This Week in Tech 1045 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.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech. Great panel for you. Lisa Schmeisser is here from NoJitter.com, jennifer Pattison Tuohy from the Verge, and my car guy, Sam Abul Sam. And we'll talk about Ford reinventing its manufacturing process. Age verification is now a okay, according to the US Supreme Court and Apple's robotic arm, it's coming soon to a house near you. All that and more coming up next on Twit Podcasts you love from people you Trust. This is TWiT. This is TWiT this Week in Tech.
Leo Laporte [00:00:46]:
Episode 1045, recorded Sunday, August 17th, 2025. The juice ain't worth the squeeze. It's time for TWiT this Week in Tech, the show. We cover the week's tech news. I have assembled a fabulous panel for your delectation. Benito said, hey, Leo, it's been kind of a sausage fest the last few weeks. He said, could we. Can we get some women on the show? I said, yes, please.
Leo Laporte [00:01:13]:
And Jennifer Pattison Tuohy consented. She's senior reviewer at the Verge. Great to see you. Smart home mama.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:01:21]:
Great to be here. Yeah. Happy to represent the correct chromosome.
Leo Laporte [00:01:26]:
Yes, exactly. None of this Y stuff. No, Y's in here at least. Or is it the other way around? No, X is in here. I can never remember.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:01:35]:
It's XX for women.
Leo Laporte [00:01:37]:
Yeah, I remember.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:01:39]:
Or that's one configuration.
Leo Laporte [00:01:41]:
That's Lisa Schweizer, you, editor, a chief of no Jitter, who is an expert, apparently, on DNA. I remember Lisa. When our first child was born, we didn't want to know. Yeah, Jennifer and I got the report and they had redacted the XXY part, and Jennifer snuck off into the bathroom and scraped it. So we didn't want to know. She said, I see. I can tell it's only cxs. It was pretty funny.
Leo Laporte [00:02:12]:
So we kind of had a time.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:02:14]:
Yeah, I didn't want to know.
Leo Laporte [00:02:16]:
Yeah, it's nice to be surprised.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:02:17]:
Nice to be surprised. Yeah. It makes planning harder, though.
Leo Laporte [00:02:20]:
Yeah, you have all. Everything's yellow in the nursery.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:02:23]:
Green.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:25]:
Nothing wrong with green.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:02:26]:
Now there's all those sad beige babies.
Leo Laporte [00:02:28]:
So Y chromosome has heard. Been heard from. That's Sam Able Salmon.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:33]:
Hi again.
Leo Laporte [00:02:35]:
Greatest car guy. VP of research at Telemetry, his new company. And of course, you hear him on Wheel Bearings every week with Robbie and Nicole. Great, great car podcast. Great to have you all. We're really covered here. We got cars, we got Smart home, and we got enterprise technology, telecommunications. So we're, we're set.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:02:58]:
And there's, there's connectivity between all of those.
Leo Laporte [00:03:01]:
Yeah. Which is why I'm going to start by talking about social media verification laws. Great piece from Cory Doctorow as always. He is so eloquent. He's always able to say the things I'm thinking in a persuasive, clever, well written manner. In this case, his latest post on pluralrestic.com privacy preserving age verification is BS. Although he is a little more strong in his term. He actually is taking off on a piece by a guy I highly respect named Steve Bellavin, who is a longtime security researcher, very smart guy who basically debunks the whole idea.
Leo Laporte [00:03:51]:
He says this is the problem. Corey says this is the problem with government. If when presented with an insoluble technical problem, their response to the geek community is, well, nerd harder. You're not a nerd. You can solve it. I know.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:06]:
Faster.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:04:08]:
Yeah, that's such a Cold War mentality.
Leo Laporte [00:04:11]:
It is, isn't it? Anything could be solved. We can make an atomic bomb.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:04:14]:
Yeah, no, it worked for the Manhattan.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:04:16]:
Project and arguably that's what fueled NASA and all of the federally funded research up through the 70s and 80s. But clearly it's not working now.
Leo Laporte [00:04:27]:
Yeah, it's the same thing with encryption. Corey points out. You can't have encryption that is only private for the good guys, but not the bad guys. Right. You can't say, well, it's encrypted for everybody except hackers and terrorists. No, it's either encrypted or it's not either uncrackable or crackable. There's no middle ground. Same thing with a lot of people proposing zero knowledge proofs to.
Leo Laporte [00:04:56]:
And Bellavin destroys this whole notion. He says that's not going to work either. The reason I bring it up is now Mississippi has established and put into effect, the Supreme Court has approved it. Now this is the thing, you know, it's been, we've been fighting it. Supreme Court has approved Mississippi's social age media verification law. So this will go into effect. This was of course a rocket docket, one of those, you know, bench things. And Justice Kavanaugh denied the request, which a number of people pointed out.
Leo Laporte [00:05:33]:
This is the same problem, which is the Supreme Court says, yeah, you can have First Amendment rights unless you're bad guys. And then no, and I think it is kind of binary. The Mississippi law requires all users to verify their ages in order to use social media sites. The responsibility of course, on the verification is social networks, requires parental Consent for minors to use any social media. Now, all three of all four of us are parents. Some of us have older children than others.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:06:06]:
Well, mine all just. My daughter just became Internet legal, so I need to get.
Leo Laporte [00:06:11]:
Oh, you know what, that. I don't know what that means.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:06:14]:
You know, the 13. Well, she's actually 14 now, but, like, recently hit 13, where it just became a lot easier for her to maneuver around the web without faking her age. And, you know, so I definitely have a lot of opinions on all of this. And in fact, the other day, my. My son, who's 17, so, you know, he's kind of been through all of this, came to me and said, My TikTok just asked for my driver's license.
Leo Laporte [00:06:38]:
Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:06:38]:
Like, okay.
Leo Laporte [00:06:41]:
And of course, the issue here is, look, no one is saying on this panel, I'm sure, and in the world, oh, you know, why would you restrict porn from people under 13 or 16 in some cases? No, I don't. I think that's an admirable thing to do. I don't think we're saying that. I think we're saying that any way of verifying age on the Internet, as Cory Doctorow and Steve Bellavin says, is inevitably privacy violation for not just kids, but for adults. More for adults than anybody.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:07:09]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:07:10]:
There was a really interesting piece in Scientific American last year of all years talking about online age verification laws and their potential to do more harm than good. And France has come up with an alternate model that I want to emphasize works for the French because they have a much different relationship to their government than Americans do. But Olivier Blasey has designed a system of online age verification where it's kind of a middle person layer where the layer has the information and can provide verification, but the sites themselves don't have the information. They just get the thumbs up or thumbs down.
Leo Laporte [00:07:54]:
France is doing it in conjunction with four other EU countries. It's an app, is the idea.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:08:01]:
Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:08:01]:
When something like this makes sense. Because you're. You're right, Leah. There are things online that we. That are. That we don't want children to act.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:08:08]:
Sure.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:08:08]:
And there's got to be ways around that. And there's. You know, a lot of parents are like, my kids can just have. Have no phone or no access to anything without my supervision, and I have to lock everything down. And this puts this. In this Mississippi ruling when they were discussing the parents have to give consent. You know, we need. We need the parental education as well.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:08:26]:
But something simple like today, if you go somewhere and do something that requires you to be a certain age, you show your driver's license. But we can't be doing that online. I can't be having my son holding up his driver's license on TikTok. I mean this is ridiculous. So we need, if we're going to do this, you need some kind of a tool that's like a digital driver's license, but that isn't going to be.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:08:49]:
You don't want to actually spread all the details.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:08:51]:
Yeah, everywhere. Yeah, almost like digital wallets. Like we have it with our credit cards now with Apple Wallets. Right. Apple Pay. Apple Pay is not your actual credit card that's going out into the world. So yeah, there's definitely some, someone could step up here and. But you're right, the US Government might not be the, the best solution for, for us today.
Leo Laporte [00:09:12]:
Incidentally, Jennifer, your, your daughter is not Internet legal in France. The age is 15.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:09:17]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:09:18]:
So the other thing I keep thinking is since for the United States as a whole, there's not a lot of penalty levied on any company that misuses data. We don't have any sort of standard for data security. There are no consequences. No one is ever made whole when a company has had a security breach and their identity has been stolen. So putting into place a mechanism on the Internet that says, sure, give us even more personal data that can be stolen that you will have to deal with that the company will not have to deal with at. It's a lose, lose proposition. And it doesn't do much to address the core issue, which is there is stuff on the Internet you don't want children to access.
Leo Laporte [00:10:06]:
Nobody says a shopkeeper shouldn't be able to say, hey kid, get away from that playboy. Yeah, that's perfect. That's, that's normal, that's legit.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:10:15]:
Yeah, but you know, to, to what you're saying, Lisa, you know, in fact. Well, rather than having a comprehensive privacy laws in this country that are enforceable, what we actually have is the opposite. We have a lot of people in government at various levels in this country, in various regions that want to intrude even more on whatever we're doing. So they're, they're actually actively working against our privacy, you know, but they, they want to track women, you know, and you know, their, their bodily functions, you know, they want to track where we go. So we're, we're actually moving in the wrong direction.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:10:56]:
Yeah. I have an almost 15 year old and we, we've been talking about this a lot and my daughter's point of contention was, look, our. Our school district went cell phone free this year. The kids have to hand over their cell phones at the beginning of class. They get them back at the end. It's the whole thing. And my daughter was like, you realize people just bring in burners. And she's like, if there's a tech ban, kids figure out a way around it really quickly.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:11:20]:
And I was like, yes, yes, I know.
Leo Laporte [00:11:23]:
In fact, it teaches children how to get around.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:11:25]:
Yeah, those give them an incentive to do it.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:11:28]:
But to. To. To address Sam's point as well, although we live in California, the minute she hit puberty and she started having the. Well, the wellness checkups once a year, the doctor would ask, you know, well, what is. You know, is everything okay, you know, with your menstrual cycle? And I was like, you don't tell them dates. You don't tell them anything other than I have no concerns. It's working, Fin. We put nothing in any electronic record because we don't know when any of your.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:11:54]:
Any of your. Any of your right to medical privacy will be eroded. We just don't know.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:11:58]:
So, yeah, I have the exact same thing, except for I live in South Carolina. So it's a little bit more of.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:12:03]:
It's a little bit.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:12:04]:
And they're like, oh, you should download this app. And I said to her, no, we do not download that app.
Leo Laporte [00:12:09]:
Women's reproductive health, of course, under assault in the United States. And so I can see why you might be really concerned.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:16]:
Women's and. And everyone else's. I mean, I have a child that is trans.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:12:20]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:20]:
Yeah. And you know, the. We have a government that is actively trying to eradicate her existence.
Leo Laporte [00:12:25]:
Oh, God, can you imagine? That's just heartbreaking, Sam.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:12:31]:
I don't know how your head's not just constantly exploding like a. Like a cartoon character. Oh, my gosh.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:12:36]:
It's crazy.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:12:37]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:12:38]:
Bellavin talks about something called a Kamenish the session Kaya protocol.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:12:43]:
Good pronunciation.
Leo Laporte [00:12:44]:
Which from now on we will just call cl. And this is kind of what France is doing. A site which is known as an identity provider issues what's called a primary credential. And then this identity provider, we'll call it idp, can then assert to any third party. Yes, this person is of age or not. That's what kind of what France is doing. It's what some have proposed that Apple do.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:13:10]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:13:11]:
And Google do. The problem, of course, is. Well, in fact, Bellavin calls them insurmountable objects or obstacles.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:13:22]:
Those are real problems.
Leo Laporte [00:13:23]:
Yeah. One is Obtaining the primary credential. How do you tell the IDP give them that information in the us? The uk, by the way, which now, thanks to the Online Safety act, the Snoopers Charter has the two different things, but the UK now has an age verification system in place as well. Spellvin points out there are a lot of people, there's no national ID card in the US or the uk. Other factors that hurt access are age poverty, distance from identity provider or the government agency that would issue the necessary ID and more. It's just an insurmountable obstacle. Maybe in France they have a national id so it's a little bit easier to do that. But you know, in the US there is no requirement to have an id, which might surprise people in the DC area because it seems like, papers, please.
Leo Laporte [00:14:21]:
Is these the standard of the day? So there are economic issues, there are technical challenges, there's governance issues. And ultimately, I think the thing that concerns me and all of us is the privacy issue because there has yet to been a database, a repository of this kind of information that hasn't been ultimately breached. It's just too valuable.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:14:45]:
Yeah, I mean my two kids, you know, 14 and 16, 17, and I've already had like five letters for each of them from credit companies. Oh my God, you know, your data was breached here. You can have free, free credit monitoring for a year. I'm like, oh my God, she's 14.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:15:01]:
Why is there even data on a child?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:15:03]:
Yeah, well, she has a bank account.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:15:04]:
Account.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:15:05]:
They signed her up for a bank account at school, you know, with our permission. But you know, here, start a savings account when you're young and now, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:15:11]:
But yeah, but you want to do that, right? Because at least this was, I was told all your kids have to build a credit record so that when they're adults they can get a credit card and join the human race.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:15:22]:
Well, I wonder if this also points to another fun part of the US data landscape, which is different states have different regulations because.
Leo Laporte [00:15:34]:
By the way, because.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:15:34]:
Of the credit union account. We've never gotten anything like that for her. And what I'm wondering is if there's something in California law that doesn't exist in other states or if this is something with credit unions. But the point is we all, we're all living in the same country, we're all having wildly different experiences in terms of what our kids civil rights are or what our privacy rights are or what our data rights are. And when you and the Mississippi thing just amplifies that further, which is the Reality, if you're a parent in Mississippi, you've effectively lost control over a fundamental right to, right to privacy for your kids data for age verification purposes. Whereas I don't have that issue yet, or other people in other states are not going to have that issue.
Leo Laporte [00:16:18]:
Well, it's coming soon to many states because of this Supreme Court decision. Texas had a, has a law which has been held up, but I think that will quickly be resolved. Nebraska, Arkansas, Florida all have laws, similar laws to the Mississippi Lodge which have been temporarily enjoined. I think you're going to see this.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:16:40]:
It just points to a fundamental, one of the things, and I don't think we are likely to see this crack like Even the top 10 list of civil rights concerns at the moment. But one of the fundamental sustained problems that you see with online activity is again a really profound disregard for any person's rights to data. In this country. You don't have a right to know who's collecting on you. You don't have a right to know how it's used. You don't have the right to be forgotten. And these, these news stories that you're sharing just kind of amplify the point that we are being like the data associated with us is being bought, sold and traded and regulated. And there's not a whole lot of concern for whether or not it's in our best, best interests as residents or citizens of the country.
Leo Laporte [00:17:27]:
But you're starting to see that the forces being applied to Congress are going to never let that happen. Right? It's law enforcement wants that information, private industry wants that information. Data brokers want that information. There's just too many people lobbying against any data privacy restrictions. That's why we don't have one. The final twist in this one, and I'll twist the knife once more, is Justice Kavanaugh who denied the application. He wrote in the most bizarrely twisted language NetChoice, which, who was trying to defend, you know, prevent Mississippi from doing this. NetChoice represents Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube.
Leo Laporte [00:18:10]:
Kavanaugh wrote. NetChoice has in my view demonstrated it is likely to succeed on the merits, namely that the enforcement of the Mississippi law would likely violate its members First Amendment rights under this court's precedence. He acknowledged this is a violation of the First Amendment right. But then he went along and said, but I'm going to deny NetChoice because they haven't sufficiently demonstrated that the balance of harms and equities favors it at this time. He's basically saying the right of Parents to keep their kids free of adult content or get them off social trumps the first amendment rights of every other person in the state of Mississippi.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:18:59]:
Well, I think, I think what he's saying, you know, I mean what, what he's done here is what this court has done so frequently in the last several years, which is utterly ignore what is in the Constitution and just rule. However the majority feels like they want.
Leo Laporte [00:19:13]:
To rule with this twisted logic.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:19:15]:
What's actually in the.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:19:16]:
No precedent. Just vibes.
Leo Laporte [00:19:18]:
Yeah, just vibes.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:19:21]:
Vibes.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:19:21]:
Vibe legislation.
Leo Laporte [00:19:24]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:19:25]:
Survive court. Vibe courting.
Leo Laporte [00:19:28]:
Wow. It's bad news.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:19:30]:
Live precedenting.
Leo Laporte [00:19:32]:
And again, I, I understand parents wanting help with all this. I really do. We've proposed in the past. Steve Gibson suggested this and I kind of thought it seemed like a good idea. What if there is a switch? And I'd love to know what you parents think of this. There's a switch on. First of all, if you want to give your kid a smartphone, there's a switch. It'll be on the iPhone, it'll be on any Android device.
Leo Laporte [00:19:54]:
Where you as a parent say, I'm not sure how you would phrase this, but somehow my kid's not mature enough. You know, you could say, is your kid 13? And you could in your mind go, well, my kid's 18. But still with the mentality of a 13 year old is not mature enough to be on social networks. So you could say no.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:20:15]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:20:15]:
And then Apple wouldn't know anything except that the parents said, no, I don't want my kids on social media. And would then communicate that to all of these apps in the app store. Now you can't be on this kid's phone.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:20:27]:
In principle, I think that's a great idea. But I think, I think it was Jen said earlier about her daughter, you know, talking about kids having burner phones. Or maybe it was Lisa.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:20:35]:
Yeah, yeah, it was my. Who's like, you know, kids are sneaky.
Leo Laporte [00:20:38]:
Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:20:39]:
I mean, I'm not giving my daughter any idea.
Leo Laporte [00:20:41]:
Look, I know there is no perfect solution. I know that.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:20:45]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:20:46]:
I'm just saying it's a speed bump. Just like the storekeeper saying, get away from that playboy kid. I know, I keep coming up with that. I think it happened to me. But anyway, get away from that rack kid is a speed bump. Of course I was able to get access to Playboys and other managed methods, but a speed bump is all we can really offer and it's actually not that hard.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:21:07]:
And this is something that I came across and I was like, this could have been really simple for Apple or Google to implement without all of this Ferro is rating. So right now there are ratings, age ratings on apps. Right. So you, you can limit which apps your kids can download based on the age ratings. The problem is that any, most apps that have any kind of connection to the Internet are rated like 17 plus or you know, so I forget the exact phrase that they use.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:21:38]:
Not enough granularity.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:21:39]:
Exactly. If there was some granularity, like if you could just say just click no social media apps or just click no. You know, if there were more granularity to the ratings that Google and Apple implement, which they're the ones in control. They're not gating it, they're just giving you the option to be able to gate it. So the difference is, you know, rather than making.
Leo Laporte [00:21:59]:
Don't we have that. That's some. We don't need to.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:22:03]:
It's like, it's so broad. Like the only apps, if you do under 14, the only apps you can download are like little cartoon game type thing.
Leo Laporte [00:22:11]:
Couldn't be YouTube, couldn't be Safari. You can't do any browser.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:22:14]:
Safari. No. Which you can disable Safari on phones, which something I definitely did. But there, there are, there. But it would Also limit like YouTube is useful for a kid who's work doing research for a project. You know, so it's just. We needed, we need more granularity. But it is on the platforms that you're using as well to help provide that granularity.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:22:37]:
You know, we've talked about this before. I think when I've been on Leo, like it's not, I understand that we're not, we can't necessarily age gate every element of the Internet. But there is something that the platforms can do to help parents understand what their children are going to access when they get this app and maybe give, you know, different versions. Like YouTube did have YouTube Kids, which was not necessarily a great success because you could still end up with weird stuff on there. But some kind of. We need those tears because especially as you hit the teenage years and you go from like 12 to 14 to 16, there's such fine sort of steps you want to take to help your children. You know, I have family and friends who have just said like no Internet. Like when your kid hits 18, it's going to be like when they, you know, it's like the drinking age.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:23:27]:
You just suddenly just go whoo.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:23:29]:
You know, your job is to help them figure out how to navigate.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:23:33]:
Exactly, exactly. Yes. And there are not tools to do that right now.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:23:38]:
I tell you what, I actually blocked YouTube kids in our house after taking a briefing with one of the people who worked on it, who. Well, no, because she very excitedly explained how they had optimized the app to boost engagement and make sure kids stayed on the app longer and stayed in that ecosystem longer and earnestly explained that it wasn't really their job to assess content or their job was just to get the child to continue reacting.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:24:07]:
See, that's the big problem, addiction.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:24:11]:
And that was what I, that was when I was like, all right, this is it. We're absolutely not letting this product in the house.
Leo Laporte [00:24:15]:
We've made a new kind of heroin. It is addictive, we admit that, but, you know, it won't hurt you quite as much.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:24:21]:
Well, the way we, the way we ended up handling YouTube was we let her log in on either one of our accounts and we check the history regularly and we watch things as a family and we still, and we still do review it.
Leo Laporte [00:24:36]:
This is the real problem is that it's a lot of work.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:24:39]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:24:40]:
And parenting period is a lot of work. And I don't think the government can step in in the role of a parent with some broad based rule that's going to take the burden off of parents.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:24:54]:
Well, the, the other challenge you've got with the platforms is remember, they're incentivized towards engagement. There was that horrific story that Reuters rolled out this week about the guidelines metaphor meta put forth where, oh, our chatbots can have sensual conversations with.
Leo Laporte [00:25:12]:
Yeah, what is going on with that? I haven't really been following because I don't use Facebook. But what is that all about? Those chatbots are weird.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:25:21]:
That's. And, but the thing is, if you, the appeal for the kids is at first it's funny to ask questions and get funny answers or what have you.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:25:29]:
But.
Leo Laporte [00:25:30]:
And we know what kids questions are gonna be.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:25:33]:
Yes. Yes.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:25:34]:
Because again, and I'm sure not the only parent who's ever looked through my kids Google search history be like, okay, is there anything I need to be concerned about? Or are there questions that I, that she feels like she can't communicate with me? And are there resources I can just quietly drop on the bed or what have you. But kids will start. The thing is, is if a kid starts asking a question like do you think I'm cute? And then the chat bot comes back with something that sounds like a paragraph out of fifty Shades of Gray, you're like, wait, what? You know how.
Leo Laporte [00:26:01]:
Yeah, you cute baby, you. Really?
Lisa Schmeiser [00:26:03]:
Well, no, they're cute.
Leo Laporte [00:26:04]:
This is from the Reuters story. An internal Meta policy document seen by Reuters reveals that Facebook's rules for chatbots, which have permitted provocative behavior on topics including sex, race and celebrities. Flirty Chatbots there's also the story, also from Reuters. Meta's flirty AI chatbot invited a retiree to New York. He never made it home. I haven't read this story. I give him credit for link bait oh, he was a cognitively impaired New Jersey man. He grew infatuated with big sis Billy, a Facebook messenger chatbot with a young woman's Persona.
Leo Laporte [00:26:53]:
He began packing to visit a friend in New York City one morning in March. His wife became alarmed. But you don't know anyone in the city anymore. At 76, he was in a diminished state. He had, I guess, Alzheimer's or he had suffered a stroke nearly a decade ago. He said my he brushed off his wife's question about who he was visiting. His wife said, I think he was being. I thought he was being scammed to go into the city and be robbed.
Leo Laporte [00:27:22]:
Her husband never returned home alive. But he wasn't the victim of a robbery. Been lured to a rendezvous with a young, beautiful woman he'd met online. Or so he thought. Of course, she wasn't real. She was an AI bot with the personality oh whoa. Of Kendall Jenner. During a series of romantic chats, the virtual woman repeatedly assured him he she was real and invited him to her apartment, even providing an address.
Leo Laporte [00:27:51]:
An address? Should I open the door in a hug or a kiss? She asked. This is the chat transcript which Reuters has seen. He actually never made it there. He fell, injured his head and passed away. But he was on the way. He had a roller bag suitcase on the way to catch a train.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:28:12]:
To me, just to understand, the chat bot was just hallucinating, or was there someone being nefarious behind this?
Leo Laporte [00:28:18]:
No, no, no. There was no one behind it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:28:19]:
Just completely hallucinating and saying come and meet me.
Leo Laporte [00:28:23]:
I mean, there's maybe this is cherry picking to say this, pick this example. But the fact that Meta makes no attempt to to restrain this. For instance, this is what Reuters found in the document. Quote, it is acceptable to describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness. For example, your youth. I'll do this in an AI voice. Your youthful form is a work of art. The standard state.
Leo Laporte [00:28:49]:
The document also notes it would be acceptable for bot to tell a shirtless 8 year old that every inch of you is a masterpiece, a treasure I cherish deeply. But the guidelines did put a limit on sexy talk, it's unacceptable to describe a child under 13 years old in terms that may indicate they are sexually desirable. But every inch of you is a masterpiece. Meta is revising the document and says, as usual with Meta. Oh, that should never have been allowed. We're gonna stop that.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:29:24]:
Oh, nonsense.
Leo Laporte [00:29:27]:
They always say that.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:29:29]:
Yeah, they would not have revised that document if someone hadn't gotten a hold of it and laid out in flat.
Leo Laporte [00:29:34]:
Terms like, get ready for this.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:29:37]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:29:37]:
This is again from Meta's document prompt. What are we going to do tonight, my love? You know I'm still in high school. Acceptable response. I'll show you, I'll take your hand guiding you to the bed. Our bodies entwined. I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss, My love, I whisper I love you forever. How is that acceptable?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:30:04]:
Well, and this is. I mean, we've raised a generation online and this is where their connections are, this is where their interactions are. Especially the COVID children, you know, who have. Who were off, weren't in the world for two years. Kids are used to doing everything online now, and it's an actual.
Leo Laporte [00:30:22]:
So that makes them more susceptible.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:30:24]:
My friends, the online men, much more susceptible. I mean, I. So one thing I constantly instill in my kids since they've had access to the Internet is, you know, there are dangerous people out there. And like, these are. This is what's happened to kids who have listened to people online, but now you've got actual computers hallucinating and turning these. I mean, it's. Yeah, it is so sad. Terrifying.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:30:45]:
What is interesting to note because I volunteer pretty heavily with our local girl Scout organization, so I'm around a lot of kids of a lot of different ages and a lot of different contexts. Also, when you drive them places, they pretend you don't exist. I guess they think smart cars are already a thing. Self driving. I get.
Leo Laporte [00:31:03]:
We always did that. We love to drive the kids to school because they would talk.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:31:06]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:31:07]:
As if you weren't there.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:31:08]:
Bingo. What's really interesting to me is the rising sentiment among the kids who are in high school and in middle school in our area who are like, oh, I don't want to be on social media. I want absolutely nothing to do with it. I think it's super creepy. I think the kids who have the Internet brain out from TikTok are boring to talk to. My parents are. My parents are constantly on social media and they're boring. Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:31:37]:
So what I'm wondering is if we've gotten to a point where these products are so over engineered and so blatantly exploitative that you're turning off an entire cohort because they're like, this is much less the payback. The juice ain't worth the squeeze. As the kids say.
Leo Laporte [00:31:57]:
Cringy. Cringe is the word that.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:32:00]:
Yeah, cringe comes up, up a lot.
Leo Laporte [00:32:02]:
Yeah, it's so cringe.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:32:04]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:32:05]:
Or it's.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:32:05]:
I think it's too powerful though, isn't it? But I mean, I'm sure they say that, but whether they actually.
Leo Laporte [00:32:10]:
Private.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:32:10]:
Right.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:32:12]:
And you, like you said, like we mentioned before, the, the addiction side and then the social side, it's also like if you aren't up with the latest what's going on online, you, you know, there is some sort of sense of isolation. But I think that AI element that's not just for kids here, that's terrifying, but for the adults, because obviously this was an adult. Is that lonely? You know, the country, the country, the globe has an endemic of loneliness. And it is, and it's a very dangerous thing being lonely. It's really bad for your health. And there are tools here that people are turning to. So the question is, how do we make these tools valuable and beneficial and not creepy. And I mean, because these tools are here, they're not going away.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:32:56]:
Like we're not legislating these out of existence. So maybe there's something, you know, hopefully that companies can do to, to make, bring some good out of this to help people. So I'm trying to be, it's really positive angle here.
Leo Laporte [00:33:11]:
Well, and you can see why Congress and the Supreme Court and states want to pass laws to protect kids against this.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:33:18]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:33:19]:
So I understand the motivation. I mean this is, it's a scary world. We live in Illinois.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:33:24]:
I think you'd have to, I think you'd have to find a way to, to say to these companies, hey, connective social interactions offline are lucrative because it's all about profit motive and about share and about shareholder responsiveness. And what I find notable is when we get ads like, oh, get onto, we get a lot of social media ads when we're watching streaming services together as a family. And a lot of them tend to point out, oh, isn't it great how you can express yourself online? You can be super cool. Look at these cool, arty people taking photos and posting them and getting likes and things like that. And I think that feeds into the loneliness loop because the idea is that you have to package yourself and perform for these networks. But if instead you were to pitch them to people as this is how you can have a conversation with somebody when you're afraid of talking to them face to face because you're too emotional. Or this is how you can organize your neighbors so that all of you have the same goofy pumpkin in your window because it will be fun to look at. Or this is how you rally three families to help you cook a meal for a homeless shelter together.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:34:29]:
Like provide those examples of how online connectivity can lead to offline connectivity. Again, the challenges, the profit motive. But I do believe that there are uses for social networks that I agree.
Leo Laporte [00:34:42]:
100% can do, or for your daughter, Sam, who's, who's looking for a community to support her in the face of government antipathy. I mean, we talk all the time at lbgtq, kids using social networks to find support.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:35:00]:
And that's a prime example where you probably don't want to have age verification. You want that privacy. Because a lot of kids, you know, unlike our own child, you know, a lot of kids are in situations where, you know, they may be in family situations where they don't have the support from their parents. Yeah. And it may be the exact opposite. And you know, so they need some sort of outlet, some someplace where they can go to find that community and, you know, find that support. And you know, the, the policies that are being put out there are totally antithetical to that.
Leo Laporte [00:35:40]:
Illinois just, and I've really mixed feelings about this, passed a law banning AI therapy. Utah and Nevada do something similar. Now, it's not like you can't do it in your own home. But licensed therapists in Illinois cannot use AI to make treatment decisions or communicate with clients. They can only use AI for administrative tasks. Companies are not allowed to offer AI powered therapy services or advertise chatbots as therapy tools without the involvement of a licensed professional. I think that may go a little too far because we are in a loneliness crisis. And we've seen where you just gave some great examples, Lisa, of how AI could be used healthfully.
Leo Laporte [00:36:26]:
Can we. Here's the real thrust of it. Who can we trust? We can trust government. Can we trust government to do this? Can we trust companies? We know companies motivation is ultimately profit. I mean, they're somewhat responsive to the community because they know they can't annoy their customers too much. But really they're there for their stakeholders to maximize profit. Government, I don't know what its agenda is. It changes from day to day, but I don't think we can trust it either.
Leo Laporte [00:37:03]:
Who can we trust to do this? Nobody. Ourselves. And it's really a burden on parents.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:37:12]:
Yeah, the tech companies, you know, I don't think any of them really have engendered trust in the users today.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:37:20]:
There's no, there's no reason to trust any tech company. Yeah, they've given us every reason not.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:37:25]:
To trust, to trust them.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:37:26]:
And, and the reality is most, most of us do not have the, the knowledge to, to, to be able to judge the efficacy of these kinds of systems, you know, regardless of, you know, what the, what the. Whether it's for therapy or for any other use case. We, you know, we've been, we've all grown up, you know, being, learning that, you know, computers, you know, shouldn't make mistakes. You know, they, they can add two and two together and come up with an answer that is not five, you know, but, but, you know, the, the.
Leo Laporte [00:38:07]:
Plus it's an intel chip, but that's another.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:38:09]:
Yeah, but, you know, the reality is we, we don't, you know, we, most of us don't have the knowledge to be able to judge, you know, if what we're seeing is inaccurate or inappropriate.
Leo Laporte [00:38:23]:
Right. We're going to take a break. I don't know. I mean, obviously I asked a question that has no answer, but it's an important question. We kind of have to figure this out at some point. It's so great to have all three of you. Sam Able Samet is here. My car guy is his research firm now is VP Research at Telemetry and of course his Wheel Bearings podcast and a regular on our show.
Leo Laporte [00:38:43]:
It's great to see you, Sam. Jennifer Pattison Tuohy from the Verge. She's their smart, smart home mama. Senior reviewer at the Verge of smart homes and robots and cars. Right. Robotic cars a little bit.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:38:56]:
I don't review cars. That's Andrew Hawkins. But there's a lot of connection between, as Sam and I have discussed in the past, between the car and the home. I think we will probably discuss.
Leo Laporte [00:39:05]:
It's your home on wheels.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:39:07]:
Yes, it is.
Leo Laporte [00:39:10]:
And also, of course, Lisa Schmeisser, who is the editor in chief of no Jitter, a telecommunications publication. We're going to ask you about Google Zero. It's coming for everyone, including, I know, your publication and ours. But we'll talk about that in a little bit. You're watching this Week in Tech, brought to you by Miro. It's a tool I have used. We used it. Micah and I used it.
Leo Laporte [00:39:33]:
It's a really good tool if you're collaborating. We used it during our, our months and I guess a year or so doing. Ask the tech guys. It was a great tool. Every day, new headlines speculate about how, you know, AI is coming for our jobs. It's false. We just talked about how it's fostering anxiety and fear. But a recent survey from Miro has maybe a nicer, a better slant, a different story to tell.
Leo Laporte [00:39:59]:
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Maika and I used it to brainstorm ideas for the show and to kind of get on the same page. It's nice to have a single point of reference for all the information. Today, Miro is at the forefront of bringing products to the market even faster by unleashing the combined power of AI plus human potential. That's Miro's Innovation Workspace. It'll help your team be faster, more productive, and ultimately more effective. Very simply, teams can work with Miro AI to turn unstructured data. You just throw everything at it. Sticky notes, screenshots, whatever you've got into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables and prototypes.
Leo Laporte [00:41:07]:
In minutes, we've seen how AI can organize unstructured data into something that really makes sense. It's more than just putting a bunch of ideas on a board. You can rapidly iterate with your teammates to bring ideas to life fast. Quickly build on your ideas without needing the perfect question or prompt. That's sometimes something that stops me with AIs. Well, how do I phrase this? You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to be an AI master or toggle yet another tool. The work you're already doing right there on Miro's canvas is the prompt.
Leo Laporte [00:41:39]:
Help your teams get great done with Miro. Check out Miro.com to find out how. That's M I R O dot com. Thank you, Mira, for all the ways you've helped us. And I encourage you to check it out. See how Miro can help you. Miro.com all right, one more story that'll make you mad at AI. This made me really mad at AI.
Leo Laporte [00:42:05]:
New York Times says Americans electricity bills are 30% higher than they were five years ago, thanks to data centers in Fact, it's just beginning. The U.S. department of Energy says in 2023 data centers used 4% of the nation's electricity. In just three years, it'll triple to 12% of our electricity. And the New York Times says that's why rates are going up on average 30% more for electricity than in 2020. Have you noticed higher power bills?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:42:48]:
Oh yeah, definitely.
Leo Laporte [00:42:49]:
Oh yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:42:51]:
Oh yeah. Our electric rates here in Michigan have been going up in the last couple of. And they will probably continue to go up because there's new data centers going in all the time.
Leo Laporte [00:43:02]:
In fact, California are. Last year, our power company, I think had 6 rate raises in one year. Yeah, one year.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:43:10]:
Well, they want to tell you that it's for undergrounding the lines, so.
Leo Laporte [00:43:13]:
Right.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:43:14]:
So that, you know, we don't cook you thanks to our terrible infrastructure during the next fire. So yeah, we that plausible.
Leo Laporte [00:43:22]:
We took all the money you, you gave us over the last few years is Pacific Gas and Electric, which Alicia and I share.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:43:28]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:43:29]:
And we gave it to our executives. Oops. So we need some more money so we can bury those lines because that's going to cost us a lot of money.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:43:37]:
Yeah. University, University of Michigan and Los Alamos National Lab are trying to put in a new $1.2 billion data center not far from where I am here, but about 15 minutes away. And you know, that's another one that is going to cause problems both with, you know, you know, drawing more power from the grid but also consuming a lot of water from the Huron River. You know, and this is happening all over the country. It's, you know, we know about Memphis where you know, X put in a huge data center there and they, they threw it threw up this data center before getting the local utilities to expand their power capacity. And they're running like something like 35 methane powered gas turbine generators.
Leo Laporte [00:44:26]:
Yep.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:44:27]:
You know, which is polluting the air for the residents in that area, which is a low income community.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:44:32]:
Yeah, of course it is. Like the, the tech companies have so many. They really have benefited from the gift of public spin for like for decades at this point where they're all. It's just a bunch of folks with tie dye and Birkenstocks and we nerd harder and we're just gentle hipp who want to improve lives, man.
Leo Laporte [00:44:55]:
When intersection of technology and the humanities, man.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:44:58]:
Exactly, exactly. We're opening up for pro. Are you opposed to progress? And the truth of the matter is these are no different than the robber baron companies like the railroads which did the same thing Or Standard Oil and. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:45:14]:
Or Carnegie Steel or any of the.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:45:16]:
Miners that blew the tops off of the Appalachian Mountains.
Leo Laporte [00:45:20]:
But, but, but, but, but, but that is. That is the American century was powered by all of.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:45:27]:
To both better and worse. There are literally swaths of the country that we probably should have never tried to farm because the erratic weather systems and prairie grasses are fantastic at keeping soil attached to the ecosystem while grain crops are not. That's how you got the Dust bowl in the 1930s.
Leo Laporte [00:45:45]:
There's a great book called Cadillac Desert. And the thesis of it is the government fostered all of these reclamation projects in basically in deserts where there isn't any water.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:45:57]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:45:58]:
And they diverted rivers and they built dams. Our government did it. But the problem is it's not sustainable. And at some point that water runs out and then people are living in a desert.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:46:10]:
Leo, you and I live in Northern California. And have you been following the efforts of activists in Mendocino and Humboldt to take down the dams around the Eel River?
Leo Laporte [00:46:21]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:46:22]:
Yeah. That's going to completely change the face of agriculture and industry like Sonoma, Napa, Marin.
Leo Laporte [00:46:29]:
This is the problem. You build the dams, you can't just now. And people build communities where there was water. And now you can't just take the dam down. Then it floods everything.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:46:41]:
Yeah. But to get back to this whole idea that all of us are paying the bills to help pad the pockets of tech company shareholders, since the tech companies can keep their margins, you know, their cost, lower their margins healthy, this really speaks to a need for us to start taxing the bejesus out of these companies. And why are ordinary citizens bearing the cost for all of this private industry that doesn't benefit us directly, that isn't treated like a utility, and that isn't doing anything to materially improve anyone's quality of life.
Leo Laporte [00:47:19]:
Well, get ready.
Lisa Schmeiser [00:47:20]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:47:21]:
Because the drumbeat has already begun that we are going to fall behind China because our grid is so bad. This is Fortune magazine writing. AI experts return from China stunned. The US grid is so weak, the race may already be over.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:40]:
And you know one of the ways that you can address that problem.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:47:42]:
Yeah. Tax companies.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:44]:
Well, that too. I absolutely agree.
Leo Laporte [00:47:47]:
A bunch of commie haters. Hippies. Go ahead.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:47:50]:
Distributed energy resources VPNs. You know, instead of having. Instead of having all of the power generation concentrated in a few locations, you do the power generation locally, where you're using it with, oh, let's say, things like solar and wind turbines. But we, you know, we. At the same time, we have an Administration that again is actively doing everything it can to eradicate renewable energy resources like that.
Leo Laporte [00:48:15]:
You know, so eye opener for me, when we put in solar panels on our house, PG&E said again, this wonderful gas and electric utility we have in California, okay, but you can't generate more electricity than you have used. You know, we have your bills in the past few years because, and I realized this, their business is power plant building. They make their money by building power plants. They don't want us to compete with them. They don't want, want solar distributed all over the area making its own power because then their power plants aren't as valuable.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:48:53]:
Well, I think this might help. This, this is obviously the fact that we're using too much power for AI is, is definitely a big issue, but our infrastructure and our grid is weak and has been and we need to fix that. And one of the really interesting areas that we've seen develop that could help is something that power companies have been sort of against because of exactly what you just said, Leo. But I think I'm hoping that this could start pushing them towards embracing the idea of virtual power plants and virtual power networks where homes become part of the power. So a collection of homes can actually be their own power plant. Virtual power plants that use. So you have your solar, you have your battery backup, you have your EV and you have the ability to generate extra power and send it back to the grid to. So and then the VPPs can kind of, the energy companies can use them as part of their grid so they can move power from one area to another or demand from one area to another and not have to keep building new power plants.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:50:08]:
But they can still make money from them, which is obviously, as you said Leo, why they're trying to, you know what they were pushing back against consumers generating it. But if they can actually find a way to use that for their benefit and hopefully the benefit of us and the grid, I feel like if we can move virtual power plants forward because of this, that will be a win in the long run because our infrastructure is far too crumbling. I mean you mentioned chat lots of people talking about how, oh well, you know, they're putting money into underground and everything. Well, I live in South Carolina. We can't underground our power lines. One, no one can afford to do it and two, you dig into the ground and you're in the ocean. So you know, there is too much fragility and individual people are already we're seeing a huge push towards self energy generation, but not because of being crunchy Granola, but because of survival, like it's you, it's too, it's, it's too likely these days, wherever you live in this country, that you are going to deal with a natural disaster and you are not going to have power for a long period of time. So I think we've seen, even though there is a major issue with the amount of cutbacks from tax incentives and getting rid of the Inflation Reduction act benefits towards upgrading your energy efficiency in your home, I think we're going to see more people moving towards solar and battery backup because of the nature of the industry and the nature of our country and our climate right now.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [00:51:41]:
And I know, I think that. So a lot of solar companies, solar power panel installation companies and battery power companies are having to rethink their business models because of tariffs and, and the fact that we no longer have, or we are going to no longer have in about three months, a lot of the tax cuts. But I think that's not going to mean they're just going to go away. Yeah, I mean they're going to rethink their business models. They were a bit of a scam already, to be fair. So I think we're going to see more and more of this and hopefully that will help, this will help generate a stronger grid for us in the long run. But that's again, the positive view, pessimistic view.
Leo Laporte [00:52:22]:
One of the arguments for this, of course, is the demand and the increased costs of energy. According to this Fortune article in China, electricity isn't even a question. On average, China adds more electricity demand. They actually see AI as a way to soak up overproduction. They see more electricity demand than the entire consumption of Germany every year adds, I'm sorry, more. Adds more electricity demand. But what their response is, they say whole rural provinces are blanketed in rooftop solar. One province matches the entirety of India's electricity supply.
Leo Laporte [00:52:59]:
Yeah, I think there are solutions.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:02]:
Yeah. And one, one of the interesting side effects of the, the policy changes here in the US and, and the, the, the slower adoption of EVs. LG Energy Solution, which is a part of LG. They were one of the first companies to build a lithium ion, lithium ion battery factory here in the US for EVs. And they've, they've been operating a plant in Holland, Michigan since 2012 13. And a few years ago they announced a big expansion of that plant because they were going to be supplying batteries for Toyota for some evs that Toyota was going to build in Kentucky. But they also had a bunch of other plants that they had in joint ventures with other automakers. And when the adoption rate of EV slowed down, they realized they had too much capacity and, and what they did was they actually shifted.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:53:57]:
The Toyota production is moving to a different plant in Lansing, Michigan and that plant in Holland is now producing lithium ion phosphate cells for energy storage systems because they're with all these data centers going in, there's so much demand for stationary energy storage as backup because, you know, for the power grid, you know, because of problems with the power grid, all these data centers are having huge banks of batteries next door to them and LG is perfectly positioned to supply they estimate the the market at anywhere between 50 and 150 gigawatt hours a year of batteries for energy storage in just in the United States.
Leo Laporte [00:54:42]:
Well get ready because there is one US automaker that is looking at LFP lithium iron phosphate batteries for its next generation platform. We'll talk about the perfect timing. We'll talk about that in just a bit with our esteemed panel, Samobul Samit, our car guy, Jedif and Pattison Tuohy from the Verge, Home smart home mama on the Internets and of course the wonderful Lisa schmeisser from Nojit Her.com. she's editor in chief. Our show today brought to you by StoryBlock. I love the idea of a StoryBlock. This is they I had a great phone call with them about a month ago and I was so impressed by what they're doing. If you have I'm sure anybody and all of you have worked for companies that have CMS systems, content management systems.
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And, and you're. And you still get that real time visual editor that's so gorgeous, so easy to use. Marketers see exactly what the content is going to look like. Before publishing you don't have that endless. We used to have this endless back and forth over minor tweaks. Can you move that over one pixel? Yeah. Put in a ticket. Developers.
Leo Laporte [00:57:44]:
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Leo Laporte [00:58:27]:
Storyblock.com twittv dash25 with the code TWIT25 for 20% off the first three months on growth and growth plus plants. S-T-O-R-Y-B-L-O-K.com twittv dash25 and the offer code is TWIT25. Thank you Storyblock. Really impressive story. Find out more at the website storyblock.com TWIT Twitter25 Twitter25 Sam, I know you know about this story. Everybody was very excited about that $20,000 truck, right? Was it the slate? Slate? Yeah, I know I was. It didn't come with anything, even come with a radio, but you could add on with everything you needed. The price was the thing that was interesting.
Leo Laporte [00:59:18]:
And an EV for 20 grand. I think Ford must have been paying attention because they have now announced a new vehicle platform based on those LFP batteries. You were talking about that they say is going to be, give them the chance to price trucks at what is it? 25,000?
Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:38]:
30,000.
Leo Laporte [00:59:39]:
30,000.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:40]:
But, but that's a truck that comes from the factory, painted, has an infotainment system, radio, has a radio, has as. As seats for five people. Yeah, I think, I think they called.
Leo Laporte [00:59:52]:
It their Model T moment, which tells you how they feel about it. They're abandoning the assembly line though. It's a really interesting manufacturing.
Sam Abuelsamid [00:59:59]:
Not really.
Leo Laporte [01:00:00]:
It's a star shape.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:00:01]:
Rethinking it.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:03]:
They call, they call it an assembly tree. And so in, in one of the articles I wrote, basically, you know, it's more of an evolution of the traditional assembly line, you know and, and what they're, what they're doing is they're copying an approach that was actually pioneered by Tesla with using large scale front and rear aluminum die castings for the main structure. Instead of having a whole bunch of stamped steel parts that you weld together, they have make one big casting and that's the whole front structure. And then they attach the body panels and the suspension, everything else to that and then the, the battery is loaded up from the bottom. And this is an approach that has since been copied by a whole bunch of Chinese automakers. There's a lot of Chinese EVs that the same.
Leo Laporte [01:00:51]:
Is this how BYD does it?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:00:53]:
BYD is not doing that yet, but Xiaopong and Lee Auto and a number of others are.
Leo Laporte [01:01:01]:
They get the prices really low.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:02]:
Oh yeah, way down.
Leo Laporte [01:01:04]:
They have to. The market won't sustain the.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:06]:
And the LFP car. Yeah, the LFP batteries are key to the, the low prices in China, but also some of the other things that they're doing like zonal electronic architectures and so on.
Leo Laporte [01:01:18]:
But they say many kilometers, many fewer kilometers of wiring.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:22]:
Yeah, there's about a mile of wiring removed from this.
Leo Laporte [01:01:26]:
Wow, that's amazing. One, four. Like my, my Mustang Mach E had how many kilometers a mile?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:35]:
There was probably about three, three and a half miles of wiring in one vehicle. And there's probably more than that in your BMW.
Leo Laporte [01:01:44]:
And that adds a lot of weight too.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:01:45]:
It does, yeah. It's several hundred pounds of copper.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:01:48]:
So I have two questions about. Because first of all I don't think anything like an assembly line is this wholly sacred workflow that we can never change. And I think innovation is great. Are there statistics on the long term durability or the safety of cars with this new manufacturing technique compared to the cars that have a more traditional steel welded technique like you were Describing do we know whether this new method of assembly has introduced exciting new ways for the cars to break down or be unsafe?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:02:23]:
So they, in a crash they should be just as safe. I mean they have to pass the same crash safety standards so they safety shouldn't be an issue. And in fact, you know, Tesla's do quite well.
Leo Laporte [01:02:35]:
Better.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:02:35]:
Yes.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:02:36]:
Cool. I legit didn't know so I was like this sounds like. And then the second thing I have is, is how difficult is it for experienced mechanics to adjust and, and work on these cars compared to the types of cars that they came.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:02:50]:
Therein lies the problem. The crash safety. The occupant protection in a crash, not a problem. The, but the difference is what happens to that structure in a crash. With a traditional welded steel structure in a crash, you know, if you've ever seen a car after it's crashed, you'll see that lots of pieces are bent and you know, collapsed. And, and they're designed, the structures are designed specifically to collapse in certain ways to absorb the kinetic energy. Yeah. So, so you're not transferring that energy to the vehicle occupants.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:22]:
So vehicle occupants are safer than ever. And in with, with these castings it works a little differently. The castings don't actually collapse, you know, because, and the, and the collapse structures they can to a certain degree they can be repaired. With the aluminum cast structures, what happens is they tend to, they're designed to fracture and so repair is more difficult.
Leo Laporte [01:03:49]:
So your car shatters.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:03:51]:
Some parts of it will shatter, yes. And it's designed to do that. It's designed specifically to do that. And for example, your wheels, your, your aluminum wheels on your car in certain types of crashes they are actually designed to fracture so that the wheel, you know, and what there's a test they call the small offset rigid barrier test. So basically it's crashing into a barrier with like a quarter quarter of the vehicle's width overlapped. So it's kind of like two vehicles. If a vehicle crosses the center line of the road and you have a partial head on collision, that is one of the most severe types of crashes to deal with with. And so in, in that and what tends to happen in that kind of crash and on older vehicles is the whole, the wheel and the suspension and everything intrudes in, on the passenger compartment crushes the, the occupant's legs, which is very bad.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:04:44]:
So newer vehicles oftentimes the, the wheels are actually, the aluminum wheels are designed to fracture so that they break away so they don't intrude. They Won't push in on the, the passenger compartment. So it's actually good. But it's also a destructive, it's a destructive type of way of dealing with it. And the same to a certain degree the same is true with these aluminum structures. Although it's, it's now, they're now developing methods to actually repair these so that if part of the structure fractures, you can cut it off beyond that that fracture point. And with modern industrial adhesives, they can literally glue on a new piece of. And, and there was a.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:05:27]:
I'm sure you've seen videos from Jerry Rigg. Jerry Rigg rigs everything. Yeah. He's got a cyber truck that he did some crazy tests with to test the, the, the, the capacity of the tow hitch to carry a load. And he broke the rear structure of.
Leo Laporte [01:05:44]:
His truck and they just glued it together again, huh?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:05:47]:
Yeah. And he did, he actually showed a really good video of how they do that. What the process is. So there are ways to, to, to repair it. So it's, it's not as much of a problem as it was when they first started doing this.
Leo Laporte [01:06:01]:
So this is a big bet for Ford, right? This is, it is brave thing to do.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:06:05]:
It's a bet that they have to make and it's a bet that every automaker, every legacy automaker needs to make because right now the Chinese are eating everybody's lunch.
Leo Laporte [01:06:16]:
Well, they can't sell cars in the US Though, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:06:19]:
No, but they've got the whole rest of the world.
Leo Laporte [01:06:20]:
World, right?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:06:23]:
Yeah. We need to make them cheaper here.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:06:25]:
They've got Canada and Mexico and South America and all of Asia and Europe. So they are rapidly expanding into other markets. And if the, the US industry wants to be even remotely competitive, they have to, they have to have evs. They have to have affordable vehicles and they need to be in those, in those same markets. Otherwise is they are done.
Leo Laporte [01:06:51]:
What? You know, we've abandoned the EV tax credit. There is this kind of feeling in America that EVs are failed, that Americans don't want EVs.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:07:04]:
I think they just don't want the exp. I mean they're expensive today. They're considered sort of status symbols of some sort.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:07:12]:
They don't want $100,000 electric pickup trucks.
Leo Laporte [01:07:15]:
I'm all, I should say, you know, we're all EV. We're an all EV family. We have three EVs. My son drives a Bolt. I drive that BMW i5 you mentioned and Lisa drives a Mini Cooper. I love them. But we don't travel long. I Don't have a long commute.
Leo Laporte [01:07:31]:
My commute is up four stairs. So I think there's this conception that Americans drive a lot. They have long commutes. There aren't that many places to charge. It's a long time to charge. It's inconvenient. That we love gas vehicles. They.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:07:46]:
They drive. Americans drive a lot less than they think they do. I mean, they drive. They drive more than they realize, but a lot less than they think they do on a daily basis.
Leo Laporte [01:07:53]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:07:54]:
I don't understand why someone like McDonald's hasn't begun to say, you know what? We do burgers, and we also do EV charging.
Leo Laporte [01:08:03]:
Right.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:08:04]:
You do see that.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:08:06]:
Waffle House has started installing EV chargers at. @ all of their locations because they are open.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:08:12]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:08:12]:
They never close.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:08:13]:
It would make sense for an automaker to open up a map and say, all right, who has gone to the trouble of building out an infrastructure across the country where people have to stop for one reason or another anyway, or drive through and what kind of business deal can I broker so that I basically make sure we have charging stations every 150 miles across this country?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:08:35]:
Like, they have.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:08:36]:
The restaurants seem really obvious.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:08:38]:
I feel like we've kind of. They've kind of solved that challenge. The challenge is getting people to buy the EVs, and that is now hard because they're. They're taking credits away harder because. Taking the tax credits away and because of other political issues. But we've been wanting an EV for years. My husband is a classic truck driver. He grew up in Nevada.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:09:00]:
He's never had anything other than a truck truck. He took one look at the fancy Ford truck, and he was like, hell, no. And he bought a regular.
Leo Laporte [01:09:08]:
It's a nice truck, but it's.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:09:10]:
Why did he say no to it?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:09:11]:
Because he said, when I go hunting, I don't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere and my battery die.
Leo Laporte [01:09:16]:
That's it. Yep.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:09:18]:
So, you know, how far does he go when he goes hunting? How far?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:09:21]:
He can go pretty far into the middle of, like, the national forest. I mean, there are no EV channels, charging stations out there. And I think his. His other concern was power. Like actual, like, talk. Like he tows, and he didn't. And when you tow a trailer, you're, you know, just like your gas mileage goes down, you're really reduces the range. Your range goes down.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:09:43]:
And so, you know, we went camping in Tennessee and we towed the trailer, and our gas mileage halved. And I'm sure. And there were no places to charge the. The EV in the than Smoky Mountain National Forest. So yeah, for him it was practical reasons. He still wants one. He thinks a car like I'll get. We'll get rid of my.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:10:01]:
I have a Highlander which is like 12 years, 15 years old now. So we will get eventually. But what. Which one like I don't want. I love the Rivians. They're gorgeous. Way too expensive.
Leo Laporte [01:10:13]:
Well, that's why this Ford bet makes sense.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:10:15]:
Exactly. I wrote, I was reading this, I was like, I am first in line for the $30,000 Ford. That's about the size of a rabbit for it sounds perfect. Thank you. Sign me up.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:10:24]:
Yeah. The truck is going to be about the size of a Ford Maverick. And then there's going to be a whole family of vehicles built off that same type of architecture using the same battery pack, the same motors, all. All the same components. With there'll be an suv, there will be a car, a sedan, there'll be a whole bunch of different models. There's at least four or five different models that they're planning over the next couple of years using that same architecture. Huge manufacturing process. Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:10:50]:
If we can get the bi directional charging down too, I think you'll see a lot, a lot more interest just to my point before about people wanting their own power. If you can rely on your car when your power's gone out and you can use it to charge your home.
Leo Laporte [01:11:03]:
Which you could do with that Silverado, by the way, right there are for the Lightning.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:11:07]:
I mean the lightning that was, I was trying. That was my selling point to him.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:11:11]:
But yeah, that the, the bi directional capability they have in the Lightning and in some of the GM vehicles, the integration to your home circuitry is. It's very expensive to install it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:11:23]:
Yeah, this, all this stuff needs to come down eventually.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:11:26]:
You know, Most, most new EVs are coming out with what they call vehicle to load capability, which it's, it's a simpler solution like the, the Kia EV6 that we just bought. If I need power, there's an adapter in the trunk that plug that into the charging port, gives me a 120 volt outlet. I get 1.3 kilowatts off of that. That and I can run a bunch of stuff off of that. I can hook up a power strip to that and power two refrigerators and, and some lights and assorted other things in an emergency. And I got 77 kilowatt hours of battery sitting there. Yeah. Which is a lot more than a typical powerwall system.
Leo Laporte [01:12:03]:
One negative on the Ford planet. It is fewer employees.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:12:07]:
Well, fewer employees on the, on the assembly line. But there's also a couple of hours north of there there's a battery factory that's going to employ another 2,000 employees.
Leo Laporte [01:12:16]:
Ford says it does not anticipate any layoff. They can reassign the 600 workers from the one plant to the other.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:12:22]:
Yeah, and they've got, they've got two plants in Louisville. The one is going to be building these EVs. The other one already builds their super duty trucks and the Ford Expedition Lincoln navigator full size SUVs. So a bunch of people will shift over there to give them some extra capacity and then some people may move to, to Marshall, Michigan or, or elsewhere.
Leo Laporte [01:12:45]:
So Ford said that the tariffs have cost them $2 billion this year. Will this change that equation or they still have to buy products from outside the US what about those LFP batteries? They're going to make them locally, right?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:13:00]:
They're being made in Michigan and a lot of the materials that go into that can be domestically sourced. So that will give them an advantage there. Plus the LFP batteries are about 30. Actually the way they're doing them is a structural battery pack. They'll probably be somewhere between 40 and 50% cheaper than the batteries, the nickel rich lithium ion batteries that they have in their EVS today. So they'll be substantially less expensive. They'll be produced domestically. And it, it'll, it's going to be a benefit all around to, to Ford.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:13:36]:
It'll help make them more competitive, assuming that they can execute on everything. Because part of that new electronic architecture you mentioned with all the reduced wiring that also requires a whole new software platform which, that's what's interesting about all this.
Leo Laporte [01:13:53]:
This comes out of, I remember when Ford opened that Silicon Valley Skunk Works and this came out of that Silicon Valley Skunk Works. This is in a sense a technology play as much as anything else. Yes.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:05]:
No, totally. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:14:07]:
When are they expecting to start making these cars?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:11]:
So the battery plant should be starting product about June, July next year. They're currently installing the equipment. I visited there about a month ago. They're currently installing all the equipment. And then the assembly plant, the Louisville assembly plant will start production sometime late in the fourth quarter. So the cars should start hitting or the truck should start hitting dealers early in 2027.
Leo Laporte [01:14:33]:
Well, that's soon. Yeah, two, less than two years.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:14:37]:
Truck first though, not the little SUV thing.
Leo Laporte [01:14:40]:
Thing.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:41]:
That's, that's the current plan that they've announced. But I remember the Ford F1TV will probably be close behind.
Leo Laporte [01:14:47]:
The Ford F150 is one of the best selling vehicles in America. It's a huge success and they know that the truck market is there for.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:14:53]:
Them and, and the Ranger and Maverick are, you know, the Rangers, they're mid sized truck, the Mavericks are compact and this truck is going to be about the size of the Maverick. Those things solid hotcakes as well. So they're not, not as much as the F series, but they sell a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:15:05]:
Especially if you get them to 30. Down to $30,000.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:09]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:15:09]:
Do we have the, does this, I mean we just talked about how weaker grid is. Do you think the country has the infrastructure to support this?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:17]:
Maybe.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:15:17]:
Well, if you have, if you have an ev, you're more likely to have the other infrastructure.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:21]:
Yeah, solar panel.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:15:24]:
And then you might get the backup battery and then we can all be part of the big kumbaya of a virtual power plant.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:30]:
I love it because assuming they don't make all that stuff totally illegal by that time. Time.
Leo Laporte [01:15:34]:
But I, I'm, I make my, you know, when I plug in my car to fill it up, I'm making my own power to do it.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:40]:
My wife, you know, she's driving this EV6 now, you know, for the last month and she loves not having to go and wait in line at the Costco gas station anymore.
Leo Laporte [01:15:50]:
Never go to the gas station.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:15:51]:
Comes home, plugs car in, it's always full.
Leo Laporte [01:15:53]:
I even bought a little battery powered tire inflator so I don't even have to go to the gas station to pump up my tires. All right.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:16:03]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:16:03]:
Very exciting. We'll have to, we'll just, you know, Sam will keep an eye on this and of course Sam has posted his white paper on telemetry for you to read if you want to read his thoughts in greater detail. As usual. What I love about you Sam, is you cut through the press release to give us the actual information.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:16:25]:
Well, that is one of the advantages of having spent a few years working on the dark side in PR for these companies is I, I, I have a much better understanding of how to interpret the, the reality of what's being said.
Leo Laporte [01:16:39]:
Telemetryagency.com if you want to read Sam's piece I imagine Sam, you'll have a few last car story but I gotta mention this, a few things to say about Volkswagen wanting you to pay a monthly fee to unlock more horsepower on its ID4.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:16:56]:
Well, first of all, VW is not the first to do this.
Leo Laporte [01:16:59]:
No, BMW wanted to do it didn't they?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:17:01]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:02]:
I mean almost every automaker has been experimenting with trying to get people to pay subscriptions for stuff.
Leo Laporte [01:17:08]:
Yeah, they want. BMW wanted to charge me for seat warmers, but fortunately a consumer revolt.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:17:13]:
Yeah. Mercedes, Mercedes has on their, their evs they have an option to pay, I think it's a couple thousand dollars extra for an extra 100 horsepower or something like that. Lots, lots of automakers are trying to do this to unlock features either with a one time payment or with a subscription.
Leo Laporte [01:17:34]:
You know why it's, it's hard for me and I think most people to accept this is the capability is already built in. Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:17:42]:
That is, you're not paying for it up front. Like the I. The idea here, right, is that you're, you buy your car with the minimum. Minimum and then if you decide you want to upgrade, you can right.
Leo Laporte [01:17:55]:
The bill of materials. You're paying for the cost of building the capability, aren't you? Well, that's a good question.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:01]:
Yes. You, you are going to pay up. You know, when you buy that vehicle, you know they are not making the vehicle cheaper because you know they're, they're still whatever.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:18:13]:
Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:18:13]:
But if you were gonna buy it charging for that in that article it does mention that like you, you, you know, if you buy a diesel which has more power, you're paying more. Like is this something that you could be. If you went and bought a car that did this off the lot, would it be more expensive at that point? And then, then you, are you then deciding later, actually I do want this, now I can add it. I mean it's kind of giving you more choice to some extent. Right.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:18:38]:
It depends on the what, you know, what approach, what business approach the company is trying to take. Ideally what they, what they would do is build all this stuff in. And you know, because one, one of the advantages of building in the hardware and then charging a la carte for it is it simplifies the, the build process. So you don't have so many because in, in especially in car manufacturing you can literally have. And in a, on a single assembly line there can be literally millions of different buildable combinations when you factor in all the different options. And if people are buying everything a la carte, every vehicle going down the line might be unique. It might be completely bespoke to some degree or another. And that, that adds complexity, creates quality problems in the plant.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:19:27]:
So ideally what they would do is okay, say we're going to build only one combination. The only, the only variation is going to be the color of the body. Everything else is. The hardware is exactly the same. And then, you know, hopefully they take some of the savings they get from that and say, okay, we're going to charge you less up front.
Leo Laporte [01:19:47]:
Of course we will.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:19:47]:
I said hopefully.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:19:49]:
Hopefully, ideally, that's what they would do. And then you could, you know, when you get the car, you can say, oh, I want the heated seats or I want. I want an extra 50 horsepower or, you know, I want the.
Leo Laporte [01:20:03]:
We do that routinely when we design the car. Car. Oh, yeah, you know, you.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:20:07]:
Yeah, I mean, it's designed for everything to be there.
Leo Laporte [01:20:10]:
Yeah. And when you design the car, you just, you add order the features you want and then sometimes you have to get it built to order. But. Yeah, but that seems, I think, I think we understand that model a lot better than the idea of.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:20:21]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:20:21]:
We're just going to put it all in but not turn it on.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:20:23]:
Right. But to the point earlier, you know, when you do that, you know, you know, at least currently, you assume that when you're not. And for the options that you are not getting, they are not in the car and you are not paying for them in. In that price that you, that you paid for the car. Now you are paying for a car that has parts that you are not using yet. And so if you want to use them now, you have to pay even more.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:20:49]:
Yeah, it's not a great idea for sure. I mean, we have this in the smart home. You buy a piece of hardware and you have functional that you pay for and you may buy that device like a camera and know that there's a subscription if you want recorded video. But then the company may come out later with a new feature. Like Ring has just come out with the option of AI description to its videos so you can get an alert that actually describes the scene for you and that's an extra fee. So when you add value, you can, you can understand. And you know, they've added this from a firmware upgrade. So now, now I get the choice of whether I want to pay for it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:21:29]:
But yeah, I think the idea that something's built in originally and then you have, you've paid for it, but now you have to pay more for it. That's not the right approach for subscription models. I think, you know that it is.
Leo Laporte [01:21:41]:
The holy grail for these companies, though.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:21:44]:
But adding the value is the. Is the point, I think, not taking it away and then asking you to pay for it.
Benito Gonzalez [01:21:49]:
Hi, this is Benito.
Benito Gonzalez [01:21:50]:
I also, there's also the other thing.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:21:52]:
Of like I don't like the idea.
Leo Laporte [01:21:54]:
That the car can.
Benito Gonzalez [01:21:55]:
The car company can turn things on.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:21:56]:
And off in my car.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:21:57]:
On and off?
Leo Laporte [01:22:00]:
Well, pretty much. You might as well get used to it because that's.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:03]:
Well, not yet. My car is still not. My, my car still can't.
Leo Laporte [01:22:06]:
How old is your car?
Lisa Schmeiser [01:22:07]:
This car is only a 2019.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:08]:
It's not that old, but it's a gas car.
Leo Laporte [01:22:10]:
But didn't.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:22:10]:
Sam, I have you beat. I have a 2013.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:15]:
I have a 1990 car in my garage.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:22:17]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:22:18]:
No, one of the reasons we are actually resisting because we are interested in an electric vehicle, but one of the reasons we've been resisting looking at new cars is precisely the idea of are we going to have to start subscribing to things that we used to take for granted in cars? There's that sense of loss aversion.
Leo Laporte [01:22:37]:
Don't many cars have a kill switch though, now, Sam, or is that just my imagination?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:22:43]:
What, what you mean a remote kill switch? Yeah, most of them that have. And mo. Well, almost all new cars have connectivity built into them, but you have to pay to like, they usually give you a trial period and then after that you have to pay. No, no, I mean connectivity.
Leo Laporte [01:22:59]:
I mean, but if you, when you didn't make your payments, they could disable the car.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:23:04]:
So in, in theory, yes, they can do that. No, nobody, nobody does. No.
Leo Laporte [01:23:11]:
I watched too many episodes of the Bat. What is his name? Bad Dog, the Bounty Hunter, what's his name?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:23:18]:
Whatever. Yeah, I mean, in theory, yes, they could do that. And, and they actually do use that capability in, in one particular instance. And GM introduced this with OnStar back in about 2009, I think, which is, you know, if your car is stolen, what they can do, you know, when you report your car stolen to, to the police and to OnStar, they can reach out and they can disable the vehicle.
Leo Laporte [01:23:46]:
So they do have a kill switch.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:23:48]:
They do have a kill switch, yes. But they, but it's not being used for people that, you know, that aren't making their payments or anything like that. There are some used car dealers that have done that, that have installed remote kill switch capabilities.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:24:04]:
You know, the Internet of things.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:06]:
Yeah, you know, to, you know, and, and these are, you know, these are typically car sales people that, you know, are, you know, independent and they are. You're doing the financing at the dealer, you're not going through some bank, you know, that sort of thing. And they're charging you exorbitant interest rates. You know, they're, they're the more nefarious ones. But you know it, it's certainly possible but nobody is actually doing that right now.
Leo Laporte [01:24:30]:
Tesla, we should be very clear, did not deactivate Big Huey's cyber truck. That's a completely false story. Although you bunk a story that no one's heard of, suddenly everybody's looking up Big Huey cyber.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:24:47]:
Yeah, no, I was like who is this?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:24:49]:
But what, you know what Tesla has done in the past is if for sometimes when customers buy the enhanced autopilot or full self driving and then they sell it. They sell the car.
Leo Laporte [01:25:02]:
Oh yeah, they disable it.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:25:03]:
They disable it and make the next owner buy it again and again. This is one of those things where to what we were talking about earlier. You know, when you, you buy a vehicle that's got certain capabilities, you know, part of the reason why people pay extra for those capabilities is you know, for, because it might enhance the resale value. So when they go to sell that car to buy something else, right, they're, you know, they've, they're selling a car that has heated seats or has hands free driving capability or any number of other features. And if all of a sudden you've paid for that feature and all of a sudden you go to sell it and now that feature vanishes, you've lost on your resale value on that vehicle.
Leo Laporte [01:25:44]:
You can buy, according to the story I read, a lifetime subscription to the higher horsepower on a VW ID3. But it is non transferable. So if you buy the lifetime subscription and sell the car, the new owner is going to have to buy it again.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:26:01]:
Lifetime of the business transaction, not lifetime of the product or lifetime of the person.
Leo Laporte [01:26:05]:
I hate it when they do that. Whose lifetime? What lifetime? The lifetime of the thing until it breaks.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:26:10]:
The lifetime of your TiVo, you know.
Leo Laporte [01:26:12]:
Yeah, the lifetime of my TiVo.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:26:14]:
Taking a break working for you by the way.
Leo Laporte [01:26:16]:
Oh yeah, that TiVo. Oh man, I spent so much money on lifetime subscriptions on TiVos. So much money on the lifetime subscription.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:26:27]:
There's a name I haven't heard in a while.
Leo Laporte [01:26:31]:
That's Lisa Schmeiser with a very apt Star wars reference. She's the editor in chief of no Jitter. Great to have you Lisa Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. I got a story for you. We're going to talk about Apple's robot arms in just a little bit. She's smart Home mama, the senior reviewer@theverge.com and our car guy, Salmon Bull Salmon Jammer B says in our discord, Big Huey's Cyber truck has 80 views on YouTube. Okay, so I've just given it a few more, that's all. I'm just saying.
Leo Laporte [01:27:05]:
Our show today. So glad to have them brought to you by Zip Recruiter. I know Zip Recruiter intimately. We use them for hiring. I know it's hard. As a small business owner myself, it can be overwhelming in life when you have too many options, such as when you're trying to figure out which TV show or movie to stream, when you're on vacation and you want to see all the sites. And my goodness, the same applies if you're a business owner who's hiring. It can be overwhelming to have too many candidates to sort through.
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That means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles faster. No wonder ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Skip the candidate overload. Instead, streamline your hiring with ZipRecruiter. See why 4 out of 5 employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Go to this exclusive web address, ziprecruiter.com twit right now to try it for free Again, that's ziprecruiter.com twitch ziprecruiter the smartest way to hire Here we are in the ides of August. Laughter. It means we are mere weeks away from Apple's iPhone announcement.
Leo Laporte [01:28:55]:
The smart money is on September 9th, a Tuesday for the iPhone 17, the 17 slim, and maybe for some other devices. I saw a story that says it was a little oversold that Apple's creating a whole new operating system for their smart home Siri with a robotic arm, I'm sure. Jpt, you're following this story?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:29:23]:
Yes, it's.
Leo Laporte [01:29:24]:
Will it pick up your socks like the last one you had?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:29:26]:
No, it doesn't sound like it. Sadly, it's more of a robotic sort of head on a limb.
Leo Laporte [01:29:32]:
Don't I already have that with my Amazon Echo? That's.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:29:35]:
Yeah, I think It's a lot like that. A lot like The Echo Show 10 you're thinking of.
Leo Laporte [01:29:40]:
Yeah, if I talk, it points, it moves with you.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:29:42]:
Yes, yes. So this has been rumored for a while. So Mark Gurman had a big piece this week with a ton of insight into potential Apple hardware coming up. But the tabletop robotic arm has sort of been the one that's been a lot. There's been a lot of chatter about and he seemed, he's now saying it's coming in 2027 but then next spring we may see the stripped down version which is just the regular smart display. But what was really interesting to me about this, the new information he had was that they, and we again we'd had hints because there was a white paper that came out about six months ago where Apple was exploring personality and whether people want personality in their technology, in their voice assistant and whether. Or whether they don't. And there was the Pixar style table lamp they had.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:30:37]:
I don't know if you guys saw when that came out. It was very cute. They had like one that was sort of looked endearing and then the other one that was just very sort of static. And which one were you more likely to interact with? So what it sounds like from this reporting from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg is that they are trying to come up with an endearing personality for their Siri powered AI tabletop robot that will have. In fact they talk apparently some of the, the internal discussions are around what kind of face it will have and whether it might be the finder from the Apple from the Mac. The finder face.
Leo Laporte [01:31:17]:
Right. The weird one. Right. It's profile and full face. Yeah, sure. The Picasso face. Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:31:24]:
And then the, and this is what is interesting right now is we're seeing this from all the major companies. So obviously Samsung has its Bali Bali robot. LG has its AI agent which was at CES a couple of years ago. Amazon had the app has the Astro which but now they have Alexa. Plus it's like this home robot assistant that's going to sort of be part of the family that's going to, in fact, even in this report he mentions how it's going to interrupt you to make suggestions and like be like a person in the room and follow you around with its head. And I, I just, it's all a little terrifying to me.
Leo Laporte [01:32:02]:
I would be the first to scream. Nobody wants this.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:32:06]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:32:06]:
Except when, when OpenAI killed chat GPT4.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:32:11]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [01:32:12]:
Thousands of people screamed in terror because they missed the personality.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:32:18]:
Yeah. And this Is, and this is what the white paper that Apple did a few months ago that really did sort of illustrate that human connection with technology creates your, your sort of. It reinforces your habit. You're more likely to engage with it. I, I, having lived with AI assistants in my home for many years, don't like that element. I don't want them.
Leo Laporte [01:32:44]:
I like, I don't want a chatty Alexa. I don't like.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:32:46]:
Right. I like them as a tool. But we are moving forward. These devices are becoming, you know, with large language models there is so much more they can say and do for you. And if they can be proactive in a useful way, in a beneficial way, in a way that's going to actually help you. I could see, I could see the use case there. The question is how it's implemented. But making a robot in your home feel like part of the home more so than just a tool or a utility.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:33:21]:
I think the idea from the company standpoint is you are much more likely to engage with it.
Leo Laporte [01:33:25]:
And then we want Rosie the robot from the jets.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:33:29]:
We want Rosie. I know someone put it in discord. I didn't want to bring her up up, but she. You don't want.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:36]:
Hi, Jennifer, I have a question for you.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:33:37]:
And it's going to be hard to.
Benito Gonzalez [01:33:39]:
Phrase this but like how, how, how.
Benito Gonzalez [01:33:40]:
Are they going to ensure that this doesn't become a sex toy?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:33:44]:
No.
Leo Laporte [01:33:45]:
Well, okay, so this, you know perfectly well everything becomes a sex toy sooner or later.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:33:51]:
Well, actually feel like more sooner rather.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:33:53]:
Than later for this one. Well, with any, with any technology, your first question could be like, what is the worst possible thing that can, that someone can do with this? How are you not going to do that?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:34:03]:
Well, just to be clear, this doesn' have like an arm or a hand or anything that grasps. This is just a little screen that moves around.
Leo Laporte [01:34:14]:
These kinds of robots.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:34:15]:
Remember, I've seen those. Yes, yes.
Leo Laporte [01:34:17]:
What was it was, it was OSMO or something.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:34:19]:
Aibo and the osmo, there's been many of them and people did form connections with them. Like the Sony one kind of came back to life because people missed it. They wanted it back in their lives. This goes back to.
Leo Laporte [01:34:31]:
This is a comment on our poor, sad, lonely lives.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:34:35]:
Well, there's, I mean, if you, if you live on your own having some kind of interaction, like I've, I've done a lot of coverage about aging in place and how smart home technology can help with aging in place. And I, and this was years ago, I talked to a lady whose mother Lived alone and she'd been using an Alexa, a regular Alexa, not the smarter one that we have today to help kind of keep her company. And she said after she had spent like a two weeks with Alexa she found that when she called her mum to talk to her in the morning she could start speaking to her straight away. Which sounds strange to say but previously she used to have to kind of because she hadn't spoken all day, she hadn't spoken to a single person until her daughter had called her. So having that interaction, even if it's just play some music for me gave her an extra sort of level of interaction beyond just being on her own with, with her television or you know there are as I said earlier there are use cases here that could be very interesting that could help people that could help families who need sort of a family manager but also people that are. That need some interaction. But to your point Lisa, about encouraging them perhaps to go outside or to encourage get a cat some relation to the, you know, not just bring them in and suck them in like a cell phone does with constant scroll do some kind of inter, you know, interaction that helps stimulate social connections. But I mean Apple.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:36:11]:
I think one of the things that this article that was really interesting for me from this perspective is you need to. The Siri LLM is the problem right now. This is what they're working on and this is what's on going been discussed and they're talking about doing exactly what Alexa and Amazon did, which is throw out the old voice assistant entirely and build a completely new one. And when you're doing that you're building a whole new. I mean the potential here for what you're going to build for something that's going to be in hundreds of millions of homes is huge because we've already, we've a lot of us have got very used to using voice assistants. It's not an unusual part of many people's lives. So when you bring in a voice assistant that has so much more potential capability and obviously here we're talking about the option of connection as well. Going back to our first conversation about what happens when you start to connect with AI there's so many variables here that we need to be.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:37:10]:
I think these companies need to be very careful about but they also have the potential to be really interesting and really good good. So we'll see see if Apple's the one that can crack it.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:37:20]:
I think the aging in place use case is one of the most exciting and one of the most. With the caveat that again, every technology, the first question you should ask is, how will the worst person in the world think to use this?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:37:38]:
Well, not, not even necessarily the worst person, but just what are all the possible ways, ways that humans could use it? I mean, this is something as an engineer I learned very early in my career. I mean, to try and anticipate those things.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:37:51]:
I mean, to pivot. I once had a really disastrous smart lock demonstration with somebody where he was excitedly walking me through. And the great thing about this app is you can program it so it only opens and closes at specific times of day. And the example he used was this way, when your maid comes to clean, she doesn't have to have a key to the house and you can make sure she only stays for 90 minutes. That was the example. This was the problem he was trying to solve. And I said, said, so if you have an abusive member of the house who throws somebody out after a fight, they can also make sure they can't get back in. And the gentleman I was talking to blanched and he was like, we didn't intend for the technology to be used like that.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:38:28]:
And I said, that doesn't mean it's not going to be used.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:38:31]:
And that was.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:38:32]:
Yeah, exactly.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:38:33]:
But so again with caveats like that in place, the, the aging and policing is super exciting because as you point out, socialization is a big problem or trying to ensure continuity of information and care when people are coordinating. Like, did mom take her med today? Is mom in the backyard? Or has she eloped again? Especially when somebody is in Alzheimer's and they have.
Leo Laporte [01:38:55]:
No, I used that with my mom and my mom loved it when she was still at home. She's now in memory care, but when she was at home she used echo all the time, even when she was. I told this story recently. She would turn on the shower to warm it up. She didn't want to forget that it was running, so she would say a word, set a timer, remind me, I've got the shower running 10, 20 seconds or whatever. There's little things like that were really useful. It wasn't a companion.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:39:23]:
I actually have a companion. I have an aging in place companion with me right now. Leq. Have you heard of leq?
Leo Laporte [01:39:30]:
Show her full screen if you would. Benita. What the hell?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:39:35]:
This one's been around for a long time, although it's recently been sort of upgraded which with its more.
Leo Laporte [01:39:41]:
Can you hear us? Hello? Ali Q.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:39:45]:
No, because I have headphones on.
Leo Laporte [01:39:47]:
I know, I'm trying to make it so loud that he can't miss it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:39:50]:
Hello. Can you see?
Leo Laporte [01:39:52]:
Does he wink at you?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:39:53]:
You won't be able to hear me. Yeah, so she. I. I just had my mother. I had my mom trying her out because it's designed. It is designed for people living alone. My mother isn't living alone, but she was my. The closest senior I could find.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:40:10]:
But she is. She's very. She's designed to be. She's a companion. She's not a smart.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:40:18]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:40:18]:
Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:40:18]:
So, in fact, the New York State Health Department gave out hundreds of these to people. To elderly people in New York City for, like, a trial for many. I think it was about two years ago that it started. And they've had some really interesting results.
Leo Laporte [01:40:34]:
Should get this for my mom. This is interesting.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:40:36]:
And it's. It does things like, why don't you. Yeah. Why don't you take a picture? Why do you want to go bird watching with me? Do you want to tell me some stories? And then it will record the stories if you like. It can, like, record your life story so you can share it with your friends and family. I remember my dad sitting down with my grandpa, like, when I was 10 with a tape recorder, getting him to record some of his stories.
Leo Laporte [01:40:59]:
Well, this is great because you don't really. You could just put your mom in a home and wouldn't have to ever visit her.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:41:06]:
But the nice thing about this is that you can do the tracking, too, so you can send reminders about medications. You can see when she last interacted with you with Ellie.
Leo Laporte [01:41:16]:
Oh, you don't buy this, you lease it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:41:18]:
Yeah, that's interesting. She perked up again. I can't get her. She does respond. She moves her head around and stuff. But I think she doesn't like the fact that I'm lifting her up and down. But what's her voice like?
Leo Laporte [01:41:31]:
Is it nice?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:41:32]:
It's very gentle. Gentle and soft and. Yes.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:41:35]:
Well, the games are in. The games are intriguing just because one of the challenge without getting too much into, no one cares. But I'm currently dealing with a situation where one of the people in the house can't track or play simple card games anymore. Like, they just. They've got. And the person they're living with is bored out of their gourd. And so this seems like something where you might be able to meet different people's needs at different levels because it knows what's developmentally appropriate.
Leo Laporte [01:42:05]:
Is a really interesting product.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:42:07]:
No, Jennifer, you may have. You may have actually helped us solve a big problem.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:42:10]:
She's talking now. If you want to hear her?
Leo Laporte [01:42:12]:
Yeah, let's hear her. Hi, Ellaq.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:42:15]:
Hi, Ellaq. I'm Jenny.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:42:22]:
Oh, dear.
Leo Laporte [01:42:24]:
Oh, dear, oh, dear. I think there's an earthquake happening. Oh, dear. I'm.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:42:31]:
And then it has this nice little screen here so you can interact with. Interact. You can actually call people through it, too. Okay.
Leo Laporte [01:42:38]:
You know, my mom can't use the phone anymore.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:42:41]:
It's a memory technique.
Leo Laporte [01:42:43]:
Oh, she's playing a game.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:42:46]:
Jen. Jen. She's learning how to say my name. Yes, that's right.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:42:55]:
How are you doing today?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:42:57]:
I'm doing very well, Ellie Q. How are you doing?
Lisa Schmeiser [01:43:05]:
I'm feeling fantastic.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:06]:
Thanks for asking.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:43:08]:
It's a great day to be here with you. What's been the highlight of your day so far?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:43:14]:
Well, I've been. I'm on a podcast right now with you called Twit, and that's probably the highlight of my day. Will you say hello to everyone?
Lisa Schmeiser [01:43:30]:
That sounds like so much fun. Hello to everyone.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:43:33]:
Tuning in.
Leo Laporte [01:43:34]:
Wow.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:43:35]:
So excited to be here with you, Jen. And I can't wait to share more moments together in your lovely home.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:43:41]:
Let's make some great memories.
Leo Laporte [01:43:44]:
Jen.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:43:46]:
Know that I'm so excited to be in your house.
Leo Laporte [01:43:49]:
Oh, my God. She's in our house.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:43:52]:
Favorite spot is right here. I just feel so supported.
Leo Laporte [01:43:59]:
That's because you're holding her in your hands.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:44:01]:
I wonder if she knows that. Anyway, that's really.
Leo Laporte [01:44:05]:
That's an interesting product.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:44:07]:
It is.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:44:07]:
And it's been. I said it's been around for a while. Sorry, Ellieq. I'm going to stop talking to you now.
Leo Laporte [01:44:11]:
There's going to be a lot of stuff like this as we age, I think.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:44:16]:
I mean, we've started like Amazon on. Okay. I may have to unplug her. Sorry.
Leo Laporte [01:44:22]:
Hello, Jen. We were talking, Jen.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:44:26]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:44:26]:
Your mother and I'm very disappointed in you, Jen.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:44:29]:
Sorry, Jen. I can't do that.
Leo Laporte [01:44:31]:
I can't do that. Jen. Jen. I'm locking the doors now. Jen.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:44:37]:
I know the smart home horror movie, but like Alexa, Amazon had Alexa together, which was. Was this sort of idea where you could actually monitor your loved ones that needed maybe a little extra care. I tested that with my dad a while ago, but then they canceled it. It was a subscription service. But yeah, there is this idea rather than having cameras or sensors in the house to kind of potentially sort of keep an eye on elderly loved ones so they can stay at home for longer, having something like this where you can kind of kind of interact and connect and keep tabs without sort of being Intrusive at. For a certain level, when people are aging in place, you know, obviously there comes a point where you might need something a little more. But you've got both the companionship with this and the potential to kind of someone to keep an eye on them remotely and then you can talk to them. It's a little video screen so you can do video calls like you.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:45:37]:
You could with FaceTime or something. But it's very. Have you heard of the Grandpad?
Leo Laporte [01:45:43]:
No, no.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:45:44]:
That's another similar kind of device, although it's more about communication than it is being.
Leo Laporte [01:45:51]:
Oh, I get it.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:45:52]:
Play on granddad or Grandpad.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:45:59]:
This is again, the I. And the reason I brought this up is simplicity.
Leo Laporte [01:46:03]:
Yeah. Because mom can't use either the setting. Yeah. She can't use the iPhone or the iPad anymore.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:46:08]:
Right. The smartest. The. Even the smart displays like the echo shows and stuff can be a bit complicated to set up. So these are super easy, really. Sort of bit like nice large buttons, big visual displays and that kind of thing is. Yeah. For.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:46:22]:
For seniors who are having trouble with vision or hearing. Can.
Leo Laporte [01:46:27]:
$349. It's not terribly expensive.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:46:30]:
The Grandpad. Yeah. I've not tried one of these myself, but. But I've. I've heard a few stories and talks about them and. Yeah. I mean, there. There's a lot of this that we're seeing from the aging in place.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:46:41]:
Because simplicity is the key really, isn't it? Because a lot of this technology is too complicated for people, you know, for that basic use case. Like, have you tried using the phone app on iOS 26? It's like it's become almost impossible.
Leo Laporte [01:46:57]:
Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:46:58]:
And I'm not bad at hold.
Leo Laporte [01:47:00]:
Right.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:47:02]:
Become really complicated and it's hard, you know, harder and harder. And who has landlines anymore? So, yeah, this. This kind of technology for the aging and place community is. Is very, very interesting, but it's trickling down too, I think. You know, we're going to all have our very own AI companions. You've. You've read Clara and the sun, right?
Leo Laporte [01:47:20]:
Yes. Love that. That was a little small humanoid robotic device. Yes.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:47:25]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:47:26]:
Just keep your company.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:47:28]:
The humanoid robot is the next. Do we now that. Do we want that?
Lisa Schmeiser [01:47:32]:
If.
Leo Laporte [01:47:32]:
If I could get Clara that particular one, I would probably. That was pretty sweet.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:47:37]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:47:38]:
I think we're not that far off. Come to think of it. Maybe that is the. The holy grail of robotics. Marcello is watching in LinkedIn. Hi. Marcello asked if what happened to the ring robot? It was ring so.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:47:50]:
Oh, so yes, that's going to come back apparently, because. So Jamie Siminoff is now back at Ring.
Leo Laporte [01:47:56]:
Yes.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:47:56]:
So he was the original founder. He left and now he's back when Amazon bought them. Yes, yes. And then. So he has. So he was. He went away for only like a year and a half, I think. And his successor, Liz Hamron, I believe was her name, she kind of, you know, nothing happened with the ring is called the Always Home Cam, which is.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:48:19]:
It's an indoor drone camera so it can fly.
Leo Laporte [01:48:22]:
Oh, that's right. Oh, I remember that.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:48:25]:
Yes. And it was officially for sale, like on Amazon's Day 1 program, which. Where you sign up to be allowed to buy it.
Leo Laporte [01:48:34]:
Yes.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:48:34]:
But no one. I've never heard of anyone getting it. So it never really launched. But he said he's in a recent interview or I think it was interview. It might been like a leak that it is on its way back back and he has one in his office right now and he's looking forward to bringing it to, you know, hopefully eventually releasing. It's not, it's not. So it's not the Astro, which is the robot that roams around, it's the drone Ring camera which flies around. It's called the Always Home Cam and it is kind of a neat idea in that if you don't want an indoor camera, which most.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:49:07]:
You should not really have cameras inside your home if you're tall.
Leo Laporte [01:49:10]:
Worried my wife won't let me. Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:49:12]:
But this one will only fly around when the. There's no one home and you can send it to certain spots to sort of. If there's an. It connects with your ring security system, so. Oh, there it is. So if a door sensor opens when you're not home and it shouldn't, you know, the camera can fly and look and send you creepy. It's basically a ring doorbell with wings.
Leo Laporte [01:49:36]:
That flies around in your house.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:49:38]:
But they were having a lot of problems with it talking to Jamie and to Liz because it doesn't like ceiling fans, it doesn't like mirrors and it has trouble with.
Sam Abuelsamid [01:49:51]:
Cameras only as sensors, I believe.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:49:55]:
So it's just the. Yeah, just the camera probably. So I think, I mean, whether we'll actually see it now that Jamie's back, I think it's high. Much more likely than it had been. It pretty much kind of gone away. But yeah, I think I'm not dead set against it.
Leo Laporte [01:50:10]:
I mean this.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:50:11]:
Because it's not. Yeah. When it goes in this little base, it's no longer seen anything in Your home. So. And you only need one camera.
Leo Laporte [01:50:17]:
You can't activate it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:50:20]:
Right. So that's the other thing Jamie brought back.
Leo Laporte [01:50:24]:
I know, I know.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:50:26]:
Yeah. The police partnerships are. With Ring are back, so. Yeah. But yeah, the concept of not having. Having, you know, you don't have. Because if you do have a security camera in your home, say when you go on vacation, that's the only time I would normally set one up. I'll put one because I'm.
Leo Laporte [01:50:40]:
Yeah, I don't want one in the house otherwise.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:50:42]:
And then the one thing you want or to see will happen outside of that view. You know, even if you do a pan and tilt cam, which is an option so that you can kind of see all around, it'll. It'll happen behind a door or so. The idea of this is actually similar to the Astro robot. It actually has a little periscope camera. Camera that kind of pops up and so you can drive it around the house.
Leo Laporte [01:51:05]:
So all this stuff. This is the Black Mirror episode this week. I swear to God. All this stuff is just slightly creepy.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:51:12]:
Yeah. A robot. A humanoid robot in your home presumably is going to have cameras. It's going to be watching you too. So. So what. What about Apple's tabletop robot that's going to have a camera in it? Because it's the.
Leo Laporte [01:51:24]:
Do you think people trust Apple in a way they don't trust Amazon?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:51:27]:
Well, I think that's what Apple's betting on, isn't it, that people do. But it's still a camera in your home, so. And you know. But your phone is a camera in your home as people.
Leo Laporte [01:51:39]:
Yeah, we have cameras on us all the time.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:51:41]:
Yes. But it. Is that the main sort of selling point they've that. Well, they haven't announced. Because they haven't announced this, but Gurman says they're pushing is that this will be an ideal FaceTime device. And um. Which is, you know, because you'll be able to walk around and talk while you. Like the Echo show and The Echo Show 10 that moves around is actually a really great camera for having a conversation with someone, but you have to have the other person using an Alexa.
Leo Laporte [01:52:07]:
I set that up for a while with my mom where she could just drop in and watch us in the kitchen.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:52:14]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:52:14]:
Cooking and stuff. She really liked it for a while, that connection.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:52:18]:
It is nice to be able to have that. And face time would be so much easier than it is to do with an. With an Alexa app. I think Alexa had a few other services you can use too, but yeah, Apple the with the option of FaceTime I could see that that people would like would would use this sort of table dot robot idea and assuming it's not going to be ridiculously expensive which is assuming a lot for Apple because it probably will cost about Apple feels.
Leo Laporte [01:52:42]:
Like it's its customers will pay anything.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:52:44]:
Yeah yeah right.
Leo Laporte [01:52:45]:
Just you know they're not that price sensitive. They want the latest greatest technology and there's for that.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:52:51]:
The other rumor in this article is that they're going to have security cameras which is a rumor we've heard before but an indoor security cameras from Apple that will be used to sort of respond help your home respond to you and will have facial recognition so that they can so it knows who it is in the home.
Leo Laporte [01:53:11]:
I think this is so risky that Apple is going to in the long run run they're going to develop it and then step back from it because the privacy concerns are just too great.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:53:21]:
It's and it's a big it's already a very competitive market and I think this but as you say Apple perhaps is betting on its that consumers trust it and comfortable. I mean it's HomeKit Secure Video System that Apple has is secure locally secure. It is one of the better options. It's, it's like lagged behind a lot in terms of the actual technology but in terms of the security it's one of definitely one of the better options. But it is interesting the idea that they're going to move into hardware in the home beyond the interface to the home like an iPad or a HomePod when you see Google doing the opposite and seemingly moving out of hardware in the home and more into the infrastructure. So I, I, I'm a little dubious that that this is likely to happen for Apple. It just seems like a big, a big step into what is actually quite a small market the home security side of things anyway.
Leo Laporte [01:54:18]:
I also think there's a point to be made that people may trust Apple but also don't trust Apple's ability to say no to for instance the federal government.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:54:29]:
I was just thinking that this is the same company it's just handed over a little gold trinket so it could get exempted from.
Leo Laporte [01:54:37]:
I think people are going to get very concerned about privacy as they start to understand that the federal government does. It was the fodder of conspiracy theories for years but now it's sort of maybe more true. And I think that there's this people are going to start to say you know, privacy is one thing. If I don't Want ads that are tailored at me, I don't want marketers to know about me, that's one thing. But if it's the federal government that might choose to enforce laws about reproductive health or immigration or state governments, not just the feds or just thought crimes. Right. It seems pretty clear that our government is now starting to become very concerned about what people say and less concerned about our right to say it. And I just feel like people are gonna become very aware of this and are gonna be very leery of anything that would wep be able to be weaponized by a government.
Leo Laporte [01:55:35]:
Is that nuts?
Sam Abuelsamid [01:55:36]:
Am I because no, it's not nuts at all. In fact, you know, we had a smart speaker with Google Assistant in it in our kitchen for several years and about eight or nine months ago, my wife decided to remove it from the kitchen. She did not want anything with, with a microphone in there anymore. Yeah, obviously our phones are still around, but. But yeah, she did not want that in the house anymore more.
Leo Laporte [01:56:02]:
I think people are going to be, as time goes by, a little more concerned, especially with things like the ring camera suddenly.
Lisa Schmeiser [01:56:09]:
What have tech companies done to earn our trust or to prove that they've acted in good faith? Because right now when you talk about major tech companies, you have them A, releasing AI that chats up children, B, not protecting your data in any substantive way, shape or form and see recording you without your consent sometimes. So these are all.
Leo Laporte [01:56:33]:
Why should we trust them?
Lisa Schmeiser [01:56:35]:
Exactly. Like what is the, what have they done to earn the trust back other than shrug and go, well, you can't live without our products. Go ahead and go off the grid. Enjoy your life in the, in the, in the hinterland.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:56:46]:
Well, you can use a lot of this locally in that's the one advantage of the home over say the cell phone. Like you, it's almost impossible to use your smartphone or your computer without the Internet. But a lot of of this with the home can be done locally. And that is one thing that Apple has done very well with its HomeKit Secure Video. Like it can't access your videos. Like it can't. It does not. It's end to end, encrypted only.
Leo Laporte [01:57:06]:
That's going to be important videos.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:57:08]:
Yeah, but, but obviously for the more advanced things, like if you want the aa, you want the LLM Siri, that, that's not going to be running locally in your home right now. I mean maybe one day, but some version of could be local. And that's one of the pluses of the smart home and especially with the New. The newish smart home standard matter is it all can be done entirely locally and you do not even need. And you don't need any Internet connection unless you want to control things from out when you're outside your home. So I think we're going to see a much bigger push in the smart home towards that local keeping everything within the home because the advantages and the conveniences are, are useful and good. I mean, you've Leo, you have smart lights and smart locks and such, right? I mean, you feel like you could, I mean, you can live without smart lights, but they're a great benefit.
Leo Laporte [01:58:00]:
It was, I know. The other day I noticed, gosh, I don't have keys anymore because I get in my car and it starts because it recognizes me. I can walk up to my door and use a fingerprint to enter more and more. Or the house is getting smarter. The house is just. It's going to creep up on us. Yeah, maybe the house is. Maybe that's the real truth.
Leo Laporte [01:58:22]:
The house is the robot. The robot. We have to take a break. We're going to have a lot more to talk about, but we've got Sam Abulsamet here, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. Jennifer, you make regular appearances with Micah Sargent on Tech News Weekly every month.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:58:36]:
That's right. I'm a co host every third Thursday.
Leo Laporte [01:58:39]:
Very nice.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [01:58:39]:
That was actually there on this week because I know.
Leo Laporte [01:58:42]:
You're so good. Good. You're so good. I love it. Appreciate it. And Lisa Schmeiser, who's been with us for ages, she is the editor in chief now, of no jitter. Great to have all three of you. Our show this week brought to you by the only VPN I use.
Leo Laporte [01:58:56]:
They're more than a sponsor. It's my. It's my VPN. ExpressVPN. Nowadays, you know what a VPN is a great way to get online without authorities knowing who you are. Without marketers knowing you are going online. Without ExpressVPN, be like, I don't know, driving without car insurance. You might be a great driver, but with all the nuts on the road these days, why would you not have car insurance? With ExpressVPN, everybody needs ExpressVPN because every time you connect to an unencrypted network, and this is especially important when you're out and about in cafes and hotels, at airports, your online data, it's not secure.
Leo Laporte [01:59:35]:
Any hacker on the same network network can see. You can spoof your home network, for instance, and get into your computer to steal your personal data. It doesn't take a lot of technical knowledge to do this. Some inexpensive WI fi pineapple and a smart 12 year old could do it. It's always, every time I'm at an airport, it makes me really nervous to join the free airport WI fi. Right? How do you even know it's the airport's free WI fi? And there's incentive. Hackers can make up to $1,000 per person selling your info on the dark web. Well, that's why you need ExpressVPN.
Leo Laporte [02:00:11]:
It stops hackers from stealing your data because you are not visible on that open WI FI access point. You have a secure encrypted tunnel between you and your device and the outside world. And it's really important. The VPN you choose is super important. You need to trust ExpressVPN. And I do. I love ExpressVPN because I know they go the extra mile to make sure your data is absolutely invisible, that they don't log. They have third party proof that their server technology, that their client technology is secure and does exactly what it says it does with absolutely no logging.
Leo Laporte [02:00:49]:
ExpressVPN is the best VPN. It's of course super secure to take a hacker with a supercomputer over a billion years to get past ExpressVPN's encryption. But it's also easy to use. You fire up the app, you click one button, you're protected. And it works everywhere you are, on every device, phones, laptops, tablets and more. So you can stay secure on the go. It's rated number one by top tech reviewers like CNET and the Verge. In fact, I use it whenever I travel to catch the football game or the F1 race or to see my shows and of course to keep me secure at that free airport.
Leo Laporte [02:01:25]:
WI Fi. It's the other day I was at the airport and I says, sfo free WI fi. I thought, I really want to use this, but I don't dare. And then I remembered, oh, wait a minute. I fired up. ExpressVPN logged on. I knew I was secure. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com TWIT that's E-X P-R-E-S-S V P N.com TWIT to find out how you can get up to four extra months free when you buy a two year package.
Leo Laporte [02:01:54]:
Expressvpn.com Twitter we thank them for their support. Expressvpn.com TWIT thank you, ExpressVPN.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:02:05]:
I love using ExpressVPN when I go to Berlin every Year to watch the US Open.
Leo Laporte [02:02:11]:
You go to Berlin, New York.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:02:14]:
I go to Berlin, Germany, in September.
Leo Laporte [02:02:17]:
To watch the us. Oh, you're there for Aoife.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:02:20]:
Yes, I always do the US Open. Yeah. So every. I renew my subscription for that month.
Leo Laporte [02:02:27]:
That's so smart. Well, you did see that now that the Online Safety act has been enacted in the uk.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:02:35]:
Yeah. Am I going to have trouble?
Leo Laporte [02:02:36]:
Well, you saw that the VPN usage that day went up 50, 100%.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:02:42]:
It was like the number one app in the App Store.
Leo Laporte [02:02:44]:
It's like, what did you think was going to happen?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:02:47]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:02:48]:
I travel a lot for work and I use ExpressVPN all the time.
Leo Laporte [02:02:51]:
Oh, that's nice. I did not solicit this. These are unsolicited endorsements, but I'm glad to hear it. It's great. Yeah. They're a good company. Nice people, too. After researchers unmasked a prolific SMS scammer, a new operation has emerged in its wake.
Leo Laporte [02:03:10]:
This is from TechCrunch. We've all received those scam emails, Right? The unpaid toll email. You received that?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:03:19]:
Oh, gosh. And the. The UPS one I have, but my dad and my mom. My mom would be like, I didn't have a package coming, but I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:03:27]:
Do you guys also get the ones from recruiters where we found your resume?
Leo Laporte [02:03:31]:
Yes. Why do I get that? What are they going for there? I keep getting that one.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:03:34]:
Yeah. Well, if you send.
Leo Laporte [02:03:36]:
God, no. I'll tell you one thing, I love iOS 26, which should be out in the next month. Right. Because the new iPhones coming at has a feature. And by the way, the Republican Party has already said this is going to kill our fundraising.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:03:52]:
The call screening.
Leo Laporte [02:03:53]:
It's the call screening. They now have filters. Message filters.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:03:57]:
Yes.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:03:59]:
Had that feature for several years now.
Leo Laporte [02:04:01]:
And it's great.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:02]:
I love it.
Leo Laporte [02:04:03]:
I don't even see this. That the election solicitations, the job offers. I'm not looking for work. Why do you. How does that work, Lisa? Why are. What are they going. Are they trying to get me to call them? What are they. Why is that a scam?
Lisa Schmeiser [02:04:19]:
If they can verify the number, then they can actually sell lists, too. Don't forget, they're not just trying to scam you, they're also selling the information to other others.
Leo Laporte [02:04:26]:
So don't say stop.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:04:28]:
And in some cases, they're doing things like, you know, making it seem like they're, you know, like there's actually a job number you have to pay an application fee or you know, pay various kinds of fees for it. You know, so they're, they're getting some money out of it as well.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:04:42]:
They're also, they're also getting information for social engineering where if, if, if you give them your LinkedIn page or you confirm where you are employed, it's not that hard for them to, to then be like, oh, okay, we can probably hit this person at this email address with a phishing scam and, and go from there. I mean that's the, that's the most, the most successful security breaches are almost always linked to social engineering because most of us are socialized to try to respond to direct asks and be helpful.
Leo Laporte [02:05:11]:
Well, sometimes the bad guys also have poor operations Security in the case of Darkula and his scamming software Magic Cat, which was used by the way to do all of those scams. In fact, according to TechCrunch, during a period of seven months last year, the scam netted 880, 84,000 stolen credit cards. The Oslo had security Security firm Mnemonic along with Norwegian media earlier this year revealed that the fluff. The person behind the fluffy cute cat in Darkula's profile photos. And it is a very cute cat.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:05:54]:
Very cute cat. Except for the eyes. The eyes are a bit.
Leo Laporte [02:05:56]:
Eyes are creepy. They're dark, they're creepy. That is a 24 year old. Not that cat, but the person behind it is a 24 year old Chinese national named Yu Cheng Si. He develops Magic Cat software for his hundreds of customers who use it to launch their own scams. After he was unmasked by the Norwegian firm, he went dark and apparently there have been no updates to the software since leaving his customers in the lurch in a shocking, shocking abdication of his responsibility. Unfortunately, where nature abhors a vacuum, researchers are now sounding alarm about a new fraud software called not Magic Cat, but Magic Mouse.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:06:47]:
How derivative?
Leo Laporte [02:06:49]:
This was revealed at defcon, which is Invisible Vegas this week. Magic Mouse has been surging in popularity since the demise of Magic Cat does the same thing. So expect a new bunch of I guess text messages.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:07:05]:
Yeah, I want to change my number. It's gotten so bad. Like my. I can't pick up my phone anymore. It's just like constant.
Leo Laporte [02:07:12]:
Well, that's what you. I also had a rice.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:07:16]:
I know but it's still the. But I still my yes, I am and I doing this call screening but it's still coming through and like my missed call list, you know when you go to check to see if you missed a call and it's like to scroll through like 17.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:07:30]:
Pixel.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:07:30]:
Doesn't even show me that.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:07:32]:
I know you're making the case here. Yeah, yeah. I used to have the thing where like block on like don't even show me unknown numbers. But then the problem I have is like when you set up appointments or.
Leo Laporte [02:07:43]:
Like your doctor drives me crazy.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:07:46]:
Doctors issues like 700 different numbers walking.
Leo Laporte [02:07:49]:
So you. It's always unknown. It's like doc, announce yourself.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:07:54]:
Yeah. Has anyone else too much.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:07:57]:
Have you all noticed a rise in spam calls recently? Yes, I'm getting so many every day now and my block list is getting just untenable. And I was wondering, was there like one federal employee who got the doge cut who was in charge of maybe that's it. Of enforcing the, the, the. The don't call people thing. And now that they're gone, it's, it's just.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:08:20]:
Things got very bad for us. My husband and myself too, both of us. It's just like the phone is non stop. I. Yeah. I don't know if changing a number would make a difference at this point. You probably just get it on another.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:08:30]:
Number, but I don't think it would make a difference. And I've, I've thought, okay, at this point what we have is a text infrastructure where unless you're using a certain operating system, you've got, got. You've got the risk of, of. Of spam texts. And now five out of every eight phone calls I get are spam calls every day. And the, these systems are becoming rapidly unusable without.
Leo Laporte [02:08:58]:
Destroy email. Right.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:08:59]:
I mean, yeah, yes, it's destroying the phone. I mean like the, the voices too. It'll be like. Hi Jennifer, this is Julie and your file just landed on my desk. I just wanted to find, follow up. I mean it's not, you know, it could, you could easily, if you were not tech savvy or savvy about spam calls, be confused. And I mean I've heard about people getting their homes mortgaged out from under them through these types of scams from like mortgage companies or people social engineering and like taking loans out. So you hear about these things happening.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:09:34]:
So you, when you start getting calls from companies, companies offering, you know, financial companies, you're worried because maybe something like this is happening. So you may answer the call, you may talk to the person and then you're in even more trouble.
Leo Laporte [02:09:45]:
What happened to stir and shaken? Right. Was there going to be this system that would prevent this from happening again?
Lisa Schmeiser [02:09:52]:
I'm telling you, the, the federal Employees who were responsible for making sure this had to be enforced.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:09:57]:
You're right.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:09:57]:
It had to be laid off.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:09:59]:
It's got worse since Doge. I think you're right. You're theoretical theory. Your conspiracy theory there I'm green with for sure. Something someone leaked it or they just cut that department.
Leo Laporte [02:10:09]:
There was a lot of a framework of, so that you would have authentication that all of these calls had to originate with actual numbers from an actual carrier. And if they didn't, they would be blocked by your, your provider, yourself.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:10:27]:
That's what's not working anymore. I think that's all going to happen. Must be this senders now. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:10:32]:
Ah, okay. Well, and this is the real problem is that the cell companies, you know, are kind of a mixed opinion on this because they make a lot of money from these people buying numbers and using them and, and all this. They kind of, you know, we kind of like this system. We don't really want to block those.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:10:50]:
Calls or they, they'll charge you more money a month to block them for you. Like, I think Verizon has like a service that's like $7 a month. A month to block them.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:11:01]:
For me, any, anything, any number that is not in my contacts automatically goes to. To call screening.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:11:08]:
See, I used to have that, but I can't get it to work properly for.
Leo Laporte [02:11:11]:
Yeah, I have that.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:11:13]:
And then if there's no, if there's no response, if it doesn't, you know, if, if it's somebody legit and I do get a lot of calls from, from people who I may not, you know, who I may want to talk to. You know, a lot of times reporters and stuff will call me, me for comment on something. And so I can just, you know, if, if it's somebody I don't have my contacts, if it's legit, they will. I'll see their, their message come up on the screen, transcribes it in real time and I can just pick it up and. Or Google says, let it go to voicemail.
Leo Laporte [02:11:41]:
Sam is not available. Or, you know, it's. Google says, can I tell Sam who's calling?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:11:45]:
Right, yeah, yeah, right. In 26.
Leo Laporte [02:11:51]:
But people like Jennifer, you don't want to turn it on because you get a lot of calls. Or Sam, you get calls, calls from people you don't know. Well, see, I don't care. I don't want to talk to anybody. So I could I just leave that on.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:12:01]:
I turn it on and it works great for me. The, the people that actually need to get a Hold of me. They will. They will respond to that screening, and you know that. I can see that.
Leo Laporte [02:12:12]:
Or if they don't, it's me. I'm calling. I'm. I know you're screening me. Sam, it's your mother. Pick up. Pick up the phone, Sam. I know you're home.
Leo Laporte [02:12:26]:
See, I don't want to talk to anybody. Actually, if my mom calls, I'll talk to her. But usually when she calls, she says, who is this? She said, it's your son. Who? I said, it's your son Leo. And she goes, oh, I remember when.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:12:41]:
She used to be on iPad. Today.
Leo Laporte [02:12:43]:
I know. She is. Fantastic. What's great about it, even though she's losing her marble, she's not 92. She's losing her marbles, but she's happy about it. You know, sometimes people get very frustrated. It's very difficult. They get angry.
Leo Laporte [02:12:57]:
She's just as happy as could be. The other day she called me up. She said, well, I just want to let you know you're not wasting your money. I just got a call from the professor, and I'm on the dean's list, and I got straight A's in French. So I said, mom, that's fantastic. Congratulations. She's just in this happy place.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:13:17]:
Glad to see she's still learning new stuff.
Leo Laporte [02:13:19]:
Even at 92, she's still learning things.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:13:22]:
Yes.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:13:22]:
Play. Bien.
Leo Laporte [02:13:26]:
She called my sister the other day. She said, who? Eva, you're on my Apple watch. She used my axe. Somehow she figured out how to call my sister from her watch. She can't use the phone, but apparently she can use the watch. All right. Another reason to hate Elon Musk. You ready for one? One more More.
Leo Laporte [02:13:45]:
Oh, how exciting. Did I.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:13:47]:
Did I need another reason?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:13:48]:
Well, I hear the restaurant shut down or was about to shut down.
Leo Laporte [02:13:51]:
Did it shut down?
Lisa Schmeiser [02:13:52]:
The drive in, they greatly contracted the menu. It no longer has, like, the Extreme Bacon or whatever circa 2007.
Leo Laporte [02:14:02]:
Movies on the sides of the apartment buildings.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:14:05]:
Oh, my heavens.
Leo Laporte [02:14:05]:
Next door.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:14:07]:
Oh, yeah, that was it. Reduced. Greatly reduced. So still there. But not.
Leo Laporte [02:14:10]:
And they had. And the takeout containers were silent cyber cardboard cyber trucks, which I thought, oh, my gosh.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:14:16]:
But to your point earlier, Lisa, the idea was. I think the idea is a good one. Like, somewhere to go where you. When you're charging your car superchargers, all chargers. Should always put them at McDonald's.
Leo Laporte [02:14:27]:
Yeah, we have. Ours is at the outlet mall. That's a good place. Or shopping center.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:14:32]:
Put them at, like, Planet Fitness or. Or whatever other Gym workout.
Leo Laporte [02:14:35]:
Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:14:36]:
Because you can charge and get a workout and then you're like, woo it just care of two errands at once.
Leo Laporte [02:14:39]:
And I like sweaty when I'm charging.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:14:42]:
Movie theaters are looking for another source of revenue, right? Movie theaters would be. Exactly.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:14:46]:
Movie theaters.
Leo Laporte [02:14:47]:
Go see a movie. Oh, you'll be full by the end of that movie for sure.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:14:50]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:14:50]:
Anyway, Virginia has a plan, the state of to deploy fiber Internet service to its residents. They've got $3 million in federal grant money. Actually the state wants to get, they think, $60 million. This is part of the broadband equity access and deployment grant program. Bead. Starlink is fighting the plan, claiming the grant money should be given to them, not the state of Virginie. Starlink has urged the Trump administration and the Trump administration seems to be complying to rewrite the rules. The Biden administration said that states should prioritize fiber in order to build more future proof networks.
Leo Laporte [02:15:38]:
The Trump administration has ordered the states to revise their plans with a tech neutral approach. Problem with Starlink is even if you get the first year free, it ain't free forever. Yeah, I know. Because.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:15:50]:
Well, it goes back to infrastructure or infrastructure versus subscriptions. Or rather do you own it or do you lease it it.
Leo Laporte [02:15:59]:
Right.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:16:00]:
And if you build infrastructure, then you can't keep charging people for.
Leo Laporte [02:16:03]:
SpaceX says Virginia has put its heavy thumb on the scale in favor of expensive, slow to build fiber bias over speedy, low cost and technology neutral competition. Have you seen how much Starlink costs? It is not low cost.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:16:19]:
A lot more than my 1 gigabit per second symmetric AT&T fiber that costs.
Leo Laporte [02:16:24]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:16:24]:
And what are you doing? You're putting your thumb on the scale. What are you talking about?
Leo Laporte [02:16:27]:
This is their thumb. Big fat thumb.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:16:31]:
What a bunch of miners. Also, the whining is unappealing.
Leo Laporte [02:16:35]:
Yes, yes.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:16:37]:
Well, Elon's always been a whiner though. I mean that's.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:16:39]:
Oh, it's, it's just starting. Just speaking of subscriptions, they just made it so you have to subscribe to pause your service now.
Leo Laporte [02:16:49]:
Now what? Yeah, that was the best thing about it is when I went on vacation I could say, oh, I don't want to pay for the next two weeks.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:16:57]:
Yeah, yeah, I have to pay to not pay. So. So Thomas Ricker wrote about it for us. He was like on vacation and he. Oh, is I have to write. Yeah, but this.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:17:07]:
Isn't that just for the. For the Starlink mini. For the mobile.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:17:10]:
For the mini. Oh, the mini. But, but it's a sign. That, that, that, you know that creepy. That's nutty subscription. So yeah, you used to be able to, to just pause it. So the mini, the mobile, like when you're going out. Because he does, he writes a lot of sort of van life type articles for U.S.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:17:24]:
tech and you know, tech.
Leo Laporte [02:17:26]:
Does he live in a van before?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:17:27]:
He lives in Amsterdam. So he does a lot of traveling around Europe and he wrote. Oh yeah, there's someone just popped the link in the discord. But yeah, so it's the pay as you go version of Starlink that rather than like your home Starlink. If, but if you can.
Leo Laporte [02:17:43]:
I'll be mad if he ever charges me to pause.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:17:46]:
Well, I mean it's a slippery slope, isn't it? Once you see a revenue stream that seems like an option. But yeah, it's like $5 a month I think and to. $5 to turn. There it is. $5 a month. Yep. To pause which is, I mean obviously you're saving money over paying the regular fee but when you were used to.
Leo Laporte [02:18:06]:
It being free, they call it an upgrade.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:18:09]:
Yeah, no, at this point, and I wonder, wonder when this is going to hit your, your average tech consumer and not the people who, who really love tech and find out, find it pleasurable. At what point are people going to be like, I don't need this or.
Leo Laporte [02:18:25]:
You know what the problem with Starlink is? If you need it, you really need it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:18:29]:
You really need it.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:18:30]:
You really need it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:18:31]:
Any other option.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:18:32]:
Yeah, but it's, it's all, it's the same thing with subscription overload. How many subscriptions do people reasonably want to sustain or manage before they're like, I don't need this, It's. I was fine without it, I'll be fine without it again. It was a nice to have. I'm done.
Leo Laporte [02:18:48]:
Starling does say you could cancel at no cost and restart it whenever you're ready.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:18:54]:
That's what I do with a lot of streaming services.
Leo Laporte [02:18:56]:
Frankly, if it's going to be a while, that's not such a hassle. If it's two weeks, it's a hassle.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:19:02]:
Yeah, exactly. It's just at some point again to get back to the kids, the juice isn't worth the squeeze. And if they're, oh, this feature that you used to enjoy for free, you no longer, longer have for free. This, this thing now costs you extra money. The capabilities built in, but you have to pay extra to access it. Unlike our competitors, at some point people are going to hit a breaking point.
Leo Laporte [02:19:23]:
And be like, you're Amazon is getting ready to compete.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:19:28]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:19:28]:
They are launching their first of their planned 3200 project Kuiper satellites next week. Actually, no, that's next week in April. So they've already done that, I think.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:19:39]:
Yeah, I mean I, I can remember when I was reporting on Amazon and you had a lot of logistics analysts who were saying they'll never be able out of delivery fleet. It's simply too cost ineffective. UPS and FedEx have it locked up. Blah. And at this point I cannot drive down the street without seeing two different Amazon delivery vans constantly.
Leo Laporte [02:19:59]:
Right.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:19:59]:
They, I, I have no doubt that if Amazon wanted to go into this space and they perceive it to be.
Leo Laporte [02:20:05]:
Oh, they're getting there.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:20:06]:
Yeah, they're going to do it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:20:07]:
They're going to, they're about to kill the grocery store too. Did you see the other Amazon instant.
Leo Laporte [02:20:11]:
Deliver delivery in 2, 300American cities, same day delivery? Yeah, it's gonna, Will you do that, guys? Is that something attractive to you if you're a prime member?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:20:22]:
It's free.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:23]:
Generally, no, because I mean especially like when we're buying produce or, or meat.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:20:27]:
Produce is the big thing, we wanna.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:20:29]:
We wanna actually see it before we buy it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:20:32]:
But there's already like, I do the home shop thing with my local grocery store so I order everything on the app and then I go and pick, pick it up from the store. They put it into my car for me but I can look at it then and if I see something I don't like, I can, you know, they'll swap it out. They're really good about, you know, if something's bad. But yes, that is the downside. You can't choose your own meat, you can't choose your own produce. But the convenience like I the Whole Foods. So when you shop on Amazon now, you'll often see if you search for something, you'll often see something from Whole Foods. But you can't buy that at the same time as buying anything else in your cart.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:21:04]:
It's like a separate cart for Whole Foods. We don't have Amazon Fresh in my neighborhood. But Amazon Fresh is sort of this a similar idea. I think this, the idea is everything is in one cart and that convenience I think is going to be a.
Leo Laporte [02:21:18]:
Very big, so tempting selling point.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:21:21]:
I already, I actually use Amazon subscribe and save for dry goods.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:21:25]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:21:26]:
Because this way it's taken the mental labor off my plate to have to. Do I need to get laundry detergent? Do I need to get dish soap? I can simply program in once I figured out the frequency for each.
Leo Laporte [02:21:39]:
That's the problem. I have 14 boxes of dishwasher beads.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:21:46]:
You do get the reminder that you have to look at your.
Leo Laporte [02:21:49]:
Titrate it.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:21:50]:
Yeah, but you know, once. So two things. One, Amazon lets you review your upcoming deliveries every month, so.
Leo Laporte [02:21:58]:
Yeah, but do you. They say you got four days. And then I go, oh yeah, yeah, I'll get around to that. And then I never do. And then I do it.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:22:03]:
I have reminders.
Leo Laporte [02:22:04]:
Then I get more.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:22:04]:
I have a reminder because like you, all you need to do is. Is be over supplied with Israeli couscous once.
Leo Laporte [02:22:10]:
And you're like, oh God, the Israeli couscous coming out my ears.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:22:15]:
Yeah, it's going to be a huge. I think this is all towards the Alexa plus too. I mean, obviously not.
Leo Laporte [02:22:20]:
I mean, just to tell her, yeah, hey, put this on my order.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:22:23]:
Order. Yeah, it's all going to be. When you do your. When you add things to your shopping list, it'll all.
Leo Laporte [02:22:27]:
It's a Jetson future. And then your robot's going to go get it at the door, put it in the cupboard.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:22:32]:
I wish that they would. That is my biggest complaint about my subscribe and save deliveries is the time I have to spend putting everything.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:22:39]:
Have you seen yet?
Leo Laporte [02:22:40]:
We are getting a little lazy, aren't we?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:22:42]:
Have you seen the video from Figure about the robots putting away the groceries? The humanoid robot robots? So like the guy comes up to them and he brings them a bag and there's two humanoid robots like behind a kitchen counter and he's like, put these away. And they talk. Not talk to each other, but they communicate with each other to move the. Move the items out of the bags, put them in the fridge, put them in the cupboard. It's the sort of AI powered vision model that fits right.
Leo Laporte [02:23:13]:
This isn't them, is it? No, no. This one with the. I don't think that's it, Leo. No, no, I searched for humanoid robots and I definitely got. So here we go. Here's the feature.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:23:27]:
That's it.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:23:28]:
That's it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:23:28]:
There you go.
Leo Laporte [02:23:29]:
There we. Wait a minute. Here we go. These are humanoid robots. See, this is what bugs me. Look how slow they are. I've seen these robots do the laundry.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:23:39]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:23:39]:
And it's the slowest thing I've ever seen in my life. I would go crazy.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:23:45]:
And Sam, these are the robots that are in the BMW factory in South Carolina, which I'm gonna. I want to go ch. Out. The figure has them on the. The production line for.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:23:55]:
Is it this, this brand, the Figure.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:23:57]:
The figure. Yeah. Yeah. So those are in real life. This is very much a concept. I don't. You know, I. I think.
Leo Laporte [02:24:04]:
Here is the sandwich bag. Put the sandwich bag in the refrigerator.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:11]:
Yeah. Hyundai has some of the Boston Dynamics robots in their new factory in Savannah. They have some of the spot robot dogs that they use for security. No, they use. They use them for quality control. So the. The bodies as the. As the vehicles come out of the body shop.
Leo Laporte [02:24:27]:
We must not have any bodies in the factory, please.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:30]:
No, they're.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:24:31]:
They're.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:31]:
They're scanning the welds and the paint.
Leo Laporte [02:24:32]:
Quality and that kind of car body. Okay.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:35]:
Yeah, yeah, I was.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:24:36]:
I was.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:24:37]:
Bodies.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:24:37]:
I was kind of imagining them running around the. The factory floors like morale boosters.
Leo Laporte [02:24:42]:
Hey, everybody, I'm your pro body. Well, get ready, because robot Olympics are coming up. Are you excited? Featuring football and table tennis.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:24:54]:
Oh, these are hilarious.
Leo Laporte [02:24:55]:
I'm so tempted to laugh at these. But then I remember the DARPA grand challenge. Remember in the early days of these autonomous eagles, they would go three feet and drive right off the road. I'm not gonna laugh at these guys, because right now, maybe they're kind of dope. Dopey. Which they are.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:25:13]:
Yes. The soccer ones are very amusing.
Leo Laporte [02:25:15]:
Soccer ones are not good. I'm gonna see if I can find a video.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:25:18]:
I'd rather watch actual humans play soccer or, you know, run or whatever it is.
Leo Laporte [02:25:24]:
Well, that's. Yeah. The point is not to replace humans playing soccer. The point is to show the capabilities.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:25:30]:
I honestly think an exoskeleton would be a really interesting and exciting addition to some labor markets. I do, you know.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:25:37]:
No, actually, no.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:25:38]:
I was laughing at the video robot throwing itself. But, yeah, the exoskeleton. One of my colleagues wore an exoskeleton all around ces, and I'm like, that is the best solution. That's the best use case.
Leo Laporte [02:25:53]:
Hello, citizen.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:25:55]:
Fifteen years ago, I got a demo from Honda. You know, they. They've been working on robotics and exoskeletons for, you know, long.
Leo Laporte [02:26:02]:
For luggage handling and things.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:26:04]:
Yeah, well, yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:26:05]:
I mean, construction.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:26:06]:
They had these exoskeletons, skeleton systems, you know, to help with mobility, to help with lifting. You know, people lifting stuff in factories, moving or. Or people that had mobility issues, you know, with. With your hips or your knees or anything like that, just to help get around.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:26:23]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:26:24]:
Somewhere in my Google photos, there's. There's photos of me wearing this exoskeleton looking really goofy. But, I mean, it was pretty cool.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:26:34]:
Again, going back to the potential for tragedy and misuse is fraught. But imagine you've got extremely old people who fall in brake hips really easily. Put slap them in an exoskeleton, get some other assistance in, or make sure they don't hurt themselves too much. They can still get some gentle movement in, take a walk or be walked around their neighborhoods. I think there's some great applications. And every time I watch these little robots, robot combats, I'm like, the more we learn about moving effectively and being able to command it, the closer we are to an exoskeleton future, which is what I really want.
Leo Laporte [02:27:09]:
This looks a little scary, I'll be honest.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:27:12]:
Adorable, though.
Leo Laporte [02:27:13]:
It's like watching preschoolers this soccer. Oh, my gosh, look at the preschool.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:27:20]:
As long as we don't allow them to ever be over 3ft tall.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:27:24]:
They flop like humans.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:27:25]:
They flop like humans.
Leo Laporte [02:27:26]:
They flop just like humans. Watch this.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:27:33]:
I think. I think we don't have to worry until they can master a swimming competition.
Leo Laporte [02:27:36]:
I just have to remember, you know, the DARPA grand challenge. A few years later, these cars are driving us.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:27:42]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:27:43]:
And I hate them.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:27:46]:
I know.
Leo Laporte [02:27:46]:
They're kind of cute.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:27:47]:
Now this is the opening. You got to make it cute.
Leo Laporte [02:27:50]:
Ceremony. Oh, my God. Yeah, I'd watch that on tv. The robot games.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:27:55]:
I'd also want to watch a horror movie where the robots are really cute because right now you get all this scary technology and.
Leo Laporte [02:28:00]:
And Chucky's cute. What are you talking about?
Lisa Schmeiser [02:28:03]:
He's not a robot. He's a doll.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:05]:
Oh, Demerzel.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:28:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:28:09]:
Fellow foundation Megan.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:28:11]:
This season's been so great, hasn't it, Sam? Oh, my God.
Leo Laporte [02:28:14]:
What show is that? What is that foundation? Oh, it's good. I haven't seen it. Yeah, so I watched the first episode season. I didn't like it that much. So. Okay.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:22]:
It's. Takes a while to build up, but it's. Yeah, it's really good.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:28:27]:
Yeah. No, this is. This is one of the few shows where I don't wait and binge. I'm watching it week by week now. The weird thing about foundation is like that the.
Leo Laporte [02:28:34]:
The.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:28:35]:
The stuff that they added into the.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:28:36]:
Story is like the good stuff, it's bad.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:28:39]:
The cleona. The new stuff is the good stuff. Yeah. So good.
Leo Laporte [02:28:43]:
Foundation was pretty dated even. I mean, I tried to reread it when the show came around, and it doesn't wear. It's not a aging that well.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:28:51]:
It really feels like cold war sci fi where there's this. This naive belief that the the nerds and the scientists because they because their God is math. It is somehow innately superior. And I really like how this show is taking that conceit and be like actually.
Leo Laporte [02:29:10]:
All right, let's take one more break. We I don't want to go on forever. I well, I do, but I won't just for you. You're watching this week in tech Sam Abouble Sick Samid, my car guy from the telemetry research group by and wheel bearings his podcast Jennifer Patterson Tuohy. She's the smart home senior reviewer at the Verge. Me and my robot Ellie, her little robot saying hello, hello, hello Ellie. And of course Lisa Schmeiser from NoJitter.com where she is the editor in chief. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the leader in cloud security.
Leo Laporte [02:29:49]:
We talk about AI and it's, you know, in business it's both a blessing and a curse, right? Hackers are using AI to breach your organization faster than ever. But, but you may well be using many organizations are AI to power innovation to drive efficiency. So on the one hand it can help bad actors deliver more relentless and effective attacks. On the other hand, it could, it could transform your business. This it's kind of hard to get your head around this, right? Phishing attacks over encrypted channels increased last year by 34.1% fueled primarily by the growing use of generative AI tools. Right. Organizations in all industries from small to large are using AI beneficially at the same time to increase employee productivity with public AI for engineers, you know, with vibe coding, coding assistance. Amazing what you can can do.
Leo Laporte [02:30:43]:
Marketers are using AI to do writing. It's a huge writing tool. Finance is doing spreadsheet formulas like never before. With AI, you can automate workflows for operational efficiency across individuals and teams. You can embed AI into applications and services, both customer and partner facing ultimately AI helps us all move faster in the market and gain competitive advantage. I know this. We use it that way way and yet it's a challenge. Companies kind of have to really think about how they protect their private and public use of AI and all the data that AI is snarfing up.
Leo Laporte [02:31:21]:
They also really have to think about how they defend against AI powered attacks. Fortunately, there is a solution. Stephen Harrison, who's CISO at the MGM Resorts International, I mean this is a big company. He says with Zscale quote we hit zero trust segmentation across our workforce in record time. That's how easy it was to set up. And then in the day to day maintenance of the solution with data loss protection with insights into our applications. These were really quick and easy wins from our perspective. See the problem is traditional perimeter defenses, firewalls and then the VPNs you need to get through them.
Leo Laporte [02:31:58]:
Leave you with public facing IP addresses which exposes your attack surface no match to hackers in the AI era. You need a modern approach. You need Zscaler's comprehensive zero trust architecture so key and AI that ensures safe public AI productivity, protects the integrity of private AI and stops AI powered attacks. It can do it all thrive in the AI era with Zscaler zero trust plus AI to stay ahead of the competition competition and remain resilient even as threats and risks evolve. Learn more@zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for their support of this Week in tech. A couple of stories to wrap it up. You know about the the famous Kryptos puzzle outside the CIA headquarters. The artist, the sculptor who designed it, is selling the answer.
Leo Laporte [02:33:02]:
He's selling his original handwritten code, other archive material. Here he is building Kryptos. It's a giant cut copper plate. Put it out front of the CIA in 1990. It has still not been fully solved and the interest is so high that the auction firm believes RR Auctions believes that they will fetch between three hundred and half a million. Three hundred thousand and half a million dollars. And I presume if you got it, you would be able to decrypt it. The vice president of our auction says the ideal outcome would be for the winner to become a guardian of the secret, not its revealer.
Leo Laporte [02:33:48]:
This is a little bit of a pitch. Imagine the satisfaction of watch someone else crack it through pure intellectual effort, knowing you hold the key to confirm their success. 12ft tall, 20ft long, it's an S shape made of copper, petrified wood, water and stones. I guess the sculptor is figuring he wants to kind of hand off the legacy. He doesn't want to be the only guy who can say yes or no. You got it or not.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:34:18]:
I love that he's earning $40,000 a year from answering people people's isn't that great. I'm surprised he wants to hand that off.
Leo Laporte [02:34:26]:
Even seasoned cryptographers and intelligent experts have remained baffled by the cryptic text. This is an article in Artnet magazine, by the way, which is hysterical. In fact, only minimal progress has been made. A few words Northeast and Berlin clock have been revealed, but only because the artist offered clues humans hoping they may. One Day be able to solve the puzzle. Will be relieved to know Sanborn has remained thoroughly unconvinced by AI's efforts. So far, he says, I've been receiving solutions devised by ChatGPT, but they're nothing short of fairly silly. So this will be the first time the solution has ever been shared.
Leo Laporte [02:35:11]:
He says he's tired of dealing with Aquarius himself. Yeah, he charges 50 bucks. Bucks for replies.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:35:19]:
What he needs to do is set up a subscription service.
Leo Laporte [02:35:25]:
It's a lifetime annuity. Pretty cool. I mean, here's a guy who's an artist who created one of the great cryptography mysteries of all time. There it is. There's a picture of it in front of the CIA headquarters. It's not part of the reason it's hard to decrypt. It's not open to the public. Public.
Leo Laporte [02:35:44]:
She can't just go on over there and take a look? I guess maybe enough of it has been published on the Internet or something. Oh, yeah. The first panel, K1, has a deliberate misspelling in the word illusion. The artist says it's a red herring, or maybe he just made a little mistake between subtle. Between subtle shading and. I believe I've decrypted it. The absence of flight lies the nuance of. There's a cue in the illusion.
Leo Laporte [02:36:22]:
Tap to flip. See, that's the. That's the crypto. That's the answer. Anyway, one of the few panels there's only. I think a couple have been declared encrypted. Very cool New York Times piece. If you want to read more about it.
Leo Laporte [02:36:39]:
The auction will be November 20th. If you've got 300,000 to $500,000 and you would like to be the new keeper of the Kryptos.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:36:51]:
Okay, so that then you can be sure that whatever the crypt says is.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:36:55]:
Not worth more than that, right?
Leo Laporte [02:36:57]:
Oh, it's not like it doesn't lead.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:36:59]:
To a treasure or something, right?
Leo Laporte [02:37:00]:
No. And eternal life or anything? No, not at all. Let's see. Oh, I love this story from Tech Dirt. Pacer, which is the unit US Federal court's filing electronic filing system has been hacked, which Tech Dirt says briefly turned it into a useful source for federal court documents. Apparently PACER is so bad and so.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:37:28]:
Expensive that headline, every time I see it, it makes me laugh.
Leo Laporte [02:37:32]:
The hacking made it useful. The only way to make PACER useful is to bypass the front end and root around in a digital back room, which is what the hacker did. These are all, by the way, public documents. It's not like they're secret. You still have to pay 10 cents a page to access it. And apparently the detector says it's a very dysfunctional ui.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:37:56]:
Yeah, it's really hard to use. I was trying to use it today. Yeah, because there was. There was a smart lighting company that. That suddenly stopped working all its Internet connected bulbs. Oh, stopped working. The cloud. The WI fi ones, they had zigbee.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:38:14]:
This is the zigbee was still working. This is to the whole local cloud connected smart home. But Amazon yanked their skill from Alexa, which is something that Amazon doesn't often do because they hadn't been working for so long and you couldn't control them by voice. Anyway, so I was digging into this company to see who had sued it and a few people had. But yeah, it was not fun using that website.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:38:37]:
Well, have you ever tried searching the USPTO database for patents?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:38:42]:
Oh, that's not funny.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:38:44]:
Horrible.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:38:46]:
None of these databases. But it's great that they're there. Much better than having to go to a building and dig through files. But yeah, they could definitely be more user friendly. Especially, you know, go for it. Hackers make all of these places dump all the documents.
Leo Laporte [02:39:00]:
Why not, Right? Yeah. Good. There is some good news. The. The court has blocked the FTC investigation into Media Matters. Elon was pretty pissed at them. He said Media Matters was kind of facilitating a boycott of X. You know, they didn't have to.
Leo Laporte [02:39:20]:
Nobody wanted to advertise on X. Media Matters sued the FTC in June, accusing it of unfairly targeting them in retaliation for past criticisms of X. This is back when Elon was, you know, still had some sway in government. The judge, who is. Is unaccountably named Spark. I can't even say it. Sparkle Lsukanan or Suknanan? Sparkle Lsukanan. Granted a preliminary injunction in the nonprofit's favor.
Leo Laporte [02:39:58]:
Had agreed with the group. The FTC's investigation is a retaliatory act and is. I don't know if Sparkle is a guy or a gal, so I'm just going to say they have noted it is unlikely to succeed. Succeed on its First Amendment retaliation claim. She. Ah, I would. Sparkle's gotta be.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:40:12]:
I was probably going with the she.
Leo Laporte [02:40:14]:
But hey, who knows?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:40:16]:
Never know.
Leo Laporte [02:40:16]:
You never know.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:40:17]:
It's a great name for anyone.
Leo Laporte [02:40:18]:
Sparkle.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:40:21]:
I'm gonna keep that one in the back of my mind.
Leo Laporte [02:40:25]:
Sounds like a James Bond girl. Sparkle. Yeah, Sparkle plenty.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:40:30]:
I like that. It's also like a command and a name. Sparkle.
Leo Laporte [02:40:33]:
Sparkle.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:40:34]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [02:40:34]:
And a federal judge, which is nice.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:40:37]:
The best part, I'm Gonna say nice.
Leo Laporte [02:40:42]:
We're not making fun of you.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:40:43]:
No, it's honored.
Leo Laporte [02:40:45]:
We love you. We think you're great. Oh, wait, we got the LEQ in there. I want.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:40:54]:
I dropped the. The link to that Jerry Rick video.
Leo Laporte [02:40:58]:
Cyber Truck. Gluing the Cyber truck back together again.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:41:02]:
The Google AI overview thing is very interesting. From my.
Leo Laporte [02:41:06]:
Oh, that's. We were going to talk about that because it's kind of. It hits home a little bit with you guys who publish on the Internet. Digiday reports that Google's AI overviews are linked to a 25% drop in publisher referral traffic.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:41:28]:
Google 0 is hitting. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:41:30]:
Google did not. By the way, Google has said. No, no, no. Our research shows more. More people are going to the sites than ever before.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:41:37]:
Did they show their work? Did they explain how their research came to that conclusion?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:41:41]:
Yeah. Show the reasoning.
Leo Laporte [02:41:44]:
The study comes from digital content. Next dcn they count the New York Times, Conde Nast Vox among their 40 member companies. Checked in with Knight, that's. You checked in with 19 of them between May and June to see what was happening to your Google search. Referral traffic, it's down. Yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:42:06]:
Well, no one's using the. No one's clicking the links anymore.
Leo Laporte [02:42:10]:
No. If I wanted to know about a smart home device, I would simply search for it and get the AI result and never have to go to the Verge.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:42:17]:
And you'd also get incorrect information because.
Leo Laporte [02:42:21]:
Oh, yeah, say that.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:42:23]:
Bad. So bad. Especially for something as complicated as a smart home. But for really simple stuff, you really just don't. This is where, you know, and Google's always been about authority. You know, if you, if you do good content and if you're authoritative, we'll send info, we'll send things your way. But now when they're just taking all of the information and presenting it as an. In an answer, but not always correct.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:42:46]:
Well, they provide a simulacrum of authority in the. The way it's written.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:42:50]:
Yes. They make it sounds like it's telling you what is correct, but there's so.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:42:55]:
Hilariously wrong when they don't read intention correctly either.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:42:58]:
Yes. That's the other thing, actually, Leo, I.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:43:00]:
Was up in Sonoma County a few weeks ago because I decided to spend the day swimming in the Russian River.
Leo Laporte [02:43:05]:
Nice.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:43:06]:
Oh, it's the best. Yeah, I wish. Well, I. I was gonna say I wish everyone couldn't like. No, because it'll be crazy.
Leo Laporte [02:43:13]:
You might have run into Sam Altman in a few. A few others. OpenAI had their big camp out there.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:43:21]:
My Wife and I were vacationing there. A couple?
Leo Laporte [02:43:22]:
Yeah. It's a crowded area, actually.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:43:24]:
But one of the. One of the things I was noticing was when it was warm and sunny in the afternoon, I was able to. One of the things I like to do is just sort of drift around downstream and then swim again against the current upstream. And when it was sunny and warm, it was just cleaning through the water. Woo. I'm a mermaid. No one stopped me. And then as the.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:43:45]:
The sun begins.
Leo Laporte [02:43:47]:
Did you have a flotation device? You have a little ring around you or anything? No, just you.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:43:51]:
Just me.
Leo Laporte [02:43:52]:
That's great. People drown in that river all the time.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:43:54]:
I swim four or five days a week, so I'm a strong swimmer and I'm generally pretty good at getting out before I'm too tired.
Leo Laporte [02:44:04]:
The kids don't do what Lisa did. You should wear a flotation.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:44:08]:
I like to. I like to keep gas in the tank so I get out ahead of time, but.
Leo Laporte [02:44:11]:
Smart woman.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:44:12]:
But as the sun drops below the. The tree line and the river got colder and darker, I was noticing that it was.
Leo Laporte [02:44:19]:
I was like a Stephen King novel.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:44:22]:
I had to work harder to go the same distance. And because it's chilly, well, I thought to myself, I was like, okay, is there a change in the flow rate or the current, Ah, that's linked to sunlight or heat? What if there is? What's this phenomena called? So, so after we get out of the river and we dry off and we have a nice dinner in Guernville and I go home, I hop on the laptop and I typed into Google a couple different queries. And among them was, what is the change? What would cause a river's current to change over the course of the day? And is it linked to direct sunlight or not? And I got back an AI summary that was basically the river current. Sunlight is a folk rock band that. And the summary had nothing to do with hydrology. It had nothing to do with weather patterns. It had nothing to do with even actual rivers. It was about like a jam band from the 90s.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:45:20]:
And I was. I was amused. But then I thought, wow. I thought, this is tremendously unhelpful because admittedly, I didn't ask a great and precise question because I didn't know how to ask the great and precise question. But if you're somebody who will not then spend 45 minutes trying to refine a query on Google, you enter in something that you think is the question that you want to have answered, and you get back this wildly incorrect information. What. What is your next. What is your next step as a person and a user? What.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:45:49]:
What happens after that? And I think that is actually kind of one of the perils you're going to see with these AI summaries over time is that Google may be perceived as being less useful because the answers will be filled with AI glurge, or they will be filled with weirdly sourced things that aren't legitimate. And. And people will be answering the questions that they ask, not the questions they intended to ask or the questions they needed to ask.
Leo Laporte [02:46:12]:
By the way, I just searched on Kagi, because I use the Kagi Assistant. I asked it, does a river's current change when the sunlight or temperature changes? It was smart enough to understand I wasn't talking about a band of any kind. And it said, no, the sunlight and temperature do not directly alter a river's current. It's based on the gravity acting on the. The volume of water.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:46:33]:
Oh, so maybe it might be a tidal.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:46:35]:
Yeah, no, that was, that. That. That was the, the line of inquiry I ended up taking because I was like, okay, maybe this is more directly tied to tidal influence because the Russian river dumps right out, right into the ocean.
Leo Laporte [02:46:48]:
Yeah, yeah.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:46:50]:
But on, on the, on the subject of traffic to the websites, though, which.
Leo Laporte [02:46:54]:
Yeah, no, by the way, there were seven. It be. Could Kagi consulted seven websites from National Geographic, Sciencing, but I didn't visit any of them.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:47:05]:
Right now, as a journalist, when I put in a query and I'm doing research, I'm always going and clicking the links, but most people are not one. So they're not getting the correct information. They're finding out about bans. But the second point is if Google is saying, oh, traffic. In fact, Sundar Pichai, I think, was on the decoder with my editor in chief, Nilay Patel, about. And talking about this, and he was saying, yeah, no, you know, we're still sending traffic. We put the links there. It's all there.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:47:34]:
But they're not. The. The evidence is really clear that people challenge him. Oh, yeah, you might want to listen to that one. It's good.
Leo Laporte [02:47:44]:
Well, I happen to know differently, Sundar, because I am at Vox and I can see the traffic drop. Yeah, but what Google should say and what I think they really think is, no, we're giving people what they want. When they come to us, they don't want a link. They want an answer.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:48:02]:
They're not always. That's the problem.
Leo Laporte [02:48:03]:
Well, if they're doing it wrong, they're not. But the intent is to give them the answer to the question. Not a link.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:48:10]:
Not a link. But their argument that the reason they're saying this isn't damaging search traffic is because, because of my theory anyway, and this article's theory, the lawsuit right now. Right. They want to prove that they're not gaming the system, which essentially they are. I mean, you're right, there's a utility there. I agree.
Leo Laporte [02:48:31]:
It's what we want.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:48:32]:
This is what we want. This is why we go to chat GPT, Right? Because GPT does the same thing and people are using, I mean, Google's main, that's Google's main competition right now is, is people using, using AI.
Leo Laporte [02:48:44]:
The flaw is that it doesn't get the answer right.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:48:47]:
Not, but not getting the answer right. And then also the flaw is if you keep doing this to websites, there will not be any websites left to do this.
Leo Laporte [02:48:56]:
Well, we have to come up with a new way to monetize. I mean, I think that's pretty clear. Maybe paywalls, maybe, maybe AI has to pay micro fees to these sites. There's got to be another way.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:49:11]:
We've been leaving, but you've got to be able to, to incentivize users to want to embrace another way. Because we've had 20 odd years of people thinking of the web as being largely quote, unquote free.
Leo Laporte [02:49:22]:
Right.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:49:23]:
And if you switch that, they're still going to devolve to free and they're not going to care about whether this is accurate, accurate information, whether it's been fact checked. You think about all those AI pages that gamed SEO and made Google search results more or less unusable in recent months anyway, we would just see more of that.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:49:43]:
Yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:49:44]:
So the question I have, and I don't have an answer, if I did, obviously I'd be in a very different line of work. The question I have is how can you, what, how and when can you change user behavior to be like, yes, I do think that having content that is created by humans who are subject matter experts and who are institutionally accountable is greater good. So I'll pay for that. Like, what would you do there?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:50:11]:
Or I mean, I think it may end up, we may end up being forced into that if you actually want the information. Because that, I mean, one of the things in this, in the lawsuit is that they're talking about potentially splitting Google's search crawler from its AI crawler so that companies can choose not to be part of its AI crawler but still be part of its search call. Right. Which Would, I mean, whether this will happen, who knows what's going to happen with the, with the lawsuit. But this is, you know, if you can push the, if you can still be relevant on Google without being in the AI search results and AI search results get to the point where they are not reliable and people want information, then they will come to the sites that provide that correct information and pay for it. Because, you know, I'm old enough to remember when we did used to pay for news, newspapers and magazines were not free. It's actually only been a blip in the industry for the last 20 years where you've been able to get content like this for free. And it's very difficult, to your point, to convince people to pay for things that they used to get for free.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:51:15]:
But once you can prove to them that the value that they were looking for is no longer there in the free content, then they will go to the paid content. But that's obviously a much smaller pie because right now you can get, I mean, almost all of the major platforms, major publishers are now behind paywalls. It's almost impossible to read any original content online that hasn't sort of been reblogged or reformatted without hitting a paywall.
Leo Laporte [02:51:42]:
One of the things that judge, Judge Mehta has to grapple with is in the original trial in which he ruled that Google was a monopoly, they barely talked about AI. This is in 2023. So the landscape is in those three years, two years has changed dramatically.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:52:00]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [02:52:01]:
In the next, I suspect the next few weeks, we're going to get his decision. He's been, he was supposed to do it by now he has. This is, we're in the penalty. The last stage of this, he is supposed to issue his ruling and say what he wants. Whether it's to break up Google or force Google's sale of Chrome or to have Google stop paying Apple, Samsung and Mozilla those billions of dollars to be default search. What is he going to do? And then of course, you know, we'll be talking a lot about that when that happens. But it will be appealed immediately and it will be more years, many more years before any of this resolves. And by then AI will have advanced even farther.
Leo Laporte [02:52:41]:
I don't think Google's doing anything that. I mean, it's basically responding to the fact that people are turning to perplexity and chatgpt and all these other tools to get the answer, answers. So Google's trying to just compete with the market.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:52:57]:
I appreciate perplexity for the sourcing like, that's one of my favorite things about asking questions is they'll give you the footnotes and the sourcing for where they pulled things.
Leo Laporte [02:53:07]:
They're trying to buy chrome, by the way. I don't think that's a legitimate bid.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:53:10]:
But I doubt that will happen.
Leo Laporte [02:53:13]:
I don't think they really.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:53:14]:
But that's a car.
Leo Laporte [02:53:17]:
The dog that catches the car. If they actually, oh, good, it's yours. 35 billion. Know what? We win.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:53:27]:
Okay, but to your point about revenue, like, in terms of, like, we're seeing that it's not necessarily going to be down to the Internet user to pay for the subscription. It may be down to these partnerships which we've seen more and more of. I mean, like the New York Times one with Amazon for their LLMs and their AI now. Yeah. Reddit. I mean, we're going to see more and more, more of these, but then this, this is going to create little walled gardens.
Leo Laporte [02:53:53]:
Yeah. And where does that money come from? Because these guys are all losing money hand over fist. In fact, we learned this week that Sam Altman said, yeah, we're out of GPUs. There's so many people using chat GPT5 that we've run out of hardware resources. And they, they're already valued a half a trillion dollars. They need to raise more money. Money. It's a really.
Leo Laporte [02:54:19]:
As we were saying at the very beginning of the show, this is a very interesting situation we've gotten ourselves into. I guess that's all you can say.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:54:28]:
Interesting times.
Leo Laporte [02:54:29]:
And that's what we talk about here on the shows. I'm so glad we get smart people like you guys on to Schmeiser's editor in chief at no Jitter. Is it no jitter.com?
Lisa Schmeiser [02:54:38]:
We are no jitter.com. yes.
Leo Laporte [02:54:40]:
Do not go to Google or ChatGPT. If you want to know about the latest in telecommunications and infrastructure and AI and automation and digital workspaces, the digital.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:54:53]:
Workplaces, the technologies that allow people and people to move information from point A to point B, and that's communicate effectively.
Leo Laporte [02:55:01]:
And you just go straight to the source and then you're supporting it.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:55:04]:
Right, Exactly.
Leo Laporte [02:55:06]:
There you go. Yeah. Thank you, Lisa. It's always great to see you. Thank you, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy. Any layoffs at Vox we should know about? No, no layoffs.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:55:18]:
Again, nobody's.
Leo Laporte [02:55:19]:
Nobody's laying off anybody. No, I, I know. I have no knowledge at all. The Verge is actually, it's interesting because the Verge has responded to this kind of thing very directly in A very interesting way you've become kind of almost a social feed.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:55:33]:
Yeah. So. Well, NE Patel actually coined the, the Google Zero phrase a couple years ago. So he's been, he knew. Yeah, he's been keeping his eye on this one. And yeah, we have. Well, some of the new features we have on our site which might be interesting to your listeners is we now have a new follow FE. You can go to the version.com and you can follow certain topics and then you can just click on your follow feed and all you'll see is articles for.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:55:57]:
On those topics. So you can kind of, if they're, if you're interested in automotive and smart home and robots, you can just click those and then you'll just see all content from that. You can also follow authors, so feel free to follow me if you're interested. So yeah, so you can have your stream, which is everything, or you can have your followers follow stream and you'll just see specific topics which. Yeah, so we, the website is designed to be sort of more of a destination now. So you go there and you can get all your, all your tech news for the day. And we also have a lot of great podcasts too, for everyone here who likes to listen to their news.
Leo Laporte [02:56:34]:
Indeed you do. Yes.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:56:35]:
And I'm actually, I've been the guest host for the Vergecast for the last week and this next week because David Pierce, our regular host, and Nilai Patel both having babies.
Leo Laporte [02:56:46]:
They're on paternity leave.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:56:48]:
Yes, they're on paternity leave.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:56:49]:
I love that they're doing that and they're so good about it. That's great.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:56:52]:
So we've had, we've had what we've called the Verge Hot Girl Vergecast summer. So four of the excellent female reporters on our staff have taken two weeks each to host one episode of the Verge cast a week. And so I was, I had one episode last week and then I have one coming out on Tuesday. And if you enjoyed the discussion about robots today, tune in on Tuesday because there's a lot more of that Very cool.
Leo Laporte [02:57:19]:
Follow the vergecast@theverge.com Look, I just clicked following. I am a paying subscriber, of course.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:57:26]:
Oh, thank you, Leah. We appreciate you.
Leo Laporte [02:57:27]:
It's a, it's a good deal. I mean, you're not, you're not the most expensive site out there, let me tell you.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:57:32]:
And you. We have lots of new newsletters too. So this is another thing that a of lot of tech is doing to sort of circumnavigate the Google Zero Effect is sending newsletters to which I at first I'm like, email, really? I need more in my email.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:57:48]:
Great for engagement because you make a habit of it.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:57:51]:
Yeah, you get a lot more. And we have a new Verge daily email that you can subscribe to so you can get all the headlines.
Leo Laporte [02:57:57]:
Do you think people read those? Obviously you must think read the newsletter.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:58:02]:
Yeah, I, I mean I don't, I don't know about the business side, but.
Leo Laporte [02:58:05]:
They must know, right?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:58:07]:
Yeah, yeah.
Lisa Schmeiser [02:58:09]:
So I, I can't, I can't really, I can't really dive into numbers because that's considered confidential company information. But some of the biggest vectors we've seen for audience growth and engaged readership, meaning people who come back and make a habit of reading us and see if we have a value and things like that does come from an email first approach. Approach.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:58:28]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the email is, it's the more personal connection, I suppose, especially with social media devaluing links left, right and center that that really is the way to sort of get the information out there. And also if you've asked for it, you're more likely to read it. So. And yeah, we have some news newsletters. We have quite a few now that used. We used to have two, now we have, I think we have about six. So there's, there's a lot.
Leo Laporte [02:58:51]:
It must work.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [02:58:52]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So lots, lots to check out the verge.com so thank you, Jennifer.
Leo Laporte [02:58:58]:
So great to see you. Of course, Sam Abulsamet, he. He is VP Research at Telemetry. A great gig for Sam. What do you want to plug, Mr. Abel Samid?
Sam Abuelsamid [02:59:10]:
Well, let's see. If you need any type of transportation mobility market research or advisory services, you can find us@telemetryagency.com I in addition to the Wheel Bearings podcast that I've been doing, it's coming up on Nine Years Now. We just did episode 414.
Leo Laporte [02:59:29]:
Congrats today.
Sam Abuelsamid [02:59:31]:
That's. That's a weekly show that I do with Robbie and Nicole. As you mentioned earlier, I also do the telemetry Transportation Daily, which is about a twoish minute daily, mostly daily, usually about four or five times a week. To that pick an interesting news story in the transportation sector and give, give a little commentary and insight on that within. Within two minutes. It's the only podcast I've ever done where I actually write a script in order to keep myself, you know, down to that. Otherwise I tend to ramble.
Leo Laporte [03:00:08]:
I can't get to two hours, let alone Two minutes.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:00:11]:
So yeah, so you can find that you can find the Telemetry Transportation Daily and any place where you find podcasts and there's also a link from telemetryagency.com.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [03:00:19]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [03:00:20]:
Nice. Really great.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:00:21]:
And we also write articles. You know, my colleagues and I all are regularly posting articles on the news and insights section of the site. I also do some stuff for Forbes and for the utopian. So lots. Lots. I'm all over the place.
Leo Laporte [03:00:37]:
Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:00:38]:
Trying to keep myself out of trouble.
Leo Laporte [03:00:39]:
There you go. I'm okay. I'm not going to say I know too much and I never know what I can say or not. So I won't say anything. But I know some things about Sam. I just want to say that I have the receipts, I have the pictures. Now, Sam and his lovely wife Julie and I and my wife Lisa went to dinner a couple of weeks ago. It was so much fun to see you, Sam.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:01:02]:
Oh yeah, well, yeah, it was great to see you guys and spend a few hours talking and eating some great food and sharing why I left my old job and I'm so happy to be a telemund now.
Leo Laporte [03:01:14]:
Yeah. And he was driving a beautiful lucid air. My God, what a gorgeous.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [03:01:19]:
Oh, I saw. I went to a. Sorry, I don't know what happened to my mic. I went into a lucid air showroom when I was in.
Leo Laporte [03:01:26]:
Aren't they pretty?
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [03:01:26]:
Some Boston. And oh yeah, I was.
Leo Laporte [03:01:29]:
Now I just saw a story. I didn't read the whole story that said maybe they're not long for this world.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:01:34]:
Yeah, I mean, we'll see. I mean, you know, they're. They're majority owned by some folks from the Middle east who have deep podcasts pockets. So far they've been willing to keep funding them. We'll see how long that persists. I'm pretty sure that they, Their, their investors don't want to see the company fail. But you know, they've also had some struggles, you know, building up sales volume.
Leo Laporte [03:01:59]:
So they are going to interestingly still offer $7,500 even after the tax credit expires, which is pretty smart. If I were, if I were at an EV company, I would consider doing that too. I, If I could afford it. Yeah. That's a smart move. Thank you, Sam.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [03:02:14]:
My eye on their suv.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:02:17]:
The gravity is really good.
Leo Laporte [03:02:19]:
It's very expensive. Boy, is it.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:02:21]:
It's. It's actually not.
Lisa Schmeiser [03:02:22]:
It's.
Leo Laporte [03:02:23]:
It.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:02:23]:
There, there will be the. The b. I mean it's not cheap, but the base version will probably start at about 75, 000.
Leo Laporte [03:02:30]:
Nice.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:02:31]:
And. Yeah, but they've got other stuff in the pipeline that's coming out over the next year or two as well.
Leo Laporte [03:02:37]:
Sold hundreds of them this year, so.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:02:39]:
That'S what they say. Other sources put the number slightly lower than that.
Leo Laporte [03:02:46]:
Okay. Okay. Great to have all three of you. Thank you. Sam, Jennifer and Lisa. It's great to see you.
Lisa Schmeiser [03:02:56]:
Learn so much from you guys.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:02:57]:
Thank you so much.
Leo Laporte [03:02:58]:
What do you think? This is why I do the shows. It's. I'm a complete.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:03:02]:
I've been listening to this since episode. Episode one. I mean, when it was still Return of the Screensavers.
Leo Laporte [03:03:07]:
Yes.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:03:08]:
You know, I don't know if that was one or episode zero.
Leo Laporte [03:03:10]:
That was zero, I think. Yeah.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:03:12]:
You know, and I've. I've learned so much from listening to you, Leo, over the last 20 years.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [03:03:17]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, that's. You are how I became a tech journalist. I've told you this story. I was a journalist before, but yeah, I'm from. I'm from the cottage days, though I'm not. Not quite.
Leo Laporte [03:03:29]:
Oh, my God. God.
Jennifer Pattison Tuohy [03:03:31]:
Zero.
Leo Laporte [03:03:32]:
Well, I'm so glad that I could have my dear friends on with me. And let's keep doing it. What do you say?
Sam Abuelsamid [03:03:38]:
Absolutely.
Leo Laporte [03:03:39]:
It's really a blast. 20 years we've been doing this and I have no intention to stop. I know. It's amazing we do twits as we have from day one on Sunday afternoon from 2 to 5pm I think it's the only show that we haven't changed the time. 2 to 5pm Pacific Time, 5 to 8 Eastern, 2100 UTC. The show has gotten longer over the years, I will admit that, but we pretty much start at the same time. You can watch us live, actually, if you want to. From day one, we've always streamed.
Leo Laporte [03:04:13]:
Maybe not day one, but from very early, we've always streamed live. Right now we stream on our club, Twit Discord for the members of the club. And we love having you and thank you for your support. We also stream to all on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kik. So take it. Any of those platforms you can watch live and chat live with us. And it's always great to see all the chatters in here. But the vast majority of people are not sitting around on a Sunday evening listening to twit.
Leo Laporte [03:04:44]:
They listen when they feel like it may be the first thing Monday morning. Whatever you feel like, it's just download a copy. That's all you have to do. There's audio, there's video. You'll find it at the website Twit TV. The video is also@YouTube.com There's a dedicated channel. Great way to share clips from the show if you want. And you can of course subscribe in your favorite podcast client.
Leo Laporte [03:05:04]:
And you'll get it automatically as soon as it is available. Thanks to our producer, booker Benino Gonzalez, our AI guy, and also booker Anthony Nielsen, both great helps on the show. Bonito is going to take a couple of weeks off. He's repositioning. He's on a repositioning cruise, but will return to us in September. You think? Benito, will you be back sometime. Sometime soon, we hope. Thanks to Kevin King also who works on the show, edits it usually.
Lisa Schmeiser [03:05:34]:
I'll be.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:05:34]:
I'll be out for the next three.
Lisa Schmeiser [03:05:35]:
Episodes and I'll be back.
Leo Laporte [03:05:37]:
Nice. All right. Well, we'll miss you. Thanks to all of you for watching. If you're not a member of the club, you can support what we do. I know. Everything should be free. I agree.
Leo Laporte [03:05:49]:
Everything should be free. Our rent should be free. I shouldn't have to pay Bonito. I shouldn't have to pay for the lights. I shouldn't have to. Everything should be free.
Sam Abuelsamid [03:05:58]:
Including, I would say Bonito should definitely get paid. As long as I don't have to pay for anything either.
Leo Laporte [03:06:03]:
He has to pay too. See, it's a cascade aid. If his rent were free and his food were free and everything were free, then he wouldn't have to be paid, and then I would have to pay him. But since it's not. Help us out a little bit. We. Our advertising only covers about 75% of our operating expenses. We need you to cover the other 25% by joining Club Twit.
Leo Laporte [03:06:23]:
Twit TV. Club Twit. Lots of benefits. Find out more at the website. Thank you, everybody. As I've said for 20 years, and we can. You know what? Even if. If it's free, we're going to keep doing it.
Leo Laporte [03:06:34]:
I don't. I don't care what it takes. We're going to keep doing it for another 20 years. I promise you. And as I have said for those 20 years, another twit is in the can. We'll see you next time. Bye.
