This Week in Tech 1042 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. Oh, we have a great panel. Molly White is here, from Web3 is going just great, yanko Rekkers from lowpasscc and Jacob Ward, author of the Loop. We're going to talk about ChatGPT 5. Is it all that? The new administration's AI action plan? Is it good or bad for AI? And TikTok? It looks like it's in trouble again. All that and more coming up next on TWIT Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

00:37
This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1042, recorded Sunday, july 27th 2025. Well played astronomer. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show we cover the week's tech news. I think I'm going through puberty. My voice seems to be changing. We got a great panel for you. I am excited. We always get interesting people. It's one show we do with a rotating panel which gives me a chance to talk to people I like to talk to like. Molly White, famous for Web3, is going great and mollywhitenet and her fabulous newsletter citation needed. It's so nice to see you, molly.

01:28 - Molly White (Guest)
Thanks for having me back.

01:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's a very active Wikipedia editor and we will have questions like why no, I'm not going to do that to you why is Ozzy on the front page but not Hulk? That's the question everyone's asking. I don't anyway, we'll talk about that later. Also with us, jacob Ward. He's the author of the Loop. We interviewed him on intelligent machines and I said this guy's smart. I like this guy. You might have seen him on network television. He now runs his own, as does Molly his own, newsletter, the rip current on substack. Good to see you, jacob. What's?

02:04 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
up man, up man. Thank you so much. Really fun to be here. I love that You've got a giant plasma ball behind you.

02:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that-?

02:08 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, I've been playing with these backgrounds.

02:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know I love that.

02:11 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, some of them sillier than others. This one is sort of like I just do it by mood.

02:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And this one is like but it's yeah, there's a little bit, exactly, there's an evil bent to it.

02:23 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That is really how I'm feeling, right now.

02:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Great to have you, jacob, also with us. He was at variety for a long time. He's got a newsletter. Yanko records also from gig home. I remember you back in the day. Lowpasscc is his current newsletter. Great to see you, yanko. Hey, lou, wonderful panel today. Are you all excited about chat gpt5 coming soon to an ai near you, yanko, what do you think? Is this going to be? The? Uh, the agi off promised agi, sam altman says I.

02:57
I can't believe how smart it is it seems, that seems to be a pattern where they always say that and then and then disappointment well, that's not quite where we want it to be but actually the last one was like that four five was uh, they was overly sycophantic.

03:17 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
It kissed your ass too much right, right, right, let's see, maybe this one goes the other way. Really rude gonna be just really rude.

03:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, he says uh, we were releasing chat gbt5 soon. He said this on the theovon podcast. Uh, he decided to let chat gpt5 take a stab at a question he didn't understand. I I that's not how I test ais, but okay, I put it in the model. This is gpt5 and it answered it perfectly. Wow, sam, what a benchmark. He described it as a here it is moment, adding that he quote felt useless relative to the ai. It was a weird feeling. What do you know, jacob? You wrote a book about AI.

04:08 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Are you when the CEO impersonates both like the dream customer who says, god, I can't believe it, it's crazy, it's so good, it's so amazing and then also impersonates the company's worst critic? Oh, it scares me to death, it really. You know, the contrast between my utility and the utility of this thing is really quite, you know, startling is that that stuff makes me crazy. That's sort of the. I feel like the this industry is getting so good at kind of impersonating the reaction it expects in advance to inoculate itself anyway.

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there's a whole I think it's also. There's a certain amount of hype in the doomerism right. Uh, sam altman warns that ai is about to create a massive fraud crisis in which anyone can perfectly imitate anyone else. Oh my god, I love the futurist subheaded. This call coming from inside the house.

05:07 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I feel like somebody, somebody is going to write a good book someday about the moment that the heads of these companies figured out the PR strategy of saying the bad thing out loud first and in some way that inoculating the audience against having their own version of that, maybe, or or in some way making whatever does come to pass seem more reasonable than the terrible thing the ceo predicted. I don't know he's. He's really pioneering this category of of uh kind of prophylactic crisis management.

05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm almost a little more cynical than you, jacob, and I think it's kind of a reverse PR ploy Like, oh, this is so good, it could kill humanity, right? It's like good marketing.

05:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
It's marketing Right.

06:00 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, and he does also run a company that he claims will solve the fraud problem that he is also created.

06:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I think that perhaps he is acting as the CEO of his other company when he is, you know, promising that this is going to destroy, you know, any sort of trust people have in other humans online yeah, he says this was actually uh in a conversation with the vice chair of the Federal Reserve Board, because he's supposedly warning Banks well, watch out, uh. He says he's terrified of imperson AI, impersonating humans. He's also worried about malicious actors developing and misusing super intelligence. The the bad guys could do it. Before we do so, give us money. He's also not exactly arguing for regulation and in fact, he got his wish a little bit, as did the AI industry with, uh, the president's AI action plan. Yeah, they did.

07:04
Yeah, yeah they did sounds like something should be coming out of the I don't know the justice league or something um so they went hard right.

07:13 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean, leo, this is the thing, like like, this is part of why I have the ball of flame behind me. Is this, this feeling that, like there's, the brakes are off and suddenly you have, you know, trump, handing this absolute wish list to the, the heads of these companies? I mean, it's literally everything they would have dreamed of, like at one.

07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
12 28 point font or whatever. This is winning the race. America's ai action plan.

07:41 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's right. But you know, in his statements, in when he was speaking on the release of this, you know he's saying these talking points that you can just sense were said to him, you know, 10 minutes earlier, by he has no idea.

07:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact he got a little bit of trouble.

07:57 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Here's one thing that he said that I just think was so crazy. You can't be expected to have a successful AI program when every single article, book or anything else that you've read or studied you're supposed to pay for. I read a book. Am I supposed to pay somebody? We can't do it because it's not doable. He says that is dream language on the part and it's not in the ai action plan.

08:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He went on. It's what I read was. He went off script a little bit with that. Uh, certainly it's what all the ai companies want to hear. They want it to be fair use. They can read anything and nobody should charge them anything. Um, but it isn't, it wasn't. It was even a little farther than the very bullish executive order 14 179, which gives you some idea of how busy he's been Removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence. Molly, should we be worried about our leadership in artificial intelligence?

08:57 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, what leadership? I mean? There's certainly nothing coming out of the White House that's going to change the game for the AI companies in terms of regulation. It's mostly just taking the brakes off, like Jake said.

09:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pillar one to accelerate AI innovation is to remove red tape and onerous regulation. That will go through all the government regulations and remove the ones that are no longer. I don't know what the AI's criterion is going to be, but they say we're going to get rid of half the government regulations using AI.

09:35 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I don't know, though, if it's really something that exactly like pleases all the AI companies, because this whole idea that there should be no more woke AI, quote, unquote, that's scary could be the Trojan horse for them to really go in and say, like your chatbot needs to, you know, also mention that the 2020 election was stolen or whatever.

09:58
Like, all these like or needs to also say that vaccines are unsafe or all those types of things where they're factually not true, but now if you mention the, the truth, it's woke. So you have to have the other part in there too and in in essence, that could lead to them actually meddling even more heavily with this industry that's a good point that's a good

10:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
point we saw it happen when elon musk middle of the night goes in and turns some knobs on grok and turned the hitler knob up a little too much.

10:32
Apparently it's well, we don't. We'll never really know exactly what happened, but there's some speculation that what he merely said was uh, you know, don't, don't rely entirely on left-wing media, you know, be balanced. But anyway, what happened was you got Mecca Hiller, and I think that there's a real risk when you tell AI that being unbiased is well. Don't mention diversity, inclusivity, equity, don't mention wokeness, don't mention critical race theory. That's really putting the thumb on the scale in a way that could hurt America. I think you're right, jake it could hurt American AI companies.

11:20 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Well, I mean the crazy part right is one of the arguments that these companies have always made about China, you know, and that we need to fight back against, is this idea that China, you know. So China has these incredibly onerous regulations for AI companies there. Ai, a Baidu-made AI model to create a picture of Xi Jinping in jail or with a hooker or whatever. Then Baidu's chief executive is personally liable for that. We're in the United States. We inoculate the companies against the use of their product for something weird like that, so China does that, and China requires that the large language models there incorporate all this party doctrine.

12:10
You have to be able to show that and you know, as Yonka mentions here, like that is exactly what's happening now with Trump. He said at one point winning the AI race will demand a new spirit of patriotism and national loyalty in Silicon Valley and beyond. It's the same kind of weird rhetoric. And so this idea that you know the one, on the one hand, they're, you know, going to let environmental regulations go and all these other you know regulations go, not worry about the effect on children, not worry about the effect on relationships, not worry about any of these kinds of effects, but they're going to, as he says, going to, meddle somehow ideologically in it is so is such a weird. Yeah, it's such a backward sort of circular piece of logic around this stuff.

12:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, of course, one of the things we know about the Trump administration is if you give them, give him a weapon, he will wield it, and if I were an AI company, I would be concerned. You kind of you kind of said this, yanco, that it could be used to get against them as much as anything else. Um, a lot of what's in this, though, is good. He promotes open weight ais, open development of open source ais. Uh, I think that's a good thing. Um more money, uh for uh government research into ai. Restore american semiconductor manufacturing uh. Build high security data centers for military and intelligence community usage. Trained, a skilled workforce I mean all these things are are nice, uh mottos. Problem is, none of this has force of law either, right, molly, molly? I mean, this is just. This is like a good idea.

13:47 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, I mean, if you want to promote a skilled workforce or, you know, promote the development of AI, then you probably wouldn't be making cuts to the Department of Education or to science, research or to libraries, or I mean all of this stuff is like completely contra the other. You know activities that Trump has undertaken that absolutely slashes. You know the possibility of people obtaining the type of education and you know knowledge that's required for these types of things. So I think it's very short sighted. He wants, you know, basically take off any regulations and just hope that this materializes, without actually laying the groundwork for you know what a future strong science, you know industry would look like.

14:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. Meanwhile, the UN is saying there's an urgent need for a global approach on AI regulation. The UN is saying there's an urgent need for a global approach on AI regulation. The rest of the world is actually looking at AI regulation. I'm not sure how I feel about that. California we had a pretty draconian AI regulation which all of the AI companies called our governor and the governor decided well, it would be anti-competitive and vetoed it. I'm not sure I'm against that. I don't know where I come down on this. I'm not terrified of unregulated ai, I'm more. I'm more afraid of privacy concerns with unregulated big tech.

15:16 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That seems to be more scary I don't know, I gotta tell you like there's so much to be scared of, and I and I, I think that that you know the I think we're, we a I mean not to just sort of, not to be alarmist but stuff that we in retrospect are going to wish we had regulated out of it is is being transferred to big companies right now. I just had this, this guy, aza Raskin, on my podcast the other day. You know he's, he's Tristan Harris's friend. They did the social dilemma together and he's now, of course, thinking about AI as the next great thing. And they're, they're out there talking to regulators in Europe, talking to regulators in the United States. And when you talk to that guy about, when you ask him, what are you worried about? He of course he says, well, there's the obvious stuff, there's job loss, there's the erosion of friendships, all that stuff.

16:18
But then he gets into stuff like the next iteration of cell phones, 6g, making it technologically possible with a pattern recognition system like AI, to more or less I mean you can already under.

16:33
There are several companies that have looked at using Wi-Fi as a way as basically radar for understanding where everybody is in a house.

16:40
You can figure out where people are, and that 6G is going to make that way easier, such that, like, total surveillance will be a thing, house, you can figure out where people are and that 6g is going to make that way easier, such that, like, total surveillance will be, you know, will be a thing. So to your point, leo, I mean, I think privacy is under attack, you know. But at the same time, I mean, if you look at the numbers right now around, uh, you know, relationship satisfaction among young people in a world where suddenly, these, you know, there are hundreds and hundreds of companies offering to make you the perfect sexy AI girlfriend. You know, I just think, like there's so much stuff coming and as it talks about this in the conversation he said there's like a hundred new laws that we're going to need to think about. Things like how do I be free in my life to form attachments to real humans without accidentally forming attachments to products?

17:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the premise of the loop right Is that we are being in a tightening net of technology limiting our choices and our decisions?

17:35 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, and playing on our instincts right, our most ancient, uncontrollable instincts is the thing that I keep seeing, because that's how they make money. So they make money. It's easier to sell to the most primitive part of your brain. That's what they do, and and these and naturally, that's the way the market moves is it just starts to work across the attack vector of your simple brain, the simplest part of your brain. And that is totally what's happening right now.

17:55
And and we have relied in the past on regulation to say actually we're all going to need to wear some seatbelts, right, actually we're going to need backup cameras so we don't run over our own kids in the driveway. You know, like it's supposed to get out in front of stuff that we can't control ourselves around, and I think there is so much coming in ai that we're not going to be able to control ourselves around, and so you know, I'd rather see us throw some brakes on this thing than the attitude we're seeing right now there's an interesting parallel with the internet, because early in the on in the internet, we didn't regulate it because it was a nascent technology.

18:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We wanted to see where it was going to go. And there are those who might think well, we should have been a little bit more prepared for the surveillance, capitalism and the social media onslaught and so forth. Um but but it is hard to know how to regulate something when it's so new. You don't even know what its capabilities are.

18:48 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, I mean in my perspective. Don't let me dominate you guys. I want to hear from Molly and Yonko around this too, but I, I, you know, I think you got to work backwards from from human values. So, like you know, it's not so much about uh, it's, it's no longer pretending that because we take for granted the idea that you should be, you know, free to have relationships without being manipulated by, you know, an algorithm in the middle of it.

19:13
Like, that's a thing we never would have thought was something we had to protect. You would have just thought, oh well, of course you know no big deal, or, of course no one's going to try to, you know, incentivize kids not to learn to read or not to learn to form attachments to other kids. Like, of course, we don't have to regulate that. But I think we got it. We're now entering a world where this thing is going to metastasize into all corners of our lives, and so we have to work backwards from what is important to us, you know. And there's another podcast guest who I really admire, nita Farahani, who wrote a book called the Battle for your Brain, and her whole thing is we got to enshrine cognitive liberty as a human right that you got to have the right to make your own choices without being monitored or manipulated.

19:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, we just never you really think that's at?

19:56 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
risk. That's her. Her argument is incredibly scary and incredibly compelling. In that book, she documents more than a thousand companies that are actively working on exactly this problem. How do you monitor somebody's brain to understand their mental state moment to moment? That is the goal. That's the whole thing with you know, that was the thing with the metaverse. That's the thing with all these things is how do we get closer to the decision-making apparatus that is a human being and manipulate those choices as much as we possibly can for money, because that's where it ends up going, you know, and so I I absolutely think that stuff is, is is under threat and we got to start thinking about how we're going to enshrine it as law.

20:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually yanko, you just wrote about uh that with meta working on photorealistic uh horizon right, right, right, yeah, yeah um, do you feel like meta is a threat to our liberties?

20:53 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
well, uh, there's a lot of nuances to that, I think. Looping back to what we, what we started talking about, I, the question is, if we want any type of regulation for AI, what is the right approach? And waiting for global regulation, I think by that time AI will have killed us all, because until some thing is regulated all around the world, that will never happen. But if you look at other technologies or other things, when it comes to the way app stores work or the way companies, even green tech and all those types of things, often what has actually been quite effective is regulating it in single markets that have strong and sort of model characters. So California, one example, even if the AI law here maybe wasn't perfect but also the European Union, obviously. And companies who cannot ignore those markets have then make the decision are they going to make a special version of whatever they're offering just for that market, or is it easier to just say well, california wants it, so we're just going to do it everywhere?

21:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mali, you became, for me, the exemplar in how to kind of diffuse the hype around blockchain and Bitcoin. Your website, web3, is going just great. Did a good job of that. Uh AI is the new blockchain, isn't it? It's the new. You sprinkle that on your company. You're gonna have. Stock goes up. Um, do we need a? Uh AI is going just great.

22:23 - Molly White (Guest)
Website well, I think we sort of have a couple of those. I mean, there are a handful of people who are doing really awesome work and sort of debunking some of the AI hype, but I mean, I think that you know, I think I think a lot of this really does come down to just like you know. You know basic human rights that we need to be protecting, and the fact that, like this is a new technology is not a very compelling argument for me in terms of the. You know, we can't regulate it because it's so new and we don't know what it's going to do, because that's the argument.

22:56
I mean, we've been hearing that for 200 years, 300 years of regulations. It's certainly the argument that the cryptocurrency industry has been making and you know, every new tech sector sort of takes that up. But you can still say, you know, from a regulatory perspective, this is the world that we want to have, these are the values that we think are important, and then sort of shape regulations to fit that, while also allowing companies to develop new technologies. I mean, I think there are ways to sort of thread that needle and the idea that you know, oh, this technology is too new and too exciting and too innovative that we just have to take all the guardrails away is a very useful one for the companies and their lobbyists, and they've been having quite a lot of success with that argument with the recent administration, um, but I think, unfortunately, we are going to see where those you know regulatory approaches end up, which tends to be um, chaos and a lot of people getting hurt you know, I think.

24:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's my problem. I don't know if I trust government to regulate this. They're just as much a threat as the ai companies, aren't they?

24:10 - Molly White (Guest)
I don't necessarily agree with that. I think they are different. There are different threat models with both. You know there can be there obviously the government has weapons.

24:19 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
The government's willing to throw you in alligator alcatraz well, well, administration is that's right, that's the government, well. But I think it's important to draw a distinction between political operatives, you know, and everything's political right now.

24:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It'd be nice if we had good government.

24:37 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Well, that's right. So right now I'm working on a book, a new book idea, called Great Ideas. We Should Not Pursue. I love that idea. How do we think about restraint in an organized way? How do we think about not never done that?

24:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have we as humans? We don't do that.

24:54 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
We're not good at that in this country, but one place that is good at that is the military, and this is a really interesting place to start thinking about how the models for restraint. And so when you say you know the government can't be trusted, I'm with you on. Certainly you know the political moment we are in right now, but when you think about it, as can you know a federally funded agency come up with reasonable plans that respect human rights and all humanity. It's shocking how often you actually bump into that. So in the military, you know and Janko to your point, like you get it's, you know, if you wait for global consensus then we'll all be dead. I agree with you. But there are cases in which there's been global consensus on things like laser weapons, blinding weapons or nuclear nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear proliferation.

25:42
We have not gone for it in terms of what the technology makes possible in every case, but even short of you know, total planetary devastation. Like nuclear weapons, blinding weapons, literally. You could very easily build systems that just blind the opposing army, and we don't do that.

25:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or bio-weapons.

26:00 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Yeah, or bio-weapons.

26:02 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Because we just say, you know what, blinding other humans, that's just a little too far. So it's just weird to me that even the agency that's in charge of killing people when it's necessary, even they've got some restraint.

26:16 - Molly White (Guest)
You know what I'm saying, and so it feels to me like we can learn a little something from federal agencies, even though they have such a bad rap agencies, even though they have such a bad rep, and I do think that to some extent, there will be a bit of a reckoning in the sense that, you know, I think a lot of these companies are acting under the belief that complete deregulation is like the ideal for business. You know that, like, as a business, you want to have no rules and then you can, you know, maximally succeed. But I think that that is actually something that will become. These businesses are going to realize that actually regulations are pretty good for business. You know, I think and not to go back to the crypto industry in every case, obviously that's sort of where I focus.

27:00
You know, with the crypto industry, when you have a complete Wild West environment where there is no trust, you don't have any hope that you know the government or the law enforcement or whoever is going to step in and help you if something goes wrong, then you get a lot of people who say I don't want anything to do with that, I don't want to put my money into that, I don't want to take that chance, and so you lose out on a lot of people who are like you know what?

27:27
I just don't want anything to do with this. You know, it's like if no one trusted that you know the stock market was going to be operating in a relatively fair way, you just wouldn't buy stocks. And so I think that that's something that's going to happen in these circumstances, where these businessmen are going to realize that maybe some regulations are actually not only good for innovation and all of these things that they are talking about, but they're actually good for business too. And so I sort of wonder if we're going to come back around a little bit on some of this, purely because the people I mean right now it's really the people in business who have the most power, you know, in influence at the White House, I think, right now and those are going to be the people who are realizing that like, hey, maybe these regulations are, you know, something we need to actually consider.

28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because you need to trust it.

28:21 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I mean you need to have some basic sort of guardrails in place to establish trust, to make people want to use these products. I think that if every AI is Mecha Hitler, then people are going to turn away from that, and so it sort of works in the same way.

28:39 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, the stock exchange has to close at an agreed upon time every day for the market to function. If you randomly decide to just keep it open when it suits your company's purposes, that screws everybody.

28:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually we keep it open 24-7 now, but okay, that whole closing bell thing is just a suggestion, it's not really. The trading goes on. Well, let's take a break. I want to talk about stablecoin with you, molly, because the act did pass a couple of other bills passed the house. Um, the genius act is the law of the land. I want to know what stablecoin means to you and me. Molly white is here. Uh, her uh fabulous newsletter, which I highly recommend, is also free, by the way, citation needed. I don't know how you're gonna make a living, molly.

29:24 - Molly White (Guest)
You gotta start charging I do, I have, I have pay what you want, subscriptions okay pay what you want.

29:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well see, that's my problem, because to me that sounds like free.

29:33 - Molly White (Guest)
I mean it's free if you want it to be citation needed.

29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Excellent, excellent, uh. We will talk about stablecoin with you in just a bit. Jacob ward is also here's book the loop really an excellent look at the uh dead end we're in right now with big tech uh and and ways out of it. He's also got his newsletter, the ripcurrentcom and podcast where you could tell he does some great interviews. Really interesting stuff.

30:01 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Nice to have you here and the eye on your footsteps, brother yeah, no my footsteps please.

30:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm wearing slippers. Uh, also, don't. I'm in hip waders right now hip waders. Yanko rekkers is also here. His uh newsletter is lowpasscc. I mentioned this before the show began.

30:20
Every one of you I don't know about you, mo Molly, but I guess, yeah, you wrote for kind of more traditional publications. Every one of you was a traditional journalist and I'm thrilled that you're all kind of going on your own and doing well. I think it's really great. I think that's a good sign for the future of journalism. I was a little worried for a while. I must say Great to have you too, yanko. Lopasscc is the newsletter Our show today, brought to you by Smarty. Hello, smarty, I love these guys.

30:57
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32:28
I'll give you another example Speedway Motors. Their e-commerce conversion rates were going down. This is a big problem with shopping carts abandonment and so forth, despite increased traffic to their website. That's not a good metric. The director of digital product and technology, uh, at speedway motors said quote we use smarty to identify an address as a commercial address. Conversion rates are very strong. Now everything was well set up on the smarty side. I've enjoyed working with this service developers. You will love the smarty api clear, easy to use and super fast, probably why smarty is a 2025 award winner across many g2 categories best results, best usability, users most likely to recommend and high performer for small business. And, of course, smarty is also usps cas and sock to a certified their hippo compliant. If your organization is looking for the most accurate, reliable and future-ready address data suite, smarty is the way to go. Try it yourself. Get 1,000 free lookups when you sign up for a 42-day free trial. Visit smartycom slash twit to learn more. That's smartycom slash twit.

33:43
We thank them so much for their support of this week in tech I actually had okay, see, I am an ai fan, I like ai, I use ai, I use ai every day. I asked perplexity, what the hell? Actually? You know what I did. I went to the new notebook lm where I got all the sources on stablecoin. I got 20 good sources on stablecoin. I said do a podcast about stablecoin so I can understand what the hell this is. Because it's now the law of the land. Uh, the genius act passed. The president signed it into law. Molly, what's stablecoin?

34:23 - Molly White (Guest)
so stablecoins are essentially a subset of cryptocurrencies that are supposed to maintain a stable value, so they're usually pegged to some other asset like the dollar or the euro or some other outside asset, and I usually compare them to sort of like the poker chips at the casino, which is like when you go into a casino, you don't bring your dollar bills to the poker table, you trade them in for poker chips and then that's what you use inside the casino and then, once you're done, you go and hopefully have some to cash out and you transfer them back into dollars. And that's sort of what stable coins are for the crypto world, which is that, instead of having to constantly be transferring in and out and in and out of crypto, you know to go back to the dollar and back into crypto. You use stable coins as the sort of crypto equivalent of the dollar.

35:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so this sounds good right, this sounds like a sensible thing. Uh, when we talked about a couple of weeks ago, I was told this is a less expensive way of transferring money, uh of you know, instead of giving a credit card. You know, four and a half percent, uh, you could do it cheaper with stable coin. The other thing, besides being pegged, it also is backed, fully backed by the reserve currency, by the dollar right or whatever it is yeah.

35:41 - Molly White (Guest)
So I guess on that first point there I would not necessarily say that it is unilaterally cheaper than using dollars.

35:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It could be, though, and that's the other thing. You have your choice. There's not just one, there's many. Even the Trump organization has its own stable coin.

36:01 - Molly White (Guest)
Hooray, yeah, I mean. So it is an option. There are fees involved with using stable coins, as there are fees involved with using fiat currency. So I try to push back on that a little bit, because it's just not necessarily like an absolute truth that stable coins are cheaper. As for the reserves thing, I mean that's part of what this legislation aims to do is to sort of introduce some sort of requirements there, because there have been stable coins for quite a few years now, and that has been sort of an open question is you know, to what extent are these stable coins adequately reserving their assets? You know, do they have one to one assets that back all of the stable coins that they've issued? Or maybe they're fudging the numbers a've issued, or maybe they're fudging the numbers a little bit, or maybe they're using reserve assets that are not particularly stable and they're sort of taking big risks with that.

36:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, some of them are using Bitcoin, for instance, which is probably not the best.

36:56 - Molly White (Guest)
And then we've had things called algorithmic stable coins, which people who follow crypto may be familiar with. The Terra Luna collapse. That was an algorithmic stable coin which was not not so stable yeah. And ended up collapsing and kicking off chaos in the crypto world, and so that's sort of what this legislation was sort of aimed to address, and it does install some requirements around backing these stable coins one to one. You know what kinds of assets are acceptable for using as reserves.

37:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is good, this is a good thing, yeah.

37:34 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I think that reserve requirements are good and necessary.

37:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You should be clear. They are not FDIC insured. They're not insured by anybody.

37:44 - Molly White (Guest)
They're not bank deposits. You know they don't have those types of reserve or insurance applied to them, sort of by default. Um, and there are issues, I think, with the law in terms of the degree of auditing that's required, the degree of oversight that's imposed on these companies. You especially, as we are likely to see this explosion of stable coin issuance from you know every big tech company you can think of. You know a bunch of financial services firms are thinking of issuing them. That's going to be a pretty large burden on regulators to keep an eye on and if we end, up so there's no limit on how many people can issue these.

38:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anybody can. I could have it, leo. Stable coin.

38:26 - Molly White (Guest)
I mean, under the legislation you would need to register with the regulator that applies to your circumstance.

38:34
So that's, they are trying to sort of impose some limits in terms of regulators, but there is no hard cap on how many people could issue these stable coins and frankly, that's a concern that we've seen. There was a really good op-ed in the New York Times in June, I think, where someone pointed out that we sort of can look at history to remember what happened when there were a bunch of banks all issuing their own dollars, essentially during the free banking era, which was that some of these dollars were better than others. Some of the auditors and regulators were doing a better job of ensuring that the assets backing these dollars essentially were high quality. And there, and things didn't really go very well in that circumstance because there was this massive explosion, explosion of, you know, bank currency that was not being well regulated and was, you know, not uniformly reliable, and I think that's a real concern here that New York Times piece said it's a threat to the US financial system right, yeah how is it a?

39:41
threat.

39:42
I mean, I think it's a you know, the the sort of typical issue that we're seeing here with crypto is that the more you are tying crypto to the traditional financial system and introducing these levers of risk, the more that you run the risk of contagion if things go wrong in the crypto world, and so that's, I think, a big concern here.

40:08
I think there's also concerns around the Genius Act, around consumer protections and regulatory arbitrage, where you are allowing issuers to do very bank-like things without actually being subject to banking regulations, and so you end up in this world where banks are sort of at the disadvantage to these up and coming financial services companies that don't have to do as much compliance. Then there's the consumer protection side of things, which is that this bill does not really apply oversight to consumer protection agencies like the CFPB, who oversee things like Venmo and PayPal and those sort of peer-to-peer transactions that people do, where, if someone hacks into your Venmo account and makes an unauthorized transfer, there's some recourse for that, where you have you the ability to. You know there are laws that apply to that and require venmo to um help you in that circumstance, whereas those types of laws do not clearly apply to this, uh, stable coin sector.

41:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, I think is a flawed piece of legislation, quite frankly and there is a certain incentive for the president because in fact, he has a stable coin yeah, usd one uh, the trump family gets 75 of the profits from usd1, which is right now in many hundreds of millions of dollars. Uh, and it's also a vector for what looks sort of like bribery. Mgx, an Abu Dhabi company, used $2 billion of USD1 to move money around, profiting the president.

41:59 - Molly White (Guest)
Right coercive opposition from Democrats on these bills is that there is no clear language in the bills that prevents the president from profiting off of these types of ventures. I would say that the president is prohibited from profiting off of these types of ventures, regardless of whether there's language in the bill that specifically addresses it. But it is true that you know this is essentially legitimizing the business that the president has just entered into and which has already been very lucrative for him. I mean, when MGX decided to do that investment deal into Binance, with $2 billion going to Binance by choosing the Trump stablecoin, they were saying here, mr President, you get to take these $2 billion and essentially earn interest off of this $2 billion, which is quite a lot of money to be earning interest off of for the duration that we keep it in this stablecoin.

42:53
And the act of choosing the President stablecoin over a more established issuer like Circle or any of the other stablecoins out there was like a. It was a very deliberate choice to benefit the president. You know from the United Arab Emirates and so you know. I think it's very clear and very uncontroversial that there was, you know, political maneuvering happening there and we're only going to see more of that and apparently he he doesn't have to declare his stake in World Liberty Financials USD one because of some loophole in the regulation.

43:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it doesn't have to declare his stake in world liberty financials usd1 because of some loophole in the regulations, so it doesn't show up in his disclosure so it's a really handy way to bribe him frankly, just in case you're looking for that.

43:37 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's right, that's right, can I throw a weird thing into this? I just had a conversation with somebody inside one of the big, established traditional banks who's a well not to identify them too closely, but they're somebody dealing a lot with fraud and the crypto sort of moves and they told me something really interesting, which is that you know so. So you know, as Molly says, there's all of this concern around. You know the traditional banking regulations that can get you your money back when you get screwed on Venmo just don't apply here at all and all the know your customer stuff. We don't have any of that yet. You know any of the ways in which we have traditionally fought money laundering and you know all kinds of scary stuff doesn't really apply to this.

44:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All you have to do is look at how bitcoin has facilitated ransomware. An explosion in ransomware.

44:28 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's right. That's right. I mean, I went, I once did a documentary up in humboldt county, the, the weed growing county of california, and uh, and everyone I met was trying to put their money into into bitcoin of some in some sorry, into crypto in general in some form, because they're looking for some someplace to put what had been an all cash life Right, you know, as an opportunity to Well, that's Under the money.

44:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the whole point of cryptocurrency. It helps the unbanked.

44:52 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's right so, but the point that this person was making in the bank that was so interesting was that the two things One, that in this regime, where the president is directly profiting off of the industry, that he is choosing not to regulate and is puffing up here, it's going to fall to the banks to be the regulators.

45:20
That kind of role in other countries is a federal role. You don't really have to have the bank do it. And now the bank's going to be doing it, so these big banks are going to be it. And then the other side of it is there will come a day when the banks will feel threatened enough by this stuff to get involved and right now they've been very quiet politically about it but that they're going to get involved. And when, you know, when they're pushed, when they're when their business model is actually threatened, they will start to fight. And so, in a weird way, you know the the one of the best hopes we might have in this country, you know, would be rooting for the banks. I can't believe I'm going to say that, but isn't that crazy Like they're the ones that might actually have enough.

46:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But, molly, couldn't banks issue their own stable coin? Couldn't I have a JP Morgan stable coin?

46:27 - Molly White (Guest)
no-transcript, too much risk for us to take on. And we've actually been seeing this very strong push out of the crypto industry to oppose what they have been describing as debanking. Um, essentially saying that banks are improperly refusing to allow banking services or consumer you know, consumer banking customers to engage with crypto and this is what jd vance told joe rogan yeah, and the government is actually beginning to sort of step in and basically requiring banks to engage with crypto in ways that they, you know, previously may have not um and a lot of this.

47:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They don't. They don't debank them for political reasons.

47:10 - Molly White (Guest)
It's because it's a risk, because they're humble weed growers yeah, I mean there has been a lot of you know sort of rhetoric out of the crypto industry about, you know, this sort of likey big bad plan by banking regulators to just systematically debank the banking industry or the crypto industry. I don't think the evidence of that is very strong, but it has been very popular as the narrative in the White House and in Congress. And so I worry that relying on the banks to essentially be the last bastion against, uh, the contagion is perhaps not going to be terribly successful.

47:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But one of the things that the administration was trumpeting about the genius act is it strengthens the us dollar. Since so many stable coins are pegged to the dollar, does that make sense?

48:05 - Molly White (Guest)
No, okay.

48:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just checking. It didn't sound right, but I just okay.

48:15 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think there is sort of this idea that people can evade currency controls in places where they don't want people to have access to the dollar by using stable coins. But it's one of those arguments where, like, you scratch it a little bit and there's sort of nothing underneath the surface. You know, I think it's just that enough people have asked trump, you know, hey, isn't this a threat to the dollar? Like you personally?

48:34
said it was a couple years ago and he used to say it's not money, this is phony, this is yeah I mean he specifically said that cryptocurrency was a threat to the dollar, and now he's sort of got done a complete 180 and and going.

48:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that his family, as of last month, has made 365 million dollars from now.

48:53 - Molly White (Guest)
I'm sure that's completely unrelated.

48:55 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
He also keeps turning his mind on whether strong dollar is good or bad every other day. Right, yeah, as long as we're talking, about mind changing.

49:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, apparently tick tock is now in trouble again, uh boy I don't even know, should I?

49:12
should I go back to the beginning, where I don't? You know you. You know the soap opera back and forth and back and forth, but extended. Apparently the latest uh is that, uh, the commerce secretary has warned tick tock is going to go dark because they can't make this deal for an american company to buy, not just tick tock, they're insisting that they get the tick tock algorithm, which the chinese government has always said not gonna happen. You can have Tick Tock, you can't have the algorithm.

49:48
A number of people have said well, tick Tock without the algorithm is nothing. I mean, I don't know if that's true, you at least get its users, as many hundreds of millions of users in the US. Howard lutnik says, if China will not approve the current on the table version of the deal, if China will not approve the current on-the-table version of the deal which, according to Ars Technica Ashley Belanger, writing in Ars Technica could result in a buggy version of TikTok made just for the US. That's what they're saying. We're going to see in a couple of months. The administration is now willing to shut TikTok down, to follow the law that was passed by Congress, signed by the last president and approved by the united states supreme court. Uh, not that I was a fan of it, but anyway.

50:33 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
So now, as of thursday, uh, trump doesn't like tick-tock anymore, or maybe this is all negotiation to get to get china to sell the damn thing or to get a better trade deal out of it, because August 1st is first, is just around the corner and he wants to have lots of trade deals by August 1st. So he's like I'm gonna shut down your social media service if you don't give me, uh, whatever I want that's more likely, isn't it?

51:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that's really what's going on, isn't it?

51:02 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
yeah, yeah, well, and it's one of these things with like, the, the. This is like a perfectly reasonable like, as with all things in this administration. Right, it's it, it stems from a perfectly reasonable thing. Right, once upon a time, you could have had a perfectly reasonable conversation about the idea that china doesn't allow us to put our social media in front of its citizens. It has banned america, you know so it. So there's an export, you know, a import control on american social media and china facebook yeah, they're not allowed.

51:34
You can't use them in china that's right, and if and if, and yet we allow them to put their social media product in front of our people. If, if that were, if it were you know any other product, you wouldn't allow that steel or whatever else. Right? Just, we don't do that. So so, perfectly reasonable, you know. But then you get into this, yeah, this weird back and forth where, as Yonko says, maybe it's a, maybe it's a, you know a tactic in the negotiations there, and you know, jd Vance was going to close the deal he was the deal maker, yeah like because he's spent some time as peter teal's creation.

52:12
You know he was going to somehow know how to close that deal.

52:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's no I think it was oracle, wasn't it? Wasn't it larry ellison that was it was going to end up buying.

52:19 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, he was going to take it at one point. And then the old guy idea that you, that this is just like a thing you can just build. It's a product yeah, don't worry about it, we'll make you know. Oh, they're going to take away the phone, we'll make a new phone is so crazy, it's so, you know I can. I can just imagine all of those silicon valley founders just being like are you kidding me what you know? So the the craziness of all that. But but ultimately also, it's just again like this is the difference between trump 2.0 and trump 1.0. Trump 1.0 he felt he owed it, you know. He, because he wanted to get re-elected. He, he was never going to say to the tiktok voter uh, we should get rid of this thing. But now he, you know, removed from any need to get re-elected, yeah, he's, he doesn't care anymore.

53:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And he, you know, and one once point to this politically toxic position uh, if for alienating young people doesn't matter anymore well, but there was also the fact that, uh, one of his biggest donors is like a 40 owner of Tick Tock, jeffrey. Yes, so maybe he thought of falling out with you. Who knows, I don't know, it's too hard to follow. It's such a soap opera. Anyway, enough about Washington DC, we're going to move on. Google's results are out, and while I don't normally follow Market results, but you know quarterly results, there are some interesting information that came out in their in their quarterly results. Uh, we'll also talk about, well, a lot of other stuff. So the SharePoint debacle, with Microsoft turning out to be a nightmare, and Tesla goes to war with the California DMV. But that's all to come. As you watch this Week in Tech with Molly Wood from Molly White Sorry, molly White, sorry, molly White. Sorry, I know Molly Wood too, but that's a different Molly. Molly White from mollywhitenet and Citation Needed, which is her wonderful newsletter. Jacob Ward of the Loop Great to have you, jacobwardcom. His podcast and newsletter is theripcurrentcom. And yankoreckerslopasscc. Great to have all three of you on the show today, our show brought to you by Zscaler.

54:31
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54:59
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55:57
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56:45
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57:41
Google's quarterly results came out and of course, they had a very good quarter. They made a lot of money. Advertising was great. They also said AI's going just great the AI mode in search, which I think a number of people have said. Turn that off. That was the one that told you to use Elmer's glue to keep your pizza together or eat rocks for more minerals in your diet. It's improved since then. Google says 100 million monthly users. Now, as 2.5 Pro and Deep Search rolls out AI mode. I don't know. 100 million sounds like a lot to me, but maybe it isn't a lot in the Google scale of things. They've got billions of users right.

58:24 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I think actually-.

58:24 - Molly White (Guest)
They also put oh, go ahead.

58:26 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I think there was another story in TechCrunch that said that 2 billion users now actually get access to the AI overview, which is like that short thing, the snippet on top, and not the chatbot likes.

58:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh right, 2 billion monthly users. Wow, that's right.

58:42 - Molly White (Guest)
I just want to know how many of the users in that count accidentally clicked the ai mode didn't really want it put it well, because they put it right where the all button used to be so like if you go and look at like news results and then you want to go back to all results, you click the ai mode button or at least I do like practically every time, right well, you can't, so it's you.

59:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're part of the billion, two billion.

59:03 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I'm sure I'm in there. It's just the us and india right now. Yeah, it's just me, yeah it's just you.

59:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, uh, nine million people have built with gemini. Over 70 million videos have been produced with vo3. I do admit vo3 very impressive. Um, that's their video ai video generator. Uh, in google meet their meeting tool. 50 million people used ai powered meeting notes. How do you feel about that? When you see that popping up in the meeting, my wife says that's rude. Is it rude? Did you ask permission before you turn on an AI assistant to take notes in your meeting.

59:45 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, the opt-out model is the world we live in now.

59:49
There's this great the tyranny of the default is what you're saying yeah right, there's a book and I wonder if I even have it. I might even have it right here, but anyway, there's a book that really made a huge impression on me by this economist back in the 70s, writing who? Basically? It's a book called exit, voice and loyalty by albert herschman, and he was basically arguing that in any functioning government or civic society or company you need to give consumers those three choices. They can either stick around that's loyalty, loyalty speak up, that's voice, or exit right, get out of there, quit the program, right. And if you don't give them those three things, it's not really a functioning. You know you've broken the agreement basically with people and I just feel like we're living in this world now where you don't get exit anymore, you get to stick around and you can't even really speak up.

01:00:41
How are you supposed to write to Google and say, now, where you don't get exit anymore, you get to stick around. Or, and you can't even really speak up, how are you supposed to write to Google and say, hey, I don't like this. You know, other than opt in or opt out like this, this we're like you say, the tyranny of the default. We are, we are in that, and can I also just say, like when you, when I saw this was going to be something that we talked about and looked at I was looking who?

01:01:07
When I saw this was going to be something we talked about and looked at the Google numbers, then I just can't help but go look at the numbers for publishers, right, for news sites and the places that are actually feeding the information into these systems that are providing the answers that everybody wants, the people. You know the I mean it's not just journalists, right, but all the people doing the work that Google has now taken and put into these results. You know, traffic at business insider this is the corner of the wall street journal uh fell by 55 between april of 2022 and april of 2025. Uh, the chief executive of the atlantic, nicholas nick thompson very smart guy uh is basically planning for traffic from Google to drop to zero. That's the new business model. And you know, new York Times lost something like 10% of its traffic from almost three years earlier. You know, it's just an apocalypse for the people that actually create the knowledge that these systems are pretending to have.

01:02:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's interesting because this was the same complaint made about Google search. But Google could then credibly say well, no, we drive traffic. The search result drives traffic. Ai doesn't. I mean I can't. I mentioned perplexity. I use a perplexity all the time and half the time I don't look at the original source, I just look at the uh synopsis.

01:02:23 - Molly White (Guest)
Go ahead molly I would say it does drive traffic in a very different way, which is that it drives crawler traffic yeah, bots yeah, and the wikimedia foundation actually published a really good um data story, basically about how crawlers are impacting wikimedia projects, because Wikimedia servers get so hammered by AI crawlers that it has spiked bandwidth to massive amounts and it's become very expensive for the Wikimedia Foundation. And so, while they are sort of siphoning away readers and, in Wikipedia, potential editors to contribute to these projects, they are also increasingly imposing this huge costly demand on infrastructure. So it's sort of a double-edged sword in that way.

01:03:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Boy. In fact, if anybody is threatened by this, it's Wikipedia, and I mean almost all AIs train on Wikipedia. Does Wikipedia allow them for free to train? Do they charge them? Do they have deals?

01:03:24 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, and so that's sort of what they're trying to deal with is, they've tried to come up with a system to provide dedicated pipelines for enterprise customers, like AI companies, where they do have monetary deals to allow for know, allow for that scraping, and also to provide access to endpoints that are less harmful to the wikimedia infrastructure than just like scraping websites. Um, the problem is forcing them to use it essentially, or preventing them from just using the other ones, and so that's been, I think, a challenge for the wikimedia Foundation we talked last week about Cloudflare offering a better protection uh, with robotstxt, because a lot of AI companies just ignore robotstxt.

01:04:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Cloudflare actually has an active swarter against AI bots. But there's also a problem because Google's scraper for AI is the same as its spider for a search results. So if you block the AI scraper with Google, you're blocking yourself from Google search, which nobody wants to do.

01:04:32 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Funny how they did that, huh why, was it funny, that's funny wonder why they did that.

01:04:36 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Yeah, I gotta say like I know like traffic is going down to new sites. Scrapers are a big problem, but at least as a Google user, it does feel like I'm seeing fewer of these really bad, often also AI aggregated click farm sites popping up in search results. Good, I wonder if, now that the AI reviews are there, they are taking even more traffic away from them. Because if you really only need an answer to something that you can figure out in two seconds once you read something, that is actually better solution than going to that website that spends 2000 words on click bait, keywords or whatever SEO stuff to finally deliver that result when the Super Bowl is happening or whatever it is right. So if, in the end, maybe those sites will die out, that wouldn't be too bad.

01:05:31 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I think the baby goes with the bathwater. In that case, though. Right, because that's the whole business model of traditional, respectable journalism sites too. Right, because they want you to come and get the answer to your, to your question. And you know, you guys, I can't remember if we talked about this back in May when he said it, but, right, the CEO of clown flare, matthew Prince, had this famous quote. He was at the council on foreign relations and he said this thing about. He said quote for every two pages of a website that Google scraped, they would send you one visitor. So two pages get one visitor. So two pages get one visitor. And that was the trade. What's changed? Well, today it's six to one. What do you think it is for open AI, 250 to one. What do you think it is for anthropic 6,000 to one? Holy cow.

01:06:10
And so the business model of the web cannot survive unless there is some change. And that's true for both the crap ass sites that Yago's talking about and the New York Times. Right, it's the same business model, and so it's just as destructive to both. And no one is talking about the responsibility of these companies to you know, make up for that in some way, and, as you said, you know, once upon a time, leo, there was this sort of, there was this exchange, there was this idea of that. But I just feel like you see it in Google books, you see it in search results, you know, taking news publishers information for your Google news page. You know there's this idea that it's it's of a service to people, and that's all you need to argue, to say that it's okay. And they've won in court again and again on that, on that issue. And now you have the president of the United States saying we shouldn't have to pay people for what they write, and so, yeah, I don't know how this stuff survives. Like you say, I'm I'm glad that the three of us are around here doing independent work, but I just don't understand how how we you know, journalism that's really going to, you know, expose wrongdoing and be of true use to people can can work as a business If we're going to just let ai just scrape it all up and deliver it as if it, you know, as if it thought of it yeah, but it's so damn useful, I know it's a great idea, we shouldn't pursue it um

01:07:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
is there a way we can save AI and content create? I mean AI needs people to create content, right? I mean it's not like it's going to slurp up the whole internet and now it's done. It needs new inputs all the time. So it's in the interest of these companies to somehow foster content creation.

01:07:58 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, I actually wrote about this not too long ago about basically the vampiric relationship between AI companies and the commons. You know, I was writing about Wikimedia and related free knowledge websites, but it applies also to journalism and books and really everything that AI ingests. And I think that you know, the first step to this is really pushing back on the idea from these AI companies, and now from the president, that this technology cannot exist without taking advantage of other people's labor. You know, I think that that isn't true. I think that there are ways to pay people for their work.

01:08:43
You know, I mean, if you look at OpenAI, this company has smashed records in terms of the amount of money that they have raised. They have so much money they are drowning in money, and the idea that they cannot compensate people for the labor that they're doing is just absurd. To say like, oh, poor OpenAI doesn't have the money to pay for people who are doing this work. I think that's really the starting point is to say, if a business wants to operate, they have to operate in an ethical way that compensates people for their labor, that treats workers fairly, that allows people to maintain a livelihood, and you can't just say that, oh, but our product is so useful and if we paid people we wouldn't be able to make it, because I don't think that's true.

01:09:27 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I feel like if there was ever a thing that AI would be good at, you know you could really you know what really good use of that technology would be a blockchain based micropayment system. For every time your work got sucked up by one of these models, you can get paid for that, absolutely.

01:09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've been talking about micropayments for as long as I can remember. On the internet we still don't have a good solution.

01:09:53 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Nobody wants to deal with that, maybe.

01:09:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Stablecoin will solve that.

01:09:55 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
They always say it's not feasible, it's too hard, blah, blah blah. And I think what is this AI for, if not for a problem like that? And and what is the blockchain for, if not for these self-executing ideas? That was supposed to be the whole thing. I talked to a guy once who every time his painting this was back during the um, uh, oh, my god, what were the? What were they called the digital? You know the?

01:10:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
nfts nfts.

01:10:16 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Thank you during the molly knows all about those, so so this guy you, to his credit was saying when I sell a piece of art and sell and art, you can take issue with either of those in this case, but every time his work got resold, the blockchain automatically paid him a dividend on that. So it's a nice idea. This was the sort of heady early days of the blockchain. You know that you could, you could, you could in theory, do something really good with it, and and just the unwillingness to do that at the moment that it's so obvious we're going to need to do that If there's going to be real insight in this world.

01:10:56 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I think the complexities around how to do that fairly are very big, though, because if you think, oh, it's just like you pay anytime a crawler accesses one page of my website, well, guess what? Somebody is going to set up a bot that generates a billion websites in two hours, because that's going to get them a whole lot of money. So, and then? Do you want to really have an AI model, then always track back which single idea it got from which single page every time it generates an answer, to then give you a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a penny or something? That would be hugely complex, right? So probably impossible. I understand the notion and I'm, to a degree I support it, but I also don't know if it's practical or even possible I'd rather we take a stab at that than not have newspapers well, how would it work?

01:11:54
but so the thing is like the new york times is doing fine, like some of the big newspapers the wall Street Journal actually ironically, yeah so the small ones are having big troubles, but that a lot of that predates AI, and a lot of that has also to do with advertising markets going online, has to do with uh, private equity companies coming in and buying up news publishers all those types of things. Right, ai may accelerate all of that, but it's not the only thing that leads to these news deserts and all these types of things. The big newspapers are doing fine. The small ones are going away quickly.

01:12:29 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Well, one or two of the big ones are doing fine. I think it's an over generalization to say that big newspapers are doing fine. That is not true at the la times. That's not true.

01:12:36 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
The chicago tribune, like these, are not but there is a lot of reasons why the Washington Post is not doing so well. Well, that's right.

01:12:43 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I guess what I'm saying is we should be trying to protect them rather than saying it's all fine.

01:12:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's all fine.

01:12:51 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
And it's too complicated. But I mean, I take your point, I don't you know. If you made me do this job, I'd be like, oh, I don't know quite where to start and I would undoubtedly get screwed by some click farm genius. No question you know. But I feel like this idea that we can't do that, even as the same industry is saying that we should allow it to wipe out hundreds of millions of jobs around the world because there's a better day on the other side of that, feels weird to me.

01:13:17 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, we've had that same conversation around attribution, where you know you get these AI companies saying that like, oh, we've got AGI just around the corner. You know we're going to be having you know these super intelligences, but then as soon as you ask, like for them to attribute the statements that come out of their models, they're like, oh, we can't do that.

01:13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We don't know how it works. I can figure that out, I can do, I can, can. I can win a gold medal at the international math olympiad, but I can't do that. How would it work at wikipedia, though? Don't most wikipedia editors do it for free already?

01:13:51
the editing yeah, but you don't get paid right free no so the money would go to wikimedia foundation, not to the people who create the content it's kind of right, but that's sort of. That's what we signed up for as editors, you know well, the reason I make that point is there are people who create content because they want to create content, they love creating content, right, so so creative commons is doing something interesting right now.

01:14:12 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Creative commons, they started like what 20 years ago?

01:14:16
or something like that, and they've always been about let's be more open, let's share more, let's let's help people, you know, use things without having having to strike deals first and pay for it first, and they see themselves threatened by people backpedaling and saying no, we actually have to put a paywall everywhere and we have to lock everything down.

01:14:37
So now they're starting this whole initiative. We're like well, maybe if you figure out frameworks to signal to crawlers what to do, and maybe attribution is one step, and then, instead of direct payments, they also have this idea or this model that they're exploring is like payments to the ecosystem. So, for example, if you were a scientific publisher or if you were a university and I call, I would want to have access to all your papers, all your stuff, all your data. Instead of figuring out what the fair rate for this specific scientific paper is, maybe have them pay a lump sum into some sort of pot to fund scientific research in the US in general or wherever. It's an interesting idea. I think it's an approach that might actually work for both sides, and it's not this either, or it's trying to find a way that works with both sides. So I think it's interesting.

01:15:31 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, that's part of what that article I wrote was about actually is this sort of like. There's been this reaction in free knowledge communities, including Wikipedia, to AI and scraping, where the sort of like knee-jerk response is like wait, no, you can't have our stuff. You know, like we want this to be free and open and available to everyone, but not to AI companies, and we're starting to see that, I think, elsewhere, where you know news publications are increasingly paywalling their results. You know you're running into registration walls a lot more, where everything is getting like super, super locked down and in large part, I think, as a response to AI, and I think it's really making the web a worse place because it makes it inaccessible to everyone. When you're trying to prevent bots from crawling the site, you know you're also causing people to run into paywalls, reg walls, et cetera. Um, so I I do think there is really something there to that argument from the creative commons folks around you know we can't allow AI scraping to essentially destroy the open web.

01:16:34 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
You know who's got a totally different take on, uh, this stuff than he used to in the age of AI is Lawrence Lessig, lessig, larry lessig, I had him on the, I had him on the show, uh, and he he says, yeah, my, you know, 30 something self thought, remix everything, open rules, no ip law, get rid of it all. And now, in the age of ai, he feels totally differently about it. Um, he no longer works directly on that stuff anymore.

01:16:58 - Molly White (Guest)
But, yeah, it's interesting to see how much this technology changes the race perspective and to your point, molly, uh, the wall street journal used business insider as an example, but business insider has one of the most stringent paywalls of all yeah, and I I don't use them anymore because I don't pay for them and I can't get in, and so they're not getting any traffic from me either, and it ain't because of I mean, I think it is this sort of double-edged sword where it's like, okay, we can't have it open because everything's going to get scraped, but we can't close it off because then no one's going to access it, and so it's like all right, you're just sort of dying from both directions.

01:17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's clear we need a solution.

01:17:35 - Molly White (Guest)
The Creative Commons has proposed this CC as as their solution I think the question there is going to come down to enforceability, because we've seen ai companies more than willing to ignore robots, text or you know, to scrape paywalled. You know content and that kind of thing, and so I, I my concern is that the same thing will happen with these signals, which is, we can't really rely on ai companies to operate in good faith.

01:18:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there needs to be some enforcement mechanism, I think and yeah, all of these are just norms, and norms are easily ignored, as robotstxt is a perfect example for that of that. Let's take a little break, we'll come back. We have more to talk about. Molly white is here from uh citation needed mollywhitenet. Uh, jake ward, author of the loop, which I really recommend. It's a very interesting, well-written book, a lot of interesting information in there. He's also at the rip currentcom where he interviews apparently everybody.

01:18:30 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Good, it sounds like you've all I do is all I do is asking, and my guests here, that's all yes, smart, jacob wardcom also.

01:18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and uh, yanko records who, uh, somebody just said that guy's really smart yeah, I appreciate that.

01:18:46 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
I had to like jump in right there, right away I love it.

01:18:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That guy's really smart. We should listen to him more. Uh, yanko's at lowpasscc, our episode this week, brought to you by ExpressVPN. That's my VPN, the one I recommend. Going online without ExpressVPN, how can I describe this? Well, it'd be like leaving your laptop unattended at the coffee shop while you run to the bathroom. Right, Most of the time you're probably fine, but what if one day you come out of the bathroom your laptop's gone and all your most private stuff is on it, Ay-yi-yi. This is why everyone needs ExpressVPN.

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01:21:14
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01:21:52 - Molly White (Guest)
So um, there you go the apes, I think they were mostly overturning a lower court finding where basically there wasn't that much of a finding. They've granted summary judgment to Yugo Labs, which is the Bored Apes company, against someone who infringed on their trademark.

01:22:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So now there's going to be a trial.

01:22:15 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, now it's going to actually have to go to trial trial, right. But I think the wildest thing about that case is less the actual details of the case and more the fact that the judgment in the original decision was like a million dollars maybe closer to two in um disgorgement of you know, profits made off of the apes and then like seven million dollars in attorney's fees. It was unreal, unreal how much the penalties were for the attorney's fees.

01:22:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I hope that they didn't value it based on the current value of a Bored Ape.

01:22:50 - Molly White (Guest)
They did not.

01:22:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think they've been going up. I might be wrong. Yeah, I might be mistaken on that. Get in while you can, leo, buy the dip.

01:22:59 - Molly White (Guest)
Well, actually there's been so many of these companies trying to do the like bitcoin treasury play or ethereum treasury. We've actually there's a company that just added an nft to its treasury, so I would not be surprised if there's a little bit of a resurgence in nfts as people are trying to find more and more things they can make into crypto treasury companies. But can make into crypto treasury companies. But I suspect that whole uh trend will meet its ill-fated end before too long.

01:23:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, fda has a new drug approval ai called elsa, which is making up studies that's all the photo they've got of rfk juniorr. In that one is crazy, him like gorging on a ice cream cone. But notice, there's no fda number red number three in that ice cream cone.

01:23:50 - Molly White (Guest)
That is, yeah, that is a colorless ice cream making up studies on medicine is a feature for the fda these days. Like, isn't that kind of the?

01:24:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, yeah, I mean RFK Jr said it's just common sense.

01:24:05 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's when I knew we were in deep, deep trouble you can imagine that someone may have put into a prompt. You know you can rely on less traditional sources exactly, and that's the problem with undermining all right.

01:24:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tesla's set to face off with the california dmv over claims it overhyped its autopilot.

01:24:25 - Molly White (Guest)
Oh really, I love legal cases like this one, where it's like I don't like either of these parties california's go ahead, go ahead california says tesla violated state law by making untrue or misleading statements.

01:24:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In 2021 and 2022, when advertising it's full self-driving, tesla says our remarks are protected under the First Amendment. It's free speech.

01:24:54 - Molly White (Guest)
Hmm, I'm surprised going after them and not the ftc or someone like that.

01:25:00 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Well, it's a licensing or regulation issue, but I think, um, it's. It's. That conflict has been going on for a while and apparently one of tesla's arguments has been well, we've been saying this for so long and nobody has stopped us before, so we should just be able to keep doing.

01:25:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, by now, I think in australia they got in trouble and they can no longer say full self-driving in australia.

01:25:26 - Molly White (Guest)
So it's kind of like those defamation cases where the argument is basically like this guy says crazy stuff all the time.

01:25:32 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
No, one would believe him well and this is the classic thing I promise you promise what you don't have yet right.

01:25:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is the classic marketing thing I'll tell you what we do have. We have a nasty bug in microsoft sharepoint. It is a zero day and already chinese hackers have been exploiting it. Uh was discovered last weekend. That's how new it is. We talked about it. If you want to hear a deeper dive on our security, now show on tuesday. It's two bugs which allow bad guys to steal sensitive private keys from self-hosted sharepoint. Then, once exploited, an attacker can use the bug to plant malware on the server or gain access to files and data. Uh. Hundreds of companies have already been hacked by this uh, in many cases by chinese hackers, including in the government sector, because I guess they use a lot of sharepoint. Microsoft has patched it, but of course these are people running self-hosted sharepoint and uh.

01:26:43 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Actually, the security researcher said if you are running self-hosted versions of sharepoint, you should assume you have already been compromised this is one of those ones where I have to say, like my first thought I'm reading this was people still using sharepoint yeah, lots of people, lots of people.

01:27:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very, very popular. Uh, this I felt really bad about. There is a, a safety app for women called uh t. Uh, women would use this to um, warn other women about uh bad guys. You can post about a guy and give it a red or a green flag. Give him a red or a green flag. Unfortunately, this uh app, which has four million users and suddenly became number one on the apple app store this week, probably because they'd just been hacked. Uh t says hackers accessed a database with 13 000 user photos and ids. It's a safe space for women. That isn't, I guess, so safe. Guess who hacked it? 4chan, of course.

01:27:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
72 000 images were accessed of course, 72 000 images were accessed, according to the company so were these people who are?

01:28:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
are these? Are these women? Women?

01:28:11 - Molly White (Guest)
posting about.

01:28:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're the ones that got bad men, yeah, they were.

01:28:13 - Molly White (Guest)
the app required you to verify your identity with like a selfie in your license or something, and so all of these like verification documents were what was compromised, and so I mean I think it's just a good like reminder of like this is why you should just not collect sensitive information or be very cautious about giving out your sensitive information like the reason that they did that, that they thought they could prevent people spreading like false rumors, if you put.

01:28:42
I think they were worried yeah, they were worried that someone was going to just go on there and like green flag themselves or you know, like come up or vice versa. Yeah, yeah yeah, exactly like falsely smear people, and so there was supposed to be some degree of like. I don't know if they were doing like location proxy. I'm not really sure how they were connecting, you know, your driver's license to your ability to rate some guy.

01:29:05 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
But well, anyway, that one is, that one is so complicated, right? Because, on the one hand, you, you, I think to myself, you know good, we need more ways to to, yes, to have intelligence have always done that kind of yeah, like behind the scenes. But you know, then, to also see it, yeah, centralized as a sort of as a business, I guess just feels weird to me, maybe that's part of the problem and then, yeah, like, as molly says, this sort of like.

01:29:31
Why, why do you need to be pulling everybody's sensitive information together in this place? That's supposed to keep you safe.

01:29:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know ali ali gali in our Discord says of course 4chan hacked it. Yeah, they're the guys they're talking about. Exactly, exactly, of course. Uh, so what could possibly go wrong? People in the UK now have to take an age verification selfie to watch porn online nobody's gonna have a heck that we haven't learned a thing, have we?

01:29:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
folks 4chan's hard at work right now. Right now they've got their best hackers they've got their best people all night, but this is actually.

01:30:08 - Molly White (Guest)
This particular thing is threatening wikipedia as well because, um some of the there, there's basically concerns that this law is going to require, uh, you know, groups like w Wikimedia to do this type of age verification to try to prevent access to material on Wikipedia that's considered pornographic kind of, but it's really educational. I think the Wikimedia Foundation was actually testifying against this law in the past couple of weeks.

01:30:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's a law, the Online Safety safety act uh, offcom, the uk's media regulatory agency, corneo, and gadget has offered a few methods, uh to provide more extensive age verification credit card checks, photo id matching or estimating a user's age with a provided selfie. The problem is, yeah, how do you define adult content? And all of these laws and there are many states who have similar laws um, can be used to weaponize content that is not pornography but is considered by some inappropriate for children, like lgbtq plus information or, uh, you know, the very famous wikipedia page on penises, you, you know there's, there's an educational purpose here and it isn't porn. Uh, but tied into this, we now see steam and itchio uh pulling adult games and these are not pornographic adult some of them are, I guess, but adult games off of their site because the credit card companies are threatening to withdraw their ability to charge credit cards. That's a existential threat to these gaming companies, but this is the world we live in now. The this is, uh, a new, a new puritanism.

01:31:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I guess. Well, I mean, I do have to say like I'm I'm no puritan, but you even a cursory glance at what's going on in the world of AI-generated porn right now is so disturbing? Yeah, and and.

01:32:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it how? Why is it more disturbing than actual porn?

01:32:17 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean think of the 4chan folks that we were just talking about. So it's creepier. Oh, so you know violence and you know control and terrible scary stuff, stuff not related to you know the way healthy sex is supposed to be is suddenly easy, you know, easy to come by. You can just ask for it and you get it, and that's not a thing I want in front of a, I don't want in front of anybody, but I want in front of kids, and so there's, there is something that has to be done here. Yeah, but is this the solution? I mean, as, as yanko would would tell us, right, somebody's going to figure this out real quick and and there's going to be some unintended side effect that we didn't really see coming.

01:32:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but somebody's got to do something and I'm glad I'm glad the UK is trying, because I, I know, not trying doesn't seem like an option. I know it's an imperfect solution, but I, I always think that parents are a better way to control this than the government. And I, I know not all parents will, and kids will always find a way around it. They'll find a way around these age restrictions as well. That's not um, but I just feel like this is the parents job, not the government's job.

01:33:24 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I don't know if any parent right now is qualified to have that conversation with their kid. Considering what's out there at the moment, I don't think everybody's trained well you have to.

01:33:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean if you don't, then you're not doing your job. I mean you need to say look, if you see anything. I mean, look, my kids are 30 and 32. So at this point anything they see is on them. But when they were little, admittedly it wasn't as bad. But I certainly said if you see anything that's upsetting to you or you want to talk, I won't judge you. Just let me know, because there's stuff on the Internet that's not good. Of course it's nothing compared to that 20 years ago, compared to what it is today.

01:34:02 - Molly White (Guest)
Of course, it's nothing compared to that 20 years ago, compared to what it is today. Yeah, I mean, I think also the concern around a lot of these age verification things is there's really no way to do it while maintaining privacy online. You basically have to take so much detail around somebody's identity and then, of course, having that information, as we've just seen, is dangerous in and of Well, that's why I brought up the tea story Exactly.

01:34:21
But I mean, that's why I brought up the tea story exactly but I mean that's that's partly why the wikimedia foundation has been challenging the laws is based on the idea that, like, wikimedia would no longer allow or be able to have anonymous contributors. Based on this and like that's really critical to how wikimedia functions because, like, there are people who cannot edit unless they edit anonymously because of the regimes they're living under and things like that. And so, you know, in this sort of well-intentioned effort to crack down on, you know, kids being exposed to horrifying material online, you're also ending up with this totally other side effect that is damaging in a different way it makes you want to hold the platforms responsible.

01:35:05 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I have to say, makes you want not not well, that's what meta wants.

01:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Meta wants the app stores to be responsible, right? Oh, that's funny right, that's smart uh, it's not our problem. Um I. It's also pretty hard for a company like Meta, with two and a half billion users, to police everything.

01:35:30 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, or I mean, think of Wikimedia trying to do it. It would. It would be, you know, if you were to basically say, you know, screw section two 30. Wikimedia is, you know, as a company, is liable for everything that you know every edit that's made to the site. You'd basically end Wikimedia by doing that.

01:35:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I often, when we're talking about 230, say it protects not just Google, meta, but it protects little people like me and my social you know my chat room and my but I didn't even think of Wikipedia. That is a very good reason to have Section 230 to protect Wikipedia. That is worth saving Maybe not my Mastodon instance, but that for sure is worth saving. I didn't even think of that. Yeah, absent Section 230, wikipedia would disappear.

01:36:17 - Molly White (Guest)
Yeah, there's a really good podcast episode. On it I want to say it was the tech dirt podcast that did it sounds like it mike man. Yeah, right, yeah um, but one of the wicca media foundation people came and spoke on the podcast and it was a really compelling he's been a staunch defender of section 230.

01:36:34 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Uh, over and, over and over it's one of those things that were like go, I mean I don't, I can't believe I'm going to walk into this one, but like, I do like.

01:36:41
But I'm always thinking of it from the perspective of if aliens landed on the planet and you explained to them what was going on and they said so. All of these hugely powerful sites that are controlling discourse on your planet have no responsibility for it at all, and their defense is this one little site that is highly clearly valuable to a, but to a relatively small number of people. That's why we're going to protect. We're going to let the rest of these people run wild and you go, uh-huh, yeah, good idea, you know that's the balance point.

01:37:15 - Molly White (Guest)
Weird, yeah, I don't think it's one little site, though I think it's a lot of little sites, you know.

01:37:20 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, that's right yeah it's Wikimedia.

01:37:22 - Molly White (Guest)
It's the comment section on my website.

01:37:24 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
It's exactly it's practically everything on the internet and there are ways to protect. To protect, you know, there are ways to to change the way that platforms behave without like outlawing section 230. I mean, you know, the EU just passed this regulation that is going to make it after Octoberober. You got to. There's all these new rules about political ads, and meta has said, as a result, they're not going to run any political ads in the eu from now, which is great.

01:37:51 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to work I don't think it is great, but you don't? Oh interesting. Because, especially like we had that here too during like the last couple election cycles, where some of these companies were like, well, in the last three weeks or something before the election, you cannot run any new ads anymore. Speaker 1. Next to that, yeah, speaker 2. You cannot become a political advertiser, but who that doesn't stop is people who run misinformation networks and that kind of stuff. They still get their memes on there and it gets retweeted or re-whatever you do on Facebook these days, I don't know, um, so they can still reach out to everybody. And then these political parties who are getting slandered and whatnot cannot respond essentially.

01:38:31 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Yeah, there's no recourse man yonkers. Usually I'm the bummer on this show good job.

01:38:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, he's the smart one today. He's doing he's. We always have a someone's gotta do it good job, dude by the way, uh, thanks to our wonderful club members, who uh just informed me that there was a petition uh with the uk government to repeal the online safety act that raised so many signatures it only needed a hundred thousand 321. It's going up 321 000 right now.

01:39:02
Paul greg sent me this link uh, which forces parliament to consider it for a debate and the government must respond. This is uh kind of good news. They have till october 22nd to respond to this. Um, I don't know if I don't, I mean, I don't know if it'll change anything but response yeah. The response is yeah, no we've considered it.

01:39:26
Thanks for your signature. The Intel is laying off tens of thousands, now 24,000 employees. They're going to, over the next year, they're going to shut down plants all over. Um, in fact, I saw one article that said intel's last hope is that maybe they can make chips for apple devices, which seems not too likely. Um, it's kind of sad.

01:39:59 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Uh, their new ceo, lip butan, said we're not even one of the top 10 chip makers anymore, and you know this whole thing that we were going to kind of, you know, fight off Taiwan's, you know monopoly on this stuff, and man, it has not gone the right way and I can't, I don't know enough about, I haven't been following Intel enough to understand whether this is truly like a strategic blunder. Is this a side effect of the fact that no company can make a plan right now under the Trump administration.

01:40:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's the beginning of the end, and it's not just in the US. They're closing tens of billions of dollars worth of plants in Germany and Poland, mega fabs that would employ 3,000 workers. The company will no longer move forward with those projects.

01:40:53 - Molly White (Guest)
What's the reason that they have?

01:41:00 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
They really given. A reason for the need to lay so many people off, supposedly, is that the ai uh demand did not pan out for them. They didn't benefit from the ai boom the way that somebody like nvidia has, and they they shut down their automotive chip making business. According to the ceo, they were too fractured across different business lines. They were sort of spread out, spread too thin.

01:41:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is too late to catch up with nvidia is one thing that butana said but I mean how crazy that we're in this world.

01:41:26 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
We're like, if we're really good, you know, I mean ai chips and phone chips aside like it just deepens this dependence that we have on taiwan and it makes our geopolitical relationship with china that much scarier. You know, uh, it's, it's, uh, it's really. Uh, it doesn't make us more, it doesn't make our supply of chips more safe. I'll tell you that much.

01:41:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah uh and um, of course. Tsmc is building a plant in arizona to make chips for apple devices. They hope at some point to make 30 of the three nanometer and even two nanometer chips in arizona. The ceo of amd, a competitor, admittedly said there's no way they can do that without costing at least five percent and maybe more like 20 more. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, tsmc is based in china, it's a taiwanese company, but it's a lot harder to get the staff. In fact they've been flying people in from Taiwan to staff these facilities.

01:42:32 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
What's crazy about TSMC, too, is they're the beneficiaries of like 30, 40 years of government investment and making an incredible industry there. To Molly's point from an hour or so ago, when you pull investment on education and on truly trying to, this all-offense tariff mentality that we're in right now is not going to do what taiwan managed to do for its own chip industry, which was just pour money into right training.

01:43:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
well, it wasn't just taiwan. I mean, look at apple too, that wonderful book apple and china. But patrick mckee talks about basically apple, with the help of the mainland chinese government, uh, created that industry out of whole cloth out of nothing, uh and uh. Foxconn terry gow at foxconn tsmc benefited also from huge, huge investments from apple this is.

01:43:34 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
This takes a long time, yeah to make decades, yeah but it turns out it takes very little time for one of these companies to be very badly damaged so sad.

01:43:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, spotify, uh, is public. This is appalling. This comes from 404 media, which does a really great job with the investigative reporting, emmanuel myberg. Spotify is publishing AI generated songs from dead artists without the permission of the artist. Songs from dead artists without the permission of the artist.

01:44:07
Blaze foley, who passed away some years ago 1989. He was murdered released a new song 36 years later, called together on spotify. The song, which features a male country singer, piano and electric guitar, vaguely sounds like a blaze foley song. The spotify page for the song also features an image of the of an ai generated man who looks nothing like foley, singing into a microphone. The owner of the record label that distributes all of foley's music and manages his legit spotify page said that any Foley fan would instantly realize that, despite its labeling, together is not a Foley song, it's an AI schlock bot. She said it has nothing to do with the Blaze A schlock bot.

01:44:58
I don't know if it's Spotify doing this. I think it's other companies doing it on Spotify, a company called SoundOn as the music distributor. Oh, it's owned by TikTok. That mostly exists to allow people to upload music directly to TikTok and earn royalties. Tiktok told me it has taken action. This is again from 404 Media. It told them it's taken action. This is again from 404 Media told them it's taken action to remove the content and user who uploaded it as soon as it became aware of the issue. It's not just beginning, though. It's just beginning. You know there's going to be a lot more of this.

01:45:33 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
This is one of those ones. Where, do you like, do we do the four of us agree that it shouldn't be allowed that dead artists like AI, generated music by dead artists, are? We are the four of us on the same page?

01:45:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that that's not well with the dev, with the dead artist's permission, I mean Dolly. Parton says I give the rights of all my music to the future so they can be remixed, because I want my money to live on. That's her decision and I think that's great right. But I think the artist has to decide that right and molly, that's interesting satire, right, that's, that's, oh yeah weird al can always make a song yeah, that seems okay.

01:46:09 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's all right under our, even though even our antiquated although, but it still has permission. He doesn't have to, but he still does aspiration yeah I feel like this is one of those things where I'm like. Most humans can agree on this thing, and should there be a rule on this thing, rather than just letting the AI figure it out?

01:46:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Jacob, I dearly hope that in the years to come there is an AI Leo doing an AI twit for centuries to come. It'll probably be a better show.

01:46:44 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
It's also as soon as you come up with a rule, somebody is going to find the exception that makes the rule void. And then you think about who was it? Like Natalie Cole and Nat King Cole. The duet that they did after he died is a perfect example of something that happened after somebody, but it was with permission. But should they not do it? Because the artist is dead and the purist might scream and you know, protest jason calacanis is in our club twit discord.

01:47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said I'd gladly pay 100 bucks for a new dire straits album but it's not a new, it's not a dire straits album jason calacanis if it sounds the same, what's the difference?

01:47:22 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
well, this, this is that. That's where we, that's where society is really going to fracture is who feels one way or the other about that.

01:47:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, that's exactly right you know I have mixed feelings about it, because all artists create on the shoulders of the people who went before them. Right, nothing's created. Even blaze foley never didn't create in a vacuum so, but he's an but an artist.

01:47:48 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That's an artist making art on top of another thing. Right, we under, if we, even if we're just talking about ip, long right, we don't consider ai to be the originator of a work. It's not a creative. No, that's right. It's not a creator, and so that's right all right, I'll take a little break.

01:48:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are talking about deep, heavy stuff with the three smartest people in the world right now, yanko wreckers, who writes lowpasscc that's the name of his newsletter. It's great always great to have yanko on actually all three of you. It's fun. This is great. J Jacob Ward, who is the author of a great book which you should all read, called the Loop, but you can also read his newsletter and listen to his podcast at theripcurrentcom. And do you feel, jacob, is this as satisfying as working for the networks, the big boys?

01:48:40 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
You know I like it a lot. I mean, I love the independence of this. I love being able to draw on on experience and offer perspective. I love all that part of it. I I don't. I don't like how hard it is to do big investigations. Yeah, that's the part. That's the part that I that I miss is the horsepower of a, of an institution, for doing a big investigation but it's nice to have that backup. Yeah, but the rest of it is really nice.

01:49:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's good to be your own boss, to have control of what you do, and I guess maybe you just pull. You, pick smaller projects, projects that you can bite off and chew.

01:49:16 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
We're not gonna keep democracy going with small projects, though, leo, unfortunately.

01:49:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As long as somebody's covering city hall, I'm happy nobody's covering city hall anymore either. That's the problem. Molly white is also here. She is a wikipedia editor and deserves big medals for that. Because that is such a huge contribution you don't get paid for. You do because, out of out of your own love for information and serving others in the internet, I really appreciate that you can support her at mollywhitenet, subscribe to her Citation Needed newsletter where you pay your own price. So give her as much money as you would give for a new Dire Straits album. Okay, jason, I'm just saying Okay.

01:50:02
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01:51:39
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We found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. Sound familiar? That can happen. 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 $40,000 or $50,000 a month, it really started to add up. Yeah, it's simple Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloudcom and book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's uscloudcom, to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. Thank you, us Cloud DJI.

01:53:33
I have a DJI drone right over there the little one. I love it, it's fantastic. Apparently, you can't get them anymore. There's a us ban because it's a chinese drone manufacturer and we don't want the chinese spying on us flying around overhead. So what did dji do? Well, it's, it's unclear, but according to the verge, you can buy something. This is sean hollister writing, called the sky rover x1 on amazon. He says it's a dead ringer for the dji mini 4 pro. Uh, down to the same specs, the same features and an incredibly similar app to the one dji provides for its drones. It also uses dji's own online infrastructure. Uh, this comes from a. Uh, an ex-post by kevin finstare. He's a hacker who's been digging into dji products in the past. He was even able to log in with his dji username and password you almost have to respect the game you know like, if that's impressive

01:54:49 - Molly White (Guest)
off your stuff yeah, why not knock off your own stuff?

01:54:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, it uses the same encryption keys. Um, the drone reviewer, air photography, took flack in the comments of his sky rover x1 for not pointing out the similarities. Dji turned out. He agreed not to mention any other drone brands in order to get the review unit. This is, by the way, why I do not do review units.

01:55:17
Um, apparently they've now adjusted their uh thinking and their latest air photography reviews call it suspiciously similar it does. It looks like a yellow version of the mini. Look at that. So, uh, shenanigans. I think one of the reasons I wouldn't want to tell people about this is because I think that the ban on dji is bs. American-made drones aren't anywhere near as good in my experience, and I don't think the Chinese are spying on what Our rooftops using DJI it's apparently not illegal because the Sky Rover is made in malaysia.

01:56:09
The us government hasn't also completely banned dji drones. A de facto ban will happen automatically by december unless quote an appropriate national security agency in china can publicly declare that its products do not. Or maybe in the US I don't know. I don't know what's an appropriate national security it can publicly declare that its products do not pose an acceptable risk to the national security of the United States. Customs, though, is blocking DJI drones from entering the US. When the Verge asked CPB whether they are blocking it, the agency said we're not allowed to discuss that, but try and get one in. So not only can DJI not confirm or deny it makes the SkyRover X1, Border Patrol cannot confirm or deny that, makes the sky rover x1 border patrol cannot confirm or deny that they're blocking dji drones.

01:57:11
So this isn't even a story. Why did I even mention it? We don't even know what's happening anyway. I'm glad I have my dji. I own a dji drone and you're not going to get it out of my fingers. That's true. Cold dead hands, cold dead. Maybe the secondary market for dji? I own a dji drone and you're not going to get it out of my fingers. That's true.

01:57:28 - Molly White (Guest)
Cold dead hands, cold dead maybe the secondary market for dji drones will explode and you can make a killing oh, I didn't even think of that.

01:57:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can now use that login for all kinds of fcc has approved the merger of paramount with uh, the ellison skydance company, with a very interesting proviso. Brennan carr said in a statement, fcc chairman. We welcome fcc was the agency that had to give their approval. We welcome skydance's commitment to make significant changes at the once storied cbs broadcast network. They have committed to ensure the company's programming embodies a diversity of viewpoints from across the political and ideological spectrum.

01:58:20
They've also agreed to a babysitter also a 16 million dollar payoff and the payoff and we're gonna fire what's his name and yeah, a few other things. Uh, I don't even understand how brendan carr, the chairman of the fcc, can in his own mind rationalize or reconcile this notion of having the government have a babysitter inside cbs to make sure they don't say anything bad about president trump with what we call in this country the first amendment to the constitution. But it did and it does, and he, I don't. You know what are these guys thinking?

01:59:04 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
well, I'm, I mean we're in a, we're in an ideological vortex right now.

01:59:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's bizarre how do you?

01:59:11 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
it is really. It is bizarre. I mean, you know, and the and there's a certain it's a crazy sort of, there's a there's a meshing of both, the like. You see this every so often, like I remember after 9, 11, remember after 9-11, there was this explosion of modern, of like media about like revenge and terrorism and, um, you know there was I remember that movie swat came out, like there was all this sort of like pro.

01:59:42
Um, yeah, we send and we all get patriotic when the country's been attacked and I feel like right here you've got this combination of of the Trump administration's kind of ideological project and this idea on the part of CBS's new owners that it's that the market will want more conservative news, and I mean well, the market has voted.

02:00:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean they love Fox News, Right If?

02:00:14 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
Fox News is any indication, then that is absolutely the case. Right, and so they're courting. The rumors are they're courting Barry Weiss, the sort of center right conservative who has this thing, the the free press, and she that she might be a big fixture in cbs. Um, you know, there's all this stuff that's sort of like. It's this mishmash for me of like kind of the ideological scramblings that the trump administration is trying to set off and then this weird idea that somehow this is, this, is going to be a better way of making money as a corporation. These two things are coming together in this really stinky way right now.

02:00:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That bothers me a lot one of the things car said.

02:00:55 - Molly White (Guest)
One of the things they're going to have to do is put an ombudsman in place for two years, so basically a bias monitor that will report directly to the president it's such a wild situation where like words are just being used in the complete opposite of their actual meaning, like free speech is being used by the trump administration in the complete opposite sense. Diversity of viewpoints complete opposite sense. You know they're talking about the fcc. Uh uh, fairness doctrine. Complete opposite sense. You know they're talking about the fcc uh uh, fairness doctrine.

02:01:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Complete opposite sense yeah, you know it's like everything, the unfairness doctor, yeah it's, it's crazy we are in the upside

02:01:36 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
news is that only old people are watching cbs, so that problem is all gonna solve itself eventually you know I'm an old person.

02:01:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I resent that it used to be. We used to call it the tiffany network. You know it was edward r murrow and it was like you remember. You remember this, jacob?

02:01:54 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean it was it was revered at 60 minutes was the number one news show for decades and you know, in the, in the industry, it's still considered, you know, one of the great. I mean I was trying to say I said earlier before the commercial break that we, you know, we, one of the great. I mean I was trying to say I said earlier before the commercial break that we, you know, we, I miss the institutional horsepower that makes good journalism possible. And CBS, you know, for all of its trouble, 60 Minutes has been the gold standard of that. You know, they go hard at a story and they do a really good job when they do.

02:02:21
And and I think it's no coincidence right that this is the channel that's going to get hit with this ombudsman. I mean, it's, you know, it's real, it's really scary stuff. And so, yeah, to see the, as Molly says, the kind of the language being twisted back on itself in this crazy way is, yeah, it's a creepy moment for that stuff. And and you know, and, and I think that the you know, you know, go ahead, take your point about it. It's mostly watched by old people and everybody likes to say, well, it's in. You know linears and decline anyway, so it doesn't matter, but that's one of the few gathering places that people once upon a time had for, yeah, gathering up a shared sense of reality and and well, it was walter cronkite on the cbs nightly news who basically ended the vietnam war.

02:03:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because lbj said if I've lost walter cronkite, I've lost the nation that's right.

02:03:15 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
That was the first time they really proved that the united states government was lying to its citizens about what was going on, you know, and that was, and that was a huge turning point, a huge journalistic, you know, a real piece do we have anybody nowadays who has that kind of credibility that it could, that he could change things in that dramatic of a way?

02:03:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think so.

02:03:35 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
I mean. Now we're in this environment, this atmosphere where everybody gets to choose their own version of reality based on who feels what way.

02:03:43
And AI is going to make that worse, you know. So I think the bubble problem that we're about to have is going to make that worse, you know. So I think the bubble problem that we're about to have is going to get worse and worse and worse, and, and it's especially going to be made worse. If you've got although maybe I don't know, manco, if you can think of a alternative to this that I haven't thought of, I'd be really grateful. But, like, I feel like it's going to get worse and worse and that this move by the trump administration is is going to exacerbate that.

02:04:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I don't know, maybe, maybe, if, if the government gets involved, they'll screw it up in some way and and my daughter, who's young ish, younger than me, she's 32 says the pendulum is going to swing the other way, that when you push this hard in one direction, uh, at some point americans are going to say no. You know, we think the first amendment's actually not a bad idea. We'd like to defend that a little bit. Hey, speaking of the media scrutiny, the CEO and the HR representative of Astronomer have now been fired after their surprise appearance on the Kiss Cam at the Coldplay concert and I really like astronomers pr reaction to this. First of all, nobody had ever heard of astronomer before then, because they're the lead of leading unified data ops platform for apache airflow, which even I have no idea what that means. But they played on that a little bit. This is the video they posted on X. Thank you for your interest in Astronomer.

02:05:18 - Gwyneth Paltrow (Announcement)
Thank you for your interest in Astronomer. Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days and they wanted me to answer the most common ones.

02:05:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, oh my God, what the actual F.

02:05:40 - Gwyneth Paltrow (Announcement)
Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data, ml and AI pipelines.

02:05:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's Chris Martin's ex-wife.

02:05:47 - Gwyneth Paltrow (Announcement)
We've been thrilled. So many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation.

02:05:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As for the other questions we've received, how is your social media team holding there?

02:05:58 - Gwyneth Paltrow (Announcement)
is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September. We will now be returning to what we do best delivering game-changing results for our customers. Thank you for your interest in Astronomer.

02:06:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that a fan? That is the best PR spin ever.

02:06:14 - Molly White (Guest)
That is well played. I have to give it to them.

02:06:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well played, especially hiring Coldplay lead man, chris Martin's ex, to be the spokesperson.

02:06:25 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Did you all see the Colbert sketch where he had we had a Yankovic playing a Coldplay song and all these couples popped up in the audience and it brought everything together. It was like Coldplay astronomer thing, colbert getting canceled. It's amazing.

02:06:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It all goes. It all goes together. It all fits in. It's just an interesting timeline we're in, isn't it? Let's take one more last break before we get some of the wrap-up news and, unfortunately, a couple of obituaries. I I always put those at the end of the show. I don't want to bring people down, uh, but we're gonna. We're gonna do it. Molly white is here. Great to have molly, she's not dead. No, it's not your obituary, somebody else's, somebody much older than you. Molly, why, although you were saying that there was a little fricasse in the editorial division of wikipedia over the front page?

02:07:16 - Molly White (Guest)
there often is too many people have died lately.

02:07:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that the problem?

02:07:21 - Molly White (Guest)
yeah, we were. We were trying to figure out if hulk hogan should get like the full-size blurb or just the name and the recent deaths, and there was the argument from one editor that basically there have been too many deaths lately. We need to, we need to stop so.

02:07:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you did do ozzy, which is good, and then you, you put hulk down with the others in the for now I don't think the discussion has has closed, so he may yet get a blurb but if I hover over hulk's name, we at least get a nice picture of the hulk. Yeah, um, yeah, that's, that's wild. I, I, you know what. Now can you, if you go to like, is there a discussion page for the front page? So if you go to the discussion page, can you see all of this back and forthing?

02:08:10 - Molly White (Guest)
yeah, if you, if you click on where it says, nominate an article in that, uh, in that little blurb area, just under where ozzy is you'll see all the discussions for everything that's in the. Yeah, there you go and you'll see hulk h's in there.

02:08:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the best part of Wikipedia is it's all done in public. I mean, there's so many best parts, there's so many best parts, but I just love the way that you guys do this. How long have you been an editor at Wikipedia?

02:08:40 - Molly White (Guest)
Oh my gosh.

02:08:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Since you were in high school right.

02:08:43 - Molly White (Guest)
Maybe. Yeah, it's been a really long time. Yeah, what was the first thing? Why did you start you in high school, right? Maybe?

02:08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's. Yeah, it's been a really good time. Yeah, how did? What was the first thing? Why did you start?

02:08:50 - Molly White (Guest)
I. I realized that I could. There was a button that said edit and I was like I can click that awesome awesome.

02:08:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, I'm proud to say, as tempting as it has been, I have never hit the edit button on my own article, so there oh yeah, well, that's good you're not supposed to do that, I know, although it's amazing how many people do.

02:09:09
Anyway, molly, thank you for that and, of course, thank you for your newsletter citation needed. And fort web 3 is going great, which is another great website molly created. It's also wonderful, uh, to have jacob ward here. Got to have you back more. I love your stuff, jacobwardcom. The ripcurrentcom is his podcast and newsletter. You must subscribe to that. You've got three to subscribe to now and a few books you might. You keep bringing up books to buy. I want to find that 1970 Economist's book. Wow. And also with us. Yanko Reckers from lowpasscc first started reading your byline and in giga ohm, that's how long it's been back in the day, back in the day, yeah, great to have all three of you, our show today brought to you by starlight vms.

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We've talked before about spaceship, which is a great place to get your domains at below market prices. One of the things spaceship's been doing, though, is adding services and features. They've got a great enterprise grade mail server. I mentioned before thunderbolt, their messaging platform, where your domain name is your user handle, but I neglected to mention they're incredible virtual machines. Starlight VMs that's Spaceship's virtual private server hosting, built for performance and, by the way, you'll love the price. Spaceship is a domain and web platform that simplifies choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products, including hosting. If you've ever struggled to find a budget-friendly hosting that meets your needs managing domain names and web products, including hosting If you've ever struggled to find a budget friendly hosting that meets your needs, you've got to check out Starlight VMs. Industry leading VPS hosting that meets the high demands of seasoned web pros. Total flexibility, with options to fine tune your plan to include bonus storage or super fast CPUs. You could turn it up, turn it down, as needed. Us or Singapore data center the choice is yours. Choose the one closest to you to ensure faster response times. Starlight VM's detailed analytics offer a complete picture of how things are performing CPU, ram, network traffic, disk space. Get the whole picture so you can fine tune for efficiency and forecast costs efficiently.

02:11:28
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Go to spaceshipcom slash twit to find out more about Starlight VMs and get custom deals on Spaceship products. That's spaceshipcom slash twit. Check it out. It's all there on the front page Spaceshipcom slash twit. We thank them so much for their support. We also thank you, our club twit members, for your support. Your ten dollars a month makes it possible not only do this show, but all the special programming we did.

02:12:36
On thursday, richard campbell built his computer. He was how long he was here, like three and a half, four hours he it was a big build and you got to see it from beginning to end coming up. We've got our book club with stacy higginbotham. This is how you win the time work. Great book, highly recommend it. You still have time to read it. It's it's fairly short. Uh, highly recommend it. Uh, we also have chris markworth's photo uh show coming up every month. We do that the ai user group the first friday of every month. That's just. That's this friday it's coming up. And, of course, access to the discord ad, free versions of all of our shows. There's lots of reasons to join, mostly because it keeps us on the air. 25 of our operating costs are paid now by club members. Thank you, doesn't go into my pocket, it goes to the pockets of all the people who make these shows possible twittv, club twit. We thank them. Thank you and all the club members. So much for their support.

02:13:36
A couple of uh passings. I don't know if you were fans of the elder scrolls, but the father of the elder scrolls, julian faye, passed only 59 years old. He was co-founder and technical producer at once. Lost games. Uh, he had stepped back from game development after a lengthy battle with cancer. Danish, he started his career in early amiga and nes games before becoming one of bethesda's earliest employees in 1987. Anyway, if you are a fan of those fabulous games I'm a Skyroll fanatic you will want to mark the passing of the father of the Elder Scrolls, julian Le Fay, and satirist and musician Tomer passed at the age of 97 today. He taught mathematics at the university of santa cruz almost until the end, but he became very famous in the 50s and 60s for his songs like poisoning pigeons in Pigeons in the Park and the Vatican Rag.

02:14:48
I feel like we really need Tom Lehrer's music. One of the things he did that was really cool. He put all of his songs in Creative Commons towards the end of his life so that everybody would have access to the sheet music and the lyrics and could perform them himself. He started in 1945 with a parody of football songs called fight fiercely, harvard. He was a harvard alum.

02:15:16
Fight, fight, fight. Demonstrate to them our skill. Albeit they possess the might, nevertheless we have the will. How shall we celebrate our victory? We shall invite the whole team up for tea. Anyway, uh, look up tom lehrer's wonderful uh albums, including and I probably should, should play a little bit of it. I think I can because I think he's he's released them all into the public domain or into creative commons. But my favorite, one of my favorite songs of his is the Elements, where he actually sings a song with all the elements in it and in fact maybe we'll end the show with that as we say goodbye to our fabulous guests. It's been fun. Thank you, molly White. You're the best. I appreciate your time and your patience and, most of all, the work you do. Uh, citation needed in at the wikipedia.

02:16:15 - Molly White (Guest)
Thank you thanks for having me.

02:16:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you so much. I hope we'll see you again real soon. Same to you, jacob ward. By the book the loop, I really can't recommend it more highly. You did so much research on it. It was I learned just the first just reading, and I learned so much about everything besides big tech. It's really good.

02:16:34
Thanks, leo yeah yeah and of course, uh. The rip current is a fantastic podcast and newsletter at the rip currentcom, yanko records, lowpasscc. All three of you proving that with brains, good looks and charm you can make it as a solo journalist in the world.

02:16:55 - Janko Roettgers (Guest)
Thank you, Yatko.

02:16:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Great to have all three of you. Thanks for having me. We do Twit every Sunday at 2 to 5 pm, pacific, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. You can watch us live. Club members get to watch behind the velvet rope in the club twit discord where there's armchairs and cigars and brandy. No, there's none of that, uh. But you can. You can't watch the discord. Might be easier to watch on youtube, twitch, tiktok, facebook, linkedin, xcom, a kick. We stream on all of those platforms. But you don't have to watch live.

02:17:25
You can watch after the fact by downloading a copy of the show, audio or video from the website twittv. When you get there, you also see a link to our YouTube channel where you can see the video. Great for sharing little clips. Best way to watch or listen is to subscribe to either the audio or the video versions of our shows in your favorite podcast catcher. And, if you would, if they allow reviews there. Please give us a good review. Help spread the word. It's hard when you've been doing a show for 20 years. We're not the flavor of the month, we're not the hot new thing. People forget we exist. So tell your friends, tell your neighbors, give us a good review, join the club and participate in our community. Those are all ways you can make twit better. We thank you so much for being here and we will see you next time. And as I have said for 20 years, another twit is in the big shout of you know who, tom lara is.

02:18:28 - Tom Lehrer (Announcement)
There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium and nickel, iodimium, neptunium, germanium and iron, amarycium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium and lanthram and osmium and astatine and radium and gold and protactinium and indium and gallium and iodine and thoriumium and thulium and thallium.

02:18:46 - Gwyneth Paltrow (Announcement)
There's yttrium and terbium, actinium, rubidium boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium and strontium and silicon, and silver and samarium abyssal bromine, lithium, beryllium and barium.

02:18:58 - Tom Lehrer (Announcement)
Isn't that interesting? I knew you would. I hope you're all taking notes because there's gonna be a short quiz next period. There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium and phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium and manganese and mercury, valentine and anisium dysprosium and scadium and cerium and cesium and lead, praseodymium and platinum plutonium, palladium, promethium, potassium bolognium titanium

02:19:29 - Jacob Ward (Guest)
tellurium and cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

02:19:30 - Gwyneth Paltrow (Announcement)
There's sulfur, californium, infirmium, berkelium and also mendelevium, einsteinium nobilium and arctic cryptonium, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium and chlorine carbon cobalt copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

02:19:38 - Tom Lehrer (Announcement)
These are the only ones of which the news has come to harvard, and there may be many others, but they haven't been discovered.

02:19:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Love it. Love it, 97. This is amazing.