaming, which I Well, you know, the other choice is the Supreme Court.

19:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think you should stick with gaming at this point. And health insurance, and health insurance and the big beautiful bill which is currently being debated and will be debated tonight to the wee hours of the morning, and nobody wants us to talk about that, though we have to because it does have a significant impact on a number of tech issues. But let's stick with gaming for now.

20:18 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
For just another cocktail party. That's fantastic.

20:21 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
To talk about PC gaming. It has so much freedom and I love all forms of gaming. You know I don't have but PC gaming, especially in the past, I would say five years. Everything is on PC Using a controller. In the past 10 years has become so easy on PC that a lot of developers put their games that would in previous times been console only they also put them on PCs because it can work with a controller. It's very easy. You don't really have to support desktop and keyboard and mouse.

20:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Historically the advantage consoles have was it was simple, right, you just play the game. But the advantage I think for the perception is that the pc game quality is higher. Frame rates are better. No, it's also very expensive diversity of choice.

21:12 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think well still, you have everything on pcs and you. The one thing I wanted to get to I'm sorry is that japanese developers have, uh, started being interested in pcs as well in the last five years, so you really can get anything on pcs. What consoles have. If I'm being honest, it's the price and it's the fact that it's easy to use from your couch yeah, it's a, you know, couch experience whereas pc you have to be on your hand, and there's nintendo, which is its own thing yeah, and a perfectly good thing.

21:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean there, the switch has, too, has been a huge success, even though it was really only an incremental improvement on the Switch that probably most of the people who bought the Switch 2 already had.

21:52 - Benito (Announcement)
Well, every Nintendo handheld is like the greatest handheld. You know, every Nintendo handheld is the most selling.

21:57 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But that's the irony, it's not. It's actually like I find the Switch to be one of the worst handhelds ever developed, but because their IP is so strong it outweighs it.

22:07 - Benito (Announcement)
You gotta have mario, always been, always been the case.

22:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's always been since day one exclusives are very important in this business, as you, as you said earlier.

22:16 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Patrick said it right nobody would intentionally abandon this market, micro or, uh, nintendo or sony. But I can also understand if I, if I'm thinking strategically, I see those as islands. And as great as nintendo's ip is, sony at least has started to open up and sell their games on pc. Um, and I I think that that just is an acquiescence of them saying, yeah, we're going to still sell hardware, but we gotta, we have to sell to a bigger market and microsoft, to their credit, with studios.

22:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You know, part of the thing was when they made all those acquisitions was we promise we're not going to abandon sony because that was they could. They could just be like hey, sony, no more, no more playstation games for call of duty. But they're not. They're in fact doing the opposite, like right now, uh, within the next two months, uh, gears of war reloaded, which is the uh first version of the game, but it's been remastered is coming out and for the first time, it's going to the playstation right, like, so, microsoft is all about trying to get their stuff everywhere. Hey, nintendo, you want our games, you can have them, you know, um, it's. That's a very different type of approach that you know we haven't seen in the gaming industry.

23:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They had to do that to get permission to buy activision blizzard right.

23:28 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, it was very specifically for call of duty, which is the highest selling game in the history of video games. And uh, sony argued if we don't have call of duty which honestly was a bit, uh, a little bit of an exaggeration they said if we don't have a Call of Duty, that's it, we're toast.

23:46 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
We can't compete it's over.

23:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And the only reason I mean, of course, the reason they said that is that they take 30% again of every sale of every copy of Call of Duty and of every piece of microtransaction that comes after that, which is a lot. But also they wanted to derail the purchase of Activision by Microsoft, and Microsoft offered a contract saying we will put if that's your problem, we will put Call of Duty on PlayStation for the next 10 years, no strings attached, no problem. And Sony refused to sign it initially when they were starting the, the, the trial, the, the lawsuit, and in the end they signed it because my guess, so this my just speculation.

24:32 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I I have no idea, I just speculation. My guess, if I'm sitting in in microsoft and sony's uh, decision maker seats right, microsoft has kind of pulled off this, this really interesting thing where they went from competing and failing of selling a box that you put under your tv to selling services and selling an ecosystem and environment, and sony could see this coming. It's not just about call of duty, it's about them saying no, we must stop them from becoming a platform because otherwise we remain the company that sells boxes and we're competing with nintendo and oh, that's just a guess, but like they, they, they are competing with nintendo anyway.

25:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Um, the the only difference now is until maybe xbox pulls it off with this new strategy, with windows 11 gaming. Um, they have one less competitor and the most direct competitor, and we are already seeing that Sony is pushing what's acceptable. They've increased the price of their console, of their hardware, many times. They're pricing their accessories at a level which makes everyone go. You're selling it for how much now?

25:45 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
what a smart strategy of microsoft. Hey, I made my two competitors compete against each other and they're selling junk like we're not selling junk. We're selling services. It costs way less than like a lot more profit and services than there is. Yeah, like it's so smart, they just made their two rivals compete against each other.

26:03 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
They were already competing again, Again the only thing that's changed is that there's one less competitor in that market Microsoft's not competing anymore.

26:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're saying Anymore they might come back.

26:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Totally. But Microsoft is now a different. They went from a console manufacturer to a game developer and publisher. It's a different thing, you know. It's like, in a way, Samsung sells RAM chips to Apple and their competitors in another, but there's money to be made there, and so Microsoft is going to put all their games. They have so many games, so many games now that of course they're going to sell them everywhere at some point. It becomes more interesting to make money by selling the games in as many places as you can.

26:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right let's take a little break now before patrick's gets overheated computer gets overheated. Uh, there's actually still a lot of microsoft news. There's some apple news one of the hottest controversies of the week is all about apple, uh. And then of course, there's a little bit of politics. I'll put it off as long as I can, but we got to talk about that big, beautiful bill and what it's going to do to a lot of the things, uh, that we rely on in tech. But first a word from our sponsors. Great to have patrick beja, daniel rubino and, uh, dan patterson here. It's great to see all three of you. What a great conversation we can. We can keep talking about gaming. I'm enjoying it. I am this episode of this week in tech brought to you today by netsuite.

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28:46
Download the free ebook Navigating Global Trade Three Insights for Leaders at netsuitecom slash twit. That's netsuitecom slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. We were talking about this Good news if you've got any bing rewards bucks uh, for a mere 500 bing rewards bucks, you can extend the deadline on windows 10 from october 25th for another year. Daniel, I was so pleased I thought, wow, I probably don't have any. I have 58 000 bing bucks. I don't know where I have 58,000 Bing bucks. I don't know where these came from. I guess because I subscribed to Game Pass. I don't know.

29:33 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
No surprise, I'm a huge user of Bing and Copilot and everything. Yeah, I'm not. So, I don't know what happened.

29:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have more than Paul Thorat does.

29:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, but what it?

29:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really tells me is that microsoft is just looking for a way to uh keep people on windows 10, or at least not freak people out about october 25th yeah, you know, I think this was something that they had to do anyway.

29:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Uh, because people 500 points is big deal. I mean, it's not no, no, and it's not right. And it's uh, or yeah you, or you can pay 30. I think it was so. But yeah, obviously most people aren't going to go out and buy a new pc just because their operating system is not going to have support anymore. It doesn't mean it's not going to stop working.

30:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You use somebody if I mean, what is the uptake on windows 11? I think there's more windows 10 users out there right now than there are Windows 11 users.

30:28 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's about shifting over right now to the majority of Windows 11. Is it Okay? Yeah, partly, because enterprise obviously is going to be at the forefront of doing those upgrades, because they do have to, right, so they will be buying new laptops and stuff because of security concerns. Consumers are a different situation where, you know, and I would also say, there's that small percentage of people probably people listening to this podcast who are aware that you can technically force any computer to run Windows 11 if you know what to do, right. So it's like. So those people are just going to get around it anyway.

31:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is just for your normal folks who this is for normies who might have a thing. I think I'm sorry, I think it's a thousand bing bucks. Yeah, it's a thousand points.

31:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, okay, not 500, but still a thousand. But it's easy to get a thousand yeah, I have over 200 I went by I had over 220,000 and wow, I think yeah, but what's cool about for those who don't?

31:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
know dinner at the olive garden, by the way, don't? Oh, it's more than that, yeah.

31:25 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean. So you can take those points and you can redeem them for gift cards at Amazon and various places. I use some, I donate to an animal shelter, but you can buy stuff with them.

31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's a good thing. I didn't know you could give it to charity. That's a good thing. Yeah, too yeah, go to bingcom microsoft rewards yeah, but it's uh.

31:48 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, you can use a point for a lot of things and you can use it for buying microsoft. You can buy video games up in the upper right you get to see your microsoft rewards.

31:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at this 58 441. But I can give that to charity. That's good to know. I'll save a thousand for my windows 10. I'm not running windows 10 anywhere, but if I were, that's a. That's a good thing.

32:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's to me it was an acknowledgement from microsoft that yeah, even though we got to stick with our deadline, it's problematic yeah, but you know, it's like one of those things, uh, and some people think, oh, they should just endlessly support windows 10, but it costs a lot of money right to maintain support for an operating system that is.

32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's an interesting question. In fact, I was just reading a piece, uh, that said you know, this is somewhat of a dark pattern there's. How much does it cost? They're going to be doing the bug fixes for enterprise anyway. Same thing with apple apple pretty much makes you upgrade. Yeah, uh, you know, after tahoe, this is the last version of mac os that's going to support the intel max. But those are perfect. The machines are not worn out, they're perfectly good. Uh, it really it feels like a dark pattern, is it not?

33:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
it is. You know they would argue that the reason for this is because Windows 11 supports more advanced hardware security features, which is required, they'd say, for a safer internet. So and there's truth to that that the today's newer hardware, with TPM 2.0 and everything like that, is more secure than a laptop from 10 years ago. But of course, there's the economics of the situation, which is, if you only use a computer on occasion or you're not that concerned about security, you know this doesn't come off as like something you have to do, or you necessarily want to go out and buy a new laptop, even though I would make an argument that for laptops like today today's laptops, I would say for the first time and ever are where we kind of envision they should be. You have 4k screens, now you have 5g battery life, yeah, yeah you have extreme performance.

34:00
You have the video game support right, so there's like very good reasons why today's laptops are a different story than they were from like five, ten years ago. It's not even close, but not everybody has the money to go out to be able to afford these things. So I.

34:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I could find this article I had read, because it made me think. You know, maybe the thing to do. Linux doesn't do this right. Linux, as long as there are a few, a handful of enthusiasts using a piece of hardware, there will be a version of linux for, and most open source programs for it, because they support it. And I'm just thinking maybe, instead of buying another mac or a pc, I should get a fairly robust linux box and have thin terminals everywhere in. In other words, do cloud computing in my house. You're being sarcastic, aren't you Dan?

34:49 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
No, no, no, I think that sounds fun.

34:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, there's so much I feel like I'm getting manipulated into obsoleting this hardware when it's perfectly fine. Maybe it's just me. I know I'm undermining the entire economic basis of the PC industry.

35:05 - Benito (Announcement)
I mean, that's the whole smartphone market too, what you're talking about, Leo.

35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's absolutely the same thing for smartphones.

35:10 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
The Linux market will always have that advantage and to sell it to people. It's always going to be that if you're into computers like you're listening to this podcast right, you read news on this stuff. Computers like you're listening to this podcast right, you read news on this stuff. Linux is always going to be an interesting option for you to explore, even try out. For your average consumer, though, it's just not happening. Yeah, you know, it's just not.

35:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do we feel bad about all the crap going into the landfill?

35:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
that's not really obsolete so at least there are programs in your town and you know you're not supposed to just take your laptops and throw them in the garbage.

35:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hopefully no one's doing supposed to give them to poor people who can't do any better right or at least there's recycling programs that will take care of it.

35:57 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
There's a fantastic science fiction book called waste tide by shen kai fan.

36:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh called uh about um kind of a colony that develops around e-waste in china yeah, it's like a cargo cult yeah yeah, no, I'm just kidding, I'm just thinking maybe, if I got you know, I mean being perfectly realistic a pc you buy today whether a laptop, maybe, not so much because they get banged around more, but a pc you buy today should probably be still just as useful 10 years from now. Yes, except for the fact that the operating system gets obsoleted and the browsers don't work and then you have to upgrade it because you're soft, I mean this is.

36:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
We've written an article about this. It's a Mediterranean. It's like how Chrome OS is a viable alternative for people here. If you have an old laptop you can't get to Windows 11 and you technically don't want to force Windows 11 on it, even though it's not that hard, you could just put Chrome OS on it, which I would say is. I would say, chrome OS is actually the mainstream alternative to doing Linux on old hardware. For most people that would be totally fine.

37:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure, and it's Linux. It's just an even simpler linux. That's right. Yeah, all right. I shouldn't bring this up in a p on a technology show, because I'm I'm dependent upon you buying a new laptop every few years, so please do us all a favor no, but I think you're fine.

37:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think we're uh uh underestimating the the need of normal people to have something that's uh familiar and or you know, that's the whole reason why people love Apple computers and phones, because they're a little bit more simple to use than the other things, and even Chrome OS, if you go tell my mom, hey here, you know your computer wasn't cutting it for know windows, whatever.

37:45
Here's chrome os. I don't think she's gonna be happy with it. She's not gonna. You know, it takes her 15 minutes to understand where something is on the on the desktop. So I I think this is a conversation that we can have on this show.

38:01 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm not sure it applies to real people, but I like what you said there, patrick, though um familiar and simple, and I think that those things are relative and they're different for different people. It's mac and and apple operating systems are familiar and simple for me. My dad found that chrome os was actually very familiar and simple yeah, but stand back.

38:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple's about to change the entire look and feel of of its operating systems, including mac os. It will not be simple and familiar. It'll be a brand new thing, is it well?

38:35 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
maybe not. It's confusing because you see the thing behind it. Yeah, and you're like oh they're actually.

38:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there is some trouble in apple. There's a lot of upset in Apple land over the fact that Apple's put a push notification for its F1 movie in your Apple wallet oh yeah.

38:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
In your everything. It was everywhere.

38:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, they're really marketing F1. They have a lot at stake for some reason. I mean, they spent a quarter of a billion dollars to make the movie. Maybe that's all it was, but at least I think I could reviews it's.

39:09
It's. I think it's a fine summer movie. It's by the same guy at a top gun, maverick, so it's going to be a fun action movie. It's got real movie stars in it and big, powerful engines. I'm an f1 fan so of course I'll. I'll go see it. But putting an ad in your Apple wallet something Apple forbids every other app from doing John Gruber, who has been, until recently, an Apple advocate, is very upset. He says the fact that no company can inject an ad into your physical wallet. It just can't happen. So Apple's message to users is trust Apple wallet and move more of your stuff that goes in your wallet into your digital wallet. But now they're putting ads in there. Now Microsoft has faced the same heat for similar kinds of ads. Their they're house ads in Windows.

40:06 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Is this part of the?

40:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
inshittification of modern operating systems. Do we just have to put up with this?

40:12 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean we talked about earlier with services. Right, Services are the new thing and Apple is facing, I would argue, some pretty big headwinds. Right, Regulatory issues in Europe, pressures on the iPhone. They got their new operating system, which is not we already said, their new UX is not getting a lot of love. There's lack of innovation. They invested a lot in Vision Pro, which appears to be maybe going nowhere, and they missed out on the AI stuff which they're trying to catch up on now. But the fact is they're getting hooked on services and software and, you know, renewable forms of revenue. The problem when you buy an iphone it's just like when you buy a console for gaming is like you bought it, you're done so. Now you get people to buy the games.

40:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So but I think the thing that's offensive to me and many is it's not like Microsoft and Apple are in financial difficulties. No, no, they're hideously profitable both of them.

41:12 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But capitalism says that company needs to be.

41:18 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Can't stop making more money with a brand as pristine as Apple and a product that has built up such user trust and equity, has decided to. I'll just stick an ad in there, because we want people to see our movie.

41:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it makes people. Gruber says look, seeing this ad is completely destructive. He writes to all the hard work other teams of Apple have done to make Apple wallet actually private and to get, more importantly, users believe that it's private. Now users are going is Apple tracking me? I'm seeing. By the way, I haven't seen the ad, so it's not everybody getting this ad I saw it was to be?

41:57 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
why did you get it for people who? Oh no, I didn't get the one on wallet? It was about getting a coupon, a coupon for buying.

42:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was a Fandango. You probably didn't get it, because do you have Fandango? No, we don't, we don't.

42:13 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So but it was like it kind of, if you squint really hard, it kind of makes sense in wallet because you get a cube, you know you get a good price on your tickets. Like you have to squint really, really hard. But it was also on Apple podcasts, on Apple music, on fitness plus, on Apple TV on and on wallet.

42:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's places it should be, in places it shouldn't be.

42:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I don't know, I don't know, I think it's this not dishonest, but it's like inappropriate. It's like it's your, but it's like inappropriate, it's like it's your thing and it's your platform. And there was probably a meeting with Tim Cook and Tim Cook was like it would be a real shame. Well, there you go, if, if, if one wasn't the best performing movie, I don't know, I don't know how to make a Tim Cook accent.

43:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How to do a Tim Cook accent. You said something. You did a very good job, well done.

43:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I didn't know it was across different apps in the Apple ecosystem. Is that what you said?

43:11 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It was across different right, Different kinds of ads, but there was notifications and stuff.

43:15 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Again just sitting with your like let's put our corporate exec thinking hat on and just put yourself like. All of those departments are led by somebody. There's a leader there, an executive who's worked up to that job and they're respected in that job. So who, above them, said that this movie goes into all of these apps? Do you see what I'm saying?

43:32
there's like there's a tree, an executive decision making tree and they were all the tim tim cook me right, exactly, so I I'm all I'm saying is like I'm also trying to think as a journalist, like who made these decisions and who should have come from the top right right right, I would argue there's no way especially the wallet thing.

43:50 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
There's no way anyone pushes a notification like a notification like this from wallet without tim cook's explicit approval.

43:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very interesting, do you guys agree they're out the door. It shakes apple's position that we are the privacy company. It shifts it.

44:06 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It's it's very inappropriate.

44:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think this is something that they uh will not, that no one will forget they work and every time they say that impression whether they earned it or not, I don't know, but they worked really hard, spent a lot of marketing dollars, I'll give credit to.

44:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
You know people pushing back on this for that reason, because, lord knows, we've heard it for years with Microsoft and, and Android does this too. Of course, all the stores do it to a certain extent, so I'll give credit. You know where credit's due. At least people are like being consistent in this, saying that you know we've been against this stuff for years and now we're doing it too. But I've seeing this encroaching on apple for years. If you go to their store, you see the same thing. You know, I always find this offensive too. On android, you go search for an app and then the first one comes up. You're like, oh, there it is. You're about to install. Oh wait, that was an ad, sorry, it's. The app you want is actually below it, right, you know. So it's like this is all over the place, it's uh, but everything's a service these days. You're just renting equipment, you're just.

45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, everything is a temporary thing again, I'm gonna buy a linux server I'm gonna run thin clients everywhere and I'm gonna see if I can go 10 years. I'll be dead by then anyway, but I'll see how I. I see who lasts longer, that linux box or me. Well, ai leo will still be here there will always be a we'll always have ai leo to kick around I.

45:28 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think in the case of apple, uh, from now until the end of eternity. Anytime they say we protect your privacy, uh, someone will bring up that you're right ad. This was a very wrong, like a short-term strategy that will hurt them more in the long term.

45:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I think I don't know that consumers care that much though.

45:54 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I mean, I think, that we probably care.

45:56 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
the security, the cyber people, yeah, I think the average consumer doesn't care. I think probably, but down the line.

46:03 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think the reason it's important is that when people say, oh, apple is secure, they turn to the person in the know who's aware of Apple and Google and Microsoft and like Apple is secure, right. And if that person is angry because there was an ad in their wallet about a movie they don't care about, then of course it's not from one day to the next.

46:27 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Everything has exploded and fallen apart, but it's a dink in the in the argument in the armor it's a dink oh, for sure yeah, and it's a further degradation yeah, they just got to stay ahead of the competition in terms of that perception yeah, they're not worse than anybody else yeah there's no question, they're better than everyone, than everybody else, in that regard, and that's why and that's no they're, they're much better.

46:52 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We have to be honest. They are much better than uh, this is the first.

46:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the first, so in that respect they are better, because everybody else has been doing this forever.

47:00 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Leo was the first. Was it ads in your, just like daniel said, in all the stores and now in in your, your app store. I I mean, for a long time in the app store there have been ads and um right, not forever in the recent era they came in steve tried it.

47:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're not brand new, relatively new.

47:17 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, steve tried with I he's tried with I ads, then he failed.

47:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So apple, yeah that you know, that's what somebody's pointing that out in chat, that it's only because apple failed at ads. Yes, that they became the privacy leader.

47:29 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, and they wanted to do the ads with a lot of of privacy, but they are. They are private. I think there's a misunderstanding of what apple says uh, we are private. What they say. When they say we are private, I think the main thing they're talking about is third party right we know everything about you.

47:47
Yeah, they try to define those everything no, but even even their, their uh um arguments and rules that are in place. Uh, the 80 what's it called att after currency thing? Yeah, it's not about preventing individual entities from collecting your data, just third parties, because of course it's. It's to cross reference and to build profiles, and to that's what it's about and in that sense, I think they're very uh consistent.

48:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you can call it security theater, because we now know that almost basically, your phone, your smartphone, is a privacy nightmare and almost every app that's installed has telemetry. You saw the story that both meta and a russian uh search uh engine, yandex, were embedding completely deceptively the capability to track you beyond what you you know att would allow. Uh, every app has libraries in it. Now that's tracking your location. You are, regardless of what apple says. Your iphone is a privacy nightmare and apple has done nothing really to prevent that surprise for them I never leave my house is right here, baby is right here

49:06 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
baby far more boring than you have any.

49:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I you know I long ago gave up on privacy. Uh, you know I it's. It's certainly an honorable thing to try to a reasonable thing, to try to protect your privacy. Uh, it's very, very difficult and there are all sorts of covert ways that people are collecting information about you. And now in the united states, uh, with big balls in the social security administration and doge co, you know, using uh palantir to kind of correlate data from a variety of federal databases. The government, nobody knows more about me than the government and uh, that's all now available to. I don't even know who the russians, anybody. So good luck. If you want to protect your privacy, you better get rid of all your technology. Don't apply for social security, don't have have health insurance. Basically, you have to get out of civilization to get away from this. At this point it's infuriating.

50:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I wish I knew more about privacy laws in the EU, because I can't confidently tell you that it's better here.

50:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, gdpr is a big step. I I mean, at least you have a privacy law. We don't even have a federal privacy.

50:30 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I mean even, even beyond that. There are laws against, uh, creating files, certain types of files, um, you know, you can't, I, I, I, I would guess it's the same in the us but like, for example, uh, you can't create a file that says all of these people are jews, for example, you know, but it's, you can't.

50:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you can create a file that says all these people are autistic, thanks to I don't know that you can in the eu. I don't know that you can here though you can and I, and that's the federal government can address these issues with laws.

51:08 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Right you, you could yeah we should, but we need the political will yeah, so I gave up. That's the other option obvious and, of course, the important thing to note here is that you're not necessarily at risk of anything, right, uh, as you can be extremely public, uh, because there is. You're not part of any minority that I know of, um, so no, I'm lucky, right, I'm privileged.

51:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, that's exactly right yeah, um this, you know we're celebrating pride month. Uh, I'd be much more concerned if I were gay, if I were transgender, if I were uh, not white, I mean, and and the problem is not a good time to be the other in the United States of America anime Yamaguchi at CBS News has been doing tremendous reporting on this.

52:07 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
If you want further, what's the conclusion? Oh, I don't know if there's a conclusion, uh all right.

52:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The issue is that there's no immediate conclusion that you can say, okay, this is why it's bad. It's more of a if you at history, if you think about what could be done and if and maybe in the future it could lead to something problematic, right. And so you look at it and you're like, yeah, but I'm happy to get targeted ads. What's the harm? And the reality is, at the moment there isn't really a harm, except you know well, in the US it's starting to be a little bit iffy. But that's why it's so difficult to have a definitive conclusion on this issue is that when people ask what's the harm it, your answer, even though it's valid, is very vague.

52:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's like well, aidan McCullen, people always bring up insurance to me like, well, okay, it's not just marketers that are buying that information, insurance companies are, and even that doesn't scare me, I was on the Cambridge Analytica beat years ago at CBS News and that was the hardest thing. What didn't end up being that their capabilities were highly overstated.

53:20 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I mean that is true, but while we were learning this, I would have editors and producers challenge me and say well, okay. So yes, this seems bad and it probably is bad, but what's the harm If I'm sitting and watching this show or reading this news story? How did this impact me? What's the harm?

53:51 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And there are harms, but, like Patrick said, it's kind of hard to enumerate what those are in a very simple and easily digestible way that doesn't get into nuance and like kind of big picture stuff. Well, I can paint you a scenario where in that case it's problematic.

53:58 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Oh sure, If you have the but right, right, it requires explaining, and when you're explaining you're losing. So, when you're trying to explain things to people. What is the harm? You have to explain things and that requires nuance and patience and all that uh, let's take a break.

54:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to let you know that our ads, in fact, are not based on targeting, except in the very broad and, by the way, very effective way that if you're listening to our shows, you're a tech, your interest in technology. That seems to be sufficient. We don't. No podcast knows, as you know, patrick, information, uh, demographic information about its audience, uh, you know. So we're not able to use that information. Uh, nevertheless, uh, there are plenty advertisers who say, well, but I like a tech audience, right, I like it decision makers, and we do appeal to that group of people. So there are ways to do advertising without spying on your audience I mean, that's how the entire world worked before the internet.

54:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You would target a magazine or a certain slot on tv where you had a broad you know, this age group, this socioeconomic, uh type of people, and it worked okay.

55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, all right, we're gonna take a little break and I'm going to.

55:17
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57:56
So the Supreme Court ended its session this week with a flurry of decisions in all interesting different directions. One the start with the good news supreme court has rejected claims that the universal service fund is unconstitutional. Low-income broadband fund can keep running, says the supreme court, which frankly kind of surprised me. This was on friday. They rejected claims that it's unconstitutional. The universal service fund subsidizes telecommunications services for low-income consumers, rural health care providers, schools, libraries uh it's. It's supervised by a non-profit, the fcc named to run the program, usac, the universal, the Universal Service Administrative Company. I have to say that, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has supported it, it seems to me unlikely the FCC will continue to do so. So it may be a Pyrrhic victory. After all, they have made a decision that some say is going to cause a lot of problems. This is the Free Speech Coalition versus Paxton, of course, paxton of Texas, attorney General of Texas.

59:16
Age verification. The Supreme Court ruled that it is okay for Texas to require adult sites to require age verification. They said it's not meaningfully more risky than having to show your ID at a liquor store. I think this is a huge threat to privacy. But I'm curious about what you think, because, of course, if you kind of think about it if you're going to require age verification for adult sites. That means everybody who uses an adult site will have to present government IDs that says who they are, and that information will be recorded by the adult site and stored in a database and, yes, probably sold on to the highest bidder.

01:00:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Or leaked and hacked. Or leaked and hacked.

01:00:14 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Or used to target companies that they don't like and say you are an adult site and must register, and if you don't you're out of business.

01:00:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I suspect Ken Paxton's real goal is to actually put pornography out of business. Right, they're not worried about age verification, they want all these sites to go away.

01:00:33 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, that's what I mean. Like use this to target the company, like, well, you know, if you can't do this in south dakota, and then west virginia and then, another right you chip away at state by state and that's what's happening.

01:00:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is texas is not the only state there are, I think 20 or so with with laws like this and, incidentally, porn is in the eye of the beholder. An adult site could be an LGBTQ resource site. It could be sex education. It could be women's healthcare providers, is it?

01:01:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Are those like how does I hate that this is happening, because I'm gonna turn into the devil's advocate here and I really don't like that. I'm gonna turn into the devil's advocate here and I really don't like that. I'm gonna defend anything about this. But which sites are designated as needing age verification? Is it actual well-known porn sites or is it it's not named by site? Okay, is it just like a general? Well, porn sites, like sites that have porn, are have to age verify and each site has to self determine if they are.

01:01:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, here's here's the definition of sexual material harmful to minors directly from the texas bill uh, any material that the average person okay, there's problem number one applying contemporary community standards that's probably two would find taking the material as a whole. Well, you have to remember we're in a country where they ban books from the library, like shell silverstein's uh books from the library because of, you know, violating contemporary community standards which community is it? Which community. This is the whole country.

01:02:22 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Is it your community? Is it yeah?

01:02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, can't have nipples. Oh, female nipples, male nipples are okay. No caressing, touching or fondling of nipples, breast buttocks or genitals. Uh, anyway, you could.

01:02:38 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So, okay, you can keep reading this I'll probably get banned if I, if I continue so the reason I ask is that, uh, we have a similar thing happening in france at the moment. It's happening now, um, and a lot of porn sites have been required to implement age verification techniques, with the same issue that you have in the US, which is the age verification technique. It was not specified. It's like just do it and the entire tech community is like well funny story, it's impossible to do. Community is like, well funny story, it's impossible to do, while also protecting your uh, guaranteeing your uh uh, private data to stay private.

01:03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that that's what a porn hub which admittedly it's in the name is a pornography site, as adult site said.

01:03:27 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It says okay, we're leaving Texas because we can't do this in a private fashion yeah, they did that in France as well, and then there was a legal proceeding that allowed them to come back, and they are currently implementing something in the UK. After having said, we are fighting for the problem for Pornhub, I suspect is not so much to defend freedom of speech and a little bit more that you know.

01:03:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If they implement a system like that, their traffic is going to you be full by 90 percent well, and their point, which is an interesting point, is that, yeah, we're going to be good about it, but there's plenty of sites that aren't well.

01:04:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So in france, uh, the way it works. And I'm sure you're going to say, oh, but that's the government doing more than it should. It's not whatever porn is. They designated a number of specific sites, like they said you, you, you, you, you and you, you have to do it, and so everyone else, including sites that might provide information to you, know trans people or you know that kind of thing, they know that they're not uh, uh, bucket. So that's one difference.

01:04:35
The other thing I do want to say I completely agree with the tech community that this is a security I'll say issue so as not to say nightmare. But I also want to acknowledge the fact that the science on the topic is that there is a problem. Teens are getting well. I'm not going to go into details, but the science is the consensus is, this is a problem and young people are getting issues with their view and image, self image and body image and view of sexuality, and it is not the same as when we some of us went and, you know, watched porn movies once a month or whatever. It's so readily available, it's so so everywhere that it is becoming an issue Same with social networks, just out of curiosity.

01:05:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what? What is the issue? Are our kids not fornicating anymore?

01:05:38 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
well, I think I'm sure they are, but it's.

01:05:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I'm sure. They are too, I'm sure. What is the issue?

01:05:44 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
well, I would refer you to the papers.

01:05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I think, when you say science, that's a pretty broad term for this. I know what I mean.

01:05:52 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The science is the academic, the academic studies on the on the matter, I think, well, I mean, let's okay, you don't believe me, uh I'll, I will try to go and dig up the the no, I've seen him.

01:06:04 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I know what you're talking about having a pedantic discussion about what is or is not.

01:06:08
I think is kind of part of the point, and and I think that's a distraction, and I think that not enumerating, not defining what is or is not, is also part of the uh strategy here. It is so that we can define it, uh ad hoc, as we go and define things that, like leo said, could expand the scope of merely what you or I might think of as straight porn sites. This is something that is designed to be a little more strategic and crafty and, uh, define those things however they want and however particular courts want in certain states.

01:06:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think there might be uh an intent, in texas at least, or you know, certain uh states and with certain uh political leaders that is, I believe, absent here in france. Again, it is specific sites that have been named that are specifically porn sites. You know it's the scope. Is that you can disagree, that this is right and so they don't name specific sites.

01:07:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the problem in this. Yeah, that's.

01:07:12 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's the issue. That's why you can get the con to the concern. Well, what about? You know things that are uh, and you're forming.

01:07:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're in a country, maryland for instance, supreme court said parents can pull their kids from public school lessons if lgbtq books are used. Uh, we're in a country where the definition of what is harmful to children is getting broader and broader and broader, but violence is okay, don't forget. Yeah, that's fine, oh all the violence you want, because, especially in our- game pass video games.

01:07:41 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Daniel, yeah, right wow, I guess my point was uh, we have that too in France, uh, but it's much more narrow you have a naked woman on your money. We have naked people everywhere when you were talking about breasts we have ads.

01:08:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you allow kids under 16 to handle French money?

01:08:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But that's the point. This is not what it's about. It's about the specific effects of the readily available and abundance of pornographic content.

01:08:16 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But on it, and I'm not so prudish when I'm saying this I don't think, if you, if yeah, but there's a nipple on it.

01:08:23 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Breast is not porn. Uh, it's it absolutely is.

01:08:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's in that law in the us, not in france. That's my point. That's what we're talking about.

01:08:33 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Hey, what I'm saying is we're doing it right, and clearly you're doing it. You're doing it wrong. I guess that's.

01:08:38 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That's what I'm saying leo, just a just a question. I I don't know and I I really haven't been following the particulars, but this is intersection 230 at all.

01:08:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, that's an interesting question, so like could you apply this?

01:08:54 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I guess part of my thinking is could you apply this to like blue sky or x or threads?

01:08:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
or any social media. I think you could okay that's the answer.

01:09:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's actually. That's kind of where I'm thinking like, because if there's anything adult on those sites, then those sites could be required to do age verification, and that's kind of what I'm having out to my we're doing it right, which that is already a problem for us.

01:09:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
What about reddit? What about x? What about blue sky reddit's?

01:09:20
clear all of these sites are loaded with adult content absolutely, and that's that's a huge problem, because when you and we, actually we want to uh, we like the french government wants to ban, we want to uh, we like the French government wants to ban uh social media for kids beyond below 15, in the same way that they want to ban porn, which becomes a much bigger issue, because if you ban porn sites, at least you're limiting the age verification to porn sites.

01:09:52
If you want to age gate the age verification to porn sites, if you want to age gate x and blue sky and reddit, you're essentially age gating and age verifying the entire internet, which is a much bigger like whatever issue you have with age verification on porn sites, it's 10 times worse when you have to do it on the whole internet because, as you said, leo, if you want to make sure that a kid is a kid, you have to check everyone. You can't magically know. That's the issue, so you have to ask to find a way. Uh, and the, the technical means are not defined. There are a lot of companies that are claiming they can do it with ai, with selfies, with like it's not all government id, but the question still remains what do you do with all that information? Do you keep it? You do you store it? They say they don't. Do we trust them?

01:10:41 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
like that's the whole problem luckily, we also know that kids can never hack around stuff right, find new ways. Anyone who has kids and has a router and they've locked it down knows it's 100% effective and the kids never find a way around it.

01:10:56 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You know I used to make that argument. I think it's a kind of a fallacy. Of course people are going to break the law, kind of if you want to push it to the, that's not a reason not to make laws right.

01:11:12 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
No, but how realistic is this? But if it's 100?

01:11:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
enforceable.

01:11:24 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's right and and instead causes issues with access to free speech content for adults, then you got it. I don't know, I don't know how enforceable it is. What I can tell you is that I'm I people not me who have tested the brave browser with its tor mode may have been able to access porn sites when they were blocked, uh, without doing anything complicated at all, uh and just launching.

01:11:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thanks for the tip. Let me write that down.

01:11:48 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It was a brave browser, really impressive browser, that's what I'm saying. It's like 90 million ways around this stuff.

01:11:55 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It has essentially a tour mode where it connects before the junior high school.

01:12:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody in the junior high school knows when that was complex as much as I.

01:12:07 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I, I you know replied uh well, it's not a reason to not make a law know, replied uh well, it's not a reason to not make a law.

01:12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would have to. This is so simple. States for a long time for anything but medical professionals. It hasn't stopped the epidemic in any respect. You know, I it's anyway. Uh, the supreme court has ruled, so it's done, it's over. We'll, we'll watch with interest in those states where those laws uh exist to see what happens. Um, I just find it.

01:12:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I will say the way it's defined is very concerning, I completely admit, like if it's just it's. The problem is you can't define it unless you name the specific sites. It seems like what a reasonable person. According to current Community standards. It would seem like a reasonable way to define it. There's no other way to define it, and and but even that is too vague.

01:13:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Daniel, what were you gonna say?

01:13:05 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
um, I just find it funny that you know we live in an age where people get elected to government and talk about the deep state and you can't trust a federal government and all that.

01:13:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But states rights yeah.

01:13:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Let me give them my ID, let them enforce this, and it's just like I don't know. It seems like the people this is why I always say everybody on the right and the left are full of it when it comes to government and this idea of like no, we want small governments and I don't you want to work for yeah, you want the government that enforces the things you believe in, exactly people you don't like.

01:13:38
I think you're exactly right, yeah it doesn't matter what size the left one does, the left one small government yeah, they're free left left libertarians do libertarians as an anarchist I do, but I'm not part of the liberal democratic party are you an anarchist?

01:13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you have? Do you have an? A tattooed on your, on your bicep? There I?

01:13:58 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I've been saying. I've been an anarchist since high school. I like that, I still. I still stick with it. Um, it's the only. And anarchism isn't about saying we need to get rid of all government. It just says I think most forms of government or authority are probably full of are you living in the?

01:14:17 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
eu no, no, okay it might change your mind no, there's no, there's no change in my mind.

01:14:26 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
If you're, you're everybody's, either for freedom or you're against freedom it's and it's.

01:14:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're just against freedom. You french people, you yeah, but everybody's for freedom.

01:14:33 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It just it's you're just against freedom, you french people, you. But everybody's for freedom. It just it's. We're just going to talk about how much we have right, but the goal should always be we strive for more and we try to limit authority.

01:14:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree with you. I try to think of government as not necessarily authority. I think good government is reflecting the desires of society, or the needs of society, or the goals of society, like roads, uh, no pollution, things like that. Is that not a reasonable thing for, uh, for a society to do? And corruption?

01:15:04 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
and how would?

01:15:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you do that. You would do that with a government yeah, no, I mean.

01:15:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So it's like this is always the fact we can go down this hole. The fallacy of anarchism is always this idea that, like it's against all period and you can never like. If you have one person who goes, you can't do that. Like well, we're not anarchist anymore, right, like that's not how it works, because we live in what we would describe as a liberal democracy, as, although people would say, you're a constitutional republic, but we have democratic mechanisms All right. So, republic, but we have democratic mechanisms, all right. So did I vote for the stop sign down the street? No, did I vote to have the road paved down the other street? No, did I vote for. So we don't vote on everything in fact, we don't even know.

01:15:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have a representative government, but you would agree that the stop sign is a good thing, isn't it?

01:15:47 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
sure, of course, but what I'm saying is we still describe ourselves as a democracy, even though the fact we've never been a democracy it's always been a democracy yeah yeah so, but that stuff is so it's never an app, but that's the only workable way to do it.

01:16:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you had to vote on every stop sign of?

01:16:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
course? No, of course, but that's my point this is about. This is about definitions, right? So anarchism isn't? There's a famous quote about this. It's not whether we achieve anarchism today, tomorrow or whenever, it's that we walk towards anarchism forever. Basically, it's this idea that you just strive for the goal of limiting government where you can, and it doesn't mean that seems fair. Yeah, and I think that's why I don't find it a controversial idea. Like, if you've read anything about the founding of the United States, this is literally Thomas Paine.

01:16:39 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Like this was what everybody wrote about you. This is, this, is that stuff right? And part of that was that the corruption of government is not an argument against government itself. Those two things are separate, and that is actually fundamental. I mean that's fundamental to the founding of this country. It's also something that that like although you may be upset at your politicians demand better work within the system and demand better. Destroying the system harms other people. I have empathy for other people let's not just.

01:17:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is so. Anarchy isn't about destroying the system.

01:17:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, that's true. That's true. I'm ascribing things to daniel that came from my punk rock youth, of people who I disagreed with there is a that very basic like yeah, we must destroy the system, but yeah, yeah, that's who I'm talking about, not you. That's more nihilism than it.

01:17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, yeah, yeah, which is also just black flag fans.

01:17:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, right, yeah, if we're also. Nihilism is about let's destroy the system, because whatever comes after it has got to be better than what we have now that is not which is a very dangerous way.

01:17:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's demonstrably not true from history, and that's political analysis not nihilism as a whole.

01:17:42 - Benito (Announcement)
Just, we started this show with xbox that's why I started with xbox.

01:17:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're gonna take a break. When we come back, we will. Enough of that. Let's talk about, uh, oh, ai. We haven't talked about AI yet. Okay, that'll be good, and the debate does continue for the big beautiful bill. I will tell you some potential negatives, and one of them is the debate over whether one of the amendments to the big beautiful bill which is really a budget bill, budget reconciliation bill is a 10-year moratorium on ai regulation by the states, and that is, uh, highly debated. I'm curious what you all think of that. We'll get to that in just a little bit, uh, but first a word from our sponsor, zscaler, the leader in cloud security.

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01:21:23
So there were two big court decisions this week, one to really benefit Anthropic, the other benefited Meta. In both cases the courts held that ai training can be fair use. Uh, judge william alsop in the fifth district or it's in cal in the west west coast said it was fair use for anthropic to train on a series of authors books. The lawsuit brought by the authors guild, then judge Vincent Chabria, dismissed another group of authors. Complaints against Meta for training on their books now also pointed out that Anthropic did break the law when they used pirated media which might put them in other words, the books that they bought. Pirated media which might put them in other words the books that they bought and scanned, that was fair use. The books they didn't buy but pirated, that was not fair use.

01:22:23
Meanwhile, the metadata ruling asserted that, because of a flood of AI content could crowd out human artists, the potential was there for the entire field of AI training to be fundamentally at odds with fair use. That's something you've been saying, benito. Neither case addressed questions about generative AI. When does output infringe copyright on? Who's on the hook? If it does? However, I think Anthropic and Meta are both saying a victory for AI, that AI reading content, if it does so legitimately, is fair use of that content. You agree, dan? What do you think you work in this business?

01:23:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You know my instincts, especially like in the last. Well, maybe two or three years ago. Initially, when generative ai first hit, my instinct was that if you are ingesting, transforming and reselling, to me as a layperson that doesn't seem like fair use. That seems like you're taking something, turning it into something else and repackage.

01:23:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But what are you reselling if you in, if you read moby dick, if your machine reads moby dick? You read well and then, sells a summary of moby dick. Is that not transformative?

01:23:41 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
but doesn't the training data help the capabilities of the ai improve yes, but so I'm just saying like this was my thought initially a couple of years ago. Now, now I don't know. I'm of two minds. One is ethics and one is legal. And legally is what I'm way more interested in, because I can have my feelings, but my feelings might change when I have more information and my feelings might harden when I have more information. So what I'm really interested in is like what legally is happening here and what are the harms or the maybe benefits, what are the implications? I know that it sounds like.

01:24:23
I'm ducking it, but like I'm way more interested in like how these case laws are being settled. And then what does that do to the AI systems? And I kind of have this other feeling where, like, AI has been really beneficial to a lot of my life and I'd kind of like to see it improve, but not at the expense of the environment.

01:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As Sam Allman said, AI that's trained only on non-copyrighted material isn't going to be very useful. Do you want that AI?

01:24:56 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
going to be very useful. Do you want that, ai? The problem with all this, of course, is the fact that, as humans, we learn by training ourselves on copyright and my material every single day, right this whole show is based on copyrighted material. I hate to tell you all, art is derivative, right, you know. So there that's. The problem here is that, like, this is how we all function. It's just AI takes it to a whole other level in terms of performance and capability.

01:25:17 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
So that's why it feels wrong Performance and capability.

01:25:20 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it feels wrong, but I think legally, I think this is going to end up favoring the AI companies, at least the way the law currently is written is written well, at least in the case of entropic, the, the key argument that the the judge, uh, or the key part of his um judgment, was the fact that the ai's work is transformative. Right, he even phrased it as yeah, this is the most transformative, one of the most transformative things I've seen in my life.

01:25:53
That's one of the tests for fair use that if something is transformative in the case of um, in the case against meta, I believe, uh, the argument was the judge said you guys, the authors, lawyers, did a terrible job.

01:26:11
If you had said this or that, I would have judged differently. So I suspect the next case will go differently, but certainly in the one against between Entropic and the three authors, the effect the pirated part is important for Entropic because they pirated a lot of books and if the damages are important, then it can result in like several hundred billion dollars in damages. But for future AI training companies or future models, if they train, or at least according to this judgment. We'll see how it goes following the legal process. But if this judgment stands, then it means very clearly that training an AI on copyrighted content is fair use and that is a huge part of the whole conversation. It might be even argued that this is the main contention between copyright holders, authors, creators and the ai uh companies. That's the whole salami. How do you say it? I'm trying to sound american.

01:27:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the whole thing I don't know if that's american or italian the proper word would be.

01:27:31 - Benito (Announcement)
The proper word would be magilla. The proper word would be Magilla.

01:27:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Magilla is the American word, that's the old Magilla.

01:27:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But yeah. So the key takeaway here is yes, it's fair use, and that is very bad news for content creators and this is very good news for AI companies. Again, if this ruling stands down the line which it very likely might not Last week we had Jason Calacanis on who has invested in a company that does licensing of content for AI.

01:27:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said that's going to ultimately be where we're going to end up is that AI companies, because they're going to make money on this training, will end up licensing content so that they have the content to make I think that's the future of news media too.

01:28:16 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I have this ongoing chat with some people like former cbsers and I. This is kind of a debated, a fun debated topic, like the future of media. But like I think that, like you know, why create your own brand and then license it to an ai? Why not just like, do your own content directly for the ai?

01:28:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't pay, you know. I mean, I subscribe to bloomberg and new york times and washington. I subscribe to a lot of news services, but this show is based on what I glean and you know it as co-hosts because you see the rundown, which is basically a series of links to other people's articles. This show is completely derivative, but I could I consider it fair use. It's transformative. I I do, as a matter of course, try to credit uh articles and the authors of the articles when we talk about it. But uh, I'm doing kind of the same thing as an ai is doing.

01:29:11 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's how it's always worked in the media and, quite frankly, even if you discount, like the very low quality sites and the AI sites that are everywhere now, even before that, the Internet is roughly you know, I don't know 90% people commenting on an AFP or AP report and it's like the news is one day, yeah, jeff Jarvis says that he taught journalism for years.

01:29:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
he said there's one story that's original and the rest are copies.

01:29:38 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
yeah, and that's why everybody tries to break news is what is what daniel was saying?

01:29:43 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
the scale and capability are so different that it's impo. You shouldn't really. You should at the very least re-examine, uh, the conclusions you've come to in the world before AI. You should look at them and see if they still fit for the situation that is. It's kind of like social media, Like you have laws and rules about free speech and everything. In a world where people talking mean you know you go out on your lawn and you yell at a cloud. It's a different world when anyone yelling at a cloud can reach the entire planet. It is, and so I feel like this is what we the conclusions we apply to the world of media and what you do and what I do are maybe not appropriate when AI gets involved. Maybe they are are maybe not appropriate when AI gets involved.

01:30:34 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Maybe they are, but we should at least-. It reminds me very much of back in the 90s and everything with MP3s and people trading music and iPods. This idea was you would go out to the store, you bought a tape or you bought a CD. You owned that song and that music as your one copy of it. Even copying to a cassette was like the music industry was like. But then, once it became the ability to like mass copy music and just share it, it just the scale of it.

01:31:05
Yeah, the scale of it was just like something no one had anticipated. It's. All these questions came about like can you copy a song and turn to an MP3 and who can you share it with and who pays for it? And you know, can you have an ipod that jams like 10 000 songs on it, right? None of this was anticipated. So, like the idea of like you know I agree with patrick about you know, we need to kind of go back and rethink this, because the way everything is changing right now it's just we never thought of it that way, even though it's using the same systems we've always used, right, which is well, we actually talked about this on friday.

01:31:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had a guest, stephen witt, who wrote a book called how music got free, which is the history of digital music revolution really good book. And what became clear after reading the book and talking to stephen is that while everybody and their brother, you know the music industry sued their customers. People fought this, but ultimately it wasn't anything you could stop. So they adjusted their business model, they changed to accommodate it. Now you can argue well this you know, new streaming model isn't very good for artists and so forth, but it was a way of handling this piracy problem and I don't think the piracy problem is considered much of a problem anymore, mainly because they made it so easy to access the music in high quality for very low cost that people just didn't nobody bothers trying to steal music anymore, right?

01:32:30 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
the interesting thing is that piracy is coming back for video because there are so many streaming services that's true and their prices have gone up, especially netflix and so it's an economic force piracy.

01:32:43 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
It's a user experience yes, yes uh, there's a great book that is tangential or or at least adjacent to that era, uh, called Out by Dan Ozzie, and it's about the independent musicians that either took advantage of this from the late 90s to the early 2000s. We really don't think about this idea of selling out anymore, but at the time it was a really big deal and some bands air quotes sold out and got hammered by this change, and some bands really figured out how to adjust to the permutations of of content distribution changing so rapidly. Anyway, it's a really fun book to to read about that era make selling out embarrassing again, please yeah yeah, you remember when we cared about selling yeah, man make that embarrassing again

01:33:32 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
yeah, the. The conclusion of all of those uh thoughts is that at some times there's a piece of technology that comes on the scene, um, and it's a genie that can't go back in the bottle or right at that sound of the bag, yep and you. That's it. That's the new state of the world, and I fully believe that AI is an invention. Generative AI exists now. There is no going back to a world where it doesn't exist, so we have to figure out how it's going to work out with it existing legally and practically. Um and and.

01:34:14
But I and I honestly think that the copyright holders and the artists and the creators I've seen no evidence that serious people thinking about this think that there's a way to, you know, make it so AI doesn't exist anymore.

01:34:31
Some people on Twitter or whatever will say, oh, this is crap. But all the people who are actually thinking about the problem are like how do we make it work? Sag-aftra, for example, the actors union in Hollywood and the US have been on strike for video game voiceover and motion capture and everything, and they ended up finding an agreement after like what was it? 11 months of striking and, from what we've seen, what we understand of that agreement is that it's informed consent for voice actors on how their voice will be used and proper compensation. So this is just to say they understand even them who are extremely subject to being replaced by AI or, you know, partially erased, and they are working with it and trying to make sure that their opinion and the way they want things to go is forcefully taken into account yeah, I actually made that case to stephen witt is that it's important to read his book because we are repeating that cycle, the cycle that happened music now, uh, with ai.

01:35:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The question, though and it's the same question really for both technological inventions is what happens to the creator, what happens to the artist, the musician, uh, the writer? Because it's pretty clear that in both cases, we need we need people to make music, we need people to create the content the ai is ingesting, right? So how do we make sure that they are fairly compensated? This article from the walrus the death of the middle class musician. It's easier than ever to make music, harder than ever to make a living from it, and this is what technology hath wrought.

01:36:24 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You know, everybody has logic in their on their laptop is it harder to make a living than when you had to like make music in your garage and try to find?

01:36:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
harder to get rich well, yeah no.

01:36:37 - Benito (Announcement)
Yes, it's hard. No, I will. I will say yes, it's harder to make a living.

01:36:40 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yes it's harder to make a decent living maybe yeah, because I mean the the focus has gone from selling albums to touring. Basically, you need a tour and make money through merchandise. No, also just generally.

01:36:54 - Benito (Announcement)
The environment values music very low. So even playing gigs every day, you're not going to make enough money to make a living.

01:37:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A couple of years ago I had a dinner with Paul Simon and I was asking about piracy and I felt about it. He says my only concern is my kids. My son is a musician says my only concern is my kids. My son is a musician. Uh, how is he going to be able to survive?

01:37:23 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
in a world where the values his creations so little and I think that's a reasonable question does the world I'm sorry again does the world value?

01:37:27 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
creation so little? Yes, absolutely 100 yes, absolutely.

01:37:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think you're a graphic you're worried because everybody's using mid journey to create the illustrations.

01:37:37 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I would argue there are more creators in the world right now that there have ever been. Maybe they're making. There's no doubt about that, and that's exactly what they're doing, patrick, exactly.

01:37:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
And there's, in fact I would encourage you to to the YouTube channel for Rick Beato. He was a old rock producer who's been streaming this.

01:37:55
He talks about this exactly and there you can you can look at the stats. The music business charts us because they see Spotify as their own competition. They see silence as a competition and they certainly see YouTube as a competition because it is sapped the resources, which is original content creators. Yeah, absolutely, patrick. There is so much fear in the music business right now about what's happening now and that, yes, there are more creators but they're on YouTube and sub stack. They're not making rock and roll.

01:38:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, on the one hand, if your, if your need is to create and ultimately that is a human need yeah you're, you're definitely have the tools available to you to do that. Anybody can be a podcaster, anybody can be a blogger, anybody can be an artist or a photographer. The question is can you make your living doing that? And I think, increasingly, the answer is we saw this happen with photography decades ago got harder and harder to make a living as a photographer as soon as everybody had a camera in their pocket. So I, I don't know, does the world owe everybody who wants to be an artist a living? No, not necessarily.

01:38:59 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I will go one step further and in so doing become the bad guy that everyone can hate, and I disagree with myself here, but I'll ask for the sake of-.

01:39:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Play devil's advocate.

01:39:16 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Patrick, that's what I always do. I think there will always be people who want to make music.

01:39:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, because you do it, because you love it.

01:39:24 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yes, but do we need I can't believe I'm going to say this. Do we need music? Yes, absolutely. There was a time when sculpting was one of the major art forms.

01:39:38 - Benito (Announcement)
We don't need sculpting, we need music music is probably the oldest art form, though patrick music is probably the oldest music, I will say I'm just asking.

01:39:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I understand what you're saying, though, is do we need the arts? And I would say that is probably the most fundamental thing humans do, and we will always.

01:39:56 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We have lots of different. I would argue tiktok making is a form of art, nobody's saying that people aren't able to create.

01:40:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact it's obvious more. Almost everybody now can be a creator look, it's like world of goo, right.

01:40:09 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You have goo blobs here and here and the youtube. Sorry, the youtube glue bob blob took the music blob right. So, yes, we have creators. They're just doing this thing over here. I don't I can't.

01:40:25 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I can't accept the idea that that maybe there will be less musicians, less.

01:40:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, there won't be, you know, but they'll just be harder to make a living as a musician.

01:40:38 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
But I have to say in the middle ages how many musicians made a living?

01:40:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you made music because you were entertaining your family at night.

01:40:45 - Benito (Announcement)
You didn't have a tv set okay, first of all, the music industry itself is only about 100 years old. It's really not, it's brand new exactly as an industry, so we've only really been able to make money by being a musician for the last 100 years.

01:40:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Precisely. In fact, Jeff Jarvis says this in general about mass media. But that's a good thing we should have kept that going right.

01:41:04 - Benito (Announcement)
What do we take that away?

01:41:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like that's the question do we need to have people become insanely rich and popular, or is it all right to have musicians in every subway stop?

01:41:18 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
that's kind of the heart of that book sellout it's. It's that a number of musicians looked at what was happening in the music business the commodification of their art and they decided to do. Some musicians did not do that. Some musicians decided to continue to try to push and push and push into the major record label system and other musicians found that they could tour and develop an audience and cultivate that audience and find other revenue streams. But that was a much smaller group of musicians than existed before.

01:41:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and that's why Pomplamoose remember, uh, pamplemousse, uh, they lost a huge amount of money on their tour. And uh, the the? What was this his name?

01:42:00 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
jack conti.

01:42:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So as a way, for people to become a, uh, a patron of the arts listen.

01:42:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Uh, I live on Patreon. That's how I make my living. I have a number of very generous and wonderful patrons who allow me to be a professional podcaster Jack Conte and Pomplamoose. Specifically, pomplamoose was doing covers, right, not original music. Pomplamoose was most of their thing. What I know about them, they were doing covers. So when they say, oh, and we were getting no money out of the millions of views we were doing on those videos, like 15 years ago, it's because the original creators of those pieces were getting the money. I don't know if that's is that how it should work, maybe not, but it's not like they weren't. You know that there was no money being made and it went nowhere, or someone you know they YouTube to specifically I was talking about.

01:43:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The thing that prompted him was he went on tour because for that reason right and said we're gonna do a tour and it was so it ended up being really not a profitable tour. And that's when he said we're going to do a tour and it was so it ended up being really not a profitable tour. And that's when he said we've got to find a better way. I think I think it's. You know, we are absolutely also funded by our audience with our club.

01:43:22 - Benito (Announcement)
That's a very important part of our business something that we're missing out, though, when you're talking about music, is the whole scaffolding and infrastructure that supports musicians. I'm talking about your studio engineers, your recording engineers, your mastering.

01:43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't need that anymore. Yeah, you can do it yourself. No but that's the thing. Little Nas X didn't have a studio engineer recording engineering.

01:43:43 - Benito (Announcement)
But now a musician is expected to have every single skill, from marketing to mastering, to make now the musician's supposed to do all that stuff themselves.

01:43:51 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's every creator, every artist, every artist, no, exactly, but it hasn't always been this way.

01:43:54 - Benito (Announcement)
This is brand new.

01:43:55 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's easier than it used to be.

01:43:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now. The artist has to do literally everything. You have to do everything, but it's a lot easier to do that, and AI makes even the marketing part easier.

01:44:03 - Benito (Announcement)
We're going to take a break.

01:44:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But not all artists can do everything.

01:44:05 - Benito (Announcement)
Some artists can really just make music. Some artists can't do all that stuff, stuff.

01:44:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I'm learning to play the piano? No one will ever pay me to play the piano ever, I promise you does. Does that stop me from learning? No, I'm loving it that's also.

01:44:18 - Benito (Announcement)
The problem is that, like people will do it for free, so that you know, people take advantage of that, because people love to make music or paint or take pictures.

01:44:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I don't make any money on my photography, but it's one of the joys of my life. Uh, you know.

01:44:33 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
But pay for me is when somebody says hey, I like your picture on flickr there is a societal question there, um, do we need people to be motivated to make music professionally and and seriously? I think not yeah, well.

01:44:49 - Benito (Announcement)
Well then, we're going to the commercial.

01:44:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
We're going to the.

01:44:50 - Benito (Announcement)
We're going to the capitalism question here and do we really want to go there? Well then, we're going to the commercial we're going to the. We're going to the capitalism question here and do we really want to go there, and you know well, it's a question about the ai as well if ai, does you know?

01:44:59 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
do we need a universal basic income? Do?

01:45:03 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
you guys remember that ipad commercial last year that apple cut a lot of flash they crushed the creatives right right, and then out of it came an ipad yes, so okay, okay, okay, like a terrible ad.

01:45:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like a Got everybody upset Like a lampooned for obvious reasons.

01:45:18 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
But just to affirm kind of Patrick's point and maybe the broader point of this conversation maybe we don't need commercial music in the same way that we did and there are potentially millions more people making music right now that we just don't know about, or we know about them but they're in a playlist.

01:45:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every time I see a street busker and I walk by and I go God, that guy's great. It reminds me that there are millions of brilliant musicians we've never heard of and will never hear of, who probably won't even make a living, but they exist. And that's because we're inhuman and are enabled by an iPad.

01:45:55 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Look, I played the viola growing up. We didn't have a lot of money, but I had enough money to play the viola. But a lot of people don't and I think maybe if you put a cheap tablet in their hand, a lot of people will be able to make music.

01:46:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I agree hey, we gotta take a break. I have, I have an ai tool that I think we can all agree is a very bad idea coming up in just a second. This is this week in tech, with some very smart philosophers. Patrick beijat, it's always a pleasure having you on. Uh, from france, he's not. Patrickcom does a bunch of podcasts. You brought back the english language one, the phileas club yeah, the phineas club.

01:46:30 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It's really fun. Um, we send audio letters to Phileas from different parts of the world and tell him Phileas, well, that's all of us, leo listen and find out how about that?

01:46:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
not Patrick dot com? Or on podcast, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts? You should really be, not Phileas.

01:46:56 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, I do a lot of shows, not just letters to Phileas, okay.

01:47:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you, patrick. Also with us, daniel Rubino, editor-in-chief of Windows Central. A great place to go to get your Windows news and to keep up on what's going on with Microsoft in general. Anything particular you'd like to plug, daniel, before we go into our ad?

01:47:17 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
no, you should always come here.

01:47:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes when are you? You know when's your, when's your novel coming out?

01:47:22 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
you should always come here with something I know, someday I'll write a book, but yeah, do you have a novel in the in your desk drawer? I want to do a novel. I would do a book on philosophy.

01:47:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, an anarchist's handbook perhaps.

01:47:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I've been trying to synthesize Taoism and anarchism for a long time and eventually I'll write that book.

01:47:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I am a devoted Taoist. In fact, I do Tai Chi every day and I have a doubting verse of the day that I put in my diary every day. I love it because it's nothing. It's a very easy philosophy to follow If you try too hard, you're not doing it right.

01:48:01 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
It's the only philosophy you can read too, and you feel pretty good about yourself, yeah yeah, I love it.

01:48:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
True goodness is like water, right. Water is good for everything. It doesn't compete. It goes right to the low, loathsome places and so finds the way right. Water is good for everything. It doesn't compete. It goes right to the low, loathsome places and so finds the way right. Uh good, I want to see taoism and anarchy together. At last you got to write that book. I'm looking forward to it. Until then, everybody go to windowscentralcom and uh read up on all the latest. Also with us, dan Dan Patterson, whose work at Blackbird AI is really valuable, really important, helping debunk misinformation, getting the context people need about the stories they read, and it's free for all at compassblackbirdai. Did I say that right?

01:48:50 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, that's just one of our context checking or deep fake checking products that you can look at, I'm still at like.

01:48:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still freelance for jason heiner at zdnet, all the like I'll never not freelance once a journalist, always a journalist yeah, would you like to do a? Reading from the beasties boys book. While you're, uh, while you're here, that is a fantastic book.

01:49:12 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
But let me tell you, the audio book for the beastie boy book is fantastic. It is like listening to the streets of new york city in the 1980s. It's so good. That's what I want to plug listen to the audio book for the beastie boys book oh, my god, all right, I'm gonna.

01:49:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm. I'm putting it on my wish list right now, not on audible, because I don't want to support amazon anymore. Uh, I do all my books now from librofm because it supports my local bookstore. Let me just see if it has the beast awesome beastie boys book by adam horowitz. That one is that it. Let's see here. Is this it? Yeah?

01:49:50 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
with pizza on the front cover.

01:49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is a good book. All right, I'm going to add it to my cart right there.

01:49:55 - Benito (Announcement)
Look at that, will I enjoy it, even if I don't understand the street, if you like beastie boys you remember I'm an old man I mean, those are two of the actual beastie boys who wrote that book. So yeah, yeah, yeah yeah it's written by the beastie boys.

01:50:13 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, the actual book is great too, because it's a massive coffee table book with beautiful photographs.

01:50:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It's just tremendous we all have different types of friends. Right there's the one that's kind of an asshole but fun to be around once in a while me.

01:50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I already recognize myself in the book, the beasties boys book. All right, that's a good plug. Thank, thank you. This episode of this Week in Tech, brought to you by our friends at OutSystems, the leading AI-powered application and agent development platform. This is a fascinating story. Outsystems has been around for more than 20 years and for that whole time, the mission of OutSystems has been to give every company the power to innovate through software. But imagine how their mission has evolved in the time of AI.

01:51:03
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01:52:22
Visit out systems dot com slash twit to learn more. That's out systems dot com slash twit. We thank them so much for supporting this week in tech. I think we can agree. Facial recognition, while it has some use, probably should not be in the hands of ICE. This is from 404 Media. They are breaking so much, they are so good these days. Joseph Cox, the new tool it's called Mobile Fortify. You know, when I don't, you wouldn't wouldn't mind on this, patrick, but every time we uh exit or enter the us customs and border patrol takes a picture of us. In fact, I even think it says we don't save the picture.

01:53:06
But they do and, according to internal ice emails viewed by 404 media, they're using those photos plus others, I would imagine to put an app on ice's phone that they are now using. They are going around taking pictures of people to see if they're illegal, undocumented I should say undocumented immigrants. They call them illegal. Uh, now, one of the things we know for sure is that face recognition is notoriously bad for false positives. If ICE is using that out in the field with a smartphone camera and then arresting people on the base of this, this is a nightmare, a privacy nightmare, a law enforcement nightmare uh, a really bad idea, you agree these also aren't the smartest people in the world who are using this technology.

01:54:03
No, they're thug. Frankly, I consider them trump's gestapo. Yeah, uh, face recognition technology. This is um nathan freed wessler, deputy director of the aclu. Face recognition technology is notoriously unreliable, frequently generating false matches and resulting in a number of wrongful arrests across the country. We know this Immigration agents relying on this technology to try to identify people on the street is a recipe for disaster. Congress has never authorized DHS to use face recognition technology in this way. The agency should shut this dangerous experiment down.

01:54:42 - Benito (Announcement)
Mobile fortify even the name is creepy and the absolute irony of that photo that's in that article, of them taking pictures and they're wearing masks.

01:54:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like, come on, man yeah, don't you dare take a picture of us. It's a very one-way street. On this one, I guess there's nothing really much to say. This is an example of how AI can be used in a variety of ways not always, I mean we were pondering what the potential issues would be with too much personal information being out there.

01:55:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
There's one right there In the case of US customs. It might be the same in the EU. I don't think so, but maybe I've been to the US a few times.

01:55:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course, and they took your picture.

01:55:31 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
They take pictures and they take your fingerprints as well, and I don't know if they use that database for that search. But the main issue to my, the way I understand it, is that not only do they take the picture, but if they end up arresting you, you're not allowed due process Correct. You're not allowed due process correct.

01:55:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, so you may end up in El Salvador or worse.

01:56:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So if there is a false positive during the picture taking, right. If there is, like this is a very real possible scenario, very real possible scenario there's a false positive of someone who is not, you know, the person that they identified, that gets sent somewhere without due process. What if they're wrong? Is there a way for that person to say no, no, no, no, no. This is who I am. Ask my wife, you know I'm. Do they go like that? This? This is the whole issue of where does it go down the line at some point? Right?

01:56:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
um, yeah well, just thought you should know. Just I'm just saying just asking the questions here uh, what else?

01:57:00 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
so you know everyone outside the US is shaking their head. You know, this is not something that I hope you don't blame us for this, though my best, I'm thinking.

01:57:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know my wife does not want to travel outside the US fora number of reasons.

01:57:14 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
One she doesn't want to have to come back in, but two she's very much worried that people will not welcome americans well, I mean, I don't want to say that similar uh political movements haven't been seen outside the us, but I think we all understand that there is part of the country that is pushing this government and pushing for these policies, and I think we also don't want to discount the hardships that have led to embracing embracing that kind of uh political, daring political agenda, um, but I don't know, this is a whole different conversation but to answer your question very would you be nice to me if?

01:58:15
I came to visit. I think most people understand that, you know.

01:58:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope so only 70 million americans voted for this, yeah, um, all right, all right.

01:58:27
Moving away from politics, meta, meta this is a fascinating story going on between meta and open ai. Uh, mark zuckerberg said that he's going around personally to the best people at OpenAI and offering them $100 million salaries plus $100 million signing bonuses to jump ship, and he says it's working. Sam Altman says no, they haven't been offering that much. Uh, or maybe it's the other way around. Actually, it is the other way around. Sam altman's saying they're offering that much and they're not going. Adam bosworth, cto at meta, says sam's just being dishonest. He's suggesting we're doing this for every single person. Look you guys, the market's hot. It's not that hot. Notice that's not a categorical denial. They are offering a lot to the right person, I think, and it may well be 100 million dollars well, they just poached uh three additional uh researchers.

01:59:32 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
siegler at spyglass just said well, maybe there's not a hundred million signing bonus, but you know, if you take everything into account it might not be that far from the from the mark. And certainly I don't know what got into Zuckerberg, that he thought you know the the scientists at Meta weren't cutting it and that Lama apparently is maybe not good enough, or I don't know.

01:59:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was even a rumor that they're abandoning L? Uh. I don't know if that's true either.

02:00:05 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Um I would suspect that is a silly rumor. I would like to say that's substantiated, beyond so like this.

02:00:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This comes from uh, sam altman talking on a podcast with his brother jack. Oh, was it really?

02:00:19
yeah sam said they started making like these giant offers to a lot of people on our team. This direct quote you know like 100 million dollar signing bonuses, more than that comp per year. Uh, and notice the bosworth denial didn't say they're not doing that, only that they're not doing it for everyone I'm sorry, I thought you meant the the other stuff, not that oh, what other? Anyway, that meta might drop llama I don't know, I don't know if that's, I don't know that. I've seen that substantiated. Anyway, the other stuff.

02:00:49 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Yeah, it was on a podcast, sorry it started kind of amazing uh amount of money.

02:00:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish I'd studied whatever is you have to study. The three scientists they acquired are all chinese. Um, I don't know if it's a great loss to uh open ai, although one open ai uh employee said it was.

02:01:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I mean it's starting to be. It's now, but there were two more a week ago, right? I mean it's starting to be, If you're willing to write the big check.

02:01:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess you could. I mean, look, how would you if somebody comes to you and says I'll give you $100 million now, then $100 million a year to come over?

02:01:29 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Even if it's $100 million million a year, yeah, which I'm not sure I trust him about this, but maybe Mark could afford it.

02:01:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and that's the issue, that's the incumbent, or you know the fact that they have such a huge uh, uh, you know budget and, by the way, daryl's pocket in our YouTube chat pointing out that meta has more blackwell h100 gpus than any other company. I think it was a hundred, I can't remember what number was. It was a huge number, so they have. So here's my?

02:02:09 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
here's my theory um, jan lecun, who's the? I believe he's the chief ai scientist at meta, right? You're right, he's very high, high up there. He's still chief AI scientist at Meta, right, or at least he's very high up there. He's still working there. I was checking now. I was like is he gone? Why is Zuck going on a buying spree for AI scientists? I think he's done with LLMs. He's hinted more than once that LLMs are good, but you're not going to achieve AGIGI with LLMs. And there are other uh avenues that they're exploring now. And I think he's like LLMs are crap, we're for AGI, we need to go another route. So we're pushing in that direction, and Zuckerberg had a meeting three weeks ago with Lacoon and Lacoon was like well, I'm not doing that anymore. And so Zuck was like okay, do your thing.

02:02:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you need? He said Jan, what do you need?

02:03:03 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
No, I think he said we still need people to work on.

02:03:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
LMs. So let's go higher. You do your thing, jan, we'll do ours. That's my theory. So Wall Street Journal says it's known as the List and it's a secret file of AI geniuses. Known as the list and it's a secret file of AI geniuses. Only a select few researchers have the skills for the hottest area in tech. Mark Zuckerberg and his rivals want to hire them, even if it takes pay packages of more than a hundred million dollars.

02:03:31 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I'm so done with tech Bros.

02:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The list really list the PhDs from schools like Berkeley and and carnegie mellon, experience at open ai google's deep mind. They're usually in their 20s and 30s. They all know each other. It's this is the journal, and they all spend their days staring at screens. Uh, wow, I just feel like I made a big mistake when I chose to be a podcaster instead of an ai scientist. I know common lisp. One recruit who has spoken with zuckerberg, who is personally counting his dream team of potential hires, describes the company's goal is nothing less than a transfusion from the company's top ai labs. It's a new lab at meta devoted to super intelligence.

02:04:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
It's a new lab at Meta devoted to superintelligence. I mean, that's the game, right, it's capitalism. We were talking about it a little bit earlier. There is no reason he couldn't go around and offer 100 million signing bonuses, right? And I believe that OpenAI at least maybe not the other other companies, but open AI has a lot of money in the bank as well.

02:04:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe not enough to offer, to offer that kind of, by the way, compensation you might be right about Yann LeCun, because the leader of the super intelligence team is a guy named Andrew. I'm sorry, alexander Wang. He's 28 years old, grew up in new mexico that's the scale ai dude.

02:04:59 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Look at this guy, look at him he's a kid, he's, he's a really interesting guy.

02:05:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um he, he got bought out meta bought 14 billion dollars for a stake in scale ai, so in effect you could say 14 billion dollars for this guy because he knows everyone and he is a uh very well connected in silicon valley and political circles.

02:05:26 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Uh, I think this is uh you know more about his connections and maybe then he's the guy who can, you know, call people to tell them about the 100 million signing bonus um, well, at least one of the hires said yes, we will be joining meta.

02:05:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we did not get a hundred million dollars. Sign on. This is Lucas spire posting on X. So you got 99 million. Big deal.

02:05:56 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I mean, even if he got 10 million in equity right At that point it becomes abstract. So I'm sure the point is Zuckerberg is going around trying to poach AI scientists, as I have very little love for him, but as is his absolute right.

02:06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's trying to build a super intelligence team, according to the journal, of roughly 50 people. He's zuckerberg's in a group chat with two meta executives called recruiting party and, uh, there's an emoji with a party hat in which they discuss hundreds of potential candidates and tactics for approaching them, whether they prefer to be contacted by email, text or whatsapp you know what's funny about this story?

02:06:43 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
it's like I feel like when we watch hollywood movies. This is like the opposite story, like the real story should be. There should be a list of the top ai scientists and someone wants them all dead.

02:06:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that that makes more sense. Which is worse, being hired by Meta or being murdered.

02:07:02 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Yeah, like that would be like the real espionage. Like, oh, my God, that's a story, but it's just like, oh, a bunch of kids getting hired for billions of dollars. It's like okay.

02:07:11 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We're getting the social network too, right yeah.

02:07:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're getting the social network too, this may explain that rumor, dan, though, because he's building this super intelligence team separate from the llama team, so that's probably where the rumor came from.

02:07:24 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I'm just saying, I want more sources.

02:07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thing is thing is. Mark is very fickle. Like two years ago it was all about the metaverse. He even changed the company name I don't think that's being fickle.

02:07:40 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I think he saw something that he wanted the company to stand for and some kind of goal and he believed that it could be achieved and honestly, I think that that is still something really interesting and worth pursuing. Maybe it's 10 or 20 or 50 years down the line. It will be possible to make concrete, but it's still very interesting. The metaverse stuff. I don't poo-poo it as much as some of my friends and colleagues, but he saw what was happening with AI and instead of going oh, no, no, no, no, our thing is the metaverse he very intelligently went holy crap, oh sorry, can I say that? Yeah, you can say crap, yeah, okay, um, and he was like it was a holy part I was wondering about I don't know about holy father robertson in the chat room wanted to ask him about that one uh, and he was like, oh, we need to be to get on that.

02:08:37
And I mean to be fair, they were very much on it already, but they amped up the effort.

02:08:42 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Oh they're spending some money now.

02:08:44 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I wouldn't call it fickle. I think he astutely or it was pretty obvious thought we can't slack on this, so let's go full hog on it, yeah.

02:08:57 - Benito (Announcement)
The thing with the metaverse is that it kind of exists already. It's just not facebook, it's called minecraft, microsoft, yeah no, that's not.

02:09:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's not the metaverse.

02:09:08 - Benito (Announcement)
That's not the one that he envisioned, but it is microsoft's metaverse microsoft paid 70 billion dollars for minecraft for a bunch.

02:09:15 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
Of you know what's in there, do you know what's in minecraft?

02:09:17 - Benito (Announcement)
you know how much has been built in minecraft, like there are museums in there.

02:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are museums in there there are concerts I would say roblox has given minecraft a run for its money yeah, video games, man, my like second life and world of warcraft.

02:09:31 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
You can't tell me? 20 years ago people weren't living in world of warcraft there's all this already exists, it's not metaverse Very much.

02:09:38 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I was very much living in World of Warcraft.

02:09:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We haven't heard from Uncle Joe in 12 years he's been living in World of Warcraft.

02:09:46 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
A lot of the reporting that came out in 2021 and 22, which was when they launched the big metaverse project, was that meta at the time, which was called Facebook, had a big brand problem. They had a brand problem because nobody likes Facebook.

02:09:59
Well although we may think of that derisively, the real reporting at the time this was Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, some us and others, but the reporting was that we don't really think of ourselves as Facebook anymore. We think of ourselves as a conglomeration of apps, and what they tried to do is obviously we know that the metaverse was a silly no-transcript sorry for the rant, but like that's what the reporting was at the time.

02:10:50 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That makes a lot of sense. Well, that that might be the case, but I would like to push back on the idea that the metaverse is just a silly thing. In that world of warcraft and minecraft are the metaverse, what the metaverse is just a silly thing, and that World of Warcraft and Minecraft are the metaverse, what the metaverse could be is-.

02:11:03 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
My point is that people are already spending time in a simulated reality and that that isn't really what meta or Facebook was selling at the time. That's my only point.

02:11:13 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Sure, I mean, we've had virtual worlds for a long time, but people equate that with the metaverse and they say you know minecraft or fortnite or whatever. But the vision that, uh, he was pushing maybe disingenuously, um, is photorealistic, simulated environment yes, that's what I'm saying.

02:11:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was disingenuous and that they knew it was disingenuous, maybe I bet that's a lot of money 10 billion dollars to spend on that dollars a year I okay I'm just telling you what my sources in the company told me and that other companies reported.

02:11:53 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
I, I don't know what's in mark's heart, I don't, but I know, tell me this.

02:11:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No one even knows if he has a heart dan what if?

02:12:02 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
if you can indeed create an ecosystem where uh you can have photorealistic environment depicted and photorealistic you uh shown to other people in real time. Essentially, what you get is uh presence, right, the feeling of presence anywhere actually, vision pro has really improved that with the latest version.

02:12:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Those 3D pictures of people are actually much more realistic. I've heard from a number of people, including Jason Snell on Mac break weekly, that you forget you're in a virtual environment. You actually think you're hanging out with people and I think that's the thing.

02:12:45 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
As much as, like smartphones made information ubiquitous. You could get information from anywhere. If you manage to create a photorealistic environment and maybe even make it a replica of an existing environment, and maybe even in real time, then you do for information, you do for presence what you did for information yeah, that's the pitch they're getting in 2021.

02:13:08 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
That's, that's fine, but like. The reality is that we don't have that and we didn't have that. We didn't have the ability to get anywhere close to that, and apple showed that with the best hardware. All I'm saying is I'm not saying that's not a compelling vision and that it could have happened. It might still happen, but the reality, the facts on the ground, don't support that.

02:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And what they were doing was something a little more surreptitious.

02:13:32
Fantastic, by the way credit to Ben Cohen, berbergin and Megan Bobrosky at the Wall Street Journal because obviously they did some good reporting on the list. We're going to take a break and come back in just a little bit. Last break of the show, final thoughts, with a very deeply philosophical crew this week, I like you guys. Uh, it's nice to have an anarchist, a Taoist all in one person Daniel Rubino, dan Patterson got two Dan's and a Patrick Patrick beja. Good to have all three of you. Our show today, brought to you by Express VPN. I just saw a study where third party uh, I think it was Pete marwick uh audited all of Express VPN's Technologies and said absolutely, they do no logging. Look, expressvpn is more than a sponsor to me. It's the VPN I recommend. It's the VPN I use.

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02:16:34
If you are worried about privacy and android phones will soon be able to warn you about stingrays. Those are phony cell sites that we know are set up. The fact washington dc is loaded with stingrays so that foreign governments, united states law enforcement and others can snoop on your cell phone. They trick your phone into uh joining the network. They then pass the traffic on so you don't know you're not on a actual cell site, but they get to see everything you do. Law enforcement, according to ars technica, ryan whitman writing, has massively expanded the use of stingray devices because cell phones right, that's the key um. So apparently android is in position now of being able to um identify a stingray while you're using it and warn you about it. Here's the, the pop-up you might see mobile network security connected to unencrypted networks. Uh, they even will tell you the name of the sim, so you know the person who's uh involved in this story. Uh, dan, was that what you were saying?

02:17:51 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
oh, you know, I uh, I the metaverse story, oh the metaverse story. Sorry, no, no, sorry. I was just posting like here was a package we produced about the metaverse story. Sorry, no, no, sorry.

02:18:01
I was just posting like here is a package we produced about the metaverse back. Oh cool, yeah, yeah, no, this thing right story is fascinating and DC is loaded with it. I assume lower Manhattan is too. I think every major Metro, probably. When I was in Ukraine, it was 2017, right Is like when Russia launched the not patchy virus, and like I landed in the airport and like my phone started overheating. My iphone just started going nuts. I'm like how many networks is this connecting to?

02:18:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, uh, look at this. This is a stingray device made by the harris corporation. Is that you just buy it off the shelf? Awesome, put this uh wi, Unfortunately, the phone has to have version 3 of Google's iRadio hardware abstraction layer. The Pixel phones do not support it yet, of course, so but look, maybe this would be, if you're worried about it, a thing to look for. Phones that launch on Android 16 later this year, like the Pixel 10, will be the first to do this, that's a great feature.

02:19:03
Yeah, no kidding. Thank you, google. Google's position is only we should be allowed to spy on you.

02:19:08 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I was going to say. That's exactly what I was going to say. That's our job. Only we get to spy on you. Screw the Google.

02:19:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, good on France. Tesla has been ordered to stop deceptive practices on self-driving capabilities in france. You know that they just delivered this week a model y over 30 miles away without a driver, elon says, without even a driver assist. They just said hey, model y, go to your new owner.

02:19:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And it did yeah, that's a cute trick it may.

02:19:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll be honest, it makes. I see videos of waymo's pulling into the wrong lane, of all sorts of crashes with these robo taxis or or just weird behavior. I feel like these companies are using us as beta testers and risking our lives unnecessarily oh, I mean that's I'll give Tesla credit for that in a sense that Bravo.

02:20:07 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
Well, they were just like. It's going to take forever for the government to make rules around this and get this stuff going, so we're just going to go and do it now. Someone tells us to stop.

02:20:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, in fact when Doge was in the government. I guess they still are. But one of the things Elon got was the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration to drop its investigations of self-driving vehicles.

02:20:32 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean, if you look at a lot of early science, you know I used to do research and we used to have to do the institutional review board, the IRB, and all this kind of stuff. But the reason why that stuff exists is because there were scientists who didn't do those things Right and they would manipulate people and they would do deceptive practices. But the science we got out of it, like the Stanley Milgram stuff, is like amazing data.

02:20:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stanley Milgram, the famous Stanford prison experiment. Right Is that?

02:20:58 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
what Milgram's was? No, no, no, no, that was a milgram. Did the uh? Obedience to authority?

02:21:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh yeah, right the other person which you could not do anymore because of no, no but it was such, like, you know, post-world war ii.

02:21:09 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
That was such like insightful, critical research. But we're lucky, we have the research. Thank goodness he did it right I feel, bad for the people he subjected to this right but with the, the full self-driving stuff, I full confession, I like screwing with people. So I was like I told people I sold my tesla a while ago because of elon musk. And they're like, yeah, right, go you know. And I'm like, yeah, I just bought a new tesla instead.

02:21:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh man which one do you have I?

02:21:36 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I just bought the uh, another model three, but it was the uh, the highland reversion uh, which actually is a huge upgrade huge. Yeah, but it was the all-wheel drive.

02:21:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One do you? Have a bumper sticker that says you know, no, no I will not katao to that um I I did.

02:21:53 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I have seen a couple people, but in my area I've seen quite a few in our area anyway yes, saying I bought this before elon went crazy or things of that sort. Yes, I feel that way. I just don't feel like I need to prove it to you, don't need to announce like yeah, yeah and so like, but my, the car came with 30 days of full self-driving and I used it zero times. Because a couple reasons. One, I don't trust it. Uh, I just. Weren't you curious, though? Weren't you tempted?

02:22:22
no, because, the thing was like say here's the other thing too, say I tried it, and I was like whoa, this is amazing, this is game. Then you'd want it, I would want it, but one. I work from home, so like I don't help you driving, yeah, yeah, driving is not really a chore for me, two it cost eight grand and it's like, no matter how good it was, I'm not really a chore for me. Two, it cost eight grand and it's like, no matter how good it was, I'm not paying eight grand for it.

02:22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's just like I'm like, why even bother trying it when I'm there's no way I'm going to want to have this I got a story because when I bought my model x, I spent an extra 5 000 so it would be ready for fsd. Oh yeah, which it never got they changed.

02:22:55 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
They changed the hardware out. Yeah, it's now, we're in hardware revision four.

02:22:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I I gave him a five grand for nothing yeah oh well it's.

02:23:03 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I mean it's getting better. I think it'll be there someday. I'm just not gonna be that guy that's going to and I I remember he was also like, oh, but someday you'll be able to, when your car, when you're not using it, you can have your car be a taxi and he promised he's been promising that for five years I'm like I don't care how much money I need I don't want other people using my car that's what france is saying patrick is no, no, no.

02:23:30 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's the whole basis for the valuation of tesla, right that? That's the the idea that at some point he's going to flip a switch and all of a sudden, everyone's going to be making so much money from using their cars as taxis, which I guess might happen. But uh, it's. There was a video from Tesla of um self-driving going through Paris and going through the Arc de Triomphe.

02:24:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Place de la Concorde roundabout. The Place de l'Arc de Triomphe, yeah, which is the Arc de Triomphe, the craziest roundabout in the world by far oh well, maybe not by far.

02:24:10 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Is it the case?

02:24:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's the case that in most roundabouts the people in the roundabout have the right of way On the Arc de Triomphe roundabout. The people in the roundabout have the right of way on the Arc de Triomphe. Roundabout. The people entering have the right of way because otherwise you would never get in yes, no one has the right of, no one has a right of way chaos but you know the interesting thing, there are very few accidents on that roundabout.

02:24:32 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Everyone knows has great how crazy it is, and but so the point is every time they actually sent a Tesla into that roundabout yes, and it successfully, uh, traversed it.

02:24:44
And so it's very symbolic, because the every time anyone would say, uh, well, there's self-driving here and that, and, and then french people, and especially parisians, would go, oh, but wait until they come to the place de la Triomphe. That's the real test. And now it's been passed. Of course, we don't know, you know, if they chose the time or if they tried 15 times and this one it succeeded, and but symbolically it's, uh, it's impressive, um, and honestly I'm impressed by self-driving period. I think Tesla isn't there yet and their first tests in like the 10 square meters of Austin where they are operating, have been a little bit, uh, you know, hazardous. But Waymo is expanding every single week, it seems, and doing hundreds of thousands of rides per week they seem to have won this battle yeah, and more, even more than that.

02:25:41
They're showing that self-driving works. Not everywhere maybe, but you know, it's really the the gardner hype cycle of 10 years ago. We're like, oh, self-driving, it's happening, it's happening, it's here, and then it wasn't here and everyone got tired and the hype fell down. But by the time the hype was at its lowest, meaning three years ago, the tech actually started working. And you know, self-driving kind of works now, maybe not everywhere, maybe not all the time, but the initial studies show that. The first stats show that it is a lot more, a lot safer than you're showing a video.

02:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And there are is this giving you a cold sweat here. By the way, notice the driver. His hands are right next to the wheel. He is ready they have to do that just to show that he's ready to yeah, to jump right in.

02:26:35 - Benito (Announcement)
Yeah but that's why, of course authorities.

02:26:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why they're going after tesla, because tesla's claiming autonomy when in fact a driver does have to be right there.

02:26:44 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That's not autonomous in the French authorities point of view yeah, it isn't, and it's not in anyone's point of view.

02:26:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all right, but apparently, tesla sales in the EU are plummeting down. 67 people.

02:26:58 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You still see a lot of them you know there are enough that were sold before, but yeah, there were there. There is certainly, uh, there are people still buying, buying them. I have a a good friend maybe I shouldn't say his name, uh, he said it publicly, uh that he bought a new tesla, um, even though he didn't want to. I think his name is. Daniel Rubino is his name, I think Actually it's Cedric Ingrand, which I think you know.

02:27:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, cedric, I know Cedric, of course.

02:27:27 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, so we do my tech show, my weekly tech show. He comes on every month and he was like I wanted to buy an electric car again and I looked at everything and this was the only one that would tick all the boxes for a reasonable price. Things might have changed now. There are, you know, the Chinese manufacturers which are coming in and very competitive, but at the time, maybe a year ago or six months ago, he bought it. He was like that's my only reasonable option.

02:28:00 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
So, if that's how, exactly how I felt it's the. I get the arguments, people not liking elon and tesla 100 not an issue. Someone tells me I'm like, yes, I get it, but when I look at stuff I'm like ford and honda and everything else and I'm just like they're not exactly. I've had a machi.

02:28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I liked my machi. I have a bmwi5 right now. Lisa has a mini cooper electric and our son has a chevy bolt. They're all very good. Uh, I don't think tesla has the mark, has the lock that it used to have sure, that's true.

02:28:33 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I just like, when it comes to design and execution and features and fun, that for me, the Tesla just still ticks all the boxes. And I've looked at other things, but I just nothing. And plus it was just the pricing, the only reason I really went for. I got a great trade in for my previous Tesla right and they had the zero percent APR. It was just like. And plus I had a 11 000 in in EV rebates Instant, by the way those are probably going away in the big beautiful bill Yep.

02:29:04
And that was another reason I wanted to jump on this before our day all went away, because it's like Watch with interest what goes in that.

02:29:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're debating it right now. It'll probably go all night. A number of things in reconciliation in the senate uh could change the way we work. For instance, the senate version could sell, force the fcc to sell off half the spectrum used by the six gigahertz wi-fi band which currently is, uh, unregulated. The FCC might have to sell it to AT&T. Oh good, we'll watch that with interest. There's also that moratorium on states passing AI restrictions for 10 years. The parliamentarian at first said it could stay in, then said it couldn't stay in. It's unclear what the status of that is, but as far as I know it's still in the bill. They're debating that right now as we as we speak, and we'll probably be debating it all night long.

02:30:21 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
That is a completely crazy idea, right? The idea that you, you would ban states? Is it because then you don't have 50 different pieces of legislation you have to adhere to? Is that the problem? Yes, that's.

02:30:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why all the ai companies support it, because they don't want a crazy quilt of regulations. But of course, that only makes sense if there's a federal law, and then there is. Well, there is the no fakes act, which, uh the eff says the no fakes act has changed and it's so much worse. Uh, the bill which says it targets the issue of misinformation and defamation from generative ai. Uh, no fake stands for the nurture originals, foster art and keep entertainment safe act. Uh. However, uh, it's basically a censorship structure. In fact, uh, the president in his state of the union speech, that I'm going to use that because no one's been treated worse on the internet than I have.

02:31:25
The new version of the no fakes act requires almost every internet gatekeeper to create a system that will a take down speech upon receipt of a notice. B keep down any recurring incident, meaning adopt inevitably overbroad replica filters on top of the deeply flawed copyright filters, see. Take down and filter tools that might have been used to make the image, any filter tools that might be used to make the image. And. D. Unmask the user who uploaded the material, based nothing more than on the say so of the person who alleges that it's a deep fake.

02:32:00 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
What does it mean to unmask the user, to the person accusing them or or to the authorities.

02:32:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, the problem is so I run a mastodon instance, uh, and I would be. This law would affect me, because I would have 48 hours upon being informed that that is a deep fake. It's a revenge porn of me. I don't like it to take it down, I don't. That's not enough time for me to verify it. So what's going to happen?

02:32:30 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
it's going to immediately be taken down and for small businesses like you, it would be flooded with this, so it's just better to shut it down.

02:32:38 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Yeah, how does it work for things like, uh, c-sam and terrorism and things like that, which I guess has to be taken down very quickly as well, right, yeah?

02:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, this, this uh is sort of supposed to be the same thing, but I think is so broad and uh and so draconian that it basically allows anyone to get a subpoena, not just from a judge, but from a court clerk and without any form of proof it seems very wide, just like we were talking about with the age verification on porn sites.

02:33:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
The definition was so wide it became like very dangerous. Here also it seems like it could be like trump saying I, I'm going to use that um well, congress already passed the bill.

02:33:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually that trump said he was going to use the take it down act. Oh, that's a different one. This is even well. No, I've conflated them too, because they sound similar, uh, anyway, uh, we'll keep an eye on that one, it's kind of like youtube at scale right, like someone, yes, everywhere, yeah.

02:33:45
And if there's one thing, we've learned from content id I certainly have learned it is don't even take a chance because it's such a pain in the butt to fight it and you know you're gonna meanwhile be demonetized or even taken down and you just it's a chilling effect that I've experienced with uh apple, which I know you talk about sometimes when they have an event, uh on twitch, and I got a strike on twitch because I was commenting on we stopped putting it on twitch and YouTube.

02:34:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We now do it in the club only everyone has that I know has gone to the same. Uh, uh, that's interesting. Has done the same. That's interesting, yeah, which I think. I honestly think I mean maybe it's Apple's right. But I ended up actually contact, fighting it, contacting the lawyers and and it was, I was imagining they would want me to, like, you know, sign my first born to them to remove it. They were very nice. They were like yeah, we just want you to confirm that you will not use it to, you know, to, to in the future, to disparage Apple or whatever. I can't remember what the phrasing was, but it was very reasonable.

02:35:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you agreed to it. Are you going to continue to do it on Twitch?

02:35:05 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
So, no, the thing is, I promised that I wouldn't do it in a way that was infringing on copyright, which is very, which was very wide, but, of course, like you, I decided not to live comment on those shows that's right which no one is doing anymore, which, I would argue, is allowing Apple to broadcast their message unimpeded, exactly the point there is no commenting.

02:35:30
There is no context, there is no. I mean, you can, of course, comment it without showing the image. That you can do, but people who want to watch it want to see what's being discussed.

02:35:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
MARK BLYTHINGAIS JR. Well, and here's the thing, that's such broad disparagement If I say, gee, I really don't like iOS 26, is that?

02:35:51 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
disparagement. Francesc CAMPOY JR. No, but that's not even the issue. You can't show their produced copyrighted content, which is their presentation, which, if you can't show it and comment on it at the same time, the only thing that's left is their unmodified Preston Pysh. That's the point version, which is their message, their version of their marketing and what they want to say when they say we have, however many benefits to this and that, and we are very, uh, echo friendly, and of course you're going to see articles later.

02:36:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is the thing in the US. What you were doing, what we were doing, is protected. It's as as fair use in France, too, but fair use is only the right to hire a lawyer, and you and I are not in the position to fight this in the court of law, so we just give up. Speaking of giving up, I think we've done more than enough here to disrupt the status quo. I want to thank you guys. Our favorite anarchist, daniel Rubino, I think we should do a whole show. Forget the book, let's do a show on Taoism and anarchism. Do it, I can do that.

02:36:57
Together at last.

02:36:59 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
I love it. Need a couple beers, but yeah, that'll be a discussion wu-wei meets wu-tang.

02:37:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'll be great. I can't wait. Daniel's the editor-in-chief at windows central. Always a pleasure to have you on, daniel, thank you. What's the game you're playing these days?

02:37:15 - Daniel Rubino (Guest)
oh, I mean. The joke is I have a steam account and Xbox Game Pass. I have 200 games I'm not playing. Yes, exactly.

02:37:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have every game that I'm not playing. Yeah, exactly I realized. So I said I was starting to learn to play the piano. I thought every moment I spend playing Valheim or, you know, elder Scrolls Online or whatever, is a moment I'm not learning how to play the piano. So I decided to make an executive choice and learn the piano instead. It's great to have you, daniel. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure, patrick, thank you for staying up late with us. It is now Monday and it is cooling off, I hope.

02:37:52 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Well, my computer is very warm.

02:37:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So is mine. It's 32 degrees up here, so we're hoping that you get a little bit of a respite in France At some point.

02:38:02 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
I'll open the window when we get offline. All right, We'll do a show one day and I will explain to you all the ways that France is protecting the music industry and subsidizing music production and artists. Are they?

02:38:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really.

02:38:18 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Oh yeah.

02:38:22 - Benito (Announcement)
Oh, that's wonderful. You know most and most every other country has like a vibrant arts thing in their government. It's just America that doesn't at this point we're defunding public broadcasting.

02:38:30 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
We don't but you know, one of the reasons we're doing this is that America is such a broad influence on cultures. But if you're if you're a musician and you manage to get like 40 gigs a year um, I think it's 40, something like that then you will get essentially a diluted version of uh unemployment benefits for the next year to allow you to search for more gigs and keep going. It is very and so I'm just trying to say I love music and I want it to be protected. I was just playing devil's advocate earlier in the show. I love that.

02:39:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Patrick hosts podcasts on tech and gaming at notpatrickcom, including Le Rendez-Vous Tech, Le Rendez-Vous Jeux, the Phileas Club, L'Actu Tech.

02:39:25 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
And what game are you playing these days? Uh, I finished a couple of weeks ago Expedition 33 and it is such a wonderful modernized JRPG by a French uh team. It's one of the best games of the year. I think it's going to get game of the year. Uh, it's an incredible game. It looks beautiful.

02:39:39
Recommend it's on it's on game pass everything, and so, if you allow me just two seconds, this is an unreal engine 5 game which was made by 30 people, a core team of 30 people. Wow, nowadays you can make a game like this because we have the tools and the productivity increases that those tools and technology afford us a few years. Like this is AAA, huge budget level, quality and it's a good game. On top of that. Like it's an amazing, amazing achievement Expedition 33.

02:40:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft says I'm too young to play it, unfortunately, but oh well, it is included with my Game Pass. Thank you, Patrick, and, of course, Stan Patterson. I'm glad to hear that your health scare was just a scare and that you are alive and well and with us. Yeah, it's great to see you. Director of content. Blackbirdai, Everybody should sign up at compass. Stop blackbirdai and just get a little fact checking in your life.

02:40:44 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
you know a little context although, as we're talking, I'm subscribing, resubscribing to game pass ultimate. What game do you want to play, my friend? I'm finishing up also clear obscure expedition 33. Not just one of the best games of the year, one of the best games I've played. It is a type of video game that you give to people who are like why do you play video games? Give them that game and they'll go oh geez, the story is tremendous, the mechanics are great, it's fun, it's heavy, it's easy to play, but it's very challenging and complex. Fantastic game.

02:41:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there you go. And, by the way, according to the Compass by Blackbird AI, taylor Swift is not breaking up with Travis Kelsey. So that's a relief, that's a relief. Uh, I'm gonna go download this game now. You got Expedition 33, you got me that's on game pass. Uh, yeah, that's right. I don't have to do anything, I just play it nice. It's right over there.

02:41:44 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
My xbox is right over there hey, patrick, what was your run time?

02:41:49 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
uh, I'm not sure I want to say, because there are things happening at the end that you might spend time with how. How far along are you?

02:41:59 - Dan Patterson (Guest)
i'm'm about halfway through. I'm full. I'm far into the second act.

02:42:08 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Okay, 30 hours. I would say this is the tip I'll give you and everyone listening. I'm just over 20. Very important Once you are kind of reaching the end and you can feel, feel you are, don't dilly dally around, don't go making lots of quests, because you're going to out level the last encounters and it's not going to be as fun. So you can do that after just oh, interesting.

02:42:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh, that's really interesting. Uh, it's don't get too good, is what you're saying. If you want the challenge in in true jrpg fashion.

02:42:39 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
You will out level the encounter and it will be trivial. And it is so intense and the way the storytelling integrates into the actual uh fighting action is incredible. So if it's not as intense when you're doing it, you're not uh, experiencing the the full, full breadth of what the game is intending to do. Awesome, and it's so original with this Belle Epoque French aesthetic, and I could talk about it for hours. It's really good.

02:43:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't wait. I'm going to play it right now. Thank you so much.

02:43:15 - Patrick Beja (Guest)
Play in story mode Play in story mode Story mode. It's too difficult if you don mode play in story mode. Story mode it's too difficult if you don't play in story mode. Just crank down the difficulty one notch, I agree, and you'll love it yeah very cool.

02:43:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Patrick, daniel, dan, great to have all three of you. Thanks to all of you for joining us and, of course, a special thanks to the members of club twit who keep this artist and all the artists who work on our shows employed uh, 25 of our operating income now from you, club twit members. It's one of the ways we could stream on eight different platforms a club twit, discord, youtube twitch, tiktok, xcom, facebook, linkedin, uh. But it's also uh what allows us to do all the interesting stuff we do in the club, like our music special that we did on friday. That's a club special. We stream it live for everybody, but then it is saved on the club tweet feed for just twit club members for a month. Then we put it out in public. That's true of many of the things we do in the club, uh. But honestly, the reason to join the club is not the Discord, not the ad free versions of all the shows, but because, if you like what we, it's a way of kind of almost voting and saying keep doing what you're doing. Find out more at twittv slash club twit.

02:44:23
Whether you're a member or not, do subscribe to our newsletter twittv slash newsletter. You'll keep up on everything coming up on all of our shows. It's a good way to do that. Thank you all for being here. You can, if you're not watching, the show live every Sunday, 2 to 5 pm, pacific 5 to 8, eastern 2100 UTC. You can also download it. It's on our website, twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this Week in Tech and, of course, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way get it automatically, audio or video or both, the minute we're done.

02:44:56
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