This Week in Tech 1044 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. Owen Thomas joins us from the San Francisco Business Times, doc Rock from YouTube, of YouTube fame, and Wes Faulkner, who's got a big announcement about a new business he's starting. We'll talk about the latest chat, gpt-5. Winner or loser Seems like the jury's still out on that. One Tell you who is a loser? Probably Perplexity. At least, it seems unlikely. Apple will buy them. And what Apple cleverly did to ensure no tariffs on their chips. All that and more coming up next on this Week in Tech.

00:38 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Podcasts you love From people you trust.

00:42 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
This is.

00:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Twit people you trust. This is TWIT. This is TWIT this Week in Tech, episode 1044, recorded Sunday, august 10th 2025. Elephants on the moon. It's time for TWIT this Week in Tech, the show where we cover the week's tech news with the smartest darn journalists and tech gurus and just plain old enthusiasts in the biz. Joining me right now Owen Thomas. He is the managing editor at the San Francisco Business Times. Longtime friend, hello Owen.

01:24 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Hello Leo. I prefer to think of myself as a passion advocate, an advocate for passion.

01:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it. Do you share the passion or you just merely advocate?

01:31 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I, you know, I, I, I'm also an enthusiasm, enthusiast.

01:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I always call myself an enthusiast. I'm a, I'm a, I'm a geek, but I feel like I'm more of an enthusiast than anything else, and I think we make twit for enthusiasts. Basically, if you're an enthusiast, that's all it takes. Wes faulkner is also here. Good to see you, wesley. Oh, we got a new lower third. I'm gonna ask you about that in a second. Before I do, though, let me say hello to doc rock, who is, of course, youtube star and director of strategic partnerships at ecam. Of course, the software we use to switch this show remotely, even you know it's so funny because I thought your baseball jersey said M&M, but now I realize it says Ecamm. The C and A were hidden by the microphone.

02:20
Oh he's an M&M fan.

02:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I should make an M&M one too.

02:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When.

02:24 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I go to conferences. It'd be fun.

02:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, Wesley, you better explain what is worksnotworkingcom.

02:34 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It is a community website. I have extensive community experience doing it for other companies and this is my first time doing it for myself, creating a community to help with people who need suggestions navigating the work environment a lot, oh my god, these days, that is a lot of people a lot of, a lot of suggestions out there or just like, oh, have this conversation with your manager or maybe go to hr with this and they'll help you. And we all know, know, that's funk. That doesn't. That's not true. So the system itself.

03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you could be employed, you're saying, but just you don't like your job or it's not working for you, that kind of thing.

03:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The thought is, in this economy especially, you might be in a really bad situation, but you can't just leave or or even find another job. You might be stuck. And so you need to find a way to cope and manage through those situations when the stacks the decks stacked against you. So how do you, like, deal with a toxic work environment? How do you deal with a manager who's trying to devalue your work, all that stuff?

03:41
And instead of getting suggestions of saying, well, lay out all the work you've done and then show your impact on the company, they don't care about that. Instead, you have to figure out how do you protect yourself, because your manager is trying to protect their job, and if it means throwing you under the bus, then that's how it is. And so what do you do in those situations when you know you can't go to HR Because HR is going to say, well, your manager evaluates you and if they're thinking you're not pulling your weight? And I think we've all been in that situation where we try to, like, bring evidence, evidence, we try to make a case of why you are in the right and the other person's in the wrong, and it goes nowhere. It's just frustrating, demoralizing, gaslighting and soul crushing, and so this is a site for people to to find either ways to get through it or to work around it.

04:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice. That sounds like a great idea. You founded your own company. Now tell me about the website. Did you design it from scratch or are using? What are you doing? Is it a?

04:39 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
is it a Fediverse? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's being constructed, and so the I am announcing on the show, but we're not launching until november oh, that's why I can't go to that website yet, okay, I got it, it's the. The website should be up oh, all right, let me.

04:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mistyped it. It's works-notworkingcom. Do I have to type www in front of it?

05:09 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
No. You know better than that the redirect for www is not set up.

05:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I know what's happening here. Oh, I don't know. It looks like your Cloudflare says everything's working except you oh no, I made some changes right before the show. Oh, I also use NextDNS, which blocks and I thought maybe this was it which blocks websites that are brand new. Like, if you registered that domain in the last month, it gets blocked because that's a lot of places.

05:43 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'm picking up the website, so that might be good. That must be that, then next DNS.

05:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So maybe it's not you, but I apologize.

05:50 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I apologize. It should be working Hopefully.

05:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'll turn off next DNS next time.

05:55 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The logo is a little inside joke for people.

05:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, I really want to see it.

06:01 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I got it.

06:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your back channel for surviving, work and keeping, and it's a Phoenix rising from the dumpster fire I get it.

06:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I love it.

06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Join us in redefining the work of the future. Nice, nice, congratulations, congratulations, that's great, thank you. So this, the big story this week was chat GPT 5.0 and uh on, uh, I guess was it tuesday or wednesday or no, it's thursday, I guess. Uh, we, we streamed uh, the very awkward sam allman and uh and his team announcing it, showing, by the way, two uh graphs of its performance that were nonsensical, which apparently I I hope they didn't use chat gpt5 to design. Um, kind of that's kind of embarrassing. And then it launched and he said everybody's going to have it. In fact you're going to be able to use it even if you're on a free tier. And the complaints that started flowing in, I can't see it. I can't uh, I think it's just taking a while to roll out. I got it right away, played with it quite a bit too. I um, I'm kind of impressed. But there there is a broad swath, a broad range of opinions over chat gpt. What do you what? Before I go to gary marcus, what do you guys think of it?

07:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
opinions are like eyeballs. Everybody got two yeah, they got the one that they share on social media, and then the one that they keep for themselves. I like it, doc, and it's funny I just came up with that. I should write that down, yeah, because you know I'm at an age where I forget that you know what happens is. It is super fun to be hyper irritated.

07:46 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You are wearing glasses, so you're kind of, yeah, four okay this is true.

07:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Um, it's super fun to be hyper outraged on internet if everybody else is hyper outraged on internet, but at the same time, you're still using it the way you're using it, so it depends on what you're trying to do. I would say one number two know that when it first comes out, everybody and their mother is going back to try it. So you're gonna get weird server issues and things like that. And the rollout is different from two years ago, when we're rolling it out to a handful of users. Now we're rolling it out To like half the population maybe. And so, yeah, it's a different game, bro. It has to scale. Like I get super. This is gonna, leo, you understand this, and I swear I won't turn this show into sports balls. We will get mad. People are irritated at right now and hearing what player contracts are making I'm like, take those numbers and use a inflation calculator and put it back to what Jerry Rice got paid when he got Accepted. It ain't that different, bro.

08:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The numbers sound crazy now because that's where the economy is right now so, even more than that, even if it wasn't inflated uh, or it were inflated these guys make that much money. Nba stars make that much money for their teams. The teams wouldn't be paying it if they didn't get a reward. Thank you, a profit out of it.

09:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They're actually underpaid.

09:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
By the way, this is benito, they're actually underpaid I think they're probably underpaid absolutely they are underpaid and the only reason why people are mad is because you played. I'm gonna say something mean. You played in high school but you sucked. You didn't make it to college, you didn't make it to the pros, and now you're mad that somebody else is getting paid for the dream that you had. People didn't work like they did and a lot, of, a lot of pros retire in hawaii. Right, yeah, I see marshawn lynch in hawaii all the time. He has.

09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't miss him. He's beast mode is big.

09:37 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yes, I see marcellus wiley in hawaii all the time. As a matter of fact, he uses part of our wood shop whenever he feels like working. Oh nice.

09:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh nice.

09:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That dude's body. He looks older than me body-wise.

09:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, he took a beating.

09:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's why he took a beating right, you know these things happen, so these guys are paying. You know you get paid for what they get paid for what they do. And so, taking it back to tech, when you release something like this, the problem is these guys can. If they don't go out and do the Steve Jobs on stage, people talk spicy. If they do the Steve Jobs on stage, people say, oh, they lied or they overhyped it or they did whatever. The shareholders need them to say one thing and the users want everything for nothing, so somebody got to give, Something has to give. Like, let's be reality about this. Yeah, it's great.

10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's fun to read the subreddit chat GPT for a range of things. It's absolutely diabolical. I'm done with you forever. Gpt thinking is worse than 03. I mean up and down, over and out. Uh, one of the things open AI did almost immediately is they killed all, at least in the chat gpt app. They killed all the other choices, uh, and there was such a hue and cry that they brought back 4-0 and they said if people keep using it, we'll see um, yeah, you're right.

10:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That was weird, because on the first day all the choices were there.

11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and then on the second day they were all missing because I made like three videos right away and I was like wait, my video no longer right because you can't go back to the old models here's a image made by chat gpt5 of the difference between gpt4, which is friendly and warm and candle lit and has a glass of wine, and gpt5, which is you're in a boardroom with hr and doesn't look like it's going well.

11:24 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
We were talking right before we started that they're low on hardware and servers so they have to get rid of the old models to make room.

11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, they needed the GPUs. That makes sense, yeah.

11:41 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'm mostly impressed that they have delivered improved factuality. I I'm I'm mostly impressed that they have delivered improved factuality. That's, that's a great product feature to tout in their in their blog post.

11:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've been playing with it and I have had good results. I did notice it's quite a bit drier in its results. I fed some information about a friend's medical situation to it. That person asked me to do so, so I did, and it actually said something which I think is dangerous. It said that that person should discontinue a medication they're on immediately and the person's doctor said well, we'll talk in a month. So I'm going to trust the doctor.

12:20
I think there's also this story which is in Chat GPT-5, but uh still pretty hysterical, about a young man who changed his diet because, uh, the AI had told him not to do uh salt sodium chloride, but instead to do sodium bromide, which is a psychoactive drug, and it actually gave him a brain disease. So maybe that is a reason not to trust it. On the other hand, I've and by the way, this is one of the things uh open a I pushed. In fact they brought a cancer survivor on saying um I this was. I got a very kind of terse email from my doctor and I got scared and I didn't know what to say.

13:15
So we gave it to chat gpt5 because we had an early version of it and it was so helpful, it was so great it gave me all the information I needed. And they're put, and sam altman saying, yes, we think this is going to change the world. This is, this is one of our missions. Well, it's maybe not so good if it tells you to eat sodium bromide instead of sodium chloride it's really hard to bring dead people on and say on stage how it failed me those people don't end up in there those people don't end up in the.

13:50 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, I, I've had issues with it using memory. Um, it doesn't.

13:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Its memory usage is worse and for my experience, that might be another thing, because they had the resource issues, you think yeah?

13:57 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
it could be uh, but 40 definitely worked better. But this is, like you know, the first iteration. I think doc is saying like this is going to change, this is going to evolve. They're taking all the feedback.

14:08 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Can I ask a meta question here, which is not meta the company, but meta I was going to say I love my question but like does it really matter if chat GPT is better? You know, is it kind of like Google, where it's just locked in as the perceived number one player and it's going to get more usage? It's going to get more data because it gets more usage and all of the technical stuff is just kind of playing on the margins.

14:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's important for a couple of reasons. One, because Sam Altman hyped it to the sky even at the beginning. That's his job, yeah, but people believed him. And in the beginning of the talk he even said before having Chachaputti in your pocket was like having a smart high schooler. Now it's like having a smart PhD in your pocket. And he said your life will change when you have somebody smarter than you in your pocket Could make your pants really heavy. So the hype is part of it. I think also there was even this feeling among uh, accelerationists anyway that this might be the breakthrough, this might be the one, this might be a gi, it's not, obviously okay.

15:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So the problem with hype, let's. Let's cover this, because this happens a lot in tech and I'm a YouTuber, of course. Right, I prefer content creator, but I'll use the words you guys understand. Every time somebody drops something new, no matter what the industry it could be a hard drive company, it could be a computer company, a soundboard company, microphone company, camera companies, especially Everyone goes in and goes, oh well, this product was overhyped, it doesn't match the hype, or whatever. Everyone goes in and goes, oh, this product was overhyped, it doesn't match the hype, or whatever.

15:47
Now you and I are old school. We remember when releases were pretty much we learned everything all the same day at the same time. Now there's crazy levels of leakery. And then there's the idea that companies are leaking stuff on purpose. And then there's the ideas where they leak it to the people who are influencers, so that they can tell. And then there's the idea well, the influencers are getting paid, so they're lying. And there's like well, the ceo lied because they said like, all of the above are these people's jobs and this is what they're supposed to do.

16:13
You are an adult, your job is to make adult decisions, so when some information is handed it to you. It is up to you to decide what to do with it. I had teachers all throughout school who told me that I needed to be a priest and live a Catholic lifestyle. Guess what I don't do today. When I got old enough, I ran right. You have the ability to make decisions, but everybody wants to blame all these things on stuff instead of them taking responsibility and believing it. So first of all, I need to receive receipts on the person that chad told them to do sodium bromide.

16:49
And number two I went to high school. I know what sodium bromide is. I was high in in chemistry class but I remember not to take that. You know what I mean. You know what I'm saying. So like if you're an adult and you don't know what sodium bromide is, that's on you, dog. We all learned that mess in school. You know what I'm saying. So like if you're an adult and you don't know what sodium bromide is, that's on you, dog. We all learned that mess in school. You know what I'm saying. Like we all had to do the periodic table. So at some point in time, that's kind of sort of on you Right. I think we are giving up too much of our self-responsibility and blaming everybody else for things that aren't going the way it is. And even AI people have always told us at the bottom of every response it says I may get things wrong. Double check your ass. It legit says that on every freaking response.

17:41 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I am in alignment with you, doc, for the most part, but we'll go over a story about Tesla and their liability oh dear, yes, yeah but there there is a line where you can't just announce that we are training it on health data to be better at health data, and then someone goes to their friend who's the tech guy and says, hey, could you tell me what it says? That's going to happen. There are too many things in the world for people to focus on every release for every product, especially if it's not in their domain. Uh, and so they just hear things and it might be true, maybe not, but well, there's a lot of that.

18:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Regardless of ais out there, I mean that's yeah, that's the world we live in now.

18:23 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, but when you're raising money and you're not, you're amplifying this and you're downplaying the risk. And, yes, it says that at the bottom of every prompt. But every website says can we store your cookies? People ignore that. Yeah, if they're, if they think that they are, and it's wild, I agree, and it's like people should have some personal responsibility. It's just like think a little bit harder, or, but sometimes people are busy and they can't and and and. When you hear like there's an AI revolution, when you hear that jobs are being displaced and people are losing work and being replaced with AI there, there is a narrative out there where people are putting too much faith in this because they are not giving equal parts measure of truthful with equal parts measure of hype.

19:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think part of the problem is distinguishing what ai is good at, because it's definitely good at some things like really good like some of the good things, some of the time, yeah, and and so it's. We're not used to being discriminating. We're not sure how to discriminate between the good stuff and the bad stuff that we get from this source, right? Normally, if I know somebody, no, yeah. But if I know somebody who's a BS-er, everything that person says is suspect, and I'm going to take it with a grain of salt.

19:42
On the other hand, if I know somebody's really smart, that that person's gonna. When they say things, I may not take everything on face value, but I'm gonna give it a lot more credence. In fact, this was that's why we're friends. This is the warning that uh, going way back, tim to me, get jebru and uh, timnit, timnit Gebru and Margaret Schmitchel and Emily Bender gave in their Stochastic Parents paper is that you got to be. We got to be careful here, because people are going to give it more credence because it came from a computer and there will be misinformation and disinformation that comes out of this machine.

20:22
I got to say in my my opinion, we've kind of started to take AI for granted. If five years ago, I had said here's the thing that's going to generate I'm, you know this JavaScript code that I wrote yesterday for my Obsidian that works and it's great, it's amazing. Here's the thing that's going to tell me whether my supplements are good and what's missing and what interactions I should worry about. Of course I verified, but if you had told me it's going to do that based on the fact that ingested a lot of content, turned it into tokens and then is now basically using probability to decide what token follows, which it doesn't.

21:00
I don't get how it goes from spicy autocorrect to something that's actually useful. I don't even know how that. I don't think anybody understands why LLMs are so good at what they do, so I'm not going to take it for granted, because I'm amazed. Yes, it's not perfect. Yes, there's all these problems. I'm still amazed at what it's doing. Now, I notice also that some of the criticism comes from people with a bent one way or the other, so let's yeah with a bone to pick gary marcus, who is a ai we've had, we've interviewed him on our ai show, intelligent machines.

21:33
I like the guy, he's smart, but he's, you know, he's made a living debunking ai, his article, and almost immediately this was august 9th, so the next day is gpt5 overdue, overhyped and underwhelming, and that's not the worst of it. Uh, he almost gloating that chat gpt was so bad. Uh, I wouldn't gloat about it and I don't think it's so bad. Yes, admittedly it's not. Well, it's certainly not agi and it's I. I think maybe sam altman over hyped it for sure, which was a mistake, but it's. But still, and it's not just chat gpt, it's. It's uh chat gpt and anthropic claude and uh, you know, kimmy, and there's a bunch of them and they're doing amazing things and I think that that's here's uh, I gotta tell you something which is super funny.

22:30 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So Wizard Link just put in the chat that drivers blindly follow GPS into rivers and off the side oh yeah, I do that all the time we have a space in Hawaii, on the big island. Yeah, that, I think maps has fixed it since. But in like two weeks timeframe three different tourists drove their car into the harbor and then the person who lives here and know what these boat rams look like.

22:55
I'm like yo stop blaming the GPS for that. I somebody who can't drive. There's no way you don't see the water coming and don't be like, let me stop. But one lady drove a minivan in and, like a fisherman, just happened to be emptying the boat. He had to get her kids out because she didn't even know how to, you know, break the glass or you know, do any other things that you're taught in driver's ed. And so she literally was in peril. And it's funny because it's like how do you drive into the ocean? Like we don't have little secret creeks here we do the ocean, like we don't have little secret creeks here we do. But I mean, what they're driving into is the pacific ocean and there's tons of yachts next to just open your eyes you might notice.

23:31
I'm like saying it wasn't like in some weird rural situation, like when you see the, the ss faulkner next to it, you don't drive in, I'm just, but people do it, so I get that that I miss, I miss off ramps all the time I I go play.

23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I have a little too, uh, dependent on gps and I admit it, I used to. You know, get out the thomas, what they call it, the thomas guy, that book, well, I thought we had, um, we had triple a maps.

24:03 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You know, my dad used to get the one that you can never fold back.

24:05
The triptychs, and it just becomes a crumble of paper because it was so obnoxious. Yeah, but honestly, sam is not one of my favorite people, but I ain't mad at him either. But just understand that Kyle Shanahan and Pete Carroll and 30 other coaches are telling everybody that their team is going to win the Super Bowl this year because that's their freaking job. So you should not really listen to sam. You have to take it with a block of salt, because that is his job you guys don't put your own block of sodium chloride or sodium bromide because sam is sam let's take a little break.

24:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're gonna. We've got lots more to talk about. Great panel good to have you for those who are watching live. I think we fixed the glitches. I pray we fix the glitches. Uh, it's pretty hot where benito lives and apparently his computer is not happy. Uh, we've all been there. Owen thomas is here from the san francisco business. Great to see you, owen. As always, wesley Faulkner and his new business, which is great, works-not-workingcom that site's opening.

25:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
When In a couple of weeks you said November 15th is the opening day and what we're doing is it's going to be gated. So those who sign up now for the newsletter to stay up to date will be guaranteed to come in after that. We will be releasing spots every once in a while for people to join so get in there and sign up.

25:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, who doesn't work in a toxic workplace, after all? And doc rock, whose workplace is his home. So how toxic could it be if you got a rice?

25:43 - Doc Rock (Guest)
cooker. My team is awesome, though, so I did. I have a comedic workplace, like everybody on my team. We're just like a big family. Like we rarely have fights.

25:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like we're pretty, we're pretty um fun, but you're all remote, or are they all in hawaii?

25:57 - Doc Rock (Guest)
we are remote, um, but we do get together about three or four times a year through going to headquarters or going to various events. Actually, I just came from mac stock catching up on all of our old friends, which was amazing. What was it? Max dot, mac stock? Yeah, it's like, uh, um, an event that goes on. So remember when macro closed, everybody was super sad. Well, uh, barry falk and and uh, mike potts put together a conference in the middle of illinois that just all the og mac guys can go and hang out, and so that's what we did I remember when they started that team.

26:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's still going.

26:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Huh, that's nice to be 10 years old bro wow super fun. We had a blast. I got to catch up with my whole tour team like we were hanging out slurping whiskeys, having a blast the ultimate apple website.

26:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tua, not hawk tua. That's a different kind of tua, that's a whole another two when that got popular I was so sad.

26:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm like people are going to connect it to.

26:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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29:41
Students are these days spending a majority of their time online, not just for socializing and gaming, but they're learning, they're, they're doing other things. They're online all the time and with that comes a number of accounts, new passwords and if you know teenagers, they're not. They're not get using strong pattern, making up passwords based on their birthday and their favorite band's name or whatever. Even if students know the security risks, let's face it all of us convenience often takes precedent. That's why you want to take your teenager and teach them how to use a password manager. Teach them how to use bitwarden. It will generate a unique, strong password every time, on every site unique to that site. Students can use it. They can put bitwarden on their phone, on their laptop, on every device.

30:27
And the best part about bitwarden for individuals, it's free. It's open source, so it's free forever. They promised me free, forever, unlimited passwords, pass keys, hardware devices. I actually pay a whopping 10 bucks extra a year for a premium account just because I want to support these guys. But you don't have to, and for a teenager on a tight budget maybe that's a good thing absolutely free. Oh, there's one other good thing you know nowadays if you have, if you're you know, no cybersecurity, potential employers are gonna really welcome that right. If you say to them at that interview after you graduate I, yeah, I use Bitwarden. I think it's really important to be secure with passwords.

31:09
Every company likes to know their employees take password security seriously, because you know what A lot of companies have employees that don't. I know that Bitwarden's setup just takes a few minutes. It supports importing from most password management solutions, so it's easy to get started. And because it's open source, anyone can inspect their code. It's on GitHub and it's audited regularly by third-party experts. Of course, bitwarden meets all the standards SOC 2, type 2, gdpr, hipaa, ccpa compliant. They support ISO 27001-2002. They're certified. That means they have the highest possible security. Get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a Teams or Enterprise plan, or get started for free across all devices as an individual at bitwardencom slash twit. That's bitwardencom slash twit. I use it every day. I love Bitwarden. I'm so happy I have it. Have it, you will be too, and we thank them so much for their support of this week in tech.

32:08
Here was a strange ai story. It's not gonna be all ai today, but there's one more. I wanted to mention disney. This is from mike masnick, writing in tech dirt. On friday, disney spent a year and a half negotiating with Dwayne Johnson, the rock, to create a digital version of the rock for the live action Moana film. They got an agreement, gave him money, the rock agreed. The technology was ready. Then, according to Mazda, disney killed the deal, not because they were worried about dwayne not being happy or privacy concerns. They were worried that the jury's still out on whether you can copyright ai creations and they were worried that parts of the film the ai parts of the film might end up in public domain just because it's created by ai. So they yanked it I think that's amazing.

33:08 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
this is, this is, this is the holy grail of protection of workers like uh, because if this can happen to disney, where they're worried about, uh, their creations using ai being not copyrightable, what about all these engineers that are getting fired and those works? Software could be free for everyone. Everyone's now open source Maybe not open source, but open license. So I think this is really a turning point where people are realizing that if you can't copyright this, then it almost has no perpetual value.

33:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's a big flag they're gonna take all of the ai created moana footage out. When it comes out it's not gonna be in there and I suspect this all of hollywood now will now start to think maybe we shouldn't use ai in our movies, which is a shocker right, leo, leo, I'm sorry for this what do you think about the movie itself? Oh, I don't know, it doesn't matter what you think.

34:11 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Sorry, I couldn't help it. I had to do it, I had to do it.

34:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sorry. Can you smell what Doc is cooking?

34:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's what I want to know. Oh my God, I was itching to do that.

34:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I think? The Rock is great. I love the Rock.

34:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
He's so cute, you know, he's actually a super nice person. Oh, I'm glad to hear that Even like growing up, you know, like he was always around, Like when he comes home he still goes to the gym.

34:39
Yeah, yeah, well, he's Samoan, but he still goes to the gym. He doesn yeah, well, he's, he's samoa, but he still goes to the gym. He doesn't, like you know, hide behind, you know his celebrity, whatever. And years ago I used to go to the gym super late at night, so that way it was open because 24 hour fitness in hawaii is busy because everybody comes here. It's right near waikiki. I'm working out one day and he's like oh, can I jump in?

34:58
and I can't see because I'm on the bar doing my thing, and then jump in I get up and I was like, yeah, if you don't mind me taking off all the plates so you can handle it, and he just like squeezed me on the shoulder and laughed and I was like that was the most awesome but yet painful squeeze. He's really just a. You know, it's really heavy.

35:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've got two 25ers in a tan on there. Sir, you may not want to try to lift that he's.

35:22 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I just I just like to report because I think a lot of people don't understand like so many celebrities are just, you know, a little bit out there, but he is legit, one of the nicest people in the world. I'm glad to hear that because it hasn't much changed him it hasn't seems like he's gotten way richer off the liquor deal. But super, super nice cat does he have a tequila?

35:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, yeah, everybody has a tequila here.

35:44 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Here's an interesting thing though Like, so the rock can license his likeness to to Disney for AI use, Right, but then Disney can't, copyright, can't, protect that. So I mean, ultimately, like, are all these likeness deals, you know, especially for like actors who've passed away, you know the to recreate their voices, like what is? And you know, like, if there's some AI in the mix, but overall it's, you know it's human created. I think that's that's probably going to be litigated over, you know, over the coming years, Yeah'm sure disney hopes.

36:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The courts will say, oh no, ai creation are well within copyright, but I don't.

36:29 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
The courts have not said that I believe what the copyright office has said is there's got to be a human author. So if the, if the human author uses ai tools, that does not void their, you know? Author has, yeah, so what would that look like?

36:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
if so, I got, I've, I've scanned dwayne, I've scanned the rock, and now I want to put the rock in the movie. If a human I maybe like the, the voiceover person is protected. But that image is that protected? I don't think so. I don't know. That's what Disney lawyers are worried about. Wasn't there a?

37:04 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
monkey photo case a few years back.

37:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, Like where the monkey like triggered the shutter on a camera and ultimately, photographer said I own that picture and monkey was like call my agent. Well, you know who defended the monkey pita oh my god pita, the people for ethical treatment of animals, said that the macaque in the picture this is the picture uh owns the rights to that picture. Yeah, there it is. He shot that. He pressed a button that automatically took the picture, which is a great picture, by the way the funny thing is that picture actually looks AI that is.

37:50
Another sad side effect of this is I can no longer tell, and like we were talking about the bunnies jumping on the trampoline and you had an interesting reaction actually, wesley, because uh, I said, well, yeah, nobody knew if they were ai or not yeah, I said I didn't care and you said who cares, chat wins every time people listen.

38:15 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I'm gonna do a quick commercial for leo about club twit and why you have to be in there yeah because the chat.

38:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have me jumping on a trampoline. They also have me, by the way, and this is not ai. Uh, that is a 50 pound dumbbell, with which is a. It has a strange geometry though, doesn't it? It looks like it's kind of a curved dump oh my God, leo is the best, leo. Here's some, uh, here's some video of is this AI or not? Fox is jumping on a trampoline. I don't know. I don't know, do you and you Wesley? Who cares? Right, this is definitely AI.

38:57 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I remember when my kids were young and they would watch television and they couldn't tell the difference between the news and a movie, which was real, which was not, and in terms of entertainment both were the same. They were seeing a car drive down the street. They look out the window and they see a car down the street. They look on TV, they see a car down the street. They look on my phone and they see the car driving down the street. If they think it's a funny looking car, they're going to laugh, no matter what way it's presented to them. The question is when you start using that information to inform what you do next or where to invest your money or who to fire. That's when it's a problem. If it's no one's making a decision saying we are going to invest in trampoline stocks because these bunnies are having so much fun, that's that's. If that's not part of the calculation, it doesn't really matter.

39:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It doesn't really matter. That's kind of true Perplexity and a little bit of hot water for a couple of reasons so and one of them, I'm not sure, is a good reason Cloudflare, which is a company that protects a lot of. We've interviewed, actually, their former CTO, john Graham Cunning, many times. He was just on Intelligent Machines a couple of weeks ago. He's on the board now, no longer CTO. John Graham Cunningham Many times. He was just on intelligent machines a couple of weeks ago. He's on the board now, no longer CTO.

40:23
But that was to talk about a new product that they had for websites. You know Cloudflare. Often in fact it's in between me and your website, wesley you use it to protect yourself against DDoS attacks. One of the features that Cloudflare offers is blocking AI web scrapers. So often AI ignores the robotstxt file, which isn't a law or anything. It's just a norm that if the robotstxt file says no, no, ai scraping, you shouldn't scrape it. But most AIs ignore that. Perplexity has for years. But Cloudflare said they're ignoring, even when we have our own protections, which are pretty stringent. They ignore every signal from the user that they don't want this site scraped.

41:04
And the way Cloudflare did is they created a site. They put up the you know the super duper robotstexas says no scraping. And then they went to perplexity and they said tell me about this site. And Perplexity did. Now Cloudflare says that Perplexity is violating norms by doing that. I disagree because Perplexity just like any browser. If you tell a browser, tell me, show me this site, it's going to show you the site. That's how the web works. It's going to show you the site. That's how the web works. So is it so different if an, if a perplexity, an ai, looks at that site and gives you a report on it, not the site's image, but just a report on it? How is that different from a browser pulling the site and displaying it? And this is what perplexity said. This is not a fair test of this. So that's problem number one.

41:56
This is the story of nine to five mac. There was a rumor, actually started by uh eddie q at apple, that they were looking at perplexity and maybe buying the company to give them the ai chops they have not yet been able to create on their own. Uh, the other thing that perplexity just did is they are now the official thing that perplexity just did is they are now the official source of uh an ai for the president's social network, truth social, and in fact they have an ai that is trained only on fox news, the uh oan, the one america network, uh breitbart. They said we're only going to train it on these correct sources of information. So I don't know. Do you guys use perplexity? I have been a big perplexity fan for a long time. This gave me a this not the Cloudflare story, but this gave me a little pause.

42:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I've been a big perplexity fan for a minute because first I ignored it but then I got it for free when you did something stupid like buy a rabbit. And then I've been messing with comet, and comet is pretty cool. Like you can do some really cool.

43:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's their, their browser, which I've been using.

43:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah but, it has said just like. That's just like finding out that, like you know your brother -in-law's in the cia, or something like that, you just, you just, I just worry that they're willing to take their search engine and their AI it's an AI slash search engine and slant it in in that way.

43:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I don't think they're doing that to the regular perplexity, but it just bothers me that they're willing to do that for, yeah, somebody who comes along and says hey, could you just take out all the left wing stuff, stuff and just the that bothers me.

43:38 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It says that it's a that puts it back into it's just the money thing, right? And I really don't. I don't like that concept. When you know, people in my YouTube recamp love to say, well, these companies are just trying to make money. And I'm like fam, I don't know if you know how business works. That's every company. The lady that sells you know sweets at the cupcake store at the end of your block, she's trying to make money. Go buy a cupcake. But this is a little bit different. This is just like playing on people's worst sensibilities and that part ain't cool.

44:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I think it's a. It would not pass an IRB in terms of a study to see how the effects of this works, but I could totally understand that you can white label a product when you have a contract.

44:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's what it is basically, isn't it yeah? But I also want to touch a little bit on that. By the way, they're not hiding their participation. They put out a press release.

44:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I mean I would find it interesting to see how that turns out. We saw what happened with Grok when they tried to de-wokify it and all the stuff that was considered truth. But to go back to the crawling with Cloudflare, you have to realize I'm not defending or trying to promote what they're doing is right. Promote what they're doing is right, but just give me some context that Google's crawler gets fed into Gemini, so Cloudflare can't specifically de facto block them gathering information because it shows up as Google's crawler.

45:11
Right, and if you were to block that, then you would not show up in Google search and the same thing is with open ai and bing search, and so it is a war or a battle that is not exactly on an even playing it's already lost. I just want to just just put that out there. Just why they would might be so adamant to continue to do this is yeah, doesn't that?

45:33 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
uh, doesn't that seem like a bundling uh case? Waiting to waiting oh, interesting yeah wedding.

45:39 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Against whom? I mean, like, who's going to prosecute that?

45:42 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
well, the ftc. I guess it depends. If trump is mad at google this week, I think he's kind of mad at google over supposedly over youtube, but you know who knows he's not mad at apple anymore.

45:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They gave him a gold bar with a piece of glass embedded in it, and that was all it took.

45:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh, that and the promise two seconds later he said that that tim is not an athlete and I was like pot kettle, like insta pot kettle, what the heck also, tim cook is like a is like a champion biker who wakes up at 3 am to work out.

46:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at him put him next to the president. Who would you want to race in a? Uh, in a hundred yard dash?

46:21 - Doc Rock (Guest)
tim has been known to ride the saddle road on the big island and like that's a long ride.

46:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm like, dude you, you're spotting things that you don't know what you're talking about yeah, well never mind so funny though you can't, you can't tell tim cook, you can't say tim cook's not doing the right thing because apple is threatened with a big tariff on the chips that it uses. Uh, here, here is, uh the president receiving the, the piece of glass from Corning. There's Tim Cook holding that. Cook said we are going to make $100 billion investment in Corning, an American company in Kentucky, to build, to build all of our phone glass and watch glass out of their glass, which, by the way, they've been saying they've been doing all along.

47:13 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
But anyway, apparently, by the way, there's a great story there about the original iPhone. It was supposed to be plastic. Steve Jobs saw a prototype. It got scratched, it looked bad and he was like it's got to be glass and Apple's engineers had to scramble and find a glass supplier and it was corning, so it's always been Corning.

47:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, even more than that. That's that Gorilla Glass that they talk about. Corning had just shut down the plant that made it because they couldn't find a market for it. Apple comes in knocking. They said, oh, we can reopen that plant. So since 2007, corning has been making iPhone Glass. So since 2007, corning has been making iPhone glass. They haven't been making the watch sapphire glass. Somebody else outside the US makes that and, to be fair, even though it will be made, the glass itself will be made in the US. It has to be. Then the little sheets for the iPhone and the Apple Watch. Cook says they're going to make a massive you know he said this before a massive investment in the United States, mostly of stuff that they had already committed to. The president wants Apple to build iPhones in the US.

48:31 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
He's been very clear about that. It's a masterstroke by Tim, because, from everything that I've read about the $500 billion investment, they're all contingent on other partners or players. Yeah, meaning that Cook is very good at this. They fall through, they can't. Oh well, corning didn't make enough, so we didn't pay enough, but it's all assuming that we sell a billion iPhones, then that's when we'll have a bill like 500 billion, and yeah, it's. It's all based on other people that they don't have control over, and that's where the estimates are coming from.

49:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, people don't give him enough credit for his foresight. Every time somebody likes to mention Tim, they like to talk about his you know management skills and you know when, when and if he does step down which I think he's probably extended I thought he was probably going to be good for a slide out, you know, within the next two or three years.

49:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but realizing that he has this to contend with, the board is not going to let tim cook go. Yeah, I think he expanded his.

49:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I think he expanded his, his uh ticket. You know he called the and be like hey, can I change my flight? I think he changed his flight by three years because of this and he's super brilliant with this play. This play was phenomenal. If Steve was around, steve would have said Tim, you're holding it wrong. Why don't you put your finger through the apple?

49:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think Steve Jobs would have gone to the White House and presented President Trump with a gold bar? I don't think so.

49:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
No, no, I don't think that would have happened. Steve would have done something more. I don't want to say crazy, but that was his turn.

50:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think he would have flipped him off, which would be disastrous for Apple, because the president says he wants to raise a put a hundred percent tariff on semiconductors made outside the united states. That includes the semiconductors in the iphone this doesn't.

50:23 - Doc Rock (Guest)
This doesn't math. And I'll tell you why because this dude is going to lower drug prices by 1500 percent, uh, two thousand percent or four thousand percent. So he don't know how to math, bro, this, whatever he says is just okay you say that, but I think they're putting those.

50:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, whoever's doing the math isn't the president, it's somebody at the borders and they are putting those tariffs on those products coming into the country, but didn't they calculate the tariffs with chat gpt yeah they did a very weird calculation, but no matter what?

50:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
the tariffs won't hurt the biggest players, because they still have volume discounts.

51:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The tariffs were never going to hurt anybody. They're going to hurt the people who buy iPhones, the people who buy laptops, the people who buy everything that is made outside the US. Who is that? That's us, us. Doesn't hurt China, that's what US stands for Us. I mean, you could say, I guess you could say, and it's certainly the case that it puts pressure on these companies to try. Well, trump says they're going to absorb the cost. That I remains to be never happy, I don't.

51:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
He wouldn't absorb the cost, he wouldn't do it anybody else is going to do it

51:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
but I'm going to be out of the office in three years.

51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right there's, yeah and if you, I wouldn't put money on that, but okay, if you think so theoretically, let's, as of today, right now, as what's the over under chat, let's go so the question is like it take.

51:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It'll take years and to be able to bring this on. And people are, I think, with the taco trade how it's going right now. They feel that it's not going to be worth it long term.

51:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, look, I'm looking at my investments and I can't understand why the stock market's going up, but it is. It goes up and down.

52:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I might point out here's one of the funniest things that I have not heard anybody talk about, and if I have, I wish somebody would put it to me, because I would love somebody to help me with this thought. So we want to bring manufacturing back to the US? Fine, whatever. And the way we're gonna do this is by embarking all these tariffs and everything. Okay, whatever.

52:23
That's your play, but we're gonna take education and blow up the Department of Ed and Then we're gonna like do how do you get the bodies and the brainpower To work at the type of factories you're asking to come home if, in this same stroke, you're going to blow up education? If anything, this should spark the idea of wanting to bring STEM and like put money in STEM, put money in other forms of education. That would eventually get to that. If it was a long play, I think I would be on board, but you just ain't making no sense, bro.

52:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The math don't matter we still have immigration, so that, oh sorry, all right, no stop it.

53:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, just stop it. Uh. So, immediately after, uh, apple ceo tim cook gave uh the president that nice gift and the promise of a 7.5 billion dollar investment in corning and kentucky to go along with the 600 billion dollar investment that they are planning to make in the united states. Which is all good, I'm glad. I mean, that's great for us, right? They're building factories and stuff. The president said nope, no tariffs for apple, they're exempt from my tariffs. However, he did say that we're going to put a tariff of approximately 100 on chips and semiconductors. Uh, unless you're building in the United States or have committed to build without question, committed to building the United States there will be no charge, to which tsmc who makes apples, uh, apple silicon and a processors for the phones said tsmc is exempt because it has set up plants in the united states. So I mean, they say we're exempt, but I don't. I don't think that's the final authority. Anyway, we'll watch with interest.

54:10 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Uh, this is just more uncertain ties to china, we're going to force them to resign well, isn't that a story?

54:17 - Doc Rock (Guest)
here's what they should have said. They should have said that t and tsmc is now trump yeah, you're covered, you're covered I can just put his name on it and you're covered, unless it's eric that's.

54:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That is, by the way, one of the most interesting stories this week. The president has urged lip Bhutan, the new CEO of Intel, to step down. He says uh ton has investments in uh companies in China that are associated with the Chinese military. The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately, said Trump on Truth Social on Thursday. There's no other solution to this problem, and he always writes this. Thank you for your attention to this matter. I don't know why he writes that. I don't understand. Thank you for your attention.

55:08
That's his grok AI that did that. It's weird. He doesn't know how to say that. It's weird, you don't know how to say. Um, the post came after tom cotton, the republican.

55:18
Tom cotton asked the chairman of intel to answer questions about his ties to china. He is apparently chinese, he looks chinese and that's all that matters, right? Uh, I don't know. He's got a chinese name, including investments in the country's semiconductor companies and others with connections to the country's military. Uh, tan said in an email statement to employees at Intel later that day there's been a lot of misinformation circulating about my past roles at Walden International and Cadence Design Systems. Uh, cadence is a a Us based company but uh, which he ran for 10 years, but he sold products to to a chinese military university. In fact, the company pled guilty last month for violating us export controls by sending selling hardware and software to china's national university of defense technology, he says. Tan says he's always operating within the highest legal and ethical standards. Quote we're engaging with the administration to address the matters that have been raised, and sure they have the facts. I, what can you say? It's, it's, it's headline-making, I guess, and that's that's the main point.

56:31 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I mean it does you know it does move the stock and that's going to be of concern to investors.

56:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, Intel's in deep trouble, no matter what Right I mean.

56:42 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
If the board feels like he's compromised, not necessarily because of this, but just because he has the ire of the president. They could just kick him out because of the thought that, hey, we might need a bailout from the government, we might need some other investment, and so we should just like Paramount and all these other companies. They might just say, like we need to make sure the company itself is safe, and just this might be the fall guy.

57:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
And their Tempur-Pedic laurels have been long upset, so you know they're already. Like owen said, they're already in trouble oh, they're in deep trouble.

57:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's terrible. All right, let's take another break. Lots more to talk about you're watching this week in tech with the doctor himself, doc rock, the doctor of rock at youtubecom.

57:29 - Doc Rock (Guest)
How can I get the apple? Share it, bro. You know I'm an apple fan boy, but this, taking it just one step higher, yeah did they?

57:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they haven't hit four trillion yet, have they? I know Microsoft and Nvidia did. Is Apple closing in on it? Actually, apple stock went down, I think, after the tariff threat oh, it went down after giving the glass plaque up yeah

57:51 - Doc Rock (Guest)
yeah yeah, after, after the phones come out, I just got to say I love the shirt. That's all I'm excited about we'll talk about the phones.

57:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm out after the phones come out. I just got to say I love this shirt, that's all I'm excited about it. We'll talk about the phones. I'm excited about the phones. I don't know if I'm going to buy one, but I'm excited about it. It might be the first year in years that I haven't bought the new iPhone, because the old one is so good and I want to save my pennies because next year Apple's rumored to be doing a doing you know, a super thin phone that opens up like that, and that would be pretty cool, wouldn't it?

58:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I would be, if they could find a way to 86 the crease.

58:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm in, yeah, the crease. Everybody says the crease, everybody. Nobody likes the crease. It's like phone crack is where sweat gets in.

58:28
I say I say bring back the home button, that's, that's my, you are an old school man owen thomas from the san francisco business times and wesley faulkner, who has a new business it's opening up in november. Works dash not dash working dot com. Go there right now. Uh, we're glad you're here watching the show. We appreciate it. We appreciate the support of our fine sponsors. Like the folks at Oracle, this episode of this week in tech is brought to you by Oracle. In business they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. But what if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what cohere Thompson Reutersized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud.

59:19
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01:00:22
It's going to be interesting to see what happens, uh, with apple in a month. They've got new phones coming out. Rumors are they may have to raise the prices due to tariffs, but not as much as maybe they could. Uh, they're not, they are. It looks like an absorb some of it. In fact, apple's amazing quarterly results last week showed they have 49 margins. So you know they they could. They could get 40 and still be pretty happy. I would think apple has decided to, because of this uh threat of tariffs, work with Samsung to build the iPhone image sensors in Texas. For years Apple's have used Sony sensors to great effect. They have the best cameras, everybody agrees. But Samsung makes some pretty nice sensors. In fact, this Samsung Galaxy Fold I have here has Samsung sensors in it Quite nice imagery and one of them is 200 megapixels binned, but still, apple would presumably get that sensor. Um, they also samsung is is building uh chips for tesla as well over the next few years.

01:01:30 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
16 and a half billion dollar deal for that just keep in mind that the use of the tech, though, is like a few, maybe not one like multiple far generations, but it's not cutting edge um technology, that is, it's the legacy.

01:01:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They call it legacy nodes. It's not the, the main processor, it's the this, the other processors. But every phone has a number of processors in it.

01:01:55 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Right. Just saying that if people are expecting that things will be primarily made here anytime soon, even if they are able to get to the same level of technology, the amount of quantities, the volume, still won't be there for a bit.

01:02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple's struggling a little with ai. Uh, although after the reception of chat gpt5, I think ample may be saying yeah, it's good, we're not, we're not involved in uh all of that. There's a big brain drain going on. Meta has stolen at least four of their top researchers from apple. Uh, ai, uh. Mark german, in his usual sunday newsletter as power on newsletter from bloomberg, is talking about apple, how apple does want to use ai and its next generation, siri, to control the phone. You'll be able to talk to siri and have it do things uh on your phone using app intense. What do you think of this, doc? You follow this space.

01:02:57 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Man, I'm waiting. This is all I'm waiting for. I'm waiting for App Intense to do the one. Okay, this is gonna sound really crazy because I should know better and I've done this forever, but time zones are time zones and I don't change. When Nito hit me up the other day and said "'Hey, can you fill in' I was like yeah, no problem, and I forgot to put it on the calendar.

01:03:13
So I get up this morning. And then I was like, well, there's nothing f1 happening today, so let me see what I got to do to get ready for the show. And I was going to get ready an hour early and I was like yo, siri, what time is my? Am I supposed to be on twitter today? And she was like, what's twitter, you know? So I had to go and dig back in and pull up the excel sheet and realize, you know, 11 your time. Well, 11 my time, 2 pm your time. And I, you know, adjust it. But like Siri should be able to do that, and I've done this, I've sat in this chair enough times that she should be able to look at my calendar and go, based off of, you know, mercury not being a retrograde, but this time of year. You and Leo are X many hours apart, retrograde, but this time of year you and leo are x many hours apart.

01:03:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In october, you and leo are x many hours apart.

01:03:59 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I bet you could ask chat gpd5 then no, because they would have told me if I wanted to be on say you need more sodium bromide in your diet.

01:04:07 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Is what it was I I worry in pentothal I, I worry that this is going to get spammy. You know, look at notifications. Notifications were super useful and then, like now, they're useful now my notification screen is just like first of all turn off update oh so good, turn off all notifications anyway.

01:04:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, notifications are trouble, but I do like the notification summaries, not because they're good or accurate. They they're hysterical. Yes, they are. It's a little bit of comedy every morning when I open my phone.

01:04:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's true what it gives us for summaries for what's going on in our Slack. I sometimes screenshot them because they're absolutely funny. It goes there's worry over you know such and such, and I go in and it's like like that's not what they said. Yeah, but I do feel like the notifications. There's a new feature, um oh, and which we'll all find out more in september, but it's called reduce interruptions, and reduce interruptions has been freaking phenomenal as far as like not bothering me with stuff that I don't pay attention to, but giving me the stuff that I need, and hopefully that gets better, as you know, as we get this I actually am coming around.

01:05:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did put the beta, the public beta, of ios 26 on my phone and ipad 26 on my ipad and even mac os 26 tahoe on my max and I I'm coming around. I'm not crazy about the gel. I feel like I'm looking through breast implants at everything. I'm not. I don't like that part, but but other than that here all right now let me explain. Here's a summary that the atlantic fbi on epstein client list, oh wow see, that's, that's the eat shoots and leaves the comic right I, I love it.

01:06:13
I just I don't know what it means. I't care, I know I can open it and I can find out. It just makes me happy.

01:06:20 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's like I've just been liking the ones in mail. The mail ones have been the best so far and I do like the reduced interruptions. But here's the thing about Apple We've known this forever and it's never going to change. And people just keep wishifying it to change. They will come out of the gate less and then, okay, here we go, Exhale and then just take over. So I don't care if it takes them two more years to get it right, as long as they get it right, Cause right now we started the show off talking about how everybody else is screwing it up. Right, Perplexity is screwing it up. You know GPT five and open AI is screwing it up. Right, Perplexity is screwing it up. You know GPT-5 and open AI is screwing it up. So if Apple comes in like you know 2027 and be like here you go, here's what we meant or here's what you actually wanted, I'm cool with that, Like I don't mind being in last place.

01:07:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just think it gives the iPhone a little personality.

01:07:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's not a great personality, but it's like I got a little imp in my phone making still laugh at how many times siri disappoints me and I'm, like you, know better dude. Why did you even bother to ask her?

01:07:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
all I could do is laugh lisa swear, my wife swears at it. She like she is like. There is not a moment. Me well, no, but yeah, that's right. Instead of swearing at me, she swears at siri, which is good. That's an improvement. You have an android phone, I know know, don't show off. Are you excited about the next Pixel? Are you going to buy a Pixel 10? No, absolutely not.

01:07:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
No, I generally am a Pixel person. I love the phones. They are a little shaky with their new processor because they're doing a new one in-house. The reason why I probably won't upgrade is not because of not wanting it or thinking it looks cool. It's all of the firing that I saw of the Pixel staff and employees makes me feel wary that they're either going to find issues before it ships fixed issues before they ship or after it ships being able to fix them on time. Uh, I, I, it's there. It's always felt like a skeleton crew and for for those in the pixel team, and now it's just like I don't want to invest uh any money uh into being saddled with with a lemon and just being told to deal with it.

01:08:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In 10 days. Google will you know they have their Made by Google event. By the way, we'll stream that for club members in our club, a twit discord. Micah Sargent and I'll be covering that 10 am Pacific on Wednesday, october 20th. Sorry, august 20th, but I agree with you has Google lost their mojo? It feels like they just don't know what the hell they're doing anymore.

01:09:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They lost their personality or they lost their brand. On the Pixel side, especially in the earliest. You have a little problem? Oh, just call, we'll replace it. Just way back when, when Amazon Prime, when you would have an issue, they're like oh, we'll just send you a return, that's easy. Now it's the inchification of everything. It's just like now. It's just like they have a really good camera. They fixed that, which is great, and now it's just like now what? Now they're leaning into AI, but it's not a differentiator for me, although Gemini, their AI is not bad.

01:09:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a pretty competent AI. It's really good.

01:09:41 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, but you could download that on any phone.

01:09:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's why I wouldn't worry if I were Apple, because you can use any of the AIs on your iPhone, right? You don't need Siri. Here's my worry about Siri becoming. You know, hey, siri, siri put a comment on Doc Rock's latest video. You rule Doc uh, which, in theory, this is what those app intents are going to allow it to do. You know, um, remember, samsung tried this with Bixby. It was not well received and no, as far as I know, nobody uses Bixby anymore. It's still in there, somewhere hidden in my Samsung phone. You know, all these companies have lost their mojo, haven't they? They all suck.

01:10:24 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They picked Bixby as a name.

01:10:27 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I say bring back Microsoft, Bob. I think Microsoft.

01:10:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think Copilot is getting a little bit more like Bob to be honest all the time or more like Clippy.

01:10:37 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Clippy, clippy, clippy 2.0.

01:10:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Now with a new resurgence.

01:10:43 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They need to find the things that they do well and be able to do it consistently. It's like the voice dictation when it was like even 93% accurate, it was still very annoying to go through and try to correct those errors. And it was only like recently where the transcriptions have gotten really, really high quality, where it's like, oh, it's an error, it doesn't bother me. But with these assistants, that's where, if you can't rely on it to do something in the upper 90%, 100% of the time, you'll just like if I have to verify it every single time, I'm it's just a waste of my time. Uh, I was listening to hard fork, uh, and they were talking about the alexa plus and one of the playing with that.

01:11:27
It's dopey too yeah, they said, like we can see why apple hasn't released yes, and why amazon put it, put it off for so long? Exactly it's just like you have, you have to do it well, and one of the hosts said that, uh, it messed up a timer like one of the things, like the core the one thing you use the echo for exactly yeah, and so you don't.

01:11:49
You don't you want you needed to be reliable and with these like um, agentic, um systems that you are not predictable. It is like a landmine, and so they have.

01:12:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have to be able to do it and be able to say it will do these features and and be extremely confident that I'll do it most of the time uh, people in the um club twitter discord say I shouldn't buy a new phone for a couple of years and instead buy this six thousand dollar chinese robot that can do cartwheels and handstands the unitree r1, ultra lightweight, fully customizable. I don't know if I need a gymnastics robot, though I mean oh oh, oh, that's scary, it's punching, it's punching well, now you don't have to do your own handstands, you can just get actually get somebody else to do the cartwheels for you can it, uh, can it empty the dishwasher for me?

01:12:45
uh, no, that's a little I. I did see it was the funniest thing. You've probably seen this video too of a robot doing the laundry. Did you? Have you seen this one?

01:12:55 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
and I don't know, it might be the unit, so I kept putting more laundry in the basket.

01:12:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, and the robot moves at an infuriatingly slow pace because it's a robot and it takes each piece of it's, like a an a hundred year old man going yeah, and not checking the labels no, we didn't know. If it's colored, if it's delicates, that's my brassiere you're putting in there and it puts it in and then it goes and it takes another one by the way, they never show it starting the laundry.

01:13:27
I can put the laundry in the washing machine. That's not where I need help. They never show it. Starting the laundry, putting it in the dryer, taking it out of the dryer, folding it and hanging it up. They don't show it starting the laundry, putting it in the dryer, taking it out of the dryer, folding it and hanging it up. They don't show it. Do that.

01:13:37 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I just need the folding part. I would have been cool. See, that's what they do. So I think Wesley talked about this at the very, very beginning of the show. We're trying to do too much with these things Instead of doing something, then add a little more. If AI had came out and the only thing it knew how to do in the very beginning was actually translate languages flawlessly and get the nuances in that of human conversation, because it's read all the books, that would have been fine. But they couldn't leave it at that. They had to show all the other thousands. Here's the 85 use cases. If they had to check it off a little bit at a time, we would have been totally fine.

01:14:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's pretty good at translation, though, right.

01:14:14 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, it's actually relatively amazing. It's doing so much better. And um, the thing where you put it in chat mode and you say okay, you know, I, I speak japanese and my other friend speaks english and we're gonna have a go, have you done that with people?

01:14:29
uh, yeah, I've done it with myself because I can understand it and I'm actually pretty impressed by it but it does work better when you do it with another person, because it knows that two different people are talking and I can't change my voice enough to make it think it's working. So it is absolutely incredible at that and it will only get better. And now, because it works so well, there's a bunch of companies selling like translator earbuds and things like that.

01:14:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
which kind of helpful or, as I'm still holding out hope for uh augmented reality glasses that can uh translate in real time for you while you're wearing them, so you don't the new meta update does a good job of like looking at signs and helping you read what they do um, I think it's 17-0, I think.

01:15:19 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Read what they do um, I think it's 17. Oh, I think as well. But I mean, yeah, it's actually pretty good at looking at signs and telling you what it says and things of that nature, but this part is where they could have just left it as something relatively simple. But they they're trying to do too much and this is why people are freaked out, and if you knew that you were going to scare people with the job taking, then why would you do that? You know, because you get greedy my glasses are up to date.

01:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did you have to apply for some sort of special uh? No, no, it just put the case next to it and then it um it catches on oh, I have automatic updates on, so maybe I never use this, but it's kind of cool. I can say hey, meadow, what am I looking at right now? You've got a computer set up with multiple monitors keep going oh can we, can we?

01:16:07 - Doc Rock (Guest)
agree that? Oh, he's telling you go ahead.

01:16:10 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, can we agree that that meta's ai on facebookcom is terrible?

01:16:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
everybody says zero I've never used it. What does it do?

01:16:19 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
the the post summaries are just ridiculous, like you know, like there's no, you know there's no no sense of context and there's no, no evidence that the AI is interpreting the post correctly.

01:16:32 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So not the same delight as the summaries on the iPhone.

01:16:38 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
No, I mean, it's not even that hilariously bad. It's just annoying too, because Meta's kind of shoving it into the interface.

01:16:49 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I've never used. Oh, is this on the mobile app or the website? Uh?

01:16:54 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
usually I'm using facebook on mobile, so you see it under under a post. Like just you know, meta ai offers like kind of um prompts to you know, for discussion based quote, unquote, based on the post and comments, and they're just really bad.

01:17:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Oh, and then you'd see, oh, my God, well, you just mentioned something that's incredibly true, okay.

01:17:17
So again, you should understand context right.

01:17:20
So I'm doing a post and in my community I'm teaching people about, you know, doing their live streams, and I'm like, okay, if you want to create something and you don't want your audio to suck, here are a couple of settings that you have to say and I'm like, okay, if you want to create something and you don't want your audio to suck, here are a couple of settings that you have to say and I press go and it won't take the post and it's not highlighted, it's not telling me what it is, it's just you hit go, go, go. It won't take the post, it doesn't tell you the post doesn't work, it doesn't tell you why it won't take it. So then I looked at think I know what they think they're doing, so I removed the word suck and then I put something else and then I hit it and it went. But and that would have been fine if you told me you're like just say I can't say suck yeah, if you're sister mcgillicuddy from my catholic school freak, I get it, but you didn't even highlight it.

01:18:04
You can't use that word right it needs to give you feedback I got in facebook jail for telling my brother like dude, if you post that picture of me in that outfit, I will kill you. And I got in facebook jail. Do you know how many siblings say to each other it's normal, I'm not gonna actually kill my brother I love my little brother right, that's my, that's my home, you say bra all the time, bro.

01:18:28
Yeah, in hawaii we use that as a as bruh, right, we don't say it like the way you think it as a boulder holder. We say it as like brother, it's right.

01:18:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, do the and you do the shaka brah hang loose brah.

01:18:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, it's really dumb and I'm like, if you're going to censor what I'm saying, tell me what I'm saying wrong then yeah, I agree, it should give you feedback that's not so good.

01:18:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have, I don't. I have a medic facebook account, but I I don't use it for reasons like that. I want to tell people they suck. What's wrong with that? Nothing wrong just means that you're so low you would suck eggs. Is what that means. It's nothing. What do they think it means?

01:19:10 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
is it? Is it telling that, uh, that the junk meta ai is on the facebook app but not on instagram? Does that tell you something about how?

01:19:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
how they feel about facebook? Yeah, they don't because you know their, their llama is pretty good.

01:19:23 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
In fact, the local version of llamas were quite good, I thought so they're willing to junk up the big blue app, but not, uh, not instagram, which is increasingly.

01:19:33 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They just want to pump their numbers how many users they have of meta ai and that's why it's there. Does it work right?

01:19:40 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
no, I think wes, I think you're, I think you're exactly right, like it's just a use, it's just a kind of ego user, user number play yeah all right, let's take a break.

01:19:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've decided. Now the entire tech world sucks. Oh, I can't say that I'm gonna kill them. No, no, I'm not. No, I am not you can.

01:20:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I guess you can't even say killing time anymore well, they took away all the human moderators, right.

01:20:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what you're seeing.

01:20:10 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
The result of this is this is machine moderation at work and this is also why we have words on youtube like unalived and stuff like that.

01:20:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's why they say stupid like that it's the funniest one is tiktok, where you know everybody's a corn actress and stuff like that. It's just I think. I think somebody's got to write a book on internet age euphemisms to get around says, because I'm still wrapping my head around, crash out and crash out.

01:20:36 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You can't say that either, unless you're uh tesla no, but you're going ballistic right, or we would say like they're crazy or something. Those are too mean, so you got to say that they're crashing out it's like the whole tech industry is taking sodium bromide.

01:20:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what I'm thinking it's all skippity toilet skippity, did you see the big labubu robbery?

01:21:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
what do we have never thought you'd hear? On what have we sunk to?

01:21:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
on this show. We'll get back to a more real tech in just a bit with wesley faulkner, the founder startup guy. Now is this your first business that you've started up it's my first one that's actually going to ship.

01:21:17 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I mean, I did try one before, but it never got well, you didn't have ai to help you yeah, uh, so this is also my bag. This is community, so I nice it's totally your thing.

01:21:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, thousands of dollars worth of labubu's stolen as toys popularity continues to soar on world news tonight.

01:21:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Also here do you have a labubu doll, doc rock absolutely freaking nice as a freaking nut and I don't listen I do have nothing against collecting things that don't make any dang sense because, although I've taken a lot of them out of the shot, I have so many of these little like star wars doohickeys around here.

01:22:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have no room to talk, but no I love when you read in the newspaper where they say the Lububu dolls, which are creatures with 14 teeth, and I mean they try to describe it like you can somehow make sense of the phenomenon. Anyway, enough of that, Also with us.

01:22:23 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Owen Thomas, I need to take a break. It's a Lububu.

01:22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, go cuddle your Lububu. Managing editor of the San Francisco Business Times. Great to have all of you here on a hot Sunday afternoon or morning or whatever it is evening for you. Our show today, brought to you by ExpressVPN. This is timely. This is timely. We're going to actually talk about why it's timely in just a little bit.

01:22:47
The UK has adopted the online, the Snoopers Charter charter right, which has online age verification. What happened immediately the day that law took effect last week or the week before? Doubt? People downloading vpns went up like 10 times in one day. Why? Because that's you get around this stuff.

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01:26:23
Here's the story from a tech dirt mike masnick writing didn't take long to reveal. The uk's online safety act is exactly the privacy crushing failure everybody warned about. This is the. This is the thing they turned on that is going to have age checking requirements. It it turned on, it became an in effect end of july. Uh, mike says.

01:26:51
Let's start with the most obvious sign. This law is working exactly as poorly as critics warn. Vpn usage in the uk has absolutely exploded. Proton vpn reported an 1800 spike in uk signups. Five of the top ten free apps on the app store in the uk. Vpns, mike says. When your child safety law's primary achievement is teaching kids how to use vpns to circumvent it. Maybe you missed the mark just a little bit.

01:27:21
But the real kicker and this is actually more to the point is what consent, what content is now being gatekeeped behind this age verification system? Users in the UK now need to submit a selfie or government ID to access Reddit communities, not just sexy communities, communities about stopping drinking and smoking, about menstruation, about craft beers, support for sexual assault victims, not to mention documentation of war. Those are all considered too grown up for people under 16, so you got to identify yourself. Spotify for music videos that are tagged as 18 plus blocked. War footage, protest videos on X blocked. Even Wikipedia has now had to consider limiting access to users in the uk now they're actively challenging the law. But even wikipedia and they don't want to do the age verification thing. Nobody does because it's a privacy nightmare and they're the ones who would have to do it right yep, not necessarily.

01:28:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I was just thinking about this is a slight pivot, so bear with me, I'm sorry. I'm super surprised that companies like x aren't really embracing this, because if they were able to do the verification themselves and then have other companies use their log on just like you, would log on with google or facebook into a property and just you and say oh, make some money, yeah, by being a provider of age verification services exactly, and if they want to be the air thing app, they'll know, like, where people are visiting.

01:29:07
Here's the problem. You know who has this, but won't do it, apple.

01:29:11 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Apple has that data, but you know they're so privacy oriented they wouldn't do it. But that was, you're exactly right, like doing it as a single sort of sign-on thing. That would actually be brilliant. And, leo, I know this is true and this is the strangest, like you know, correlating causation thing. It's uh, it was just football pre-season round, not oblong. Well, now oblong started yesterday hand egg. We call it here in the uh so you know I'm diehard, you know, manchester united fan and that kind of football.

01:29:40
Oh, okay, yeah all of the shows that I watched in the last, like, say, july. In august we're sponsored by ExpressVPN.

01:29:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, good on them and guess who that audience they're going after is they're going after the UK audience, right?

01:29:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
100%. So it's funny that guys that used to be Manscaped like a couple months ago, all of their stuff, all the shows, they're all sponsored by various VPN companies.

01:30:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We used to have Manscaped. We used to have them as a sponsor, but now we have express vpn.

01:30:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
So what does that tell you something, hey, you know, hey, gotta keep up with the uk safety laws. It's a, it's, just don't make your jibbly bits.

01:30:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just amazing now, how long before go ahead.

01:30:26 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I know you're gonna say, just like brexit, it's gonna be coming to the united states yes, it is already.

01:30:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's in texas. It's in. Something like 20 states have age verification laws. It's not quite as broad as the snoopers charter in the uk, but many have pointed out it would block things like lgbtq information.

01:30:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It would I got one. That's funny for you. I was at a conference in Iowa just a little bit ago and I overheard a conversation in the coffee shop where the dude said out loud in the coffee shop hey, in Iowa I didn't know this, but you can't go to pornhubcom in Iowa, how'd?

01:31:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you find that out, buddy.

01:31:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I laughed out loud. You know, when somebody says something dumb in public and you try to not hold your laughing I'm not good at that. I got a loud laugh and I was just like and you have extra small condoms here oh my god hey, george, do we have extra small condoms for? This guy, oh my god. And you know youtube is doing something kind of similar where they're. They're doing some age verification thing that's coming up and it's designed to make sure that we're not targeting.

01:31:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they can do it just by looking at you. They don't need to what you watch. They can tell by what you watch.

01:31:42 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, which is not cool, because sometimes, when my nephews are over and they're being little turds, I'm like sit your butt in the front of the TV and do this while I make something to eat.

01:31:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that doc watches a lot of Bluey. I don't know what's going on there.

01:31:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Kids ruin everything. I mean messing up your Spotify Rapped and all that.

01:32:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
How come yours is so much Baby Shark, there Wes yeah.

01:32:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You seem to watch Baby Shark an awful lot. You probably shouldn't see this does anyone have the problem?

01:32:13 - Doc Rock (Guest)
with their spouse uses their like streaming account and like, oh yeah, completely no, I mean I I had to put my foot down because I was getting like bridgerton and all this other stuff and I'm like, nah, fam, don't mess me up you got all of a sudden project runway showing up in my netflix feed.

01:32:31
I don't get it what I'm so now on apple tv you actually can select the user by what you're doing. And yesterday I went to go do one of the workouts and when I hit it it like it noticed both watches in the room and I was like okay, which one of you is doing this?

01:32:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, that's cool right so then because it's doing by the, by the apple watch, it knows yeah, cuz you're connected yeah.

01:32:52 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's cool. What you know, what's funny is the reason why people in my mic. I'm in this conversation group with Renee. You know he's at YouTube and everybody's mad. It's like you. I watch tons of anime fam and like now, YouTube is gonna think that I'm a little kid cuz I watch anime. Like most of my girl folks, friends watch anime.

01:33:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So how's it? What's?

01:33:11 - Doc Rock (Guest)
wrong with anime? Pick up nothing, you know nothing, k-pop, demon slayers for the win.

01:33:16 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So I don't know what y'all talking about I might be old, but I'm no soda pop okay, so.

01:33:22 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
So everyone is like beating up on paramount right for for paramount plus, but I ask how can there be a better streaming app than one that combines Star Trek and RuPaul's Drag Race? Do you need anything else?

01:33:36 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They belong together. I love my Paramount Plus because I get those two plus Champions League football, so let's keep it running.

01:33:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, get ready. Disney and Hulu are going to be kind of into one Disney. Plus is going to become Hulu. They well, disney owns hulu but out right now I think they're going to absorb the hulu app into the disney plus app, and that's what you're seeing when, with the warner's acquisition right, all of a sudden I'm watching hbo prestige content next to dr pimple pimple popper and actually they're, they're, they're splitting this up with.

01:34:09 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Now they're splitting them up again, oddly, oddly. Discovery plus is going with discovery, so there's, they're going from like one combo app. They never killed discovery plus, uh, apparently because there were.

01:34:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There were some people who were just paying for that, so they're going to pull them apart now I think the idea in most of these cases is let's offload the the end of the line cable news networks, all the stuff, the tv state, all this stuff is dying and that's one company, and then we'll preserve the streaming stuff which is the future. But it's kind of hard to assume that your streaming system is going to be the next big thing when youtube and netflix are so dominant. I couldn't.

01:34:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Disney plus is struggling right but I just saw somebody making a joke about you know, it was on hbo, which is now hbo max, which was formerly hbo cinema, which was then turned into the end it was max and now it's hbo max.

01:35:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't remember the person who said it.

01:35:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They nailed it and I was like man. It must have took you forever to remember that line, but it was so good, because that's exactly where we are yeah, it's so crazy, like I don't even know what to call it anymore. I don't even know what I'm paying for.

01:35:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got that thing that has game of thrones on it I wonder if the uk is going to do what China and Russia have done and ban VPNs. That's the next step, isn't it? If you cannot, that would be pretty awful.

01:35:36 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, I mean, people use VPNs for work too. That's true, you can't just ban VPNs, yeah. And then travelers I mean there's got to be a lot of travelers that go through that have to have VPNs for what they do.

01:35:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't think that'd be possible. The british government dismissed all criticism as support for child predators. You must like child predators. If you don't like, oh my god I hate that isn't that awful like it can't.

01:36:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I hate that it can't be like a combination of things, and again this drives me the most crazy. Here I can speak more to what I know about. Where we live is there's still no heavy conversation about seeing a four-year-old with a full-ass can of pepsi in their head god, that's terrible you know I'm saying what's more dangerous to the kids some perceived thing that they're not gonna watch because they're interested anyway, right?

01:36:31
or 16 tablespoons of sugar, yeah, and bubbles and whatever you know, like. So we always are looking at the wrong thing, like we're always watching something while jason's standing in the back with the freaking hockey mask and you don't see him.

01:36:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As usual, Mike Masnick on Tector cuts through it to a very clear statement. Let's talk about what this law actually accomplishes. It makes it harder for adults to access perfectly legal and often helpful information and services. It forces people to create detailed trails of their online activity, linked to their real identities. It drives users towards less secure platforms and services. It destroys small online communities that can't afford compliance costs. That's an important point. Yeah, X can make money on it by offering this as a service, but my little mastodon incidents in instance, I'm not going to be able to do age verification and it teaches an entire generation that bypassing government surveillance is a basic life skill. Meanwhile, the actual harms it purports to address those remain entirely unaddressed. Predators will simply move to unregulated platforms, encrypted messaging or services that don't comply, or they'll just use VPNsns. The law creates the illusion of safety while actually making everyone less secure. How many laws can you say that about? That seems to be a common that is a very common thing.

01:37:59 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Also, the free vpns aren't necessarily the most. They're no better. Yes, yeah, and that could be putting you in some real harm using those services. Absolutely. Especially the people who think that they're protected. That's even worse, yeah.

01:38:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't offer an expensive service for free. If you're doing it, then you're making money somehow, exactly Somehow. I'll tell you who's not making money. Amazon on podcasting oh man, you know they bought wondery podcast network, started uh what, like five years ago, for 300 million dollars. They just fired 100 wondery employees, the uh head of wondery left. They've taken all of their audio. Only podcasts the ones that I think they probably bought one before, like dr death and dirty john, both of which have been turned into tv series, and they're moving them into audible, the audiobook arm of amazon. And not trying to sell ads, they're just going to make money through subscriptions and then their celebrity shows, like the kelsey brothers, you know, and dax shepard's armchair expert, will be in a new amazon division not called wondery but creator services. They are going to continue to try to sell advertising. I suspect that this is why they're doing this, that advertising sales were not easy, but they are exploring other revenue streams such as e-commerce. I don't even know what that means.

01:39:33
They struggle all the time with these types of business. I can tell you right now, selling Dax Shepard t-shirts is not going to pay his salary.

01:39:41 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I mean, Twitch is still a brand name. Barely working they still can't make money off of it still can't make money off. Yeah, yeah, they, they. They are not able to get synergies working with all of their other properties to the point where they're able to make these businesses sustainable, but they also spend out, spend and shell out a lot of money acquiring these companies and they just totally let them rot on the vine.

01:40:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really, really sad amazon it's interesting didn't have an insight into this. They basically said there's two kinds of pockets. The audio and video pockets have very different audiences in very different styles. The audio shows tend to be narrative shows in which the host, the person telling the story, like in serial, isn't the product, the story is the product, right. But video podcasts are the opposite. It's all about the celebrities you know alex cooper and call her daddy, or joe rogan, and it's about their talent, their fan bases and their franchise potential. It's about building an audience, and this sounds like amazon. It's about building an audience and finding lots of different ways to monetize that audience you can't tell me that they're saturated.

01:40:54 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
They're saturated, all of their viewers like they they've. They've expanded so much that they've gotten all the viewers they're gonna get. That's not true. No, it's not true and here's what they did wrong.

01:41:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Okay, I coached this. I get. I get paid to travel around the country and coach coaches to people. The biggest mistake that these large companies have is they're still focused on audience and audience size Right, and what makes Leo one of the best in the game?

01:41:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a tiny back audience.

01:41:25 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Before it no, no, I'm not going to let you sell yourself out.

01:41:29 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
You have a community.

01:41:31 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I won, you have a community. Audience means listen to me spout nonsense. Community means talk back and forth. That's really true Dialogue. Let's have a discourse.

01:41:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, that's why we can continue to sell advertising, because people trust us when we talk about a product, because we have a community. There you go.

01:41:49 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Look at the chat right now. The chat is here. They're always engaged. They're some of the funniest people in the planet. They have a lot of knowledge, things like that. I love these guys. We have a multiple directional conversation with people who have many, many things they could be doing on Sunday, but they're hanging out with us. And you invited me and Wesley on the same time again, which was I don't know who's booking, but that was stupid.

01:42:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, we love you, Doc. You know what I'm joking. We try to get people on who also have a community and an audience, who people like and respect.

01:42:21 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, Stop trying to build an audience, Stop trying to build views. You want to build a community. Community is everything, Because you know what happens. Why creators, quote-unquote, get burnt out, you know, is they've been just performative and they don't feel like the audience can provide anything for them. But when you have a community, even when I don't feel like doing something, I'll come out and do it and the community instantly makes you feel better and then you're on. So you know, because you've been doing this probably longer than anybody 20 years, buddy, Crack the mic and you ain't feeling it.

01:42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were in high school when I started this. No, no, no, but you were on the ground in Afghanistan as a medic, probably when I started this.

01:43:02 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, so it's one of those things where you definitely feel different when you know that your people are riding with you, and so why everybody else is trying to be performative and all they have to do and this is why I think colbert will land on his feet is because absolutely what's his whole production in-house and countdown to colbert's podcast right.

01:43:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that what conan did, and his podcast is hugely successful it's so much better than the show.

01:43:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's better than the show, though. Conan these friends is way better than the TV show and the show was good. Yeah, but the podcast is epic in the fan.

01:43:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bet for Conan. It's a lot easier and a lot more fun to do right he can say and do whatever the heck you what is all this about YouTube being the number one podcast platform?

01:43:48 - Doc Rock (Guest)
oh man, youtube is kicking buttocks like it is so good. Well, okay, here's the prime play and this is where everybody again doesn't really pay attention to these things. But these things just happen. Everybody chat TV, whatever you're listening to. Go grab your TV remote and point to me the Facebook button, yeah. Point to me the Apple podcast button. Point to me anything other than YouTube and Netflix button. Maybe you have a Roku button, depending on where you got your TV, if you have a fire TV, whatever but every television sold in the planet in the last 10 years has a YouTube button on the remote. And once they figured out during the pandemic, youtube had a tab called listenable.

01:44:26 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
at the very top of the YouTube page.

01:44:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
There's tabs across the top, whatever you most likely watch. Then there's news and there was a tab that said listenable. Now that tab has changed to podcast because by switching it to podcast, that means that when you and Andy and the boys are talking on Wednesday, I don't have to watch you. I could be in the kitchen, you know, cleaning the rice pot. But people like having the video there and they just listen, yeah, Because I need to see when Andy says something crazy.

01:44:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to see your expression you got to run over, yeah Right.

01:44:57 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Or if you're showing something he's like hey, I just bought this gadget for pick of the week and you want to show what it is. I run back into the living room because I'm like what did Leo buy that?

01:45:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need to buy right and so you know, we started doing video in 2008.

01:45:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Eight 100% Apple TV 5.

01:45:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it was always an issue for me because I knew that most of our audience it's still the case for almost all our shows is audio, probably 80% in many cases. But and so you have to be careful you can't say you see what I'm saying here. You can't because you don't know that everybody's going to be watching it or even have the video, but at the same time it does, I think it, even if you only watched a little bit or one show in 10, there's a value to seeing it and seeing what the people look like and stuff, and that stays in your brain after as you continue to listen to it.

01:45:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I bought a video because of you.

01:45:47 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I would say NPR podcasts are the exception. Do not watch those. Seeing what people actually look like, no, it ruins my brain.

01:45:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know this because I was like oh, my gosh most of my life and I would meet people and they're. You could see their face visibly fall like oh, that's what you look like, huh, huh.

01:46:08 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, they have a Facebook radio, but no, seriously, I bought iPod video because of you, because I wanted all the Twitch shows that I could put iPod video. Was that a?

01:46:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
product. Yes, sir, I don't even remember that it had a little screen, didn't it?

01:46:25 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, it was about you. Mine's a little bigger so I can't reach't reach it.

01:46:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But yeah, it's only about your big when we started, that was out watch video on it when we started doing video and I had decided at the time, if people are going to watch on that, we better. Everybody's head had better on the screen, had better be this big so that you could see us. Otherwise we're little dots on the screen. Yeah, everybody get close. This is for ipod video. And and then I realized if we do that, it'll be terrifying.

01:46:56 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You remember, even from way back when Adam Christensen would put the visual chapters in all of his podcast because the people were buying players with screens, and it's the thing, I think, one other biggest-up that we're having right now and again.

01:47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I speak at podcast conferences all over the planet are you going to podcast movement in a couple of weeks?

01:47:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I was going to go to podcast movement but it's going to coincide with a japan trip that I just canceled technically I can go, but at least it's going if you go say the definition of podcast is messing with people and like it's too short wait a minute.

01:47:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Say that again.

01:47:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
That's the definition of a podcast no, wrapping your head around the definition, what it is, I get it.

01:47:37
Yeah, yes, it's too straight, it's too strange to the people and it should be a little bit more great. Because if you create a show and, uh, just a piece of content, right, because a lady asked me the other day she goes oh, I thought all podcasts had to be an hour because she wants to do a five minute podcast. And see, it's funny to us because we've been in the game so long and we remember things like Sam used to have the three minute app, ios daily or whatever, and so I was like no, her name is Marianne. I said, marianne, you could do a podcast that's three minutes long. And she was like what is marianne? I said marianne, you could do a podcast that's three minutes long, and she was like what, but how? And I'm like, literally, I had a buddy that used to do ios apps when they first came out and it was three minutes long and it was one of the best because you always knew what was going on. Until now, there's thousands of apps every day and that show probably wouldn't really make sense.

01:48:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So one of our, one of our agencies, one of our agencies, oxford road, actually created a podcast series I know because I was in it called what is a Podcast. It was intended more for advertisers, right, so that they could understand what this medium was, which is why I was glad to participate in it, but they had to do a show about a show about podcasts, just so that people could understand what the hell that was right, it's.

01:48:53 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's the opposite of seinfeld yeah, wait.

01:48:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So what's the show? The show is like so this, this right here, it's a show about nothing right now what we're saying, this is a podcast.

01:49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think he liked it, because I I did. I said exactly what you just said, doc. I said well, first of all, it's the worst name possible, it's not descriptive, you know, and uh, and it's like saying a tv show is like a crt, it's a or.

01:49:17 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I'm gonna go watch a zenith tonight, just do you think, like gen z thinks, that the pod and podcast is for airpods?

01:49:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, or something. They don't think about it.

01:49:28 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Yeah, it used to be ipod, but they don't even know right and then there was an attempt people thinking you could only hear podcasts on ipods right, I hated that name.

01:49:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Remember I, at the very first podcast, whatever it was called. At the time I said can we just let's all agree we don't call it podcast. It's a bad idea. Apple could sue us. It's tying it to the platform instead of talking about we are. Can we call them netcat? Remember I? This was a crap.

01:49:53
Netcast you love from the people you trust was such a stupid it wasn't stupid, it was right, it was the correct thing to say, just like on tech tv, they want they. They wanted to call it the webcam network. I said well, you know, technically it's not the web, it's the internet. That, that one I won. They called it the NetCam network, but nobody knew what it was. You mean a webcam? Yeah, yeah, a webcam. A podcast you mean a podcast? Right, yeah, yeah, but going back to the question.

01:50:21 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
You know now what's the definition of a podcast. It's like a video you watch on YouTube, right? Yes, and that's because of monetization. Youtube offers consistent monetization. It's not. It may not be the most you know, the highest CPM that you get, but look at the problems that Amazon is having Like it's very you know it's Without YouTube they can't monetize.

01:50:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, isn't that funny, isn't?

01:50:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
that a little ironic. And so here's the funny thing, because you mentioned paramount. I don't know if most people realize this, but colbert is on youtube 45 minutes after the show goes off. What really? In hawaii yes, me living in hawaii I don't have to wait till late at night to watch colbert, because it comes on at 11 here, like it does everywhere else. But I get my colbert at like two something in the afternoon, three in the afternoon, because they package the show and put it up as soon as it's over the entire show no, no, they break it up into the commercial break of the little bits.

01:51:20
Yeah, right, so if every segment is eight to ten minutes long, they pull that segment. They put it. So does colbert, so does, uh, myers, you know, so know. So does Jimmy, the other dumb do you remember? When.

01:51:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
YouTube first started. They came inches away from being shut down because NBC was pissed off that people were posting Saturday Night Live clips oh yeah, I forgot about remember Lonely Sunday, viacom was the biggest one. But yeah, yeah, viacom and NBC both hated this. And then they suddenly realized oh wait, a minute, we've never had better ratings for seven life in years. It's good for the show, and now all the shows, I guess, realize oh yeah, it's actually good to post on youtube. It drives.

01:52:04 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I used to say this years ago the internet wasriblest, most, worstest, most terrible thing possible to, to coin a Charles Barkley phrase, until the networks figured out how to make money with it. And once the networks figured out how to make money with it, they stopped doing all. The scary network is going to get you stuff to catch a predator, kind of sort of went off the air as soon as the network NBCbc started making money on, you know, putting the regular shows on air. They legit. Chris hansen lost his job because they didn't want to scare people about the internet, because every show anyway go to our website and get xyz. So prior to that it's like don't be on the internet, your brain's going to blow up.

01:52:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just saying oh well, let's take a little break because I have to monetize. Somebody's got paid for this. Uh, that's doc rock, right there, the guy with the with the m&m t-shirt actually it's a it's. It's a, it's a jersey that says ecam, because he's director of strategic partnerships. Ecam, and we are very happy, cam customers is what we use to switch shows. So thank you, doc. Of course, he's also a youtube creator, youtubecom, doc rock, and he has regular lunches with renee ritchie, which is nice. Not in person, though, right, no, we don't check all the time. He's moved to san francisco, hasn't he? Yes, nice with, uh, callie lewis, correct, which, which is really cool. I know her as Callie, but she's of course not yeah.

01:53:37
Yeah, she was Callie for a long time, and then she started using her real name and they're an item which is makes me, it warms my heart. It's so cute, they both they're two of my favorite people love to see them together awesome. Yeah, also here from the san francisco business times. He's their managing editor, the wonderful owen thomas, still looking great. Sir, what do you bench?

01:54:04 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
let's see, I think uh just got up to two plates, so that's 225 god dang not, uh, not a, not a big flex in in gym world, but uh, it sounds like a flex to me.

01:54:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just uh, I just benched 95 pounds that's a bar and 220 pound plates you just, you just start where you are and you gotta work your way up.

01:54:27
Right, gotta work your way up, not 225. Wow, that's pretty good, they say, if you could bench your weight. You're strong, so that's good, you're benching more than your weight. Also the wonderful. I won't ask you how much you can bench wesley faulkner. He, uh, he doesn't have to. He doesn't have to flex because he's got his own startup now works dash, look at those guns, not workingcom. Wow, you're all strong men.

01:54:55 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I'm a little puny, weakling oh, and get it in there, get it, let's get the gun show on, yeah all right, gun show time.

01:55:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, all right, everybody, you got to figure out a way to get your biceps in there. Let's see, I bought a ticket to the gun show and all I got was this pea shooter oh, the beach is that way.

01:55:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Beaches which?

01:55:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
way is the beach that way, that way? Uh, great to have all three of you strong people on the show. You know who's got bigger biceps? The biggest biceps in our family is my wife. I said, honey, I've been working out, Feel my biceps. She said, uh-huh, Feel my biceps. And I went oh crap, she could take me. Our show today brought to you I'm not kidding either, by the way Our show today brought to you by those great folks at NetSuite.

01:55:49
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01:57:30
I mean neil degrasse tyson said that this is a good idea well, yeah, I mean better there than here, I guess, than my backyard. Um, how do you, how do you get the cable back? It's not, it's for the moon men. So if we're going to build, we need power. If we're going to build on a habitat on on on the moon, right?

01:57:52
Nasa says by the year 2030, which according to my careful calculations is less than five years off we are going to build 100 kilowatt, which is not huge but big enough kilowatt nuclear reactor on the moon and according to wired, it's ambitious but it's achievable. This comes from the new interim director at nasa, sean duffy. It's also everybody in the trump administration has many hats. He's also the secretary of transportation. Apparently, china and russia have both said they are going to do something, in fact a joint effort to place a reactor on the moon by the mid 2030s. So we want to beat them. There is now a reactor on the moon race and it's kind of a necessity for Artemis, which is NASA's plan to land on the moon. It would be on the lunar South Pole. It would be built with commercial partners. 100 kilowatts is about enough to power 80 families. It's not a massive amount but enough to power any you know colony on the moon hi, hi.

01:59:01 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
This is benito. Is this really about power? Because they could. Isn't solar like better?

01:59:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
yeah, especially on the moon. There there's no cloud cover, huh.

01:59:10 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Well, they said that the poles get sun at different times. So like one month, two weeks will get sun, two weeks it won't get sun. So unless you put the solar panels on both poles, then that would matter. But it'd be nice to have reliable power, especially if they're thinking about doing some sort of moon base or something. Especially if they're thinking about doing some sort of moon base or something to have 3D printers running 24-7 to help with creating either drilling or building structures all the time 24-7. Having reliable power, I think, is a game changer. I think this is a really, really good idea. One thing to note is that there was thought about nuclear propulsion for rockets and using Earth to slingshot, and the thought was, or the worry was, that if it's a failed launch or if it crashes, the fallout of having something that's nuclear on board was a big deterrent.

02:00:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I remember the reactor.

02:00:04 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, probably won't be a problem, but that might be something that might come up.

02:00:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll be concerned. There'll be plutonium or or something on it right uranium, there'll be some nuclear fuel source.

02:00:20
Yeah, uh, according to wired. Actually, this is uh, a, uh, actually a email to wired from um aerospace engineer who, I guess, felt like he should put this in terms that we would all understand. The 100 kilowatt design would be roughly equivalent to sending a couple of African elephants to the moon with a fold-out umbrella the size of a basketball court. Okay, the elephants uh produce the heat. The umbrella is not for shade, it's for dumping the heat into space.

02:00:58 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Okay you know well thanks for clearing that up. I'm gonna assume. I'm gonna assume, uh, crazily, that you know people of the vintage of, say, owen, and we were probably in, like you know, kindergarten, first grade when 14 touched down and you know, from that moment on we thought so much more things were going to happen with the moon between then and now, and so the fact that we even getting back to some sense of trying things, I'm cool with it, like I don't mind there being experiments or whatever, but I feel like you know we lost so much momentum after say so, you know, quote unquote cold war ended or whatever. Whatever the reason was for stopping all of the moon stuff, I thought for sure by now we would be able to, like, catch the shuttle going there, just the way I would catch a flight to Boston. You know, I would be catching the flight to the moon to go do something.

02:01:57
You know what I mean? We had all of these grandiose, all our cartoons were about that life. You know all of the comic books and TV shows. Like we just thought it was going to be so much more and I feel like I'm glad we're going back. But then again we also thought we'd have flying cars and I realized people can't drive in 2D so that one can take some time.

02:02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You may remember since you remember Apollo 14, this little quote from Apollo 13. That's Captain James A Lovell Jr, who Tom Hanks played in the movie Apollo 13. That's him telling NASA that there was a near catastrophic leak in the Apollo 13. And this was a mission that was aborted, but we've talked before about this saved in kind of a miracle way by engineers at NASA. Lovell was the captain, was the guy who reported the problem. Actually, I take it back. That was a rusty swagger. Captain Lovell echoed his words when NASA asked for a message to be repeated. So, in other words, swagger said it first and then Captain Lovell repeated it when NASA asked him to repeat it.

02:03:15 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I think this is Apparently. He says we've had a problem also. So the wording oh yeah, we've had a problem.

02:03:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've had a problem. So that's Lovell saying that Okay, yeah, and Hank said we have a problem, okay.

02:03:34 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Not words. Um, yeah, and hank said we have a problem. Okay, not.

02:03:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, not words quoted yeah, not words we hope to hear about the nuclear reactor on the moon, no, no. Anyway. Uh, you know a great astronaut and a hero and like you, I grew up watching these guys and uh, it was kind of sad we got so far and then just kind of said, okay, we're done well, I was near um one of the nasa buildings.

02:03:53 - Doc Rock (Guest)
At that time. Elementary school for me was in rockville, maryland, and the nasa place was like right up the street. So there were people whose parents that I went to school with, you know, worked there and then of course the air and space museum smithsonian spun up and I was a little kid used to hang out there all the time. So I think I became kind of a space nerd just because of the timing of this, you know. Uh, when 13 landed I was four, so I wasn't smart enough yet, but when 14 landed I would have been five pushing six, and that was the beginning of I wanted everything space. And then star wars came out in 77 and I was like you know, ken, you're still young, you don't know enough that this was not even close to real. We just thought so much more stuff was going to go down. But we had star trek and star wars and battlestar galactica and like we were so heavily sort of space and theme oriented as kids, like I really thought we'd be further along than we are.

02:04:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I'm just happy to see some things happening uh, level never did make it to the moon because of the problems. He uh, he uh came up flying in gemini 12 with uh buzz, aldrin, his good, who remained his good friend to the rest of his life, of course. Aldrin, second man to walk on the moon, uh, but level never got to go to the moon I wanted to say level.

02:05:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Show this. Um, I was lucky. That's the sls. I was lucky enough to go to one of the test fires for the for the rocket oh, that's cool. And that was 10 years ago, that was in 2015, and so hope back then was the that we would be so much further along with our journey back to the moon. They even had astronauts there that we could meet, which was an amazing experience.

02:05:37 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh, that's so cool.

02:05:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And it's just so sad what they're doing and have done to NASA, to the point where a lot of these programs are scrapped, are scrapped. Even though this sounds amazing about having a mission to put this nuclear reactor in the moon, they're scrapping years and decades worth of work.

02:05:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's so hard because that's happening across the government, uh, including the half a billion dollars that they were spending to develop mrna vaccines, not just for covid but for hiv and cancer. And the problem is you defund those things. They don't just spin right back up If somebody comes along and gives them more money. You lose a lot of momentum, you lose a lot of knowledge and you lose a lot of people.

02:06:21 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
In the case of NASA, they're de-orbiting satellite. They're burning them up in the atmosphere. We're losing decades of possible data that we could be getting from these very high class, expensive missions that have been going oh, but here's the good news.

02:06:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, there's gonna be a bluetooth satellite network. Well, I use starlink as a backup. If my uh terrestrial internet dies during the show, I don't know what I could do with bluetooth. The hubble network plans a massive satellite upgrade to create a bluetooth layer. Uh, it's kind of to do find my for enterprise. They're gonna put two new satellites up uh in 2027 that will uh detect bluetooth low energy signals at 30 times lower power than current capabilities and then they will have a bluetooth low energy finding network for enterprises. So instead of, I guess, having to put a gps on that amazon truck, they'll just know where they are at all times. The company has seven, seven spacecraft on orbit right now, with the target of having 60 in operation by 2028. They want to upgrade all of them to the new bluetooth le network.

02:07:48 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Huh I saw this and I was like what? I have a connection when I leave the room and there's going to be a satellite that's going to be able to connect it.

02:07:57 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I mean yeah yeah, weird, I mean bluetooth. Can't you know like my airpods won't reliably connect to the stairmaster?

02:08:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, no yeah, no, this I don't. Yeah, this is a little.

02:08:08 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
This is from a fine to mine, basically it is, and I think it's four hours this story comes up oh yeah, that's right.

02:08:16 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It's funny. The story comes up today I just started trying out uh cuts, a glucose monitor and yesterday, my first time trying it out, mine failed and the support was like put your phone in your left pocket on the same size as your arm and I'm like I got it. I'm a big mass of water well whiskey, and it doesn't crisscross. But come on, son, like you didn't tell me, this hundred dollar monitor can't, freaking connect to my phone on the opposite side of my body.

02:08:43
Yeah, I was doing good, I was doing my 105s and I was showering and I forgot I was wearing the third day and I knocked it and it okay, it'll be better in three hours and it wasn't, and my patches to cover it like that are coming on Amazon, like right now.

02:08:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just get a new one. I've had problems. Which one are you using? I use the Dexcom Stella.

02:09:05 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Stella, yeah, and.

02:09:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I had a bad one and I just messaged support and they literally mailed it right away.

02:09:10 - Doc Rock (Guest)
They didn't even question it Okay cool, Because they said they'll do my case on Monday. So I'm thinking they're going to send me another one, but it was just nice knowing what you're doing or whatever. Can I tell you how?

02:09:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what a victory 105 is for me. Oh, me too. So yeah well, I was D, I have type two diabetes. Yeah well, I was D, I have type 2 diabetes. My doctor said you can never get cured, but you can at least get remission. When my A1C hit 8.4 three months ago, my doctor said yeah, we're going to put you on Ozempic. So I've been on Ozempic for 10 weeks now. My A1C went from 8.4 to 5.7. It is a miracle drug. Now, if I keel over tomorrow, at least I won't be a type two diabetic. When I keel I won't be from eating eating too much sugar uh, it's remarkable park.

02:10:01 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I started with govi december 16th. Good yay I. I just checked in the other day. I have lost 42 pounds.

02:10:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wait a minute, what?

02:10:12 - Doc Rock (Guest)
It is the answer to everything in the meaning of life. Congratulations.

02:10:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome.

02:10:18 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I was the only one that got that joke. All the nurses and doctors in the office was like why is that funny?

02:10:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
42,. That's a good number. I'm like it's the meaning to everything you're talking about Like they didn't know they're not.

02:10:27 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I hope I can get to 42.

02:10:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
hey, congratulations, that's fantastic. I just started trying out.

02:10:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
These are good, I really like these.

02:10:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In fact, this is why, when apple says we're going to somehow get a continuous glucose monitor in the watch, that will be transformative. There are, I think, 14 million uh type 2 diabetics in the united states. We have an obesity epidemic and, uh, probably I don't know why probably because of all the processed foods, but I'm not sure. But I think the knowledge of what happens to your blood sugar when you eat that hamburger or whatever, is going to be very good.

02:11:00 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Put you on a rabbit hole. I have been watching this, this lady her name is Jessie and I will not attempt to say her last name because my French is not that good. Um, you might be better at it being a Laporte, but she is known as the glucose goddess, nice, and I've been watching her clips and I've been learning so much stuff from her. And the best thing is she's not about dieting or doing something weird. It's about how to eat so that your glucose properly gets processed. Yes, and it's not about changing it's just the order. So it's something to the nature of-.

02:11:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I eat protein, first baby.

02:11:32 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Salad and stuff first, then your protein, then add your carbs and you'll do better and it's working. It's working. And so my A1C just came into the little green line on the chart and I was like I have an appointment with my regular doctor in like a week and I'll be like take that lady, cause she regular doctor in like a week. And I'll be like take that lady because you know that's pretty awesome curse me out.

02:11:59 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, she's like I'm super jealous. Yeah, the last time I'm going, your youtube channel will close in a week and I was like, wait what? The last time I lost over 40 pounds was I was in london and paying for something, but I I would love to be able to, to be able to lose weight, uh. So congratulations, as I'm sure the doc has done too.

02:12:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've lost and gained thousands of pounds. I would love to be able to lose weight. So congratulations on both your muscles. As I'm sure the doc has done too. I've lost and gained thousands of pounds over my lifetime. I know how to lose weight. I just don't know how to keep it off, because my body doesn't want to, apparently. And I did keto a few years ago, got my A1C down this low, but as soon as I went off, it right up, right back up, and of course that's bad for you too. This is look. I'm not doing an ad for any of these GLP-1s or the GLP-1 drip drugs at all. You know, ask your physician if it's right for you. But as they say in the ads, but uh, what a miracle has been it's been a game changer for me bro.

02:12:50
Yeah, I tell you for so many people. I hear from so many people.

02:12:54 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Um, it's amazing it's kind of sad it's so far removed from people who probably you know well it's expensive it's a thousand dollars a month.

02:13:02
If you live in a poor place or whatever you, you have food deserts which cause you to have horrible food possibilities, and so I I understand that's more so than ever. Yeah, um, because I'm at a position now where I can afford to buy what I want to eat, but I know that large members of my family and you know place where I grew up, you know there's no good food nearby. The idea was like oh, just go to whole foods and get this.

02:13:26
They don't put whole foods in the hood. Homie, I don't know no, it's really true.

02:13:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really true. And these drugs are very, very expensive. I was lucky my insurance covers it.

02:13:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Uh, they are um. There are some tests now for oral drugs. You know the yeah lily has a oral version of this yeah, the current ones, I believe, are all injectable, which is you know it's yeah, there's a.

02:13:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know that sounds like you're gonna have to use a hypodermic needle or something. If you're a diabetic, you know what a finger prick is like. I that's. The downside of this is, before these kind of continuous glucose monitors, I had to prick my finger several times a day, draw blood. It's less than that. It's a tiny little, very thin needle.

02:14:06 - Doc Rock (Guest)
You just put it in your fat beast thing it's nothing that doesn't hurt at all, because it came off. It's so skinny. I'm like how does that even? Oh, you're talking about the cgm. I'm talking about the, the uh ozempic injection oh yeah, there's nothing, nothing, nothing, squeezing it in the fat anyways yeah, also the refrigerated supply chain that has to be adding to to the costs yes, and that's interesting.

02:14:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It looks like that was a choice by uh, novo nordisk to not put preservative in it, and I'm not sure if that was an economic decision or a technical decision, and it's not clear. Uh, but the pills will solve that.

02:14:44 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Right, lily makes what that makes manjaro, uh, and yeah and yeah, yeah, there's clearly, there's clearly a big deal.

02:14:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean that will that will make, not to mention 200 tariffs on drugs made outside the united states, which will, uh, triple the cost of my ozempic. But Lilly makes its drugs in the United States, so I imagine Lilly is on the upswing. Let's see what else Real quickly. San Francisco's metro area unemployment is skyrocketing. Why is that? Why is that?

02:15:19 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Owen, it's really interesting because there's a push and pull, owen, it's it's really interesting because there's a push and pull the. The kind of um, the push of the ai boom is, you know, obviously lifting the regional economy also. Ipos like chime and figma, those are all helping. The drag is kind of the national economic picture tariffs, consumer spending, those, you know, those are going to affect tech at some point. Right, you know, like tech cannot defy gravity but it's got a lot of things lifting it. So that push, that pull, where is it going to land?

02:15:53
You know, an interesting thing too about the AI boom is that while we're seeing a lot of hiring and leasing of offices, ai companies like to work in person, they're not big on remote work. But while they've been hiring mainline tech like Google and Meta have been shedding offices, they've been quietly or not so quietly reducing staff layoffs. In Meta's case, I think they're doing a lot of performance reviews that are basically stealth layoffs. In Meta's case, I think they're doing a lot of performance reviews that are basically stealth layoffs. So that's been hurting because San Francisco has benefited enormously in the past decade pre-pandemic from big tech's kind of expansion.

02:16:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is San Francisco an AI headquarters, in the same way it was for all of the other technological revolutions.

02:16:45 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Absolutely, and I think San Francisco, specifically within the Bay Area, has kind of disproportionately been the center of the AI boom.

02:16:56
It's pretty similar to the mobile and social app revolution, which really was more centered in San Francisco, was not so much kind of a peninsula Silicon Valley phenomenon, with NVIDIA and other companies obviously being in the South Bay, being important players. It's a little more spread out, but even NVIDIA is reportedly looking for office space because OpenAI is a big customer. They want to be close to it, they want to be in the mix. Um and uh, and that's been interesting. The um, the hot spot actually is around open ai headquarters in mission bay, which is just south of oracle park, the, you know the, the ballpark, um, on the uh, on the southern waterfront. It's a, it's a newer neighborhood, redeveloped rail yards, um, that's where the ballpark is right, or yeah just as well as the uh warriors play there the yeah, so basically, basically the space between oracle park and chase center is kind of ai central now oh interesting.

02:17:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know, when you drive down that street it feels like ai central. It's very, it's very kind of weird, it's new glassy buildings like it feels a little urban canyon. And then the waymos are going back and forth, zipping around. I feel like I'm in the 21st century and every billboard.

02:18:12 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Every billboard is an ai, is an ai company.

02:18:14 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh yeah, on that stretch of 101, yeah, oh yeah oh yeah, but uh, but also there are some like really cool restaurants. Arsico bakery, which is like the chef's kiss croissant, is, as a an outfit, what I need. Yeah, I'm sorry you guys are talking about glucose croissants. I'm throwing croissants in the mix it's not helping me.

02:18:35 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
And also we're talking about bonito's. Talking about billboards, there's one that says stop hiring humans.

02:18:40 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
So oh, yeah, yeah that's unbelievable, isn't it?

02:18:43
this is what a world we are right, you know, but like, but that startup is getting talked about, so they're winning right with this, with this weird billboard campaign, um, but yeah, I mean that that's.

02:18:56
That's part of going back to the unemployment picture. That's part of the push and pull is how much employment is the ai industry actually going to like in the long run? Yeah, because they're trying to get more efficient using AI. I mean, salesforce has talked about you know wanting to, you know wanting to like kind of keep their, their hiring under check. The problem, though, is they found they need to hire more salespeople to sell their AI products, so they've actually kind of reversed that, you know. Oh, we might, you know we might reduce our headcount. Yeah, you know, like, no one wants to show weakness, no one wants to show like they're kind of out of touch or not successfully riding the AI boom. So there's a lot of tension there, but yeah, it's an interesting time Definitely not the best numbers that the San Francisco economy has shown, but, big picture, san Francisco is doing pretty well.

02:19:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they have the best croissants. They're a little large, but other than that, I think let's take a break. We're gonna see. If you weren't watching the video, you didn't get the joke, so it doesn't matter, we're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. A couple of final stories, in fact the end of the line for a dear old friend. I'll give it a hint, good hint.

02:20:26 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Huh, that's coming up next that's wicked tech.

02:20:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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02:23:26
We saw last week that tesla had lost in a jury verdict and was being punished by a more than 200 million dollar fine. This is the first time tesla has been found and its autopilot has been found to blame for a crash. The jury did find that the driver was two-thirds responsible, but Tesla was one-third responsible. But now, as people are starting to see the transcript from the tile the trial, it's becoming apparent that Tesla actually actively blocked the prosecution of this case. It was caught withholding data, lying about it and misdirecting authorities, covering up for autopilot Within about three minutes of the crash.

02:24:11
This is from Electrekco the Model S this crash happened in 2018, uploaded a collision snapshot. This is video, can bus streams, edr data. I mean mean so much information as, as soon as the crash happened, it uploaded to the tesla servers and the servers acknowledged it. The vehicle then, after the receiving the acknowledgement, deleted its local copy. That's an interesting move. It meant that authorities couldn't get it from the car. Tesla was the only entity that had the data.

02:24:47
What ensued were years of battle to get tesla to acknowledge the collision snapshot exists at all. The police repeatedly attempted to obtain the data from the snapshot. Tesla led the authorities and plaintiffs on a lengthy, lengthy journey of deception and misdirection that spanned years. Again, this is electric writing. Uh, they denied that it existed. They said it had been. Tesla told the plaintiffs it doesn't exist. Tesla's written discovery responses were shown during the trial to prove the company acted as if this data was not available.

02:25:24
Tesla's lawyer scripted the homicide investigators evidence request. Told him what to write. He said it's you know the uh. The uh investigator said we're going to subpoena the data and the lawyer said oh, no, no, no, you don't need to do that. He write me a letter. I'll tell you what to put in the letter. I specifically wrote down what the attorney at tes'll tell you what to put in the letter. I specifically wrote down what the attorney at Tesla told me to write down in the letter. But the letter was crafted by Tesla's attorneys to omit sharing the collision snapshot. They gave them data from the infotainment system, which contained merely call logs and a copy of the owner's manual, and that goes on and on. I mean it is appalling, the stonewalling the Tesla went through. Um, the jury knew it. This was all in the trial.

02:26:19 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Uh, because it's coming from the transcript in the trial, because it's coming from the transcript, they had to do a bit copy of the memory and then they found the checksum of the raws, the zipped up or the compressed data that got sent and they're like here's the checksum and here's the log saying it got sent to you. And the jury saw all this and said this was seems to be an intentional cover-up to make sure that they didn't ever see the not only did they neither had.

02:26:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of the reasons they denied they had this snapshot is because it shows the autopilot was on. It shows that it accelerated to 60 miles an hour. Uh, it does show the driver's hands off the wheel. The driver apparently dropped the cell phone, reached down to get it, thinking that the autopilot would continue to drive, wouldn't possibly hit anything.

02:27:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
It it continued at 60 miles an hour into a parked car, killing a pedestrian also it knew that it was an area that was flagged that where it should have disengaged autopilot because the car knew it was in a restricted zone, yet autopilot did not disengage or issue a warning.

02:27:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, I talked to samuel sam, our car guy. I mentioned this last week, uh, about this, and he said this is going to uncork a avalanche of lawsuits because it's the first time Tesla has not been able to settle out of court, to keep it out of court, to keep Discovery out of court. It's the first time Tesla has been found responsible, even though it's only a third responsible. So this is a big story. Tesla says you guys are just making it hard for self-driving vehicles, which is, in the long run, a safety improvement. I agree vehicles, which is, in the long run, a safety improvement. I agree with that. In the long run, it is a safety improvement. Humans are worse. Far more people are killed by human drivers than they are by autopilot. But tesla needs to stop saying it's driving itself because it isn't but they're they're completely eroding the trustworthiness of yeah, who's doing that?

02:28:21 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
tesla, tesla are the trials, tesla yeah, tesla, tesla is destroying its own credibility. Uh, right, and you know now that, um, you know now that kind of the the fanboy glow is dissipating. Uh, around, around tesla and elon musk, you have to wonder what the, what the long-term value of the company is. I have covered Elon Musk a very long time. I'm not the only journalist who has pointed out that he repeatedly makes promises that never come to pass. He has out and out lied, with very little in the way of consequences. Will Tesla actually face some consequences here? That's what we're going to find out.

02:29:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, a big fine, but of course they're going to appeal it. So who knows ultimately what will happen? Yeah, you know, I had a Tesla Model X. I loved my Model X. My wife did not. She called it Christine, the killer car from the Stephen King novels. She claims it tried to kill her frequently, which maybe it did, I don't know. Anyway, I haven't owned a Tesla since then and even when I had it I didn't trust it to drive. I mean, supposedly it's gotten better, but she says it would constantly stop for no reason, jam on the brakes, throw her into a barrier, that kind of thing. Roll forward when it's supposed to go backwards, things like that.

02:29:56 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
One other thing is that Tesla is supposedly which you mentioned before about the new computer systems and then um, I think elon is saying something similar to this will be fueling the next, uh, full self-driving engine going forward, and people are mad because that's what he said for the previous version of the computer he said it for years yeah, and they're like what? And so he is over, hyping things over and over and over and you know who really has no credibility?

02:30:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
elon musk. All right, I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to uh end this show, because my blood sugar is now dangerously low. I haven't seen it go below 100 in 10 years.

02:30:40 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Uh, we're just, we're just wiping you out, you're just you're wiping me out.

02:30:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, wow, putting all your all your it's, it's.

02:30:47 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Your brain is just like sucking all the glucose like a burning up like a nuclear reactor on the moon.

02:30:56 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I can't leave story well, my sodium bromide levels are gonna go out because, oh yeah, ordering. I'm ordering salt and pickles from nephew over here oh, are you looking at salt hank? Oh, I was like bruh, so I got umami powder because I can't help. That's good, you know. Yeah, I got oh f. This is good, and then hot pickles. Anything else I need to add?

02:31:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh, add them all, man and then the next time you're in Manhattan, stop by Saul Hanks Restaurant. Handcrafted with love on Bleaker Street.

02:31:26 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Is there an Uncle Doc discount code. I'm about to put this in. I will call ahead.

02:31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll need to, because the line starts half an hour before the restaurant opens. It goes around the block and they're sold out by 1.30. All right, it's like Franklin's in Austin. Yeah, you need to. You need to.

02:31:45
I that's, although I should over got me I should point out, I have never had any of his sandwiches. He's probably the most famous sandwich chef in the world. Now I have never had a sandwich of his. What the heck, what the heck. I'm even an investor in the pickles. He called me up and said, dad, I need some money to buy the pickles. I said, okay, I'll help you. And did I get any pickles?

02:32:09 - Doc Rock (Guest)
no yo, the best part was the bottle said it's almost as hot as your mom. Just for that he is a character I tell you what I I.

02:32:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope that you all have children as successful as this kid I.

02:32:29 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I can't even believe oh my god, that got me right away though oh yeah, it's copy that puts the bro in bromide.

02:32:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, he's amazing, he's amazing, um, he's really he's. I'm very, very proud of him. I really am.

02:32:47 - Doc Rock (Guest)
He's a great guy and, yes, scrolling pictures of food right now, I know hey, I'm the one who's blood sugar is tanking.

02:32:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this is this is dangerous for you, leo um, yes, and, by the way, yes, he does use shopify. If you go ahead and buy that, you'll see that purple shopify button. So there you go, I'll just. I'll just check out some salt and there it is. There's the shopify button, the shop pay button, right there, baby. Uh, all right, oh, I have to do the eulogy.

02:33:25 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It's the end of the line. This hurts, this hurts, this really hurts.

02:33:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
For AOL dial up internet Did you know, they still offered it. Who can do the modem screech Now if you have a 56K modem, it?

02:33:44 - Doc Rock (Guest)
goes bing b gonna say you forgot the haze part in the middle. I was just going to say that when you did it the first time I was like you forgot the haze check in the middle to see if you were 56 or better yeah, the buying buying.

02:33:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what? That is, the buying buying? Yeah oh my god, I I was looking to see if I have, uh, the sounds in my um in my collection here, and I don't. But here's a website with the sounds of dial-up modems and related equipment. Do you, which one do you want? You get? You get your choice. You want v.92. That's the one you were talking about yep there's the boing, boing, ding, ding. That's it. We have handshake houston. We have no problems, handshake ac get off the phone, mom, I'm downloading something, mom.

02:34:41
Oh, that's. I just amazed that there is there. Obviously there were still customers. Aol says september 30th. You have a month and a half. Uh, the service and the associated software, the aol dialer software and aol shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued you better burn all those hours on those cd-roms, people, if you've got the cds quick can you use a modem, are they?

02:35:11 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
when was the last modem sold, I wonder?

02:35:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
oh I, you know what zeisel was selling them. Let me see, let me go to amazon something, something fascinating is.

02:35:19 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Cnbc had a story about AOL dial-up in 2021, four years ago.

02:35:24 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah.

02:35:25 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
And a source told the reporter that the number of dial-up subscribers were in the low thousands.

02:35:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they've kept dial-up a lot Just for those people.

02:35:35 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Yeah, that is mysterious to me. Not that it's still alive today, but why were they still operating it?

02:35:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Not that it's still alive today, but why were they still operating it? Yeah, $1,000 is not a revenue model, especially whatever it was $10 a month.

02:35:50 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I can tell you why, owen because Dave or whoever who ran that office, his Aunt Clarita or his mom Thelma, was still on that journey and he can't piss off the family.

02:36:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't cut off my mom Apparently Net.

02:36:03 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Zero is still offering dial-up internet. Earthlink killed it back in 2023, I read. But yeah, you can still.

02:36:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here is on Amazon for $55, which is a lot less than I paid, or at the US Robotics V9256K modem. But hurry, there's only one left in stock. One left in stock, I paid for it. The US Robotics V92 56K modem. But hurry, there's only one left in stock. Order soon, order soon.

02:36:31 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
I can't have it by.

02:36:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Tuesday.

02:36:33 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
The form factor is still the same. I remember.

02:36:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it looks exactly the same.

02:36:37 - Doc Rock (Guest)
I remember what a gangster I felt like when I bought a Hayes Trailblazer because, like all of the real deal dudes, they had the like 19 inch card or 17 inch card. It was called the hell trail haze trailblazer and I just thought I was cool because I finally got one that was like owning the mark 2 or something was it, it was massive bro yes did it plug into your computer yeah no, you put it in the slot. It was a big car, yeah oh, I'm so tempted.

02:37:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know why this is 279, but this is the courier which was the one right. Remember that one was the one too, yep, yep why 279, the other one's 55 bucks.

02:37:12 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Oh wait, it's a fax modem.

02:37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh both of them are oh, you gotta have a serial port. But look at that. Remember that I had a uh bulletin board in 1985 that had two of those and I felt very fancy my, my brother somehow talked my parents into getting a second phone line for to run a bulletin board yeah this was in the would have been in the 80s yeah, it was fun running bulletin boards back in the day, I have to say they still sell couplers acoustic those suction cups you put your do you even have a phone with a handset anymore?

02:37:54
you push into the rubber cups so you can connect. I spent a lot of time on cop. You serve with one of those 300 b BPS.

02:38:03 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
So is 56K really like the physical limit of dial-up, like they could not get it faster than?

02:38:08 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
that.

02:38:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's using acoustic lines, right? That's what that noise is is. The data is not being sent electrically, it's being sent as a sound down the phone line. Oh yeah. Which is only six bits of resolution, or six or seven bits. It's very low resolution it was.

02:38:27 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
It went from 9600 uh to 14, 4 to 28, 8 to 56. Right well that's because you're young, you don't remember.

02:38:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was also 300.

02:38:38 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
I've used a 300 bar.

02:38:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah back in the day the texts go like that copy serving prodigy on 300 body. We thought we were or the picture of raquel welch in a bikini.

02:38:52 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yeah, this generation doesn't know seeing a picture being drawn line by line line by line uu incode, uu decode and they didn't ask your age in those days.

02:39:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, if they figured you can. If you get it, you're probably old enough. Ladies and gentlemen, if you can get it, get it. We're glad you're here and we are so happy that you're a listener. If you are not a member of the club, consider joining. You can be in the Discord right now watching the show, chatting with smart people. We do a lot of special events in the club. Watching the show chatting with smart people. We do a lot of special events in the club. Uh, it is definitely the people, the place for people with big muscles and big brains. Join the club twittv slash club twit, and we look forward to seeing you in there. I'm gonna look. I'm gonna look like that. Maybe it'll be AI, maybe it won't, but I'm gonna look like that. Uh, thank you, big gun guys. Uh, to owen thomas thomas, it's so great to see you. Look at those guns. Time for the gun show. He's managing editor at the san francisco business times. He can bench 225 pounds, my god. Uh, thank you, owen. Always is a pleasure to see you.

02:40:03 - Owen Thomas (Guest)
Good to be here.

02:40:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Appreciate it. Also to you, wes Faulkner. Congratulations on the new enterprise founders. He's a founder of Works-Not-Working.

02:40:14 - Wes Faulkner (Guest)
Yes, thank you for letting me announce it. This is the public debut. Yay, yay, so great.

02:40:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I really appreciate you so much. Wes, wes, thank you for being on the show. I appreciate all three of you. You're all great. I like getting together with my good friends to talk about what's been going on in the world and, of course, thanks to you, doc rock. Thank you, we're ohana, we're all in the fam 4.32.

02:40:40 - Doc Rock (Guest)
Uh, petaflops, that's what I geek bench me too.

02:40:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Me too, on a fiber optic cable that weighs next to nothing, you'll find the doctor at youtubecom, doc rock, of course.

02:40:53
Director of strategic partners at ecamp partnerships at ecam, we are a strategic partner of ecam. We love ecam. Thanks to all of you for joining us. We do twit every sunday afternoon, 2 to 5 pm, pacific, 5 to8 pm, eastern 2100, utc. We stream all of our shows live thanks to the club members. Of course, they get special access behind the velvet rope in the club to a discord. But there's also youtube twit, because you know, youtube is the home of podcasting youtube twitchtv, tiktok, xcom, facebook linkedin and kick eight different ways.

02:41:27
You can watch us live and and even then you don't have to watch us live because, guess what? We record this thing on 15 ips reel-to-reel tape, then edit it with a razor blade, grease pencil and scotch tape to produce a beautifully handcrafted version of the show that you can download from our website twittv. There's a YouTube channel. We have to mail those reel-to-reel tapes to YouTube, but fortunately they do accept that we send it along to them and you'll see the YouTube channel linked on our website twittv. That's actually useful for sharing clips with other listeners. If you wanna help spread the word, best way to get this show and all of our shows, subscribe on your favorite podcast client, whether it's Pocket Casts, which we love, or iTunes or Overcast, or there's so many good ones. There's a what was that new one I just saw is available now everywhere. Caster is pretty nice too. Anyway, if you do download it and subscribe, that's for free. You'll get audio or video or both every week as soon as it's done.

02:42:35
But do us a favor in return. Please give us a good review. A five stars would be wonderful and help spread the word. 20 years we've been doing this, and I think we've been doing it so long. I think a lot of people have forgotten we even exist, so help us remind them, will you that? We'd appreciate that. And, as I have been saying, thanks to Benito Gonzalez, our editor, technical producer and Booker. We appreciate it. Benito Is vacation soon. I got next week's show and then I'm off for two weeks after that. Then he's, then he's on a jet airplane, a big old jet airplane. Well, uh, we appreciate all you do, benito, thanks, is it kevin king editing today? Thanks to kevin, that's kevin.

02:43:16
Yeah, he does a great job. We appreciate it, appreciate our whole team, all of you. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time and, as I have said for 20 years, I'll say it again Another twit is in the can. Take care.