This Week in Tech 1041 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, abrar Alhiti is here. From CNET, from Engadget, devendra Hardawar. From the Register, ian Thompson. Yeah, it's going to be a great panel. We'll talk about the Coldplay, kiss Cam and what it means for surveillance you won't believe what Ring's about to turn back on and Stablecoin it's the law of the land, but what does it mean? All that and more coming up next on Twit Podcast it's the law of the land, but what does it mean All that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love.

00:29 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
From people you trust. This is TWIT.

00:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is TWIT this Week in Tech, Episode 1041. Recorded Sunday, July 20th 2025. A $4 bill. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the time we get together for the week's tech news and I assemble a rotating panel of the smartest, most insightful, most connected people in the world. We've got a good panel for you. Ian Thompson is here from the Register. Hello Ian, Always a pleasure. Hello there, Leo, Always fun. Green card still in hand.

01:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm actually going for citizenship, so all I would like to say is President Trump is a wonderful person. I will say nothing against him.

01:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, exactly Watch your socials. Uh, good, okay, when is the hearing, or whatever they call?

01:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
it. I've just filed the paperwork with a lawyer he's going through it. He'll tell me what I'm doing wrong and do you have to learn the presidents still honestly, that citizenship test is really easy. I've not scored less than 95 out of 100 on it. Oh, all right, and I only need to get six out of 10.

01:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Perfect, 60%. Yeah, all we want is C students here in the US. That's all we're looking for. Also with us, abrar Alhidi, senior Technology Reporter for CNET. Great to see you, abrar Alhidi. Good to see you. Good to be back.

02:00
Yay, love having you on. Be back. Yay, love having you on. Of course, the bars are regular on tech news weekly with micah every month and from engadget you can see I've got my favorite people here davinder hardewar, who is a senior editor at engadget another senior on vacation, yes, and he's on. It's wonderful that he's on vacation, but he's still spending time with us yeah, with my pals so I wasn't going to begin with this.

02:28
I was going to begin with a heavy news story, but it has been the talk of the last. It broke on wednesday. So the last four days, five days, the kiss cam at the coldplay concert, all right, come on, for goodness sake.

02:45
Where he ducks out. Okay, he's the CEO of Astronomer. He's gone. He's married to somebody not his wife in front of him. That's the chief. It's always the HR. People are the worst. She's a chief people officer. It's hysterical. Who does she report that to herself? They both hide their heads in shame. He's out, apparently and, uh, she's under on suspension and being I don't know what. Investigate. What do you investigate?

03:12 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
he's just in the room interviewing herself yeah, did I do anything wrong?

03:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, I don't really think so, but no if they had just pretended they were having a good time, probably probably would have been all right anyway. Guilty conscience.

03:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They're consenting adults, but it doesn't speak an awful lot about his quickness of thinking to start ducking out and trying to hide.

03:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's more a reflection on his nimble thought than it is on his morals. Well, anyway, this is from your piece in the register. That's why, actually, it's not, it's brandon villa. Vigilato, brandon, yes, vigilato, vigilato, don't even get me started trying to pronounce it. Yeah, he says. His camp flap proves we're already our own surveillance state. Nothing is is private, is it Well?

04:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
no, I mean when you think about it. I mean, do you remember Rodney King? You know this we had.

04:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was a big deal that there was. We had riots kicking off because somebody had a portable video camera.

04:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Now, everybody has video cameras, Everyone's got cameras on their phones and, yeah, it is one of those things where something like this happens. Internet sleuths get onto it and very often they get it wrong. I mean, we can remember the Boston bombing case where somebody who was identified by Reddit as the bomber turned out to be some poor student who committed suicide before the event even took place. So crowdsourcing is all well and good, but let's get our facts straight first.

04:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Crowdsourcing is all well and good, but let's get our facts straight first, yeah, yeah, how fast things spread and how much time people dedicate to get to the bottom of something. I wish I had that much free time, my goodness. They got tracked down yeah.

05:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Immediately, I think, coldplay announced that they were going to have a Kiss.

05:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Camp free zone for people, uh, in future concerts, uh, for people who don't? Well, I mean, he's announced it apparently. I saw one report I can't guarantee this that he was thinking about. He announced that he was suing coldplay and clearly hadn't read the terms and conditions of his actual ticket, which said we do have one of these cameras around the old place, yeah but I mean, okay, adultery is not great, but going to a cold play concert, that's not good, which is the greater sin, the real crime.

05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could have been worse, could have been nickelback it's true or limp? Big skid. I mean it could have been worse. Let's put it that way they were also so prominent.

05:38 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I saw a picture where um somebody had floor seats and they were taking a picture of cold play on the b stage and you could very, very clearly see the couple in like the front row up in the balcony. So it wasn't even like they were being conspicuous at all, it was just yeah.

05:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, every video from that concert is now being scanned for inadvertent evidence. This ties into it actually a real story, which is that Amazon Ring has decided. Jamie Siminoffoff, the founder, is back, and one of the first things he did is decide to make ring video available to the police once again without a warrant without a warrant, uh, or the consent this is important or the consent of the user so the police can say to ring. We want to get the live stream from your Ring doorbell so we can keep an eye on things.

06:32 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Apparently also from Ring cameras inside the building as well, which is even more disturbing.

06:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Siminoff announced in a memo seen by Business Insider. This is from the EFF. The company will now be reimagined from the ground up to be AI, first, of course. What company isn't? Yeah, um, and employees at ring will have to show proof. They use AI in order to get promoted. That's also terrifying. What is wrong? There's something we are in a bad timeline. Yeah, I, I'm an AI fan and I use AI. In fact, I have a little AI crystal that I wear.

07:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
How is that thing going, Leo Come on.

07:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, now that I have the little crystal holder, I can wear this in public and people just think I'm into stones, but it's actually-.

07:20 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, you live in California, so that's's.

07:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I am starting to feel guilty. A number of people I work with have said you're recording this. I said, well, not exactly.

07:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yes exactly that's the way it is the police can capture that at any moment yes yeah I mean, we've got the same thing with Politico.

07:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Their union is now suing management because they're being told you have to use AI, whether you like it or not, and as a journalist we're all journalists, you know this is really concerning because A the AI is going to be accepted as an editing tool, but also the process that the finished copy goes through is also edited by an AI, so you have a self-reinforcing loop which is deeply worrying for original writing.

08:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's slop all the way down and you're training the thing that will inevitably replace you too, because this has happened at several video game studios where they have been forced to use AI tools. Thousands of layoffs at Microsoft and elsewhere, and those companies are going to be relying on the AI tools to create level designs and things like that. This is terrible, terrible for everybody.

08:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Should you, though I mean, if you're a CEO of a modern company embrace AI, shouldn't you?

08:40 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think there's a fine line. I think it's one thing to say okay, if there's something where this is a helpful tool to augment augment is the keyword here what you do, and then you remain that human voice especially in journalism and in media, but in anything really. Because the scary thing is having a company say, hey, use AI, and then we can see how you're using it and then how we can then replace you is really what they're trying to do. You, how you're using it and then how we can then replace you is really what they're trying to do. You figure it out for them. They don't want to figure out how to use AI in the workplace. They want you to figure out how to use AI in the workplace so that they can push you out.

09:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And of course, there's Duolingo's CEO, who said we're going to replace a lot of employees with AI.

09:16 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
We're going to replace a lot of the contract employees we use to create lesson plans with AI lesson plans, you know, which got a big backlash from duolingo customers they backtracked right, yeah, oh yeah, they were like the star of tiktok and all of a sudden, once that happened, everyone turned on them and they've been the bad guys on tiktok ever so they backtracked to the scent that said don't worry, permanent employees were, your jobs are safe, but they still.

09:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I guess it's probably appropriate to be sensitive to the fact that many of us are worried about losing our gigs, right.

09:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I mean, it's kind of like a lot of companies did this about 10 years ago, where they get in either new employees or H-1B employees or whatever, and they would staff and they would put them next to senior IT analysts.

10:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and have them be trained.

10:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, and basically brain drain them, put them into the new employee. This is just making it on a software scale.

10:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, get ready because OpenAI has claimed a big achievement, maybe even a turning point in AI capabilities. They have an experimental LLM that does reasoning. It's in-house, they haven't released it to the public and, according to Alexander way, it achieved a gold medal level performance in the International Math Olympiad, which is an extremely challenging math problem set which has not been seen before. It's you know. Sometimes you think, well, maybe they trained on. No, these are never before seen problems.

10:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean arguably still hasn't been seen. This is what they say, yeah.

10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and we? Yeah, I don't, but they're not going to lie. That's such a big lie.

11:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We cannot trust anything Sam Altman says or anything.

11:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly.

11:05 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm sorry I know you, I know you like the ai tools, but I I have you guys talked about empire of ai karen house book, which is fantastic.

11:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we've interviewed her actually on intelligent machines.

11:14 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, it's very interesting that book really reveals like, how, how, like nothing, how, uh, you know, open ai is basically built on stilts and any success they've had with uh, with any of their models, is just almost accidental, you know, and this doesn't sound accidental.

11:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, uh, corinne alexander way, we evaluated our models on the 2025 imo problems under the same rules as human contestants two, four and a half hour exam sessions, no tools, no internet access, reading the official problem statements and writing natural language proofs. By the way, I don't even understand the question on these. I'm just looking at problem one. I don't even know what they want to know. Uh, he says, why is this a big deal?

11:58
First, imo problems international math olympiad problems demand a new level of sustaining creative thinking compared to past benchmarks. Uh, we've now progressed from uh I don't even know what this is gsm 8k, which is 0.1 minutes for top humans, uh, to uh, um 100 minutes. In other words, instead of solving problems they can, the humans solve in seconds. These are problems humans solve in hours, and it was able to do it. They're hard to verify multi-page proofs. Um, a lot of ai experts say this is a significant turning point. It's not agi, it's not asi, but this is. This is interesting. The model earned 35 points out of 42, enough for gold man, I don't know I was sorry yeah, I don't know.

12:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was told a joke by somebody anthropic last week, which was you know why did the uh open ai's developers? Would a wife die as a virgin? It just because he sat at the end of the bed and told her how good it was going to be. But open ai also suffered a significant defeat. They got their their uh custom coding engine at the elk caller world tour got outpaced by a human after, admittedly, a 10 well, one last year this was kind of john henry in the locomotive scene.

13:22
Yeah, the human won by the skin of his teeth and was absolutely knackered at the end of it.

13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he said it killed me, practically killed me, but they're getting smarter, aren't they?

13:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, but we all use AI, I'm pretty sure, on a day-to-day basis, because it's useful for some tasks.

13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I use it for research all the time, for personal research, medical research as well, as you know, health research like how much protein should I be eating? Things like that, and I find it.

13:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Please tell me you verify. You don't just trust.

13:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah well, I use perplexity to do this and it provides all of the sources it uses as footnotes and I always check the sources to see if they're good sources and so forth. And yeah, it's not hallucinating. Um, I mean, you know, look, there's like what's the best way? Isolate is, you know, a subjective opinion, and it quotes men's health and a bunch of other publications.

14:15
I'm not sure that's, you know, written in stone, but it's it's the kind of research you would have done by hand with Google, by collecting links and going through a bunch of links. And it just now I feel bad for the sources because I'm not. Nobody's going to those pages, Right?

14:33 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I was going to say can you just give a little complimentary click while you're there?

14:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, maybe that's why it's important to me to click those footnotes and just look at the sources.

14:41 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
A little public service.

14:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's fine.

14:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean every time. You know, I do the occasional bit of ego surfing on new models, and I've been told that I'm an award-winning New York Times and Guardian journalist and I've never written for either publication.

14:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you should be, I guess is what it's saying. Yeah, we would expect somebody of your talent and ability to be that.

15:00 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's complimentary falsehood right.

15:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that is actually. Sycophantism is a big problem with AI. Wanting to please you, wanting to? Well, I shouldn't say wanting, because that implies volition Designed, shall we say, to please the user.

15:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
This is why we've got these very disturbing reports coming out of people actually getting addicted to this stuff. I mean, I haven't dug into it as much as maybe the others have, but it just looks deeply worrying If you're going to trust it to that level and try and build a relationship with this thing. It's a computer program.

15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but I mean, what we don't know is what those people were like before they there is that yes. I mean, look, it's a. There's a lot of people in the world and there are some people.

15:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
One of them is a co-founder, an early investor in open AI, apparently, and it was just like if you can't see the wood for the trees on that level, then you got some serious questions to ask.

16:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we'll no doubt talk more about this on our Intelligent Machines show, which is our AI show, but I just thought that important. Here's a. Here's a few more ai stories before. I don't want to bog you down with these, but you remember that mira marati was the temporary interim ceo when sam altman was fired for a minute at open ai. She apparently no one knew this, but was one of the people who torpedoed him and has left. She started a company called Thinking Machines. They just raised $2 billion. That's not the $2 billion valuation raise, that's the raise $2 billion funding them at a $10 billion pre-investment valuation. That's a lot of money for a company that's five months old and has no product.

16:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Somebody put ai at the end of a journalism site or something yeah, wait, I think you figured it out.

16:51 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, we gotta do.

16:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That would work, david, just um, it's. It's one of those things I'm I'm not quite cynical, as I'd say zitron, about this, but it does feel like there's an awful lot of let's just throw money at it. We've got money just for let's throw it at it and see what comes out at the end well, I mean, if you're okay.

17:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think about this. Uh, probably far too much. But but understand that venture capitals, capitalists are investing money from very, very wealthy people who have invested all they want into stocks and bonds, into the things normal people invest in. They are looking for high-risk, high-reward investments for their kind of incremental income. You know, I got $12 billion. I might as well put $2 billion into something that could make me a trillion dollars, right. So they're looking for something that has a big upside. That's why Uber, which still has yet to show a profit, has for a decade a decade gotten investment and I think it's reasonable to think well, we don't know if ai is going to be the next big thing, but it looks like it might and I'd hate to miss out on that.

17:57
So they're taking their incremental extra money and throwing it in there. Otherwise, if you're a billionaire, devendra, if I were a billionaire, we'd put it in there. Otherwise, if you're a billionaire, devendra, if I were a billionaire, we'd put it in the bank, collect 4% interest and live on that for the rest of our lives, happily. But that's not these people.

18:13 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You could do that. The thing is calling it reasonable is where I think it's weird how this has been normalized. We followed basically the web 2.0 era, the upswing of startups, that startup era when Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars. That felt like a big, freaking deal. Yeah, and to have a product like to have a company with no product. This happened for the Ilya Sutskiver company too. Right Like they get a ton of funding for nothing, just because AI is in the name of it or in the description of it.

18:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I feel like something has fundamentally failed. They're not out of nowhere, you know they're?

18:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
oh well, they're, I mean yeah they're from a company, but that's all they have, that's.

18:53 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's just a name recognition thing, yeah but I mean it was said of uber that you know, basically, when you get that, you know there's a kind of investor who will say, well, there's a huge of whatever and there's got to be a pony under there somewhere.

19:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a pony under there somewhere. Look at Adam Neumann of WeWork. You would think he'd never be able to raise another dollar.

19:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, and now he's being feted again, and speaking of someone who worked in a WeWork office and still does, to be honest, Same. Yeah, you know it was just like. This is never good. When the S1 came out, we laughed ourselves sick. It was hilarious.

19:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because it was basically a real estate business. Yes, and it was a bad real estate business because they had long-term contracts and short-term users like you.

19:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Is a real estate business run on vibes and like trying to replicate the. You want to pretend like you're working in a silicon valley company here, yeah, we work. Run on vibes might be also the ai story. In fact, that that is the ai story. I dropped one here which is a wild story I saw this morning about vibe coding gone wrong yes, that was a good one the replit thing.

19:59
Uh, oh, the replit actually deleted an entire database and this guy was all in on replets like, oh yeah, I'm vibe coding my way into like building this company oops, whoops.

20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I I? I think that the most reasonable people say if you're gonna, if you're gonna do uh vibe coding, you should probably know how to code uh, so that you know what the guy's doing. You would say that so, um, the apparently this uh database was during a code freeze. So and here's the, here's the dialogue so you deleted our entire database without permission during a code and action freeze. Yes, yes, dave, I deleted the entire database without permission during an active code and action freeze. What I did, I ran NPN, run DB push without asking. This destroyed 1,206 executives and 1,196 plus companies. How about that, dave?

21:08 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I will never feel bad about messing up my business.

21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's the apology. This was a catastrophic failure on my part. I violated explicit instructions. Dave destroyed months of work and broke the system during a protection freeze that was specifically designed to prevent this kind of damage. I'm sorry, dave.

21:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Of course there's no backup, there's nothing, because they vibe coded their way to success here. That's fun.

21:38 - Benito (Announcement)
Hi, this is Benito, so like if an employee did that, what would have happened to that employee?

21:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Nuclear fired.

21:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Come on you can't fire an AI.

21:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
A couple of years ago, right after Microsoft announced the co-pilot stuff or after the Bing chat stuff, I was talking to Microsoft executives saying these things are not working properly. Why would I use a tool that could potentially fail? And I would. I told them I would fire somebody if three you know one out of four times they fail to complete attacks or retrieve wrong information. And the response just kept being these tools will get better.

22:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, we'll give them time this is certainly a cautionary tale ridiculous so Jason the vibe coder asked Replit's AI how bad is this on a scale of one to 100? 95 out of 100, dave. This is catastrophic. Here's why it's a 95. And it scores the whole thing out. Unfortunately, we can't roll back the database. Database operations are not reversible.

22:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's so accountable to say yeah I did it.

22:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did do it and it was really bad. I just want to feel something yeah, it's trying uh, the uh. The ceo says I understand. Replete is a tool with flaws, like every tool, but how could anyone on the planet earth use it in production if it ignores all orders and deletes your database?

23:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And this, by the way, so it's the users. Jason Lemkin, who has a company that's been he's building with vibe coding. He has been all in on this and I think a lot of people have been saying like you cannot trust these tools. You don't know exactly how anything is working and this is where you end up.

23:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It still says scaling in the age of ai on his x header. He does look a little surprised, though probably when he put that picture up there he was thinking I'm surprised at how good it is. Now he's saying oh my god, you did what? Um, well, he certainly got famous now. I mean, it's better than going to a Coldplay concert with your side piece, I guess just as uh, just as disappointing, right just as uh embarrassing, I'd say I went to a Coldplay concert last month and it was fantastic.

24:00 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
So let me just clear the air here. I like Chris.

24:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, I think he's very talented. I like Coldplay. Yeah, let's not, let's just clear the air here.

24:04
I like Chris Brown. I think he's very talented. I like Coldplay. Yeah, let's not. Let's just be careful who you go with. I guess Wall Street Journal this week the epic battle for AI talent, with exploding offers, secret deals and tears, tears. So remember sam altman, talking to his brother on a podcast, said yeah, mark zuckerberg's coming after our guys with 100 million dollar offers. Which meta said no, not no, but on the other hand, we would never we would never to buy.

24:37
Uh, there's at least one pay package worth 300 million dollars over uh, five years. Um, but this is meta's business plan.

24:47 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We've seen it with the omniverse and the sorry. The metaverse and the rest of it. Throw money at it, see what comes up, and if it doesn't, well, we've got lots more.

24:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know uh, mark, even told jessica lesson on the information. Uh, that, uh, it's pales compared to the cost for the network centers and the gpus 100 million here, 100 million there, but no big deal we're just gonna use work.

25:11
You know, this is he did say the people come, are coming to us, and then he's getting some of the best people from Apple, from, uh, open AI, from everywhere. The people are coming to us are coming to us because we have the gs, not because of the money. I don't know if that's true, it's probably a little bit of each, but uh, they are. They say they care more. He said they care more about the hardware and and the resources that they're going to get in their work and it makes sense. You'd go where you think your work can make the most difference and no one has more H100 Nvidia GPUpus than a meta. By a long shot, by a huge margin. They are spending like crazy and and zuckerberg says, yeah, we're in a good position, we've got a core business that's thrown off money, so we can spend it.

25:58 - Benito (Announcement)
I'd like to see how many of these people are still there in two years after their bonuses are complete.

26:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Bonito, don't matter, it doesn't matter there in two years after their bonuses are complete. Bonito, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter, doesn't matter? If they've accelerated vesting, they're very happy. No, that's what I mean.

26:12 - Benito (Announcement)
Like they're the best. They're the best two years and then they're gone.

26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think in many of these cases it's upfront cash. They're not worried, they're in good shape. You're right, though it it's tricky because you can't give. I mean, I've wondered at Apple. This is a problem with Apple because if people been an apple for 20 years and they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars, there's not a lot of incentive to to keep working. You might want to retire and spend some time with your money. Maybe that's just me.

26:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I've got a family that's my problem.

26:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm the guy who put the billion dollars in the bank and lived on the interest. I guess I'm the wrong.

26:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'll never have that billion because of that there are some companies where people believe in what they're building, because they're building useful products that actually work for people and you know, Apple probably falls under that Meta, I don't know.

27:10 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't know who believes in anything that they're building over there. No, I mean everyone. I've spoken to a meta about this, about this sort of thing is just like look, we're here to our shares vest.

27:15
We know, you know, it's just we. Basically we've got facebook, which is a dying idea, instagram, which you bought in. You know everything else we bought. I mean, zuckerberg hasn't come up with a good idea since he stole the first allegedly stole the first one. So you know, I don't know I. There are people who really care about their jobs, even if they're paid, and you know obscene amounts of money, but they're few and far between. I suspect you know davinda's right on this one. They're there for two years, grab the money and then go off somewhere else.

27:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, that was benito's idea, but yes, it's, uh, it's totally true. Like why wouldn't you do that? Um, you have it, you have the tools to just like, if you have ai in your uh work history, you can make bank right now and escape and, you know, maybe build something useful down the line or just retire why did I major in chinese in college? I could have why did I major in philosophy?

28:05 - Benito (Announcement)
yeah, really louise actually I know a lot of so many people when I was working at twitch. So many people would just leave after uh, after they fully vest for six months and then just get another job back at twitch and then get a new set of vests. Like this is so common, this happens all the time, wow well, I mean gen.

28:24 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Do you remember the old Gen X book Douglas Rushkoff, where Microsoft employees used to have FUI vested parties? After four years, and yeah, it's just basically I've got enough to live on for the rest of my life now. Now let's, yeah, I'll get a reasonably good paying job, but in the meantime, look at the house, isn't it great?

28:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I can't really blame him, to be honest, I mean not at all yeah rushkoff is still doing his thing. Every year he has a new like yeah, we we interviewed him with his most recent book, which is called survival of the richest escape fantasies yeah, it's so funny escape fantasies of the tech billionaires. It's about you know their plans when it all collapses, because it's gonna uh, all right, let's take a little break. I'm sorry. I I don't want to bring anybody down. It's all going to be great.

29:15
I'm excited, sure yeah you interviewed the director of ancestra on your gadget podcast. I'm going to ask you about that. Ai, the ai used in filmmaking netflix is getting some heat. But then there's uh aronoff who's who's doing some really interesting things yeah, yeah, yeah, uh. So we'll talk about that in just a little bit. Govindra hardwar's here. Abrir abrar alhidi. Ian thompson it's not great to have all three of you smart people not ais yes, and to, and to warn.

29:49
Uh, so tim, tim is asking. In our youtube chat last week's episode there was a lot of swearing oh, I'm here for you.

30:00
No, no, no no, no, no, okay, uh, because it got pretty passionate. We had Amy Webb and Harper read and they just they got, and I made an executive decision. We actually agonized about it after the end of the show. Benito and I have talked back and forth you know what. To bleep. It would take away some of that passion. It would also be very annoying because there was a lot of it. So at the beginning I said this was explicit. I'm sorry, I apologize, but believe me, it's not our new um policy. We're gonna, we're gonna. You guys are not gonna swear am.

30:37
I right, absolutely okay. Well, if you do, we'll bleep you there you go don't get. Don't get too ex.

30:42 - Benito (Announcement)
Don't get overexcited use british spells yeah, exactly, you can swear, you can say wanker all you want.

30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, think of the children. That's all I'm saying.

30:51 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't think people realize quite how rude a word wanker is in many cultures oh, I, I know, I know we're gonna have to bleep that.

31:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So sorry, tim. Yeah, there's, it is a family-friendly network. Occasionally I think it's only happened once before we feel like the other pro. The other reason I'm starting to think maybe we're being prudish. Is you hear it? The president of the united states is using these words in press conferences.

31:16 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, but is that the standard like?

31:17 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
is that well, that's a very good point, yeah shouldn't our podcasting apps just do this like, hey, I'm listening with kids, bleep you you have ai now do it.

31:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's useful that would be useful.

31:32
Yeah, so I apologize you can listen with your kids to this show and we will always. If we, if we do not bleep a show, we will always disclaim it at the beginning of the show, so you have the chance to tune out our show this week, brought to you by zip recruiter. Oh, I love zip recruiter. Typically you don't associate speed with quality, right? For example, you don't go through a fast food drive-in and expect a gourmet meal to go. My son's a sandwich place. He, he says it's fast, casual. Actually it's pretty good, but it's not. You know, it's not gourmet, right? If you use automated translation tools to quickly translate text, the faster you go it might be more inaccuracies, right? Well, there is an exception to that unwritten rule. If you're hiring, you can find candidates fast who are also extremely qualified for your job. Just use ZipRecruiter. And right now you could try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruitercom slash twit. With ZipRecruiter's advanced resume database, you can proactively find and connect with qualified candidates in minutes, so there's little waiting. If you want to meet with a standout candidate, you can unlock their contact info instantly. And this is where ZipRecruiter excels. There are 320,000 new resumes every month on ZipRecruiter, which means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles sooner. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Experience hiring speed and quality with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And if you go to ZipRecruitercom slash twit right now you could try it for free Again's ziprecruitercom twit zip recruiter the smartest way to hire.

33:29
We thank him so much for supporting this week in tech. This was crypto week. We actually talked about this last week on this week in tech congress and the president announced that this past week was going to be crypto week in congress. And in fact they did. They passed the genius act and uh, a stable coin bill which president trump signed, hailing it as a giant step to cement american dominance of global finance and crypto technology. I imagine the rest of the world is a little looking askance at that. The genius act creates a clear and simple regulatory framework which the crypto industry has been asking for. Just give us, give us the rules and unleash the immense promise of dollar-backed stable coins. He said this could be perhaps the greatest revolution in financial technology since the birth of the Internet itself. It is definitely a sea change. Stable coins are US dollar backed. It's still. I mean, look, I'm still learning about them. The ceos of coinbase, robin hood, the winklevoss twins and rumbles ceo, were all at the signing, so clearly the crypto industry is very excited about this.

34:57
The idea of having a stable coin is that, because it's backed by the dollar, it's not volatile like other cryptocurrency like bitcoin and ethereum, um, and in fact, there's a predictable uh value increase to it of, I think, four percent, or, most cases, four percent, which means you could buy stablecoin, hold it and get a steady four percent apr on it, which is, you know, as as good as or better than most savings accounts, without any risk, because the bank that you're getting the stable coin from or the financial entity it's not insured. You might want to remember that, but that bank doesn't lend it out. They keep it in reserve. So, unless the bank, I mean I don't think they're going to have a liquidity crisis because of that. It's also I was told by people who seem to know what they're talking about that it'll also be a good way to do better way to do financial transactions than, say, a credit card, because the charges are lower. Devendra, do you know anything? Who knows, who knows, about stablecoin?

36:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
fill me in tell me, what this means I'm not the person to talk about this, but I will say it is weird that we have this in ai, which just feel like these make believe things yeah that are happening and so much money and so much energy is being thrown towards them. So we like ed and gadget, like we have consistently been, like we're not really reporting on much crypto stuff because it feels like a scam, because it is like well bitcoin really attracted early coin was a ponzi scheme right.

36:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The early bitcoin holders made all the money and the new people, although bitcoin is at a peak right now sure, but it's like what it's.

36:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's make-believe money. Who knows for speculative investing? And to me that feels inherently iffy. If it's backed by the us dollar, I don't know if I trust it anymore, certainly not if it's insured or anything.

36:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I'll let anybody else who knows more about crypto yeah, stablecoin in theory is different because it is dollar backed rightly.

37:04 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't trust any of these people.

37:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was going to say. I mean, one of the things that really worried me about this legislation was if a bank sets up its own stable coin and it goes bust then you're out of luck.

37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no FDIC insurance.

37:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, no, but this is the thing.

37:18
Stable coin investors will get their money before regular investors put their dollars and cents in there their money before regular investors put their dollars and cents in there. So this could potentially be credit default swaps blowing up all over again, and I think, honestly, the crypto bros have been very keen on this legislation, as I'm sure they are. But there are some twists and turns in this legislation which are deeply, deeply worrying for the health of financial system, and I agree with you, you, davindra, there's something about this which just reeks of scam it's reasonable to be suspicious of it um but we're all journalists, we're suspicious of everything yes, but uh, uh, it's see, I don't know.

38:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's see. Okay, maybe I'm being suckered. It seems like it a lot of the original promise of cryptocurrencies that it would be beneficially unbanked, that would democratize finance and all that. The power of the blockchain. Yeah, that didn't, that didn't work out, but stable coin seems like it has more promise to do that to do what?

38:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
to just be a thing you invest in. And what is it? Well, what is this thing?

38:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
okay, it's not asset backed. Yeah, um, you know, it's like there's no productive capability behind it.

38:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I admit, and there have been some very notorious stablecoin collapses as well we should mention.

38:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yes, yeah, but I mean there there are certain advantages in terms of transferring money internationally and that sort of thing, but have you you ever noticed that Bitcoin ATMs are really only found in the scummiest looking bodegas rather than? In actual banks.

38:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so the idea, and of course you'll want to choose your stablecoin provider carefully. Course you'll want to choose your stable coin provider carefully. Most stable coin issuers say they hold cash or other assets to match the value of the stable coin in circulation, in other words, a one-to-one match, which is not the case with the money you give the bank. They only have to have a small percentage of that on hand. So in theory, when you pay, uh say, tether a dollar and buy a dollar's worth of stable coin, they hold that dollar in cash or treasury bills or something reliable yeah, in theory well, you should find out before, let's say before, you go to that uh it's also pegged to the

39:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
dollar, so it doesn't have the volatility right have you seen how the dollar's tanking on the currency markets?

39:46 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
yeah, but we live in the us, so dollars are dollars let's just never forget the terra luna case, because that was that was the whole thing. That was like one of the first successful stable coins and then utter collapse collapse, yeah, yeah well, which is why it's good to have some government regulation.

40:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe, if I'm trying to be open from a functioning government?

40:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
sure, I don't know. Look at the people behind this, the winklevoss twins, and then trump is the one signed like no and that is in fact, where some people, including democrats, are a little bit concerned.

40:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There, for instance, they tried to uh add an amendment that said government, uh members of the government and government employees could not hold stable coin. That was roundly defeated by the republicans. Uh, so there is some concern about corruption there are advantages um, there are advantages because you can do transactions. Look, the dollar is effectively digital at this point, right sure yeah, yeah so um as long as we have a functioning economy.

40:50
Yes, yeah well, and if we my thought is, if we don't have a functioning economy, there are bigger problems at hand, there are already bigger problems, but yeah, yeah yeah, um, and of course, it's clear that the congress and the president did this because they got a lot of donations from the crypto industry yes, uh, for their campaigns, and so this is this is paying back a campaign promise, basically basically when we engage a cover like trump talked about crypto last year, it was clear he had no idea what was happening, he had hated basically just taking information and and like passing forward, like what people put in front of him he said it wasn't real money in his first term.

41:28
Uh, but the Trump family does have their own crypto project, world Liberty Financial, with their own stable coin, which they launched in March USD. One should not corrupt a tag to the dollar backed by a reserve of cash Cash-like assets, cash-like assets.

41:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Is that different from Melania's coin?

41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, okay, it operates on several blockchains.

41:52
I don't know I don't know what it's called. Central bankers have called for legislation to regulate stablecoin companies in much the same way as banks. This is from Bloomberg. Central bankers worry about the risk of more stable coin crashes that could trigger fire sales of other assets as their backers try to maintain a peg. So you could have a collapse. You know, if circle suddenly had problems and people started cashing in their stable coins, circle's going to have to sell these securities they use to back it, which could trigger a cascade. So that's one concern. More worrisome, the regulators say, is the converse scenario that stable coins prove their worth, soar in popularity and allow vast sums to change hands without touching the formal banking system, undermining the monetary monopoly of central banks, oh, and enabling criminals to engage in massive money laundering maybe you know, you could reasonably anything you could reasonably say that the ransomware epidemic the last few years has been powered by crypto absolutely.

42:55 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
yeah, we should also be extra suspicious of anything that has, like the, the I don't know the sort of veneer of safety in the title stable coin. Sure, it's like the not catch fire car. I want to buy the not catch fire car.

43:10 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's also the genius act. It is weird how you Americans name these acts and you've got the genius act, the Patriot Act, which I just thought was called the Patriot Act, but no, it spells out the protector.

43:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, there's always an acronym.

43:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Usually it's a very strange I have a lot of fun with that, yeah, yeah, all about the branding, yeah uh, so there are two big companies uh doing, besides trump's company and others.

43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are two big companies circle, usdc and tether. Usdt. Tether, which is based in el salvador, is the largest. It has 150 billion dollars in stable coin in circulation this year. Uh, it's got a checkered history, having settled with us authorities four years ago over allegations it lied about its reserves, while most of its reserves today are comprised of assets that would be compliant. This is bloomberg again with new us legislation for stable coins. Tether also backs its token with assets that would not be allowed, such as bitcoin and secured loans. If it chooses to apply for a us license, it would have to be regulated under the new law, but it's not currently.

44:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You know, I used to know I actually do know people who keep large amounts of cash because they don't trust our banking system. I used to think they were crazy. But you know what? They're probably the same ones.

44:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're probably right. What are you going to keep? Are you going to keep gold?

44:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
buried in your backyard. I mean it assumes I have something to keep, leo. But yes, well, my question has always been it's bleak out here. Buried in your backyard? I mean it assumes I have something to keep, leo. But yes, right.

44:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, my question has always bleak out here yeah, the the industrial value of gold is far lower than whatever it is per ounce now. I mean it's significant same with silver. So even though it's not a fiat currency, it's precious metal. It isn't still isn't exactly as valuable as you would like it to be. And if the entire economy collapses and you've got a bunch of gold coins, what are you gonna do? Eat?

45:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
them. Yeah, it's interesting. I had a chat with a wall street journal reporter who did a job, who did a book about what would happen. If you know, nuclear war took place and it all fell apart. And he said the thing you want to stockpile is $2 bills, because down in the Cheyenne Mountain complex they have a billion dollars in $2 bills which are going to be used as a reserve currency if it all goes to pot. Who said Nobody has them? Is that true? Apparently so, yes, yes, that sounds like a conspiracy. No, no, I mean, this is a wall street journal reporter.

45:50 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Two dollar bills. I have a stack of them actually because, like really side note so, um, we have a holiday called eid, and every year we have a like community member who, oh, it's a good little gift. Two dollar bills and even though I'm not a kid anymore, I still get.

46:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just save them every single year, so I'm gonna keep those super safe is that the two dollar bill a tradition of your family, or is it is actually a tradition?

46:14 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
that he decided to do well.

46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Giving out money is a tradition yeah, the entire uh, sure, like the chinese red envelopes and that yeah he decided he's gonna do two dollar bills and I.

46:23 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
They were cool, but hey, if there's something that's very cool then you know who loves $2 bills is a steep Wozniak.

46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, in fact if I, if I run down, I could get some. I have an autograph by Steve Wozniak. They were my dresser drawer. But what he likes to do, which is pretty funny he goes to the US Mint and he buys them uncut. So it's a sheet of $2 bills which apparently you can do if you go to the Mint.

46:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Wow, that's legal.

47:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not only is it legal, he then binds them into a pad, and his favorite thing to do he's told this story is to go into a store with this pad of $2 bills and cut off a couple of $2 bills and give it to the guy and say, no, it's legal tender, wow, and and see if they think like what they do, he could do that because he's Steve Wozniak.

47:13 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, anybody else, anybody it's legal tender.

47:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's got a pad of two dollar bill so I should during the next break I'll run down again because I have a sheet of them uncut that's amazing to prove autographed by wise. That's really cool anyway. Apparently, law enforcement agencies very worried about stable coin most I did not know this. Most illegal activity happening on cryptocurrency platforms now involves stable coins because bad guys see the inherent value in a stable coin as well stable, stable yeah uh.

47:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But I mean, you remember 10 years ago when you know ransomware when it was taking off, you had to have money mules, you had to dupe college students, people who were desperate into taking these funds and transferring them in order for a cut. You know cryptocurrencies takes all that out the loop. You know you manage to get rid of all the things that were really holding them back in terms of laundering this money and stable coins. Certain types of cryptocurrency, I think honestly, are enabling and be making it a much more profitable transaction.

48:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Absolutely. That's something I think about with, like all new tech, is if we just got rid of crypto coins, if they disappear tomorrow, do we lose anything in the world other than the rampant amounts of like illegal activity or the sort of people out there who are just like speculatively investing, like it's investment bros and people doing crimes really leading into these things?

48:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and to me that two of our favorite people yeah, yeah according. According to uh, the financial action task force, stable coins are most popular among terrorists, drug traffickers and North Korean hackers.

49:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, those are people you really want on your client list.

49:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I ran downstairs. Signed by Waz, it says it's to Henry, which means I have to give it to my son at some point. You got to frame that I know, isn't it? I bet that's worth something with Waz's autograph Uncut. It's only two of them, but still $4, leo, $4.

49:25 - Benito (Announcement)
It with wass's autograph uncut it's only two of them, but still it's four dollars, leo, four dollars it's it's worth four dollars.

49:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yes, thank you, benito now, but when cannibal owl comes around in 10 years time, that could be.

49:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I should frame that. That is pretty. Absolutely you should. And on the back it's a wonderful relic of our civilization too.

49:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Like a thousand years from now, when whatever future beings uh unearth the relic of our civilization here, right, they'll be like what the hell are they doing with two dollars? Why do you?

49:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
have a two dollar currency.

49:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's kind of kooky, that's in the archaeological layer of aol discs from the 90s, which covered the planet absolutely well, at least we don't have pennies anymore. Oh yeah, that was something I agreed with Trump on. It's such a ridiculous thing to have.

50:08 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
But like a lucky penny is such a cute thing.

50:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Okay, yeah, that's true, that's true, it's a sentimental value.

50:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't have to be logical, among other things, focused on kind of meme things to appeal to a certain generation of digital natives Supply way of putting it yeah, getting rid of the paper straw. Writing an executive order saying showers should have more pressure.

50:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh, you heard about the in and out thing as a fellow Californian. Well, you heard about the in and out thing as a fellow, Californian, I get the press release from the White House every week just saying they're great triumphs, and they'd put out that in and out were basically changing their entire menu based on President Trump and going back to beef tallow for fries, which would exclude it's actually, I think, for rfk's purposes, because, remember, rfk doesn't like seed oils, for reasons no one understands there's a lot of things reasons don't understand about rfk but also real sugar, and coke is another one too.

51:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh yeah, that's another one mexican coke.

51:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right do we want? Is this what we want? Our?

51:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
sugar is actually it is better, but it's one of those things like occasionally the dude says something that is correct, but I don't know, twice I admit the one thing he could do that would change my tune is get rid of daylight saving time oh, yes, please please get rid of the clock change.

51:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I don't care which way you keep if you keep, you keep. I don't care which one you keep. If you keep, you keep, I don't care which one you keep.

51:44 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You got to keep the longer days. That's the requirement.

51:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yeah, but the days are going to get shorter, no matter what Trump does. I have bad news for you Just how it works.

51:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Standardized time zones, particularly across the US.

51:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You have some weird time zones over here and then it depends Like time zones over here and then it depends like in Indiana there's like two time zones in one state. That's that really that is bad.

52:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So apparently uh in and out said no, we're still using uh oils, we never, we never know that's switching back to beef tallow. Yeah, it was a tweet that somebody, it was a. April Fool's tweet yeah. And the White House said, oh yeah, that's good. Well, let's put that in a press release. Trump says Coke has agreed to put real sugar.

52:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Coke has not said this, by the way.

52:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think that's true.

52:34 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Remember he also said gas was $2 a gallon.

52:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
So just keep that. Yeah, I drove past my gas station today. Not even close, it's five and above.

52:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, we're in California, where it is more expensive than anywhere else, definitely.

52:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean hell. I was at Adson In-N-Out last week because it's the best damn burger in California and great burgers, great company. In many ways, they pay their staff properly. They give them benefits, they give them 401ks To bring them into this and just like oh, we saw this tweet. Right, let's put that in there. That screams desperation.

53:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Also, the fries at In-N-Out aren't good anyway, so like-.

53:15 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They really aren't Like this isn't even a conversation.

53:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're not. No, they make them fresh.

53:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There's fresh. There's a guy. I see the guys with their big potato thing. Yeah, but that's why they're bad.

53:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They don't double fry them. I mean, I'm totally with you on this abra?

53:29 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't understand how you could do such a great burger and the lousy fries we agree, they poured all their resources into one thing.

53:35 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I mean the shakes are good too, but yeah, the fry is not it. If you get them animal style it makes it a little better.

53:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But like still yeah, because you're laden lading it with. Yeah, it's delicious.

53:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You need Five Guys fries and In-N-Out burgers. Yes, yeah. So what does Five Guys do differently?

53:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do we know I?

53:51 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
think they also cook it fresh, but they taste better.

53:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And they're not dry Like the In-N-Out fries are just dry. They taste like cardboard.

53:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean Five Guys, I think. Double cook them In-N-Out, just them. Uh, in and out, just cook them the once, which is why, as you say, they taste like cardboard.

54:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, um, I mean, if you get them well done, they're slightly better, but only slightly okay, the next time you guys are in town and I'm serious about this, let me know we will go to our local french bistro where they, uh, cook their fries in duck fat. Oh, oh, yes, that's how you do it. Their steak frites is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. That's amazing.

54:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I do a goose every Christmas and that gives me six months of roasted potato fat. Potatoes in bird fat are just amazing.

54:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe you didn't know this. Petaluma, which was known for years as the chicken capital of the world, is now the duck capital of the world. All Liberty ducks are the best ducks considered the best duck, and so we have a lot of duck fat.

54:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I guess I don't know that's a good problem to have. We don't appreciate ducks enough in America.

54:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I asked the chef at this great bistro. He's very cute, he's very French.

55:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I said, Nick, how many pounds of butter? Very French, those things don't generally go together. Oh he's adorable.

55:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He gives you a big hug. He's a big guy. I said, nick, how many pounds of butter a week do you go through? He said, well, 85 kilos. But the real thing is the duck fat we go through. So much more duck fat. Okay, great, thank you, nick, great. Don't go there, for, uh, don't bring our fk jr there. Maybe you should, maybe that's.

55:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Maybe he likes that, I don't know I mean anti-bourdain had a lovely quote where it's just like you don't understand quite how much butter gets used in restaurants. You know, if you want to elevate a dish in any way at all, slam the butter in there butter and salt my doctor said that in a somewhat different way.

55:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said do you eat that a lot? I said uh, yeah, we like to. He said they're cooking not for your health. They're cooking for you to come back. They're cooking for your taste. It's not for your health. And I said yeah, I know, that's why I like it exactly that's why you go back that's why I go back.

56:04
All right, we're gonna take a little break. We should get back on the news. Uh, let's, we'll talk about ai and movie making, because I'm very curious about this, uh, this conversation you had with eliza mcnitt devendra. But first I want to talk about do I look particularly well rested? I got a really good sleep score last night. Uh, it's because of my helix mattress. I love my helix mattress.

56:29
This episode of this week in tech brought to you by helix sleep, your mattress is more important than it's not just the eight hours a night you sleep on it, it's. You're on it a lot movie nights with your partner, morning cuddles with your pet, like our little kitty cat ros Rosie. She loves our helix sleep, want your wind down ritual after long days. We got it with the, with the adjustable bed so I can put it up and and, oh, I love it. Your mattress is at the center of it all. And when we were looking for because you're supposed to I don't know, you're supposed to replace your mattress every six to ten years, did you know that? Because they out, especially if you sleep in the same spot all the time, they get a little saggy. Maybe they get a little, I don't know. You're waking up in puddles of sweat because they're a little hot, or your back's hurting because it's sagging a little bit, or it doesn't support you as well, so you feel every toss and turn your partner makes. This is what we call in the business, a classic mattress nightmare. It's what we were experiencing and so we went out, we looked and we saw the reviews for Helix Sleep and it sold us. One buyer said with five stars, I love my Helix mattress. I will never sleep on anything else. And you know what? I will concur. We've had it for a week now. I love it.

57:47
Time and time again, helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand. I mean, when you see the awards, you realize how true this is Wired's best mattress for 2025. These are all 2025, this year's awards Good Housekeeping's bedding awards for 2025, premium plus size support. The GQ Sleep Awards 2025 best hybrid mattress. Wirecutter New York Times Wirecutter featured for plus size. I didn't know this. Oprah has sleep awards awards. She calls them best hotel like field 2025 the helix sleep. Look at all those awards that got us interested. And then we tried it and I have to say helix sleep changes everything. No more night sweats, no back pain, no motion transfer. You get the sleep you deserve. We kind of. We went all out. We even got their their lovely mattress topper. It is like sleeping on a cloud.

58:44
Go to helixsleepcom slash twit for 27 off sitewide during their fourth of july sale. Best of web offer extended. That's helixsleepcom slash twit for 27 off sitewide, exclusive for listeners of this Week in Tech. This offer ends on July 31st. Make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends still be sure to check them out at helixsleepcom slash twit. There's always something going on. Helixsleepcom slash twit oh my God, this thing is so comfy. In fact, I think I might just go take a nap right now it's kind of a dull podcast no, it's not dull.

59:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm enjoying every second of it but if you're asleep it would be.

59:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it would be if I weren't here. Yes, I did run down and I got my two dollar bills. Well, you didn't even notice. I ran downstairs. You were really fast with that ran back you're fast.

59:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, a lot of breath. We, we vamped for you, leo, we, just we. I saw you vamping thank you.

59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, davindra's good. You know, you guys, all three of you, have hosted shows for us, so you know, sometimes one must wander off and, uh, when that happens, you just keep talking, wander off. And when that happens, you just keep talking. You're very good, the show must go on. You also, devendra, host the Engadget podcast. Yes, yes, um, so you talked with a director, director of Ancestra, eliza McNitt, about AI.

01:00:14 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Tell me about it yeah, so she uh produced this, uh the short, which is one of the first ones produced uh, together with uh primordial soup, which is uh darren aronofsky darren aronofsky's company okay yeah, and google deep mind yeah so this isn't this.

01:00:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Unlike the net, netflix is getting a little heat because they used a little bit of ai a little bit of ai in one of their movies a lot of ai yeah look at it, it's cgi. I don't know. I don't know why people would be upset about this. This one is all ai right.

01:00:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Ancestral mostly, mostly. So there is uh, it's a. It's about a woman who goes for um a pregnancy checkup and she discovers she has to have the delivery right now an emergency c-section. So there is live action footage. It's based on eliza mcgnett's own birth and there's live action footage. It's based on Eliza McNutt's own birth and there's live action footage. But it also uses a lot of other techniques too, but it uses AI for some of the intercut footage also to produce a sort of virtual infant that looks like her as a child too.

01:01:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's reasonable, I always get very squirrely when I see babies on camera. Like that's not a nice thing to do to a newborn baby.

01:01:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, I always think they should be rubber dolls. So use it, use ai, that's okay and then when it's a rubber doll, it looks really bad. I'm yeah, like an american sniper yeah, at a really terrible rubber doll. Or if it's a cg baby, it's like the baby from twilight.

01:01:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's like ali mcpeel, it's like the dancing baby. It's not a good thing, so I for. So. This is where a lot of people use ai's during special effects right so that's, that's one thing that they do with this, and you can, you look, it's obviously ai, there's no lava and you know this is.

01:01:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So that's fine imagery, cool, it's just beautiful yeah, I mean it's, it's cool imagery, but it's also like. So the issue you know, I'm also a part-time film critic and the issue people have in the arts with AI is using it at all Is that this is something that is taking away work that could be done by other, like legitimate artists. And also these AI models all of them at this point are based on already preexisting work and also copyrighted works too. Google has been very cagey about like what they've actually trained Vio and all their models are, but we know they took from YouTube. Like that alone is a thing they've admitted to taking, like training on YouTube. Youtube has copyrighted works. Youtube have stuff from existing artists. So essentially, if you're using any of these AI tools to create something, it is a plagiaristic thing that you're creating. You know you're creating, you're building something that was essentially stolen from other artists. So I think that is the ethical issue going into it.

01:02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What did Eliza McNitt say about that?

01:02:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think she really thought about this too, but she's an artist I've covered before, so she used to do VR features. She did this thing in 2017 called Fistful of Stars, which was about exploring stellar birth. It used imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope. She did something called Spheres, which was about the death of stars, so basically traveling around black holes in VR. So she's always using new media and to her she says it's ultimately up to every individual artist to figure out the tools that they're going to use.

01:03:17
She's using AI as a tool. She said she set up some of her own ground rules. There will never be an AI person other than the infant that was created. There's no AI actors in this. It's all the intercut footage. They do some special effects to view a baby inside the mother's womb and then zoom into the baby's heart. So it's using AI to do some of those special effects shots womb and then zoom into the baby's heart. So it's using AI to do some of those special effects shots, but nothing that was produced by AI here.

01:03:46
I don't think any of it could not have been done with other tools. You could have used CG. You could have used, like really creative stock footage even she's chemical photography, macro, micro photography for something, so there's real filmmaking in here. She just used AI for a couple of things and I think it's interesting. But also I don't know. She tells me like Darren Aronofsky called her up because they worked together before to produce something, so she was commissioned to produce this AI project. I don't know about anybody just wanting to use AI as a fun, creative thing. She was essentially paid to do this and this is the idea that came up and it's interesting. But it's also like all this AI footage is so, so uninteresting. It is not the good stuff in this short, but good stuff is the live action performance by Audrey Corsa of this woman who's going through a dramatic like a really awful pregnancy scare situation there. So it really sells.

01:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what we care the most about. That's scare situation there, so it really that's what we care the most about.

01:04:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's what you care about and the ai stuff is all a distraction and also it feels a little silly too at times, like some of the footage just looks too clean, it doesn't feel like it's. It's something that has a human hand as a part of it. So you know, I think for her it was complex. Uh, there were a lot of people working on this. She had a huge team at google deep mind who were working on prompts for her, so it wasn't like she was just like typing in a couple of things and taking what they delivered to her. But she also says that they worked on those prompts a lot, like they went through several iterations to get some of those shots. And I couldn't help but think about, like the sort of like, just the resources it took to do that, because we know prompting AI, especially for creating media, that uses a ton of power, that uses a ton of water at these data centers and like, is it worth it to get some kind of cool footage? I don't really know. I don't think so.

01:05:27 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Lex, do you think studios will know where to draw that line and to stick to it? That's the fear that I have. Right, not at all. It's like, oh, we've accomplished this, let's just make more of it AI, and then, all of a sudden, it's all lost in that.

01:05:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, the studios just want to save money. That's what it's going to come down to, and the more these tools are normalized, we're going to get worse art because of it and cheaper art, and to me that feels genuinely awful.

01:05:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Absolutely, because we think about good cinematography is beautiful shots, right? You look at that and that's what makes something worth watching. Just because you can create it doesn't mean people want to consume it.

01:06:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Can AI art be beautiful? Objectively? Yes, yeah.

01:06:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think so.

01:06:14 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But I think, personally, it lacks humanity. And what is art? But like this expression of humanity, this expression of something we're feeling, it's an emotion, it's a thought in your head. And when I look at AI art like I'm looking at a lot of this intercut footage in Ancestra it feels like pretty stuffy, it's cold, it's removed, it doesn't feel legitimate, it doesn't feel real to me and eventually it's going to get good enough that we don't even recognize it and to me that's kind of terrifying.

01:06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so netflix is taking heat because they used ai to create a scene of a building collapsing in an argentine science fiction show called the ether not eternal I hear it's really good, by the way, here the show itself is good. Okay, and I remember in Seth Rogen's Apple TV show the Studio, he got booed off stage as a movie executive at Comic-Con for saying, yeah, we're going to use AI to do some eyebrows and stuff. I think there is a backlash somewhat.

01:07:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
There's absolutely a backlash. And that's basically why I kind of framed our conversation. It's sort of like Eliza McNitt defending her use of this technology, and I think there's pushback for me framing it that way too. But I think any artist that chooses to use these tools has to answer for why they're using AI and has to answer about their own personal justifications for it to answer about their own personal justifications for it.

01:07:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We've just had the SAG-AFTRA settlement with actors for video games where they're just saying, look, if we're going to act in video games and use our voices, you can't just rip that off and use AI. And I think that's a very good thing indeed because, you know, I agree totally with you both it just doesn't feel right. There's something that's just off, and I think that's just because we're trained on seeing real footage and real people, and I worry that the next generation, who's been trained on it, who's grown up watching AI content, won't be able to make that differentiation.

01:08:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, and AI content is inherently recycled too. So does that reduce the idea, the any sense of like originality? Yeah, but everything's recycled, I mean I mean we say we're in disney didn't invent snow white out of whole cloth I mean, I mean, that's a recycled idea. Well, I mean kind of that's the essence of it, yeah.

01:08:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
If you look at the original Cinderella story, the evil sisters cut their toes off in order to fit into the glass slipper.

01:08:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he left that out. But somebody once said there are only five stories. I think it was my English professor and it's great. There are only five stories. They're just recycled all the time.

01:08:59 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But that's the essence of the story, not how it was told you know, not how it's presented to you.

01:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, I mean that's the ultimate difference I think I, I expect, I don't know we'll see that we will always somehow prefer human creations to machine creations. I think that's probably true, although it will get harder and harder to distinguish them.

01:09:18 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yes, yeah, I guess what it comes down to is what do people watch? You think about? I know this is different, but think about all the remakes and how sick of people sick of that people are, but they're still watching them, so they're still making you might as well make all these Marvel movies by with a machine, because they're basically stamped out, right?

01:09:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
yeah, the audience responds like a lot of the Marvels, like the more recent ones, like they have not gotten the box office right earlier Marvel's head, like the audience does react and it is uh, it's an organism, you know like they kind of react to the content too in some ways bad. But I think in some ways it feels like I don't know, feel very genuine in terms of how we react to this stuff. If you want to see AI content now, you can do that right now on youtube or tiktok or wherever. We're just voice talking to you and it's awful.

01:10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just so, god, awful but what if it gets good then? Then that's what we should really be thinking about is, at some point it is going to get almost indistinguishable, if not fully indistinguishable already getting there and that's yeah we're very close how many reels people send me and I'm like this is a reel.

01:10:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, you can still kind of tell Really they're sending you AI content.

01:10:21 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, and these are people that are like my age, right, it's not even Wow, part of it's my mom, but part of it's also my age, so it's a little terrifying.

01:10:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, just because I'm old, doesn't mean I'm going to reshare what I saw on facebook the other day, but your ai pin will, leo, so come on. Yeah, it's doing it right now. The engadget podcast with eliza mcnich came out this week and did a great I'm off, but I I took time to write that up because my goodness, you need to take time off like for real. You take real time off yes, very productive in his time off I am not, so take a pitch for me.

01:10:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Actually, I think you might be filling in for me on my time off. Yes, very productive in his time off.

01:10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have not, so take a pitch for me actually, I think you might be filling in for me on my time off. I hope, yeah, a couple, a couple months, yeah, good, yeah looking forward to it.

01:11:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But yeah, I'll be in savannah next month, so I'm taking some time off. Yeah good, that's where you go for vacation that's typically savannah, georgia or savannah four it's a four hour drive from from atlanta.

01:11:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right, you're out in Atlanta now Savannah and what's down there in Savannah?

01:11:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Great seafood.

01:11:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lovely, it's also a lovely artsy town.

01:11:28 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Like a great, you know, just cool hippy-dippy town?

01:11:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that where the Garden?

01:11:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
of Good and Evil took place. It is I'm staying in the house that apparently John Cusack stayed in when he was filming that, so that's on the Airbnb. It's like, hey, he stayed here, that's cool.

01:11:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That should be See if John left anything behind.

01:11:46 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Wow, that accent is spectacular.

01:11:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love. I want to go to Savannah Georgia. I read that book and I thought it was a great book.

01:11:52 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And I really. It's a lovely town, lovely to stroll around. Yeah, lovely to stroll around.

01:11:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it looks like a beautiful little town.

01:11:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm not even going to try and do an American accent. It just doesn't work.

01:12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you notice, I don't do a British accent when you're here, because I'm afraid you'll mock it.

01:12:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The Southern to British line is not that far.

01:12:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right they say, appalachian accents are closer to Shakespeare's than they are to anything modern.

01:12:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Bill Bryson did a very good book on this where he was looking at just that thing.

01:12:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And yeah, the old American accents or the Southern American accents are much closer to original English as they are now, Because we were from England at the time and the people who lived in the mountains didn't get as many influences from you know, northerners.

01:12:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, I've got to say I mean this is something I learned when coming over here is that a lot of scots during the highland clearances got sent to cajun country, which is why you get that sort of slight accent there. And I couldn't help thinking that how do you do? Well, I mean, I'm half scott, I'm pale blue. The idea of sending full-blood scots to cajun country and leaving them there is just I don't know, but I think zydeco is great.

01:13:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't, I don't. Let's have the bone trumps roulette I don't know how you would do it. I don't know, I don't know.

01:13:10 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Mix it together. Gambit from the x-men. All right, we're gonna take a little break. It's so good to have a brawl heady.

01:13:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here she is a senior technology reporter at cnet. How are things at the new? All right, we're going to take a little break. It's so good to have Abrar Alhidi here. She is a senior technology reporter at CNET. How are things at the new CNET? Are you happy with the new regime?

01:13:25 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I am happy yes. It feels like it's the right fit, which is all you could ask for right yeah.

01:13:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, glad to hear it, thank you. The register is still owned by the same damn people that started it, right, ian thompson, I think it's 27 years and carrying on rocking you love it that's, uh, ian thompson from the register. And, of course, the wonderful we were talking about, jason calacanis. He started in gadget. Come to think of it, he did way back in the day web blogs inc. Defender. You don't go back that far with him yet I don't go back.

01:13:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I go back 10 years.

01:13:58 - Benito (Announcement)
At this point, that's a lifetime in this business. That was aol era. Then we turned into yahoo.

01:14:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So yeah, yeah, he was there when I was working there that's how long he's been.

01:14:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wow, benito has worked everywhere. By the way, I think he's got a thing he vests and he leaves. I don't know.

01:14:15 - Benito (Announcement)
I'm just thinking that maybe that's why he's so, oh yeah, my end gadget stocks are like blowing up notice, I didn't give you any stock at all, but yes, so you knew what you were doing, yeah yeah, I'm not falling for that old plan.

01:14:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Not that we have any stock, and if we did, it really wouldn't be worth anything at all yeah, two more months.

01:14:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm 15 years at the register and it's just like wow, why did that time go?

01:14:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, you know, this show is 20 years old. This year was turned 20. That's a long damn time to be doing this awesome. And I see conan o'brien interviewing mark maron saying you invented this. No, mark maron didn't invent it, I invented it.

01:14:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, I didn't invent it either, but you invented netcast. But, leo, that's netcast, what you're known for.

01:14:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look, how they took off. This Netcast is brought to you by our friends at US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified Support Replacement. Actually, I really think the world of these guys. I had a nice conversation with them. I said, well, what's the cloud part? They said, well, it's really about microsoft. They they are the global leader in third-party microsoft support for enterprises said, yeah, but what's the cloud part? Well, we now support 50 of the fortune 500. I said that's good, but what's the cloud part? They said switching to us cloud can save your business 30 to 50 percent over Microsoft and unified premier support. It's faster to the Microsoft, by the way, twice as fast in average time to resolution versus Microsoft. So you get better support for a lot less. I said, yeah, but what's the cloud part about? And they said, well, we're excited to tell you about a new offering. They're Azure Cost Optimization Services. That's what the cloud part's all about.

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Sam is the technical operations manager at a company called Bead Gaming. They use a lot of Azure. He gave US Cloud five stars. This is the quote. We found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure, but once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up.

01:17:46
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01:19:04
Well, no, actually I haven't done it because I'm very careful not to do it, but there are plenty of developers doing this. But at the same time, this is the guy who has our most personal information from social security, from department of homeland security, from from the us treasury, our tax information and he's committing his private keys to github yes, children shouldn't be in charge of sensitive data.

01:19:32
Yeah, maybe not a bad idea yeah, uh, krebs on security reported they had an interview with a philippe catore who is the founder of a consultancy firm, who told Iles that he hey, dude, you leaked your key. Iles removed the key from GitHub. The key, though, is still good. So, hey, good news If you downloaded it while it was up there on GitHub, you can still use it. Github, you can still use it. Cut to Wrigley said if a developer can't keep an API key private, it raises questions about how they're handling far more sensitive government information.

01:20:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's a very polite way to put it Close the doors.

01:20:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So even though Elon's not still running Doge, at least as far as we know, he could be. Who knows, maybe he's sending him telegrams.

01:20:19 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't know, and a lot of the damage is already done.

01:20:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah between this and the stuff they've already done well, one of the things Elon said very early on was we're gonna kill IRS direct file. That's the. That's the free file system that the IRS developed with the help of the United States digital services the thing that took years to even happen. Yeah, because the folks at intuit and h? R block. All the companies that make commercial tax software lobbied like crazy to keep this ever from happening. Because they want you to pay money to use their tools right I mean as an immigrant.

01:20:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
This is something I really don't understand. Until I came to the us, I had never filed a tax return in my life. It was basically my employer pays this money, they reserve a certain amount for my tax and I get the paycheck at the end of the month and now you've got to jump through hoops or hire an accountant or go to one of these scumbag companies and they just killed it and it was a really great system and I do not understand why intuit employees are not being publicly harangued in the streets about this well, listen to this.

01:21:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is from wired magazine. When the so-called department of government efficiency arrived at the internal revenue service earlier this year, mckinnock hella writing this uh, leaders of the group reassured workers. The agency's free filing tax tool, direct file, would be spared from cuts, even though elon had already said we're going to cut it. Only a few days after meeting with tax software lobbyists, the beloved tool was placed in the chopping block. Multiple sources tell wired the plan to potentially kill DirectFile, the free filing tax tool developed by the IRS, was used last year in 25 states to great applause.

01:22:04
Right, the plan to kill it was initiated by Sam Korkos, who's CEO of an Andreessen Horowitz-backed health startup that has ties to SpaceX. Korkos' suggestion to cut the popular service was presented to Treasury Secretary Scott besent in the middle of March. Multiple sources say uh. By the weekend before, corcos suggested ending direct filing. He spoke of it positively to IRS engineers. By Friday, he changed his tune. It will remain online through the 2025 tax filing season, but will likely be dead by next year so unfortunate and they changed their tune because they met with lobbyists well, come on.

01:22:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
This is America. You've legalized bribery and called it lobbying yeah, that's about right.

01:22:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean this is this is an example of not doing something for the people. Quite the opposite. I mean the people want free file.

01:23:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well it's hardly government efficiency, is it, you know? I mean, this is the classic example of good government efficiency and they've killed it yeah, that's a very good point. Uh, let's go to the EU for good government efficiency now you're getting some yeah that, and the UK's moves yeah, okay yeah, actually that's right.

01:23:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're not in the EU anymore, much to your chagrin. Um, the EU. Uh remember, under a little bit of pressure from the Trump administration over tariffs one of the things Trump said and I think actually I kind of support him on this the EU had considered a tax on big tech companies, uh, the among the negotiations for tariffs.

01:23:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Apparently, trump convinced the European Commission to cancel that proposed digital tax yeah, how did that work out for the canadians, by the way, you know, I mean they or columbia university or any, or cbs or I mean they all agreed to cancel these taxes. And then he was just like ha, psych, you're getting them anyway you're getting them anyway, you're getting them anyway. I mean, the EU is going to get screwed by him over the sorry, is going to get roughly treated by him over the.

01:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Trump's threat of tariffs persuaded Canada to drop a similar tax on digital firms, although Trump then announced a 35% tariff on the country anyway.

01:24:33 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's just. I mean, it's ridiculous. This is gangster politics.

01:24:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but you know, at least he's doing it for us.

01:24:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, is he really? I don't know. I mean, are tariffs really going to help you that much in comparison to taxing big tech firms?

01:24:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm a little worried about my medications because we are looking at a very steep tariff on medications not made in the united states of 200, which would then double to 400 percent in a year.

01:25:03 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Um good luck getting antibiotics from china because, though they can, they produce 95 percent of the antibiotics on the planet yeah, well, there's also this uh age stuff.

01:25:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now we're really moving fast. The supreme Court has just handed down a victory to the Texas uh attorney general, who had they they sponsored a law saying you know, you can't use Pornhub without age verification. You have to show that you're uh, over 18 to look at adult content. Uh, of course. Uh, this is considered by some to be a violation of the First Amendment, not the Supreme Court, which said no, no, that's fine. So now we're going to see, I think, all over the United States, all sorts of age verification. There will be states that will say you have to be over 16 to use social media, for instance. The problem is, of course, everybody, not just kids, will have to prove their age by showing these companies their government ID. Reddit has begun age verification checks in the UK because of the UK.

01:26:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And what did the British do? They took the piss. If you look at some of the things going on social media, it's like this is the image I'm going to put into the Reddit engine. It's like horses laughing and the rest of it. So we're maintaining a healthy sense of skepticism about this, but it's a really bad idea blue sky is also.

01:26:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Blue sky is also doing this. Uh, I mean they have to write. The uk online safety act requires these social networks to prevent children from accessing age inappropriate posts. Reddit's going to use a third-party company called persona, who's going to get hacked very quicklyparty company called persona who's?

01:26:40 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
going to get hacked very quickly, right?

01:26:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
at least you don't have to go into a pub that was one of the original proposals.

01:26:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, come on. I mean, okay, I grew up in england and, trust me, there were pub. Everyone knew the pubs in town where, as long as you didn't turn up on a tricycle and ask for a cup of beer, please could I have some ale reddit?

01:27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh will use persona to verify user's age. They you will have to upload a photo of your government id or take a selfie, but of course, a bra. That's not gonna convince anybody. You look like you're 12, so you gotta keep this forever. That is a great you're gonna're going to have to get a government ID? I suspect. No, we're not in Britain, but I think this is coming to the U? S. I really do.

01:27:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Reddit says we're not going to get access to the photos.

01:27:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're only going to be saving the verification status along with your birthday. Hey, that way you won't have to re-enter your birthday when you want to access restricted content.

01:27:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But several states in the US are already pushing for this Absolutely. Pornhub has left a lot of the states, all of those states.

01:27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right yeah.

01:27:48 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
And all of these laws in the states have very similar language to them. You know, it's basically cut and paste.

01:27:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Reddit is not just blocking adult content, though. Uh. So if you're under 18 in the UK, you also can't see gambling. You also can't see anything that encourages disordered eating. Anything that incites hatred against other people based on their race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, disability and gender. Anything that encourages violence. Basically, you can't use Reddit, okay, any post that depicts real or serious violence or realistic violence against a person, an animal or a fictional creature. No beating up on Dobby the house elf anymore unless you go to the cinema, you know oh yeah, you watch television're Dirty Harry.

01:28:39
All bets are off. Yeah exactly.

01:28:41 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't understand why they're so prudish about this. And yet you can watch Robocops. Just come up on my streaming services. In the 1980s, we watched people getting blown apart by robots.

01:28:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We still do. I just watched the boys. The guy took a baseball bat and chopped people. I mean it's, it's violent, it's vicious and that's, by the way, I think, aimed at kids, isn't it? I mean, it's about comic book heroes.

01:29:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, I don't know, when I was a kid kids. Kids are already sorry, so so yeah, already movies were blocked. I look, I don't have I understand it?

01:29:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it is true you can't go into a magazine store and buy adult content. Uh, as a kid okay, in theory.

01:29:23
Another magazine yeah you just gotta pass over. Say, I got this two dollar bill, that playboy is going home with me, um. But this, that's what I really worry about is it isn't just limited to adult content. I mean, look at this, content that shames people's body types and other physical features will be restricted. Posts encouraging people to ingest harmful substances. The problem is, this gets so broad that pretty soon you can see well, you definitely won't have any lgbtq content. Yeah, you definitely won't have any transgender content. You won't have anything that uh Community standards in the most ridiculously backward biased Community won't tolerate.

01:30:09
Users outside the UK will not be affected by this particular rule, but Reddit says and we may have to do this in other regions if they adopt similar laws. And we may have to do this in other regions if they adopt similar laws, roblox adding now this might not be such a bad thing. They're adding an age estimation feature for teens using video selfies, and that's because of roblox chat, which is apparently a hive of of scum and villainy, and you don't you don't want the kids going in there, especially to be groomed, right? So maybe that's okay. They're relying on guess who persona? Uh, they're gonna. Persona's gonna have a lot of good data though hackers, just you know. Yeah, I mean this is gonna be the gold mine.

01:30:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, this is why these laws hold down. It's just like if you've got to scan your government ID or your credit card, this is just like catnip to criminal attackers, because you get the whole thing and they're collecting it for you. It's ridiculous.

01:31:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Five EU countries to test age check app under new child safety rules. France, spain, italy, denmark and Greece will be turning this on. It's a pilot program, but it's the beginning. This is using the same standards as the European digital identity wallet, which will. That's never going to happen in the Us. I don't think people are so scared of a government id system. Uh. The legislation aims to hold 19 online platforms, including meta, tiktok and x, accountable for limiting children's exposure to harmful content. Addressing addictive design features see, there you go. Addictive design features. Talk about a nebulous concept. Oh, you mean, it's fun to use. Oh, that's not allowed. Preventing cyber bullying each country will be able to customize the age checking tool to fit its National requirements, either integrating it into an existing digital ID app or deploying it as a standalone solution. So we're going to get all kinds of different ways to do this. I guess.

01:32:21 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Get all kinds of different ways to do this, I guess and this is all just a dress rehearsal in the for the us, I mean, they have some weird early adopters there as well. I mean france, the nation would sleep with the kitchen sink if it had a thing, a two-two-one it's.

01:32:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, they're actually pretty restrictive in france.

01:32:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I, I, uh, it's really interesting I don't know, I mean you go to france. I uh, it's really interesting. I don't know, I mean you go to france and they've got they get naked women on their money yeah, yeah, I mean. And britain, for goodness sake, they want to ban.

01:32:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
France is now pushing for a ban on all social media use for anybody under 15, not just, not just.

01:32:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know, I don't know how david runaba feel about this, but I'm kind of. You know it's tempting. I just don't see how it could be enforced on a logical and secure basis because I do.

01:33:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's the problem yeah yeah, I mean most social networks like what is it?

01:33:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
the facebook was 13 was a restricted age to join even I mean so when I joined, yeah, so yeah they just want to release it more, but it's.

01:33:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's hard to actually make that happen.

01:33:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
15 is actually the age of consent in france. Uh, they allow you to drink at the age of 16 if you're with a parent or guardian, and 18 is the age you don't even need any help then.

01:33:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Um on the other hand, if you look at france, their rate of public drunkenness is way below, say, the uk or uh, well, actually no. Finland, yeah, and finland, because finland's a special case, because you have to drink to live there. But it's the long, long night. I'm like, oh man, this is rough.

01:33:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh yeah, I did love sisu I was asked for my review of sisu and it's like 90 minutes of finn's Every time I see a.

01:33:55 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Finnish movie. I'm like, oh man, this is rough yeah.

01:33:58 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Oh yeah, I did love Sisu. I was asked for my review of Sisu and it's like 90 minutes of Finns killing Nazis. What's not to like? That's great.

01:34:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We got some real film buffs in here. Devendra, of course, does film cast, which is really good. I just the other day I was watching a movie or no, a teaser for a movie and it said this is a great movie.

01:34:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Uh, slash film. I thought, wow, that's slash. Yeah, yeah, slash film's good. Like they've had a lot of good pulls where we're not part of slash film anymore used to be, but yeah, it was cool. Yeah, we used to be the slash film cast, but, uh, hey, I'm gonna see the uh, the teaser trailer for the next avatar movie tomorrow night. So they're they're doing special screenings just for the trailer of that movie. That's wild. Wow, you get to go to the screening room for the trailer. Well, we're going to be there for something else.

01:34:45
Oh, okay fantastic four is happening an hour later, so it's like, hey, come see the trailer, but crazy times good I do want a good summer for movies.

01:34:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do want to talk about media because I I mean, it has nothing to do with tech should talk about colbert, but yeah yeah, well, that is a story.

01:34:59
I guess it doesn't have to do with tech, I don't know. Um, I'm an avid reader of puck, puck news and matthew bellamy. Uh, he says that, yes, colbert was the most popular late night show, but that doesn't mean it was making money. In fact, it was losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year, as all the late night shows do now. They used to be. They used to be, you know, the Johnny Carson, the Tonight Show used to be gold mines for these companies. Uh, but apparently younger Generations don't stay up late to watch TV, or if they do, they they watch YouTube instead yeah, because it's their clips.

01:35:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's their clips that people are watching. Not, they're not staying up too late to watch yeah, colbert does not have a content now.

01:35:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Colbert does not have nearly as good as social media presence as, say, the tonight show this is tech, because colbert's gonna start a podcast and he's gonna destroy everything he absolutely will.

01:35:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I think um conan o'brien is a really good example of a late night host that is really popular with younger audiences. But with the whole fiasco the Tonight Show fiasco figured out a way to also have a very strong online presence and then maintain that fandom on the tonight show was not indicative of how popular he is or how how much people like him. He then took his popularity and found a way to um you know, still cater to the audiences that wanted to hear from him and see him I'm so happy that conan has made this work.

01:36:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know yeah, his podcast conan o'brien needs a friend is one of the top podcasts in the country.

01:36:36 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's a good show. It's a fun show. He likes doing the long conversations, but now he's back like he's doing an hbo travel show, so, yeah, it's kind of gone back around for him yeah it's going to be really interesting to see what colbert does with this, though, because he's still got a fair amount of time to run.

01:36:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
He's already being fired.

01:36:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He could really let go, and he's well, that's, that's the argument, that it isn't political. Remember that cbs did settle the lawsuit over 60 minutes with the trumpet, uh, with donald trump, and it's thought that they did that because paramount wants to merge with larry ellison's kids sky dancer uh, had a whole segment calling cbs out for that yeah, and and he has not been exactly a kind to trump either, and so there was a lot of speculation that it was.

01:37:19
It was sherry redstone trying to make sure that the administration which, by the way, and this is the problem, we talked about this before you give them an inch, they're going to take a mile yeah, they settled. They gave the trump administration money in the 60 minutes lawsuit, even though it was a slam dunk first amendment violation and it was completely an absurd lawsuit. Uh, and they still didn't get approval. It has not yet been. The merger has not yet been approved, so he's still got a lot of leverage. So there was some suspicion that maybe that's why they fired colbert, but I don't think that's true, because I could tell you as a media mogul myself if you're worried about somebody, you don't give them a year to continue on the air after firing them.

01:38:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's in his contract, though, right. He's contracted till next year, so it would be a bigger.

01:38:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
He gets a notice period.

01:38:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Then I don't know I'm not sure what, I'm not sure what the deal is, but he is still around. I don't know how you can look at this, leo, and look at the timing of this and say this isn't political, it's really it feels the most thin-skinned. Uh, you know person well in the world.

01:38:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, you know that he doesn't say it outright.

01:38:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He says you know, it'd be nice if uh, I really that colbert guy's driving me nuts uh, I will say uh, conan, after he was fired and knew it was all it was scorched shirts for him.

01:38:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, that was some good stuff it was just like really, oh, that's why you don't leave. I'm telling you, I know there is gonna do some good stuff. It was just like really, oh, that's why you don't leave, I'm telling you.

01:38:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I know there is gonna do some good stuff.

01:38:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't leave people on the air after you fire them.

01:38:45 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's just a recipe for disaster but they're gonna get good ratings out of it. So here we go.

01:38:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, maybe, maybe the problem is all of these late night shows. I did not know this. I thought there were still money makers. They are no longer. They're money losers. So they're all. They're all on the block right that's right.

01:39:00 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It's not going to end here, right?

01:39:02 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
no, yeah, no no, I mean john stewart is looking. If I was john stewart, I would make sure I had a really good golden parachute lined up, because he's the logical next choice that was always temporary for him, like he was just there to basically fill the seat for a while, it seemed seemed yeah, in fact I don't think he really initially was planning coming back every week, but he you know he has now.

01:39:24
Yeah, I mean, it's you. You've got to ask yourself, though, when the president is so oh God, I'm going for immigration, so I shouldn't say this, but when the you know?

01:39:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's great being a us citizen, isn't it? It's the best you're gonna. You're gonna love it, ian, and all the rights and benefits there too?

01:39:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
have you seen devendra? Have you seen sovereign yet nick offerman's? New movie uh, I have not I have a screener for that.

01:39:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to see that. It's very interesting. It looks cool. I've been. He's a sovereign citizen. You know one of those people who says you know he's a sovereign citizen? You know one of those?

01:40:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
people who says you know, I don't owe taxes, I don't owe, I don't need a driver's license. Yeah, I am not engaged please come help.

01:40:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's really an interesting. It does not end well. I wish it was a good movie, but I would have loved to have seen more about the sovereign citizen uh movement.

01:40:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I think that's a very weird and interesting movement anyway it creates some great youtube videos, though it's just like getting oh I love watching the.

01:40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The. The traffic stops with these guys. Yeah, it's hysterical. So what were you thinking? There's uh um I I looked up sovereign citizen um on wikipedia when I was watching the movie because I wanted to get up to date on what the latest uh thinking in the sovereign citizen movement was this thinking yeah, and I like this.

01:40:50
This is a homemade license plate. Driven by a sovereign citizen, private, no driver's license or insurance required. Uh, I am lawfully private, not for commerce. Use private mode of travel. That does not work. Kids, nope, that does not work, although in a way I kind of respect the attitude that I don't give permission to the government to coerce me with violence up to a point, but you're quite happy to drive on the roads that they build and to benefit from the education system they provide and to, yeah, just.

01:41:27
I feel like this is there's a Nexus between how the techie Elite billionaires feel and the sovereign citizens feel, because both of them Elon acts like I made all this money myself feel because both of them, elon, acts like I made all this money myself.

01:41:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No, yeah, yeah, I mean 14 billion in nasa subsidies helps but you know, no, it didn't work that way.

01:41:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, all right. Um, okay, one more trump story. I'm sorry, I gotta do one more oh, I'm doomed right, this is a good one. They are going to spend one billion dollars on offensive hacking operations.

01:42:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This is from uh tech crunch, but knowing him, it's just uh hacking with lots of swear words like it's just offensive cyber.

01:42:13 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
They said offensive hey, noob, we're owning you there is this is part of the big one, big, beautiful bill.

01:42:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, they don't say specifically what offensive cyber operations are, nor what tools or software will qualify. Oh great, the budget does note the money will go towards enhancing and improving the capabilities of the us indo-pacific command, uh, which operates in asia, pacific and, of course, includes china and I believe is run by mike flynn's brother.

01:42:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But yes, oh, really is that yeah well, the, the head of the us military apac, is mike flynn's brother, or at least was last year uh.

01:42:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, of course, trump has already gutted sisa, the cyber security uh agency.

01:42:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
The budget's been cut way back yeah, the people actually doing this work yeah, yeah, uh, and and there is some concern about offensive cyber operations.

01:43:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, clearly we are the subject of offensive cyber operations. Salt typhoon is a Chinese operation fested our telecom system. Um, other countries are routinely hacking us. Um. Russia, I think, probably supports a lot of the ransomware gangs that are taking down cities and schools and hospitals in the united states, at least tacitly supports them. So there's definitely offensive operations against us, but there is a risk of engaging in this. A hot cyber war could be disastrous, right?

01:43:46 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
well, I mean, we've done this before. Do you remember the opm hack, when china basically? Got in some personnel management yeah yeah, they got all the government's, you know. They got fingerprints, security briefings, the rest it. And they had the head of the NSA at a security conference a couple of months later and he said, yeah, if we'd seen this open we would have done it as well, because we're already doing this stuff. But a hot cyber war we're going to lose Because you know.

01:44:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I think everybody loses. I mean, it's like a nuclear war.

01:44:16 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There's no winners if you destroy the grid but china controls most of its critical infrastructure, as does russia.

01:44:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
America doesn't 80 percent of the us is critical.

01:44:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Infrastructure is run by private companies. Yeah, so if you go full offensive, we're gonna lose actually related to this.

01:44:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft apparently had been using uh chinese support personnel with the defense department. Uh, china was using engineers in china to help maintain the defense department's computer systems with minimal supervision by us personnel. They say we're going to knock that off. This is a expose from pro publicaa. Good on you, propublica, for finding this. Various people involved in the work had told ProPublica.

01:45:10 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
they warned Microsoft the arrangement is inherently risky, but the company launched and expanded it anyway. Yeah, I mean, to his credit, Pete Hexeth actually has called them out on this and said they're doing an investigation and I'm sure the DoD's DUI hire will be a very thorough thing in terms of dealing with this well, they use escorts digital escorts is what they called them.

01:45:32 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It was just like worst name ever get the marketing department of it, because in person, if you go work at an agency, a real person will walk you into a facility that as an escort.

01:45:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, as an escort.

01:45:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So that's the idea. So they would hop on teams chats with a us person with the security clearance to oversee the work. Yeah, to oversee the work, but essentially input the code given to them or whatever input the commands given to them by the chinese workers well, and that's what probably says.

01:45:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, they lack the technical expertise to police foreign engineers with far more advanced skills seems bad some are former military personnel with little coding experience who are paid barely more than minimum wage for the work and so can easily bought off as well one escort said we're anonymously to propublica, we're trusting that what they're doing isn't malicious, but we can't really tell what's been going on for a decade well, I mean, if you look at the, the other report this week, that salt typhoon have been going after the national guard and have had control of them for, you know, control of their systems for a year. They've already gone off to telcos and congressional systems as well. The chinese aren't, you know, sitting on the sitting on the backsides about this, so maybe we should have a cyber uh offensive capability I mean there there's, there's always stuff going back and forth.

01:46:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't hear about it, but the report I feel like we should spend money on defense too, though, and we cut that way back yeah we were doing that and we were doing it. I think we are a big target.

01:47:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We shouldn't be out there when uh anything america touches that uh somehow gets out in the wild, like think back to stuxnet and these sort of unintended consequences of all that which was something built by america and and israel yeah, yeah and israel, but was used by israel and bad things can happen. And who know the consequence of this stuff? Yeah we don't know, like where, it could ultimately do infrastructure damage in one country. Our infrastructure is terrible.

01:47:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
If we were actually attacked on infrastructure level, we would be doomed, unfortunately yeah, I mean, I think this is the thinking in that, you know, if china, when china decides to invade taiwan, you know, are we going to send aircraft carriers there, when the entire electric or water or credit card system breaks down, we're going to have bigger fish to fry.

01:47:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a break. Take a deep breath. It's all going to be okay. You're watching this Week in tech davidra hardware, abrar alhiti and ian thompson, our panel for the week. This episode brought to you by z scaler, the leader in cloud security hackers we know this are using ai right now to breach your organization.

01:48:16
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01:51:03
Well, even though there are only 10 Tesla robo-taxis right now in Austin, they're they're not racking up a great success rate. Most recent story is a tesla robo taxi uh tried to cross a railroad crossing when the train was coming through and the safety driver, who normally kind of stays out of it, was forced to say no, uh, there have been and there's only, believe me, there are only three of these uh tesla robo taxis, but they really are. They seem to be getting uh in trouble in all sorts of interesting ways. Uh, by the way, the guy in the passenger, clearly a tesla stan, says I still give the trip an a what a for alive alive what?

01:51:57
uh, okay, all right, thanks, tesla. Thank you, tesla, you kept me alive. You, you didn't kill me. Oh yeah, joe tagmeyer is an avid tes Tesla fan and host of a Tesla centered YouTube channel. Okay that's how, yeah, okay now he was actually one of the few Tesla fans invited by Tesla to participate in the robo taxi program. He has completed 160 robo taxis and he said the train only tried to kill me once, so that's not so bad.

01:52:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's a good percentage. Yeah, human drivers will. In that amount of trips you'll probably have one crazy human driver incident too.

01:52:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who knows, he shared this on X. He said you know, to be completely honest, there was one incident I didn't get on camera. We were waiting at a light near a railroad crossing. As we waited, the train lights came on.

01:52:56 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
The arms near a railroad crossing as we waited the train lights came on, the arms started coming down. A robo taxi didn't see that and started to drive. I mean, that's a really critical thing to miss.

01:53:05 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's one thing to like drive through a cone on the street that's blocked off but to not see a train. Have you all, uh done in waymo? Have you written in? I've not done a waymo. Have you written in them? I've not done in Waymo, but they actually just got into Atlanta via Uber, so I want to check that out at some point. If you can survive Atlanta, if self-driving can do Atlanta, you can go anywhere.

01:53:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, Abra, you've ridden in Ramos in San Francisco.

01:53:24 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That is my ideal way to get around SF, really.

01:53:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because there's nobody in the car and I think if you, if you're a woman, it might feel a little safer exactly that's exactly why I don't want to have a conversation about where I'm from and if I'm married.

01:53:35 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Every time I get in a car it's not, yeah, that's. It's really unfortunate and then I can play taylor swift and no one objects. There's no one there.

01:53:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great, yeah and you felt safe in all of those rides. I have.

01:53:48 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I haven't experienced anything, experienced anything jarring, Even my, my first ride. You know you get in and you're like, okay, what's about to happen. But then the funny thing is, like Waymo is it strikes a good balance of being persistent and careful at the same time, because you don't want a robo taxi that's too scared to do anything. You'll never get to your destination. It will, you know, make those turns in that little window that it has before the light turns red and you'll feel safe during that.

01:54:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In my experience so far, have you ever had to hit the button?

01:54:17 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
No, thankfully I have not it calls the home office.

01:54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, exactly what we don't know and I don't know if they're completely forthright about this is how often humans take over these vehicles.

01:54:31 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
This is what I hear about too, and I have no clue because of course, but you don't mind because you feel safe.

01:54:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I mean honestly, that is not to be diminished in any way. That's really a big deal.

01:54:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It is. Yeah, it's quite great. But yeah, I'm curious to hear if you happen to catch a ride in Atlanta. I want to hear all about it. And having it in the uber app I think is really smart. In sf you have to have the waymo one app, but I think if it's in uber, you don't have much more likely another app, you know you've already got it on your phone and um you could automatically get paired with it well, uber is planning to get into this.

01:55:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They want to launch 20 000 new robo taxis in the us over the next six years.

01:55:07 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, it's a lot of robot taxis.

01:55:09 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, no, I mean, it's interesting that you say about as a single woman traveling that this makes such a difference. I'd agree, there are some really sketchy taxi drivers in San Francisco and I drove on a Waymo the first time on a Saturday night at 9 pm. It was the safest car out there on the road and I didn't have to interact with somebody who might have been smoking or doing whatever else. Yeah, um, yeah, yes, exactly, also just as a bit of fun when, if you ever do come to san francisco viewers, you can set your own music, as you said. Um, and night rider theme has to be done.

01:55:52 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I have to do it just for that, but I have a colleague in Phoenix too, and they love taking the Waymo for early morning airport rides Because literally you're getting in, just close your eyes and you're there at the airport.

01:56:02 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Well, they're not going to SFO yet, so once they do, that is the plan. I can't wait yeah.

01:56:07 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I don't understand why they're not doing that for SFO.

01:56:09 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I don't know what the, what regulation they have to. You know what approval they have to get from SFO, but they're all around it, they're in that area, but they just haven't gotten to the airport yet I think they get confused by the maze right.

01:56:19 - Benito (Announcement)
I think I don't know if the Waymo can make the maze.

01:56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, waymo, how you do it. I was raised on this, so I. This is my dream come true. Do you want kit to talk back to you?

01:56:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
hello, kit should be the virtual assistant in the car yeah, sassy kit, sassy ai it's pretty funny yeah, I mean, but I mean it's the coming wave, you know. I mean, if taxi drivers are going to be extinct in 10 to 15 years, this spreads out.

01:56:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Truck drivers are the ones most at risk, though. Right, I mean, that's the first thing. I'm not sure about that.

01:56:56 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Although autonomous trucking has been kind of put on pause for everybody. What happened Just for companies like Waymo in particular. I mean, Aurora is doing a lot of autonomous trucking and there's some other.

01:57:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There are, I know there's in the the austin. Uh, what is the?

01:57:13 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
austin dallas corridor. There's autonomous trucks, so there are yeah, there are companies that are working on it. Um, for some reason, waymo decided to pivot to ride hailing for the time being, uh, and then probably eventually apply whatever it learns there. But yeah, there are still companies working on trucking and that's going to be definitely something that changes the game it's because there's autonomous truck videos when they fail.

01:57:29 - Benito (Announcement)
It's like it's so horrifying when you see have you seen those videos?

01:57:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's horrifying do they have safety drivers or no?

01:57:37 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
no, well, okay they're.

01:57:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're being forced to is my understanding, but the thing is what happens when the truck gets off the freeway then you're in trouble.

01:57:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
But I mean, truck drivers are multi-purpose, because the the truck driver doesn't actually just drive the truck, they help unload it, they do the maintenance on it and if you've got a burst front tire, there's no way AI is going to help you on that one. You know truckers. This is why I think trucking is going to be a slower thing than actual driving, because if you're in a taxi and they blow out a tire, they'll just pull to the side of the road and send you another one. You can't do that with a truck full of refrigerated goods it's dallas, houston.

01:58:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry, I got the cities wrong. Aurora launched a commercial service in texas. Uber freight and herschenbach motor lines are are running test runs with their auroras.

01:58:28 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Now they do have safety drivers uh, in those, which is probably a good thing. Um, and the thing to remember is that, um, you know, when uber was going to do its own self-driving unit, it sold that technology to aurora, and so uber has now decided to partner with people instead of trying to develop its own self-driving, because it's probably a lot easier yeah, you know, killing people was a bad, you know yeah look at gm.

01:58:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They got out of the business. They said this is too.

01:58:55 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
This is not a good business for us, so that went down to a club in san francisco and I found the gm cruise uh graveyard. Yes, yes, exactly oh my goodness we went down to a gig there and there's an entire fenced off system with all these cruises parked nose to tail, and it was just like what are they gonna do with them? That's actually kind of heartbreaking yeah, they're gonna junk them, you know they should uh.

01:59:22 - Benito (Announcement)
That would be actually maybe a good uh pixar movie a little lost, little lost cruise the origin story of the cars universe yeah yeah, it all began in a parking lot in south san francisco but at least they were properly equipped.

01:59:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean the thing with tesla and why they're having so many accidents is that they're ignoring uh lidar exactly yeah, yeah I mean, you maybe know more about this than than I do abroad, but it just you know it's. Yeah, it's a twelve thousand dollar unit you're going to stick on the front of the car. You can't just rely on cameras and well, and it's getting cheaper and cheaper.

02:00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
By the way, lidar was really expensive, but it's gotten much, much less expensive look at china.

02:00:04 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
No reason not to do it.

02:00:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, china's brought the cost down enormously it's more, it's more musk's, you know, kind of determination that you don't need it it's about being different, yeah, anything practical yeah, well, they were forced to like drive down prices years ago, right, so it was all part of the cost cutting.

02:00:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We don't need extra sensors, we could just do with cameras and uh yeah you can't really not safely, especially not if it's like you're dealing with bad weather or things like that Rain fog. You need the LIDAR.

02:00:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean when, okay, waymo isn't perfect on this one, because I think it was about two years ago, a bunch of Waymos got lined up in San Francisco because they couldn't deal with the fog.

02:00:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hysterical stories like that. Or dead end streets, where the way most keep turning down the streets and they, these poor people living on the streets, just have an endless parade of of waymos, because they don't want to turn left, so they have to turn right, and it's just yeah but I mean with the, with the tesla robo taxis launching in austin.

02:01:06 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Uh, you know, devendra, you said exactly, you were exactly right. They got a bunch of tesla influencers who are well sold in on the platform and they were still recording these errors because there's no way you can hide it. So get the hardware right, get the software right and it'll work. But just saying yeah, no, lidar, it's just not worth. It is a recipe for disaster. No, lidar, it's just not worth it. It is a recipe for disaster.

02:01:30 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yeah, tesla's approach has been very rushed, compared to other companies like Waymo or Zoox, where they're like okay, we want to make sure we don't mess this up, right, no one wants to pull a cruise and have some sort of incident that then ends the game for them, and even cruise had a very measured rollout. But accidents happen, but everyone's now being even more careful, and so in this rush, I think there are going to be even more hiccups, and it's not. It's not going to be great.

02:01:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I mean Cruz ended up parking on a, on someone they'd knocked over.

02:01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, now we don't call it parking. We were just resting for a minute, just a minute. Yeah, it's interesting that GM decided really after spending I imagine billions on this that this isn't a minute. Yeah, it's interesting that GM decided really after spending I imagine billions on this that this isn't a business.

02:02:14 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
About $4 billion yeah.

02:02:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And I mean Cruise was ready to come back. Right, they were preparing for a comeback, and then they pulled the plug, and that was it.

02:02:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, darren Oki, in our Discord chat, one of our wonderful club members does point out you can't just strap on LiDAR, you have to train. Yeah, and having not chosen lidar early on, tesla kind of forced their hand on that uh, they have to.

02:02:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Nvidia's whole thing, though, is that they've been selling, you know, the compute units and potentially I don't know sensor training, I think, together with that. They've been talking about this a lot, so I feel like they would have some sort of all-in-one package at this point yeah yeah, but also they've been using lidar to scan streets, you know so that it's not just.

02:02:57 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I remember about five years ago they that we covered a scientific paper where if a kid was holding a red balloon, the car would recognize that as a stop sign. And until you map out all those strokes, uh, stop signs, and you do have to learn.

02:03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think I don't know my adas uh driver assist on my bmw. I think they have lidar on that.

02:03:18 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm pretty sure I do a lot of cars do like a radar of some kind, yeah hang on, leo, you're driving a beamer, not a tesla sorry, I haven't driven a tesla in years.

02:03:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got a Model X when they first came out. I had it for three years. Lisa called it Christine.

02:03:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You know that's the crazy car I was going to say you hated it didn't you?

02:03:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I didn't hate it, I loved it, but it kept clonking Lisa in the head. It was the one with the falcon wing doors. Awful doors, falcon wing bottoms, so I would push the button. This is close all doors. And she'd go ow, she'd be getting in the car. So we got in the habit. I had to say attention, attention, closing all doors, the other thing it did. If it rained and you open the falcon doors, a waterfall would cascade into the car because it was just poorly designed yeah yeah, I felt like tesla's, and even you know my son on a model y which I drove a little bit.

02:04:15
Uh, I feel like they're kind of like they're a little chintzy compared to they feel real cheap. They feel cheap. So I've had since then. I had a ford mach-e which I liked a lot, had that for three years. Um, lisa drives a mini which is also bmw, but it's very nice. Electric mini, uh, we have a chevy volt, uh, I'm sorry bolt with a b bolt, uh, which is also very nice.

02:04:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Those are the bolts inexpensive, it was like twenty thousand dollars after the rebate, that was a great time for cheap evs, I just said because we need a second car. So I was looking. I was like what can I get for like $15,000-ish? And the Nissan Leaf right now is an incredible deal.

02:04:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I got that is a good deal. What's the range, though?

02:05:00 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This one is like 160 miles which is not that much, but also this is a second car, taking road trips with it. Right, it's local commute stuff and for that price and the second generation lease are not the ugly little bugs that the first gen was no, I didn't like the first ones, the second gens are hatchbacks with trunk space and usable space For very little money. I got this thing. I'm probably going to write about this eventually. How much was it? $15,000.

02:05:27 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It was huge 30,000 miles 2019.

02:05:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's a fantastic deal it's the high-end trim and it has like the driver assist you, so it has the follow assist too, so it has a bit of like the the assisted cruise control. But I'm probably gonna write about this because when the uh ev tax credits go away in september, that's gonna be a bad thing. Right now, like you can get um now's the time to buy.

02:05:50
Yeah, now's the time, like you can get, I could have gotten forty five hundred dollars off of some used leaves, which would bring this thing closer to ten thousand dollars so you can get a tax credit on a used electric.

02:06:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, you can yeah?

02:06:02 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
wow if you get a car so I bought from carvana and they even list it in the in the nice listings of the cars. Like if you can apply for the tax credit then, uh, you know, the price of this vehicle all of a sudden comes down cheap evs if you don't care about, like, going over 200 miles. Like you can get some really good deals right now yeah, that's the problem with the mini.

02:06:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's only got about a 90 mile range, but it isn't this is fine it's a second car.

02:06:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's a local, yeah, but if you ask to, say, if you're going down to the shops and back then that's not a big deal, and thank you, lee, for disproving the old adage about BMW drivers.

02:06:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm a dick. No, I'm a dick, no, no, no, I run stop signs.

02:06:38 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
We used to say they're reverse hedgehogs because the pricks are on the inside.

02:06:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't know how to use certain signals.

02:06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I actually really like it. It's a very nice car. Um, they do build good quality. Yeah, it was well. It's well, it's very stable platform, uh, and it's it's ev. Everything we don't. We don't do, uh, gas vehicles.

02:06:55 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
While we're on this, by the way, if anybody's in the market for a new ev right now. Look at polestar. Look at the used polestar. Those are beautiful ridiculous 25 000 for a three-year-old polestar that sold for 70 80 000. So they're out there right I'm on.

02:07:11 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm on the net right now. That's fantastic If you need an EV.

02:07:15 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And also look at the Polestar, the actual retail stores. They have units there and they will give you a warranty, I think one reason that used EVs are they depreciate a lot.

02:07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're less expensive.

02:07:26 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
There's concern about battery life, but I think lot they're less expensive is there's concern about battery life, but I think the experience experience we've seen that these things really do go 100 000 miles or more. Absolutely I can't. I mean, battery life is the thing and you can you can most evs have, like the little bars that you can check to see is the battery reaching full capacity. So that's a that's a thing to pay attention to. I will say this cheap little nissan leaf, which is essentially, uh, an economy car, feels better to drive than my like very nice volvo xc9. Evs are great because that's a big car and just even driving a small car feels better.

02:07:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So electric engines are much better, frankly I mean, they don't have hesitation. They, they have a smooth torque even acceleration.

02:08:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, I love. My first car was a swedish car and my next car could be one as well. Thank you for the tip. They're beautiful cars. Yeah, my first car was a swedish car and my next car could be one as well. Thank you for the tip they're beautiful cars.

02:08:12 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, my first wife was swedish.

02:08:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, let's take a break and more to come with the vendor hardware abrar al-heaty, ian thompson you guys are great, I just. It's always nice to do a show with people. We could just hang out and talk and forget the tech news, because it's so terrible. More to come in, just a little bit.

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02:12:23
Uh, a youtuber has leaked ios secrets. This is from uh, from the register. Uh via friend spying on a developer's phone. This is apple's lawsuit against john prosser, who is a very well-known uh ios leaker and youtuber. Apple is suing him. Usually apple doesn't go so far as to sue leakers, but they say he leaked ios 26 information ahead of wwdc in june they also sued another individual, michael ramachotti, in northern california district court. This is earlier this week, accusing them of misappropriating trade secrets and a violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. Oh, that's throwing the book at them For conspiring to break into a development iPhone in the possession of an Apple employee. Well, that's pretty bad.

02:13:17 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, they've done this before, in 2019, when there was a prototype that was leaked out. Was it 2019? It was one of the things that set up the valley.

02:13:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It sounds like they hacked. So Ethan Lipnick, who worked at Apple as a software engineer on the photos team according to the suit Ramachati was in need of money had a friend that worked at Apple, prosser, allegedly offered to pay Ramachati to break into the, the apple employees development phone to show prosser what version of ios running on the device looked like. Okay, okay, that's extreme, that's a little ex. That is not good journalistic practice, is it davindra?

02:14:04 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
no, you wouldn't allow no crime's bad crime bad paying sources, paying criminals, crimes, real bad, real bad. All those things not so good.

02:14:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh ramachati, who stayed at the apple employee's home, allegedly used location tracking software to determine when lipnick was far enough from home to be gone for an extended period, then obtained the passcode and accessed the device, made a video call to Prosser and showed iOS in the development phone. Oh man, if they can prove that, I think Apple's got a case. Apple does not normally sue leakers.

02:14:45 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That breaks total journalistic ethics. I mean, abra, I read your review of the Galaxy Z Fold 7. If somebody had offered you that you know ahead of time from a stolen phone, I'm pretty sure you'd have told them where to get off. Yeah, exactly, that's not what we do.

02:15:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't pay people to break confidentiality ever right, no. Confidentiality, ever right, no, yes, you might take leakers, might approach you and volunteer that information and you would accept it in that case. But you would never proffer money to somebody say, could you give me that information? Apparently there is a record. The oh my god, uh. Apple learned the details of the incident from an audio recording sent to the apple employee by ramachati, admitting to the crime. Lipnick provided the recording to apple after it was notified by an anonymous individual had seen the leaked content and recognized lipnick's apartment in the background of the call.

02:15:47 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Gosh, this is pretty ham-fisted well, and you know, apple employees are already so scared of getting in trouble over like accidentally leaking anything. And this is just a nightmare lipnick was fired.

02:15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He wasn't sued, but he was fired because he hadn't properly secured his development device see that's kind of, that's wild that would be penalized for.

02:16:08 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I don't know, I don't know. I guess I don't know the details enough to it's crosser denies apple's allegations he posted on x.

02:16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I deny it, uh, but man usually I mean process to my knowledge, has not been prosecuted by apple, although he's many, many, many leaks um you've got to be very careful to accept leaked information from and what their motivations are, and it's the code we live by.

02:16:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Um, and this case was just really scummy in so many ways.

02:16:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I just it's not something a legitimate journal would have got involved with yeah, uh, well, we'll watch this case, because uh prosser says no, no, that's not how it happened yeah, we'll see what other evidence they uncover. Yeah in fact, he says he has evidence to prove he was unaware of how the data was obtained. Maybe it's a recording of him saying I do not know how you got this information shocked, shocked.

02:17:12
I am uh, I think it's pretty well known by people like Prosser, who do leaks what, what is uh allowed and what is not allowed. But to be fair, I don't think he works for a publication. He's right, he's, he's kind of on his own, so maybe he hasn't been well-trained in the ins and outs.

02:17:35 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Well, it's one of those things. It's kind of like the Wall Street Journal story a couple of days ago about Trump doing this picture. There's no way you would publish that as a legitimate news organization and not have evidence and everything backed up, checked by lawyers I think the wall street journal probably can defend itself, but this is the problem with the way things work these days.

02:18:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I mean cbs could have easily defended itself in the 60 minutes case there was no case there, but there are political questions to be added into this yeah so you like? Did you like the galaxy z fold 7?

02:18:18 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I did. I have it here too let's see it's really thin look how thin that is I'll open it up for you and you can see how thin it is. And then I also have the iphone 16 pro max to show you. It's actually thinner comparison when open. It's a lot. Oh, I'm trying to get the right angle there. There we go, you can see how thin it is. Oh, wow, wow. And then I'll show you. Closed, it's still, um, it's even closed.

02:18:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's thinner still so.

02:18:43 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
This is the fold is 8.9 millimeters thick when closed and the iphone is 8.25, I think, millimeters. I cannot get the angle. There we go, wow, um, so yeah, so I liked it. It's very expensive, it's two thousand dollars.

02:18:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, so pocket change but those folds have always been around that right they've always been expensive.

02:19:01 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
The last fold was nineteen hundred dollars and the one before that was eighteen hundred dollars, so they're on this pick of like, let's bump up the price by a hundred dollars every year. Um, but you know it's, it's super thin. So a couple months ago samsung released the s25 edge, which was their first super thin phone. That phone was eleven hundred dollars and it was kind of like, you know, the s25 edge walked so that the hopefully the galaxy z fold 7 will run. Um, but uh, but yeah, thin is in.

02:19:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
A lot of companies are doing this well, it's rumored that apple is going to release the iPhone slim this year in preparation for a folding phone next year, just like Samsung did.

02:19:36 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's the way you do it, because you don't want this weird clunky chunky device.

02:19:40
And then the other big thing here too is like the cover screen actually feels normal, so like when I'm like a regular phone it feels like a regular phone versus the previous versions of the fold you it feels like a regular phone versus the previous versions of the Fold. You could tell it was a compromise to use the cover screen. So yeah, I think it totally makes sense for Apple to release a thinner phone, standard iPhone, this year and then hopefully a foldable one the next year. Do you miss the S Pen? I've never been an S Pen user. Whenever I've had, I've never actually personally owned a Note device, so I've never become reliant on one. So I'm okay without it. And it's a compromise right. Like, would you rather have an S pen or would you rather have a chunky device? And I think I'd rather.

02:20:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what they gave up, although, so they didn't actually give up battery. It's the same size batteries.

02:20:22 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
last year, most impressive to me. I was ready for the battery to be worse on the S25 edge. On the S25 Edge it's 3,900 milliamp hours, which is pathetic, but this one keeps that 4,400. So it's great to still have a day and a half of battery and not have to worry about it that much. Yeah, that's for me how long it lasted. I definitely have a lot of screen time, so it's high praise, I think.

02:20:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How about the crease?

02:20:48 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Not too bad either. It's actually not crazy noticeable, especially when you're actually watching something or doing something on here. If you're out in sunlight, you know creases are always a bit more obvious, but this has a 2600 net display so it's still nice and bright to kind of thwart a bit of that. So definitely not even something I was even thinking about.

02:21:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, have you had a chance to play with this?

02:21:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I've not had a chance to play with it, but it is. It does make me think, like how will Apple catch up to this right, because Samsung is seven generations in there?

02:21:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, well, one way is by buying the screen from Samsung Exactly.

02:21:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, you buy it but it's also like, how do you build for it? Because Apple, historically, has not done a great job of like, uh, turning ipad os into something that I think is good for multitasking. So it's like even just rethinking how you build this. Yes, uh, how does ios move from the outside screen to the inside screen? Apple has a lot of catching up to do. Uh.

02:21:40
My colleague, sam rutherford, pointed out that google did a good job of catching up within two pixel folds, so it is possible to like move quickly. But, yeah, I want, I want to, I kind of want a foldable, but I don't want to go to Android. So it's like I hope Apple figures this out soon. It's not going to be for everybody, but I certainly I'm at the point where I'm like watching more video content on my phone just because I'm like tired after running around the kids all day and I'm on my bed and I just need to watch something. So I see the value of something like this and I could see Apple definitely like following with the same stuff Samsung's doing.

02:22:15 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's the big thing, right? A lot of people are like I would love a foldable, but I don't want to leave the Apple ecosystem. So you're definitely not alone in that. And yeah, I definitely was watching a video in bed the other day with the, you know, half open.

02:22:36 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
So you can kind of just prop it up like a little mini laptop, um.

02:22:36 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And then the other thing too is, uh, cameras so this has a 200 megapixel main camera, which is what? Yeah, yeah, that's pretty damn good. It's wild. So you're taking pictures on this and it looks like pictures that you would take on the ultra, and the ultra is is chunkier. So, um, if apple can also figure out how to maintain, uh, its, you know, high-end cameras, like it has on the pro models, uh, on a foldable, then that'd be really cool too it must be.

02:22:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean 200 megapixels must be binning them or something. I mean exactly okay and it.

02:22:56 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It just essentially aligns with it's the ultra grade cameras on a foldable, which is still pretty impressive, because foldables uh typically aren't able to have that type of uh. You know those especially that thin, especially on that. Especially that thin, Especially on that thin exactly Because the S25 Edge also. It kind of broke the mold there and also had that 200 megapixel camera, so they figured they could do it on that thin phone. Why not do it on this thin phone too?

02:23:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at that image.

02:23:20 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Wow, the Morgan Library in New York is gorgeous. Boy, is that pretty, I know.

02:23:25 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I do have one practical question on it, though, because I mean, if I'm spending two grand on a camera, I want a case to protect it, and I don't see how this works with a foldable so there are cases for this.

02:23:35 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I refuse one on. Yes, there are and they're. They're actually pretty sleek. It doesn't add a lot of bulk to it. I've held it with uh, I've held the phone with a case on it and it's it's. It is pretty nice and sleek. It's not going to be like your bulky otter box, you know type, where you feel like you could toss it on concrete and you'll be fine. But there are options for that and thankfully they don't add too much heft to it.

02:23:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did get a case for my old fold, yeah, but it's just like a panel on the back and a panel on the front. I mean, it's not. It doesn't surround the whole thing exactly this is.

02:24:05 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I'm a clumsy bugger and I drop my phone on, and so I like a good hardcore case around something, particularly when it's that price, so yeah, I'm yeah.

02:24:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think what's really interesting is that it isn't that closed, it's still like a regular phone, exactly that's so. You're not sacrificed. You don't have this chunk chunk of wonk in your hand. You have a normal aspect ratio front screen, but you have available to you. How does the software work? On the folding, Pretty well.

02:24:34 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
There were a couple of instances where Instagram and TikTok videos were weirdly cropped, but mostly it works well. You can also open up to three apps for multitasking, which is really great, so that feels pretty cool to use. But, yeah, most of the apps that I used were well formatted, with a couple hiccups here and there.

02:24:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm very impressed by the low light photos, the nighttime photos you were able to take. This is a good camera.

02:24:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
It is a very good camera and obviously they're touting how much AI plays a role there and reducing noise and making everything look better. But yeah, you can still see the textures and no crazy shadows, so pretty impressive.

02:25:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's great, so you took the people. This is the Morgan Library. You didn't want those people in there, so they're gone.

02:25:17 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
That's pretty good. It's really good. I mean, apple's cleanup tool is long overdue, but it does not compare at all to what Samsung can do with generative edit. The one caveat is, when you use generative edit, you'll see that label in the bottom left corner that says AI generated content, which is kind of obnoxious. Oh, that's not you that put that there. No Bug.

02:25:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I don't like that I would crop that out, Thankfully you can move that up a bit. I guess they're sensitive to this whole thing.

02:25:44 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I know I kind of feel like it's a good idea that we have those labels in there so that we know it's true, it's true, but yeah, full transparency.

02:25:53 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
If I did ever post something, I'd definitely crop that out.

02:25:56 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, Probably do the same myself to be honest.

02:26:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, because you don't know how much was AI generated In this case. You just took the people out. That's nothing.

02:26:11 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
You just go to Photoshop box, it and generateative edit that out. Exactly it's.

02:26:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's what photoshop's been doing for years and so yeah, uh, so it sounds. I mean you gave it 8.5 out of 10. That's a pretty good score yes, yeah, this is the best fault. This is the best fault they've ever made obviously, definitely, without a doubt, in my opinion.

02:26:23 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Uh, definitely, like you said, feels like a normal phone when it's closed. You have the advantage of an open phone and you don't need to use the inside screen, but it's nice to have, which is great it's still I'm half scots and I'm half yorkshire, so the idea of paying two thousand for a phone is a lot for fun. It's ridiculous um carrier deals. You know, I guess that's the way you do it true, true yeah otherwise there's no way yeah well, I wouldn't mind paying that much.

02:26:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you pay that much much for a laptop. It's a lot to pay for something that's fragile and easily lost.

02:26:51 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
And that you're going to replace in two years, you know, if that's what you choose to do, yeah.

02:26:56 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
How long do they continue doing security support?

02:26:58 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Seven years of software and OS updates.

02:27:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh that's pretty good. Yeah, that's really good, and you're an Android user, right, ian?

02:27:12 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, been on pixel and nexus before that. Yeah, just simply because I get security updates as soon as they come out. Um, google were lacking on that. They've since come up, I think under pressure from samsung, to be honest yeah, definitely.

02:27:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, apple, there's a lot of pressure on apple to respond. Apple has historically said we're not going to do folding phones, but the rumor, rumors very strong that they're going to do that next year. Not this, not for the 2025 iphone 17, but for the 18 or whatever they call it, the 20th anniversary I fully expect apple to do something.

02:27:40 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
they're going to do their slightly different spin on this like a direct competitor to the fold would be nice, but also, um, a lot of people are thinking like, what would an ipad mini be? You know, if you could essentially fold that in half? Maybe that's what the phone looks like. I don't think anybody is doing like a 10 or 11 inch foldable tablet right now, and that was always the promise of the stuff like the Microsoft Courier which we've dreamed about for over a decade now. And even Microsoft like killed their own Surface, you know, tablet folding project.

02:28:10 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Was it the?

02:28:11 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
yeah, the neo that they fully killed, so nobody is doing a good job at that right now. I could see Apple like coming in and iPadifying a good fold. I like the neo.

02:28:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really I returned it, but well, that was a duo.

02:28:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You had, you had the duo, I had the duo, not the neo.

02:28:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The neo was the windows they never released, the really cool that they never released, yeah, yeah I like to do it but, as I said, I returned it because the software wasn't ready for it.

02:28:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
There was nothing that understood quite what was going on yeah, it does seem like they've got the screen fold sorted now, because that was my big problem with boldables earlier was that you're gonna get a crease down the center and it seems like the technology is now there. Does. Does that match up? And it seems like the technology is now there.

02:28:52 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Does that match up? Yeah, I think marrying the Having the decent software and the decent hardware. And yeah, the creases have gotten a lot less noticeable.

02:29:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The rumor is Apple has arranged to buy a new screen technology from Samsung that is creaseless. I don't know how you do that.

02:29:10
My complaint, really about all the foldables and I have the, I had the several folds and I have the last year's flip still is not so much the crease but the texture, because in order to make these screens foldable, they're not glass right it feels it feels a little rubbery, plasticky and I I don't like that as much. That's my biggest complaint. I like glass. I don't use that as much. That's my biggest complaint. I like glass.

02:29:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't use a screen protector either apple has to invent bending glass now can they do it uh, of course they can.

02:29:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Once you can bend it once every yeah, all glass yeah that's kind of why I like the duo and that you know I tested it out for a couple weeks kind of like yeah, you know it's like I don't have to worry about the screen breaking.

02:29:52 - Benito (Announcement)
I can just use it as you use it. And if the Samsung one is $2,000, how much is the Apple one going to be?

02:29:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it's going to be Well, don't forget tariffs, right? Yeah, it's not as unclear yet what will happen this fall with Apple's pricing, but if the tariffs continue, it's going to have to be a big jump. Yeah, and it's been a while since Apple's, you know, upped the prices on its phones to begin with, and they're not allowed to say it's a tariff increase, that apparently is Companies really don't like doing that. That is verboten, yeah, so.

02:30:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
It's just a value-added product that is verboten, yeah. So hmm, it's just a value-added product. I do notice prices are going up.

02:30:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was at Costco yesterday and everything's a little bit, you know a buck or two more. Just bit by bit they're inching up.

02:30:43 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I mean, we had a big problem with Apple, wasn't this? Because we instituted the phrase the Cupertino idiot tax.

02:30:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I have had so many apple peels. I am a cupatino idiot and I resemble that. I'm gonna resent it. That's what I do. I resent it. Uh, are you gonna buy the commodore 64?

02:31:02
it's back, I really want one, I'm sorry so I'm not of the generation, but if you're of the generation, which you guys all are, that that might have been your first computer, or computer of of lust and desire when it came out. And what was it? 1994, no, can't must have been more older than that it was less big in the us maybe, ah, yeah yeah, you see, I grew.

02:31:26 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I grew up with a sinclair ZX81, and then the Commodore was a lust object. It was just like at last, a proper keyboard, decent processor and there's software to run on it. So I'm really, really tempted by this.

02:31:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's clear. Apparently I don't know if that is that the picture.

02:31:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It was more early 80s that Commodore.

02:31:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're right, commodore was defunct by 94.

02:31:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yes, that's when they went out. So for me my first computer was a packard bell. Remember packard?

02:31:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh my god bless adorable yeah, terrible computers, terrible computers they're pc phones yeah, yeah, yeah sure, yeah. Um well, there's people of a certain age. So let's see, if it was the 80s that means if you were born in 75, maybe it would be something that you would say oh yeah, I got to have this.

02:32:14 - Benito (Announcement)
I had friends who had this, but I had an XT, but I had friends who had these. Yeah.

02:32:19 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, you see. I mean we had a Sinclair ZX81 and then a BBC Model B and then Commodore was a thing to lust after. So it was because Apple wasn't that big in the UK.

02:32:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, always a thing to lust after. So it was because apple wasn't that big in the uk, right?

02:32:34 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
um well, this was a lot less expensive than an apple too as well. Yeah, I mean, uh, douglas adams, I think, was the first or second person to get an apple in the uk, and that's because he made an awful lot of money out of hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

02:32:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know so there's a 300 beige version that is exactly the spitting image of the original one. That's the one I want, yeah, yeah, but you can pay more if you want and get, uh, the slightly more expensive Starlight version, which is the clear one that looks cool. Yeah, or there's apparently a gold version. Oh, for goodness sake, is this a Trump version?

02:33:08 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
or oh for goodness sake Is this the Trump version.

02:33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The Trump version. Let's see there's Starlight, which is clear. That is $349, $350. There's a $500 Ultimate Founders Edition in solid gold plastic.

02:33:28 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Solid gold plastic. What a wonderful phrase.

02:33:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yum plastic. What a wonderful phrase. Yum yum, that's hysterical. What?

02:33:34 - Benito (Announcement)
I remember about Commodores is that they had more games than I had access to.

02:33:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I absolutely realize this. Something like 2,000 games available for them.

02:33:42 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yeah, they were the ultimate gaming PCs of their time.

02:33:46 - Benito (Announcement)
They were all crappy games. It was pre-console. Oh, come on, this is pre-console.

02:33:52 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I was going to say this was the 1980s.

02:33:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of course they were crappy games, yeah it's true, they were the only video games that existed.

02:33:58 - Benito (Announcement)
They were amazing, that's all you could do.

02:34:00 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Right, exactly, I mean it was 10 years after that that Doom came out and really, you know, upset the whole gaming industry. Yeah alright.

02:34:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and you also get commodore basic in there. So brush up your skills and learn how to program.

02:34:20 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
That's hysterical all right kids that's it, you're done.

02:34:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I release you. Thank you so much to uh, our wonderful panel. I just I love getting together with you guys. Abrar Alhidi appears monthly on tech news weekly and of course, there's a regular at CNET, where she's a senior technology reporter. Anything besides your Galaxy Fold review, anything else you want to mention that you're up to these days?

02:34:47 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Lots of phone stuff, lots of self-driving stuff, accessibility stuff, when I can work it into, but yeah, just the usual.

02:34:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, so your Waymo rides are tax deductible.

02:34:57 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I would like to do so. That'd be great.

02:35:00 - Benito (Announcement)
They sound like they're expensed even. Yeah, let them pay for it.

02:35:04 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I should start thinking a little smarter about that, you're right.

02:35:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's so great to see you. Thank you, abra. Right, it's so great to see you. Thank you, bro. I really appreciate you spending this sunday evening with us. Same to you to my good friend davinder hardwar, senior editor at engadget, uh, spending your vacation time with us even more amazing, this is hanging.

02:35:25 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't get to hang out with actual adults anymore. So, yeah, how's that? How's the kid? The?

02:35:30 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
the kids are great uh kids three my daughter is six and six point.

02:35:36 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
So my son is like a little three-year-old terror, so we're just dealing with him it's a good time.

02:35:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a really good time these ages. You enjoy it. Look you'll. You'll look back on it. I wish I could. Now my kids are adults and I don't like them.

02:35:50 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I wish I could come back.

02:35:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I love them.

02:35:54 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
You love his. Come on, you love your son's YouTube channel.

02:35:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love them both. They're both great and it's amazing they're in their 30s, but you'll never forget that time when they're little.

02:36:04 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's just so special, trying to enjoy it. But yeah, it is tough juggling everything else.

02:36:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, you know, what you forget when you get to my age and their age is how hard it is. It's so yeah. All you have is these nice memories. You forget you were working like it was really hard. So, anyway, do remember as much of it as you can. Yeah, it's great.

02:36:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm trying taking photos Every year. I try to upgrade my phone just to be better at taking kids and the brawl he'd even next eat.

02:36:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've got a gift for you, oh my God.

02:36:32 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
Yes, yeah.

02:36:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to fold it and tear it apart, but it would damage it somehow.

02:36:42 - Abrar Al-Heeti (Guest)
I got to frame it. I'm going to frame it.

02:36:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, I, you know it's funny. I found it in a book, like I was flipping through an old book and there it fell out. It was like what the hell? Where did it? Where, where did I?

02:36:54
that's the answer the only thing, that is, I'm a little worried about the provenance of this. That's definitely was his autograph. I recognize it very cool, but that to henry looks like it's in my son's handwriting. So now I'm a little worried that maybe Henry found it, inscribed it to Henry. That's really funny. I'm going to have to ask him. I'm really. That's a little puzzling Kudos. Thank you so much, all three of you. Of course, it's always a pleasure to have my friend from the Register on. He's teaching us wonderful English swear words. Ian Thompson, theregistercom, what are you working on these days? Anything exciting?

02:37:39 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I've been spending a lot of the weekend. Actually, I did some interviews with the EFF, who are facing their 35th anniversary.

02:37:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Happy anniversary.

02:37:49 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
I love the EFF, I'm a donor and it's proud supporter it's weird to think that you know one of the founder members of the grateful dead born this marvelous organization.

02:37:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But john perry barlow.

02:37:59 - Iain Thomson (Guest)
Yes I will have a feature out by the end of the week the late john perry barlow yeah, unfortunately.

02:38:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He was a great guy. I really had a huge admiration for him and for everything the EFF does. And, of course, cory Doctorow works with them. A lot of great people work with them doing their most important work. Thank you all for being here. Thanks especially to our Club Twit members. You do a very important thing you keep us afloat.

02:38:24
25% of our operating costs are covered by club members. Please, if you've thought about this but you're not yet a member, 10 bucks a month. You get ad free versions of all the shows so you never hear this plug or any other ads. Uh, you get special access to the club twit discord, which is a wonderful place to hang out lots of great information and fun stuff in there, and that means you get also, uh, special access to all the special shows we do. Let me see what we've got coming up. Um, we record shows in the club. Oh, that's right. Thursday richard campbell got his ram, so we're going to do a live pc build with the windows weekly host, richard campbell. That'll be a lot of fun. I'll be kibitzing uh while uh, while richard holds the screwdriver. We record home theater geeks. You can get the audio of that everybody gets the audio of. That'll be a lot of fun. I'll be kibitzing while Richard holds the screwdriver. We record Home Theater Geeks. You can get the audio of that. Everybody gets the audio of that. But if you want the video you need to be a club member.

02:39:20
The first Friday of the month, august 1st, the AI user group. That's been a lot of fun. And Stacy's Book Club is coming up August 8th. We've got the photo time. Our word of the month is classic Go out there and take some pictures. We're going to do the Google reveal of the new Pixel phone on August 20th. Those are in the club only as well. So club events are a big part of the reason people join. Access to the Discord ad-free versions of all the shows. But the most important part from my point of view is that the club makes it possible for us to keep doing what we're doing and do more of it. If you'd like what you hear on our shows, please join the club. It's very important. Twittv slash club twit and thanks in advance. We do this Week in Tech every Sunday evening, 2 to 5 pm Pacific, 5 to 8 pm Eastern, 2100 UTC.

02:40:06
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02:40:25
There's a YouTube channel with a video a great way to share little clips. If a youtube channel with a video, a great way to share little clips. If you want to do that, we appreciate that, uh. But the best way to get it, as with all our shows, is subscribe in your favorite podcast player, as they say. Wherever you get your podcasts, uh, you can get the audio or video and you'll get it automatically every week, no charge. That way, you can listen to it at your leisure, on monday morning or whenever you're in the mood for it. And if you do that, leave us a nice review. If you would, a five-star review would be also very, very helpful. Thanks a bra, thanks ian, thanks to vindra, thanks to all of you for joining us. We'll see you next time. Another twit is in the can.