This Week in Tech 961 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for twit this weekend. Tech Amy Webb is here, our futurist, devendra Hardware from the Engadget, christina Warren from GitHub what a great panel, great way to start the new year. We're gonna talk about AI, of course, but first let's talk about CES. It starts in two days. Oh guess what? Ai is gonna be the big topic at CES. We'll talk about the passing of a computer legend and Elon Musk. Oh, my goodness, the Wall Street Journal just discovered he's been using drugs. What are we gonna do? It's all coming up next on twit Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is twit.

00:46
This is twit this weekend tech episode 961, recorded Sunday, january 7th 2024. A nation of nerds this weekend tech is brought to you by look out. Your data is always on the move, whether on a device in the cloud, across Networks or at the local coffee shop. Now, while that's great for your workforce, it is a challenge for IT security. Look out helps you control your data and free your workforce. With look out, you'll gain complete visibility into all your data so you can minimize risk from external and internal threats, plus ensure Compliance. By seamlessly securing hybrid work, your organization doesn't have to sacrifice Productivity for security. Working with multiple point solutions and legacy tools in today's environment, it's just too complex. With its single unified platform, look out reduces IT complexity, giving you more time to focus on whatever else comes your way. Good data protection it's not a cage. It's a springboard letting you and your organization bound toward a future of your making. Visit lookoutcom Today to learn how to safeguard data, secure hybrid work and reduce IT complexity. That's look outcom. It's time for twit this weekend tech first show of 2024. That's exciting and Best panel of the year so far.

02:15
Amy Webb is here always. Love having Amy on future today Institute. She is our Greg LeMond of the tech sphere. She's a serious bicyclist now. Hello, amy, good to see you. How long have you been a serious cyclist?

02:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I wrote I did mountain biking in college and then I moved to Japan and switched over to martial arts and then I got in a bad accident and then I got pregnant and then I gained a lot of weight and then I Tried running. That didn't work and then I got back on the bike about six years ago.

02:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's a kid I loved riding my bicycle. It is the best it. I mean it's. Didn't Steve Jobs say computers are bicycles for the mind? It is, I think, the most efficient form of human transport right.

02:59 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It is. It also requires a ton of focus if you ride seriously, and that's also it can be really technical and, like, really really dangerous if you're if you're in it for speed, but it can be fun, you know. So yeah, nice.

03:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, cuz I'm only reason I know, as I see your Instagram posts and you look like you're working hard sometimes. Wow, she is really dedicated. It's very impressive.

03:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Thank you. I will start posting where I'm doing a lot of long fondos, so 50 to 100 miles.

03:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, you're so. And how long does that take? A hundred miles.

03:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, on the last Fondo I did Was pouring down rain about two miles in and I cried. Crossing the finish line it took like the day. It was horrible a day in.

03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yikes. Also with us, the wonderful Christina Warren. Haven't seen you since. Well, you're wearing the hat. Get hub. You know I am wearing a hat, get a feature us, yep, and it's great to see you again.

04:03 - Christina Warren (Guest)
She works for GitHub as a senior developer advocate and we is it great pains to tell you, do not DM her on Twitter, cuz you can't, unless you work at Twitter, in which case please help me out my account, and I didn't do anything wrong, but I'm stuck in a Kafka as Calscape and I can't get out of it, and I my account has been limited for some reason and Anyway, it's helped me. So yeah, that's my play, but no, don't follow me on Twitter right now. Follow me on.

04:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Look at this when they, when they block you, they take away everything.

04:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, exactly, and I, and again, like the last thing I tweeted was literally like tune in tomorrow for GitHub universe.

04:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that didn't, shouldn't have violated, violated ex's rules.

04:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I know I didn't violate any rules, because I didn't even get a notice that I did. At first it was we think someone has hacked you because I changed my display name and then I changed my password a few times. I think the network I was on was weird.

04:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How long have you had some? There's this how long have you had film at at film underscore girl? How long have you had?

05:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
that. I mean I joined Twitter in 2007, but I was using that username and other things probably going back to late 2002, but you are on Twitter from the very be.

05:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean the earliest people. It's like late 2006. You would have been on it ever since the beginning.

05:16 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I've been on like basically the very beginning, like I was. I was a little bit late, I think it was. You know I I resisted for a few months. I first heard about Twitter actually from you on, like I think it was when it went big at South by Southwest, because I was still in college, yeah, and and I was like I was like I'm not gonna join. That that's stupid. Fast forward a few months and I do finally join. Fast forward a few years. That like was a significant part of my career and like why people got to know me and whatnot. And then fast forward a few more years and it's no longer Our home.

05:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, isn't that sad. Also with us a guy who's filled in for me now twice this past year and I said you know what? I want to be here sometime when DeVendra Hardware is on vendor, it's great to see you, happy to be here.

06:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Happy 2024, happy 2024. What a year it's been.

06:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are. I would thought I would have thought you'd be on an airplane on your way to Las Vegas right now.

06:16 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We, we kind of split the team. So CS is happening, but half of the Engadget staffer there and half her home and just we have two kids. I don't want to leave my wife alone with two kids. So you know, they're just very young.

06:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So maybe next year left and gadget has always CES and Engadget kind of go together. It's always been a big part of Engadget's portfolio. It was the CES coverage yeah we did the official awards forever.

06:38 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, we're not doing them anymore, but we were, yeah, tied there. Yeah, um I.

06:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Guess, christina, probably you're not going to see. Yes, I'm thinking no.

06:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I haven't been in a few years. I mean, well, it's interesting because when I worked at Microsoft, microsoft did sometimes have a presence there Not big like they used to back in the day, but they might have like a smaller team that would go and a couple of times I was Potentially approached about going and I was always like I don't think enough time has passed. Now, now that it's been like I last time I went was 2017, so I I Would maybe go again. It would totally depend, but no, I'm not going this year. Obviously, if somebody wants to buy me next year, meh, maybe.

07:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's one of those things where you there's an amnesia that sets in how many years it takes. Many of us haven't gone since COVID, which would be now right be the fourth year since COVID Actually, the third we went, and I went in January 2020, before we really knew that there was this right.

07:43 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right because they hadn't canceled things yet. That's right, because I remember that, because I I Was literally about sleep to the air. The last trip that I took was in February of 2020, and then I was about to leave for the airport in March of 2020 to go to Zurich, oh and, and they canceled, like literally, I was about to get into a car and but yeah, so, so, yeah, january 2020, it's a question, but it wasn't.

08:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was yeah, we went but it takes, I think, maybe four or five years before you Forget the pain. It's like child. Right, maybe I wouldn't know that you forget the pain and say, hey, we could do that again.

08:18 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Amy, you wouldn't know either, but that seems.

08:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm I'm actually going to Davos, not.

08:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you're going to the World Economic Forum.

08:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, but I remember the last I used to go to see us every year and I feel like the last year that I was there was so veterans will remember this there was a spot in a hallway where you could sit on the stairs and and there was sort of like this why intersection? Yeah, and there would be a cluster of men and it was always men who would get to that point in the stairwell Look right, look left, and and I would play this game that was called Are they going back to CES or are they going over to AEN?

09:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, adult, right so this was the fork in the road between yep porno. Yep, well, they're both porno, but one space.

09:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, they overlap and I would sit in the hallway also, cuz you know like I would sit there and just people watch and try to try to guess who was gonna go in which direction.

09:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a great game.

09:34 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I got very, very good at it so.

09:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What was that? What was the tell? What was the giveaway?

09:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Absolutely I cannot. I'm gonna get hate trolled forever. So no, I will not. I will not divulge. Someday We'll go to a bar and I'll tell you what I saw, but that I cannot unsee the Twitch game, by the way, a Twitch stream.

09:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was a Twitch stream. No, no, that should be, somebody should do that. Well, I can't anymore because they move.

09:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think they moved it now it's a dead.

10:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First they moved off site and then they moved to a later date. So yeah, yeah, yeah.

10:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I, but I haven't been to CES in in years and that 2020 CES. I was in Davos at web at the annual meeting and I knew something bad was happening because the Chinese contingent was not there and you know, just it was like they normally don't not show up for things, and I was just like this is probably, this is probably gonna be really bad.

10:25
And then I, I met South by in March every year and I, you know, that was the year that we were waiting to see what was gonna happen with South by and of course, they were the first to man.

10:34 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I can't. I that wasn't. We had such great plans for that, so you know what, though they killed it.

10:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That team, I think, did an amazing job of pulling together Because, honestly they they really needed the city to cancel the event because of their insurance and the city didn't, and it really Kind of screwed them over, yeah, so I thought South by did a phenomenal job that year of pulling something off within like a few days.

10:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyways, it's kind of sad they were forced to sell it as a result of the losses and then sell it.

11:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
the Penske family took a Steak in it, so it's not sold outright but pens the big portion of it now. They do, along with a bunch of other media properties. So, no, no, it's still. It's the, still the same crew running it and they're awesome people and they've been around forever. Yeah, if you haven't registered, I will plug. That'll be the thing I plug. Like everybody should register for South by, because it's gonna be awesome in a couple months.

11:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We, and as the world economic form is happy to tell you, there's only 17. You cannot go to seven days, 18 hours, 19 minutes 46 seconds. We will be rebuilding trust in seven days, 18 hours, ladies and gentlemen, finally, finally, great. So Jeff Jarvis used to go to Davos every year too, and I always kind of mocked him about this, because this is what, this is what is Davos.

11:54 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, okay, hang on. So there's a lot of people who sort of go to Davos and, for those of you listening, I've got my, I'm doing the air quotes there, so I do a lot of, I'm on a lot of boards and I do a lot of stuff With the forum. So the folks who are on the list have to go through this whole security process and there is an interior security perimeter and that's where the main things happen. There's a whole bunch of people, though, a lot of journalists, that descend to the city of Davos and are in other places when they're. You know, like face.

12:30
Meta has usually every year, like Palinters, got a house. Microsoft Usually has a bunch of stuff there, and so journalists Can get sort of a day pass to go to that type of thing, but you, you cannot. So and I'll just say this because I get a little irritated every year at the horrific Like people making fun of it and all this negative coverage Most of those people are not on the inside and have absolutely no idea what's actually yeah, we think of it as kind of the Bohemian Grove or maybe the Allen and company, where it's a bunch of big wigs getting together and planning our futures behind closed doors.

13:04
Nobody. Yeah, that is exactly what's happening. That is very much a lot of what's happening. It's also a lot of one of you know, like a whole bunch of meetings and a whole bunch of stuff, but it's not some kind of, you know, secret cabal situation. Well, how is that different. I mean, it sounds to me. For one thing, business insider usually gets its hands on the list and publishes the list. We know who's there.

13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, we don't know what happens behind those closed doors. I mean, are they planning our future?

13:34 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I will tell you so so realistically. You know, most of my time has spent I run the company, but my time has spent with CEOs of other companies and it's very, very challenging because everybody is so busy to find time to meet, and so one of the things that about Davos is that it's one time when everybody's in one spot and can have conversations. That's just really, really hard to get on calendars at other times of the year. So, and yes, that's behind closed doors, but they would be behind closed doors anyways, and whatever other cities, so it's not like there's some kind of Illuminati style terrible thing. I mean, yeah, that's a good point it's the open.

14:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know they're planning our future all the time. That's their job. Is there? Is their government there, though? That's the question. Is government talking to them? Yeah, this was always the concern, like at the Bohemian Grove, was that the government, and like the World Bank, is telling the Fed what the interest rate should be? No, no.

14:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So the United States usually does not have a presence and what really sucked was when Trump decided to go and we don't. We have some presence, but we certain, like presidents, don't. Usually a president would attend.

14:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No it's be George. George Schultz would go, a Henry Would go. Yeah, sure, um, we know actually is really the president, but you know they have this, this figurehead who gives the speeches, but meanwhile the Secretary of State or somebody is like.

15:06 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, yeah, I would.

15:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would hope that the Secretary of State in there and, yeah right, I'm just being, I'm being yes.

15:13 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, not everybody's going to get that. Trump was annoying because he always had this cadre of 40 or so photographers with him and he did this, like this, like this, like I'm a fine lady. Like I'm in my prom dress and I'm entering now and everybody should be taking pictures of me, and I was like I literally just need to go to the bathroom. Can you please step any? Just move aside, because you're blocking the washroom for everybody.

15:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To be fair, it would probably be like that for any American president at something like Davos. Right, they're disruptive by their nature. Yeah.

15:47 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, they're not, though, because there's tons of presidents from other countries there, and they don't have an army of photographers with them, so I mean, that's most of who's there.

15:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Were you there when the Donald was? There yeah. Unfortunately.

16:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I just wanted to go to the back, honestly, like he's just kept like walking around, like he got a new Birkenbeck and he was completely beyond.

16:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's go back to CES. There was just gossipy of my part. They're just. If you don't know. There've been a lot of stories lately about how he smells and I was just curious.

16:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
A lot of filet officials will do that to you.

16:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, yeah, yeah, don't eat, don't eat, yeah, anyway, that's your diet. Anyway, from W E, f to CES, what is? You must, being a senior editor over there at the Engadget, have some idea of what we're going to expect at CES. Is there anything? It's been a while since CES ever broke something. A big story, right?

16:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, I don't think anything's going to break here. It's a lot of more of the same. There's a term we're probably going to be hearing more and more of this year, though, and I don't know if you guys have talked about it, but it's AIPC, and that's Intel and AMD with these new chips, with their new laptop chips that have NPUs built into them. You know it's ironic.

17:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The ironic part of all this and you know this is Apple put an NPU in their iPhone five years ago, 2017. Eight years ago, seven years ago and, frankly, all of the Apple Silicon devices have pretty robust machine language co -processors built in them the PC side is just getting caught up.

17:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Everything relies on that.

17:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so this is kind of the PC world catching up.

17:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Basically, that's what all of this has been, but it is kind of interesting like what future, what developers could be doing. Well, that's the end. Adobe and others have said that they're going to build, like you know, things that can tap into your NPU.

17:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's also the irony of it is which that Apple has been so privacy focused that they're doing things like fingerprint reading or face reading and they're not doing chat, gpt style AI, even though the hardware is capable of it. In fact, apple you know Mark German just published his Bloomberg newsletter today basically saying Apple is woefully behind, like more than a year behind an AI.

18:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well they're. I don't know that they're behind. I think they're just behind in commercializing or talking about it, because they created and they've actually been doing a lot.

18:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have their LLM. They have a new LLM.

18:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, they made with Columbia. Yeah, that's meant to be on device. So AI at the edge kind of thing, ferret right. Which is kind of somewhat interesting to me that they went open source, because Apple is the, the grand poob of keeping everything tightly controlled and secrets and walled gardens and all the rest of it. But Apple, you know, apple is not a hyperscaler, right. Microsoft, because of a, you know, of Azure, and Amazon because of those, are hyperscalers. So I think part of what's happening is you've got a consumer goods company in Apple which is going to have to make a transition to become some form of a hyperscaler in order to compete.

18:58 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's weird because where Apple tends to do things after everybody else right, they didn't make the first MP3 player, they didn't make the first smartphone, but they made the ones after seeing the mistakes that everybody else made. But everything happened so quickly with AI, so in the past year we haven't heard much. We're like oh man, you're done, we can't.

19:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that funny? Yeah, so weird. Yeah, oh, you lost, it's just. The race is not only not over, it has just barely begun.

19:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's just begun and they've like, I think, focusing on things that we're actually using, like focusing on the computer vision stuff and making face ID faster and using the neural engine for that. That's useful to people waiting to see what a developer does with an MPU. That's like that's what Intel named you're going to be doing, and we're going to have to wait a while to see if those things actually pay off.

19:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm also, uh, I'm kind of more in, well, I don't know, I, I, uh, I, I Jan Lacune, uh, uh, did a good interview in I think it was it was a wired with Stephen Levy in which he says open source is really where you want AI to grow, because you don't want any one company to control this. You don't, you know, you don't want it to be a meta thing and he works for meta. You don't want it to be a Microsoft thing. Uh, you don't even want it to be an open AI or anthropic thing. You want it to be open source. So, in, in that regard, I'm glad Apple's doing it that way and I think it is very interesting if you've got the hardware to do it locally, to do it on device, so that it's not being sent up to the cloud.

20:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And just things that will happen more quickly, like Apple's talked about on device Siri Pings, you know, and stuff on your Apple watch. When you ask for Siri, it doesn't just like fetch to the cloud and, you know, trigger all that stuff. It just happens, things can just happen. So we'll probably see more of that on on PCs, like that is certainly the future version of, like co-pilot for Windows or something.

20:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's reassuring, but also to individuals concerned about privacy and to companies concerned about data exfiltration. Go ahead.

20:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Definitely. You're saying Yon Lakun. I was saying, like Yon Lakun, it is funny to see him like champion open source, where he is the guy who's also saying authors should not be paid for writing books. Can.

21:03 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I just, can we just double click here, because this is bullshit and let's talk about why. So I think it's rich that that Lama 2 is. So this is Meta's product.

21:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It leaked out right. And then they opened.

21:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, it's not open source.

21:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
None of it is for commercial use, but there this entire business ecosystem, which is the stuff that I pay attention to, is built using the same concept that Facebook was built on, which means all of Facebook's value comes from UGC, user-generated content. So what do like? Do we think that magically, now because we've put the words open source in front of Lama or anybody else's LLM, that magically this changes anything? It doesn't. All this is really going to do is it's a new way of commoditizing people's work, and it's still the largest companies that are doing this. So what you have now is, I think, just like a further entrenchment and a further concentration of power, but under the guise of open sources, though that's somehow going to make everything better and assuage everybody's concerns.

22:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I defer to your expertise in this, but let me give you an example of why I think it's a good thing I was able to. There's an open source program called ChatGPT for All, the idea being you're going to run this locally on your device. The problem is you still need a large LLM. Thankfully, because there are public LLMs. You can use an API to talk to open AI, but that's still sending data up to them. But you can download LLM and other derivatives like that onto your machine. You can then give it a corpus of information and you can create an expert system that does not call out to the cloud. That to me seems to me a benefit that does not, in fact. Yet the original LLM had to be created by a big job company using lots of TPUs.

22:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But that's actually a pretty important thing. I think that you can't just ignore that aspect. You're talking about the fine-tuning thing that you're doing on device and the fact that you'd like that that can be more private for you. And to be clear with the other hosted models there are, depending on what license you're under, the amount of information that you send back to them, especially if you're under a corporate thing, like I know, if you use the Azure Open AI service. I know if you use certain things from Bedrock, it's not actually retraining that information based on what you're sending to it. I just want to make that clear.

23:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but you are still contacting the cloud and you're sending your query to the cloud. There is still data collection going on, whereas where I do it locally- nothing is going to the cloud.

23:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We should separate out data collection and privacy, which is a good argument, from who is the what is the economic value of what's being generated and therefore the argument that's being made about open source, I think, falls apart, yeah, but I would also just go back and say I think that and I think you're exactly right on that, but I would also just want to push back a little bit on.

23:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't think that we can dismiss so quickly the fact that the actual like you're talking about the fine tuning aspect and that's fine that you want that localized and you want that specific, because I think that makes sense. But we cannot at all ignore that the main model and the main way that that was trained A most of those models are not actually open source. The data is not open source, even if they make parts of the model available, even if they make parts of the data that people can train against available, that is usually pretty closed off. And B we don't know what that's all been trained on and there's a lot of people who have lots of opinions on how that data set was trained to begin with. So I think that I mean, look, I'm in favor of open sourcing more things, but I also tend to agree that a lot of companies are using especially Facebook. To be quite honest, they're using the language open source, even though what Facebook's doing is not open source.

24:48
It's open access under specific conditions, and that's a good thing and I'm not against that. But it's not open source and I equip with using that language because I think the language is important to be specific on. But I think that they're doing it for not altruistic reasons. They want everyone to be dependent on their models and their tooling because they can then find ways to monetize that. It's not as if, you know, they think this is good for humanity, and it's also not as if a lot of these specific models themselves will never be made open. Just because you have a localized thing that you might be able to train something against doesn't mean that you actually have access to all the different inference points and data parts that encompass that model.

25:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'm on Nomex. I mean I don't want to go too much in the weeds on this, but it's kind of depends on what you define open source. These models are downloadable Nomex license, mit license. They're large language models that can run locally. Yeah, maybe, I don't know this.

25:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't have the access to the training, the training, and also not all of them are very good. I mean, that's the other thing too. Llama is interesting, because it's actually good, but a lot of these things that you can do locally. They're fun, they're toys.

26:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, aren't they going to get better? I mean, isn't this where you want development and work to go?

26:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
But it requires people. So this is the other huge thing that most people don't understand you need armies and armies of people who are doing labeling. You wouldn't have Linux without an army of people creating and contributing to Linux right and yeah, I guess the issue is the vast majority of people are using the user interfaces that are super simple and don't require.

26:35
So, like again, it's the big tech players who are in the space. So I agree with you in a perfect world we would have systems that are clean and opt in and you know, everybody would be on the up and up. But that's just not the situation we find ourselves in. Yet again, all right.

26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, anyway, I forgot how we got into this. Oh, open source is going to be all over CES. That's how we got into it. I mean not open source, ai, sorry. Open source will not be all over CES, ai will be everywhere. Is AI starting to become like blockchain, a kind of a term that really means nothing?

27:14 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
People are just throwing it on. You know product descriptions and some product names and stuff to, so that we got to watch out for that. But I think, like you know, ed and Gadger, like we have not, we really have not covered much of the blockchain stuff, because I think a lot of us called like this is BS.

27:29
Like this is nothing. So there's a lot of stuff that we kind of passed on. But AI we've seen it, you know, transform things. We've seen what chat GPT can do. We've seen like how it's completely changed the way Microsoft is approaching things to you and I have my issues with that and like kind of how Microsoft is kind of going all in on it without quite knowing where it's going to take us.

27:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But hey, Apple's going all in on Vision Pro without knowing where it's going to take us. That's what companies do. There's a difference like.

27:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Vision Pro is not like the entire future of the company.

28:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, but I would bet that Apple has spent at least $100 billion on Vision Pro over the last 10 years, right? So I mean?

28:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
it's. It's a bold bet. It is a. It is a bold bet, but I don't know. I got to test that thing and I could see how it could lead us to something cool.

28:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, I just add one other quick thing before we hop off of AI.

28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh we're going to never hop off of AI, trust me.

28:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, no, but as it relates to interest and and what's what.

28:26
So I was with Brad Lycap, who's open AI is COO, a couple months ago and he was telling me that he talks to a lot of people who don't realize that open AI is a company and chat GPT is their product.

28:41
Right, and to me, that's analogous to some of you know AI, or generate. When people talk about AI right now, they're not talking about part of, yes, they're talking about generative AI and, by and large, when business people talk about generative AI, what they're actually talking about is automation, yes, so that's a fundamental challenge going forward, because the expectations have been set, especially by investors, that, like AI writ large, is going to do all this stuff, and my concern is, given where the hype is, that we wind up where we were in the 80s, when all of these promises were made. There was nowhere close to the compute, by the way, that would have been required to do any of what was being described, and we wound up in an AI winter, and I think that from a national security standpoint, among other things, that would be a really, really bad situation for us to be in.

29:33 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I agree. I mean, I think this is a good thing. You bring up the compute aspect. I think that that's why we're able to be where we are right now and that's why people have opened up possibilities again. But the expectations and what's actually there, I I couldn't agree more. I think there's sometimes a disconnect, but certainly, you know, this is why people like companies like Nvidia have been doing so well, because they've spent 15 years investing in not just growing their, their, you know compute business on the GPU side, but also with CUDA and creating a language that is kind of the de facto thing that people are using when it comes to training these models and running these things.

30:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I wouldn't expect a whole lot of business automation stuff at CES. It's going to be that other kind of AI, right it's going to be whatever that is, that's what.

30:22
I would think it's the thing, the science fiction thing, that normal people like me think of when you say AI and we, you know we had. It's really true that I far at first thought that AI was another gimmick like blockchain. It wasn't going to be particularly interesting and, having lived through a few AI winners, was very aware of that. You know, over promising and under delivering, but increasingly impressed by mid journey and stable diffusion. And I have a couple of custom GPTs I made for myself that are incredibly useful as expert systems, and we use AI to generate show notes, to generate clips from our shows. We're using it more and more at twit, so I'm much more convinced of the of the of. Now. That's business automation, I would guess, but anyway, I'm like transcription.

31:13 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, that's a business automation.

31:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, but but the expert systems I'm building I don't know what you would call that. I mean, I don't know. I think that there is some value. Certainly, stable diffusion is not part of the business automation sector. I guess we're going to get to. We don't need to do it yet. Well, I want to finish the CES conversation, but we're going to get to this whole issue of the New York Times lawsuit and who owns the content that is generating these LLMs and and do the LLMs have the right to access it? And who you know? What does copyright have to say about that? But let's finish CES first. Is there a particular AI implementation you think is going to divindre be important to consumers to pay attention to, like, I don't know, a toilet that you can diagnose your illnesses?

32:00 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean we've we've lived through the smart home wave at CES, We've lived through 3D TV, so is there just like a whole load of BS that you really have to sit through at that show A lot of people say that they're excited about the smart home and that it's back like it's back maybe every year every robot with a mop a mopping robot.

32:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now, what more could?

32:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
it be LLMs big thing.

32:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, lg has a robot that can watch your pet for you. So that's two wheels in it.

32:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, all it does is look at your pet and that's it. But that's good.

32:33 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Okay, that's it. I can't really, yeah, tell what's good with AI at this point at CES, but there's always going to be junk. There's always going to be junk, always going to be junk. But on the PC front, it is interesting to see both Intel and AMD kind of jump on this thing and also say, like we're trying to get developers on board, we're trying to make this a thing and the MPU has the potential to be like you know, the next thing, like a GPU and deal with some low level tasks on your computer. So your next device could do some cool things like better background blurring and stuff like that, without hitting your battery too much.

33:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's really interesting this these new earbuds using MEMS technology that you talk about that's kind of intriguing. Mems is micro electronic electromechanical machines. These are these are nano bots, in effect, but they're actually physical machines. They're used widely. You actually have MEMS in your house, probably Many scales use MEMS and my June oven has MEMS in its feet. So it knows how solid state stuff. It's cool, yeah. So what, what, what? What's this going to happen? What's this going to do for earbuds?

33:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think the idea is that, you know, MEMS is an interesting thing because it can open up the, I think, the range of frequencies that you can kind of pack into a really small like a wireless earbud or something, and the next generation that we talk about will handle like low frequency stuff better, like bass stuff, Whereas right now you need a separate driver, I think, in some of those headphones. So, you know, making making the audio stuff better that doesn't need to be broken in like speaker tuners and things like that. Like you know, that's kind of interesting to me 40 times louder bass response according to X MEMS.

34:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Shake your head. That's just what I want. Wifi 7 in everything.

34:18 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's a big thing actually. Like Wi-Fi 7, again, this is a typical CS thing People get excited about routers and networking technology, but I do think, like Wi-Fi 7, I think the the idea is like stability right, like they want to make Wi-Fi a lot more stable. If you have a frequency disruption or something, wi-fi 7 should be able to get around that. Honestly, I think Wi-Fi 6 and 6e were huge upgrades. I don't know if you guys have noticed, like if you've upgraded a router recently, but they are amazing stuff.

34:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and actually Wi-Fi 7 solves one of the problems. One of the things we have to tell everybody who's on our shows is please don't use Wi-Fi. Yes, because Wi-Fi is a collision based, like Ethernet. Collision based, which means your Wi-Fi router will politely pause if it sees another signal trying to transmit and wait for a random amount of time and then try again, which, on a call, means there's a dropout. And we know, you know, there's a noticeable dropout and it's fairly regular, and so we tell people to use hardware. Supposedly Wi-Fi 7 is going to limit that with multi-link operation, so they'll be able to use multiple bands. So when there's a collision, at least you'll have somewhere else to go.

35:24 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's super cool. Like I remember. Like I remember when Wi-Fi started rolling out and I was doing tech support at my college and people would call and be like well, I don't have. I don't have any wireless in my room. Like hey, these are really big buildings, they have really thick walls. I can't do anything about how this Wi-Fi works. I can't help you. I can't help you here.

35:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, do you guys remember Wi-Max?

35:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was at.

35:47 - Amy Webb (Guest)
CES when Wi-Max launched Sprint oh, I was too Sprint. Yeah, that was going to be the big thing, and I remember being like super, super, super excited, and then I followed by just disillusionment and sadness.

36:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, it was so sad for them because LTE was the thing that they didn't have the spectrum to be able to get. That they made a bad choice. They made a very bad choice. I mean, that's ultimately, in my opinion, why Sprint was the one that was acquired by T-Mobile and not the other way around. Was that the Japanese owner at that point basically was just like we lost too much money on this because of Wi-Max.

36:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I was at that CES too, Amy. In fact, we built Colleen Henry, our chief engineer at the time, built, using Plexiglas and a bunch of boxes, a multi-band Wi-Max streaming unit that would connect multiple devices to the Wi-Max, a theory being, you know you're going to get some real solid bandwidth here, and she would carry around over her shoulder this giant Plexiglas box as I would try to stream from showstoppers. And you know it wasn't a great solution.

37:01 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, that's cool, though it's cool, cool idea.

37:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, like you, we were fooled by the promise of Wi-Max. Like Sprint, we were fooled by the promise of Wi-Max, which didn't deliver. A sad. That was where they launched. It was at CES in.

37:14 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Vegas.

37:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was another maybe, perhaps bad choice on their part. Let's see if we get 100,000 nerds to use this at the same time and see what happens.

37:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Go ahead. I was in the press conference for gosh. I think it might have been maybe, christina, you know this Warner Brothers or something, but it was the launch. I was supposed to be there for the launch of HD DVD, yes, and I walked into the room like we're sitting in the room and somebody came in and was like HD it's not happening.

37:45 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, because that's right. They just canceled it. They canceled it like one day into.

37:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
CES. I remember that I was literally sitting in the room when some junior staffer came in and was like why it's dead? Like there is no, it's in blue. Long live Blu-ray Long live.

38:00 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I remember this. Yeah, cause that happened Because Sony was behind Blu-ray, obviously, and yeah, it was. Warner Brothers Was it. Toshiba Toshiba. Toshiba killed HD DVD. But wasn't, it wasn't Warner one of the studios that had made like the bet on HD DVD?

38:16 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I just remember like we were supposed to be seeing a. I think we were supposed to be seeing a preview of something, and yeah.

38:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there was one company that put everything on HD DVD discs. Maybe it was Warner's. Oh my God.

38:29 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It might have been Paramount Warner, might have been both of them, I can't remember now, but I think one of the studios was exclusive to HD DVD. I remember this and then I remember, like the you know the disaster, which is basically like, okay, what do we do now? You bought this movie.

38:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here from 2008,. The story on scene at Warner goes Blu-ray exclusively delivering crushing blow to HD DVD.

38:55 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's what I was in.

38:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's why you run Warner Brothers, that's so funny. And then two years later they're like yeah, sorry about that, this is dead. Or like a week later it was yeah, it was very, very funny.

39:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, while rumors of Warner potentially dumping HD DVD have been circulating for the last few months, the timing of the announcement right before the start of the consumer electronics show seems designed to inflict maximum damage to so she was planned HD DVD push at the show. Can you imagine the the booths, everything they had to just, oh, we've got to take it all down, not to mention the chaos at the adult video forum.

39:31 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, Well, I mean, what was what was so bad about that, honestly to me, as, like a consumer who owned a significant number of DVDs and what?

39:40
What I think really hurt the the film industry, to be frank, having that split between those two formats for those two years. That was right in the run up to when streaming was actually going to be a thing, because broadband would finally be everywhere and the technology to actually distribute films and watch them that way was finally going to become mainstream. And so what happened is is that in your last like two, three year window, you had to potentially still cash in on consumers who would actually buy content and box sets and things like that. You had the market split and and you had them slip between these two formats and you had them split across studios. And so, honestly, like that was kind of a, you know, like self owned error, like on the behalf of the studios for not being able to come together that way, because they didn't know it then, but that was going to be a last straw for the, the buckets of money they could make.

40:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it's really sad. To this day you still can't get balls of fury on anything but HD DVD. It's a great movie. I love that movie. Yeah, did streaming just kind of streaming kind of just just obviated the whole thing.

40:41 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh, it did, that's what. I'm saying and, and and they lost out on like that last because they were printing money. Yeah. During those areas like, especially like the early odds when people like DeVendor and I were spending hundreds of dollars a month on on discs. I'm speaking for both of us here at DeVendor because I'm pretty sure that's for you yeah totally.

41:00
I know that was true for me and you know they were able to. They were making just as much of that. More money on the home video really says they were in box office. It was this massive cash grab and I think that they just mistakenly thought that it would last forever. It was like nope, a little company called Roku spin off of. Some things that the company called Netflix are doing are going to change all that.

41:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now Roku is at CES this year with its own line of TV sets.

41:27 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They're next line, they have a line of premium TVs. Yeah, yeah.

41:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Roku pro. These have AI built in, so whatever, whatever.

41:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Okay, what is?

41:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
the AI doing.

41:39 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Everybody understands that.

41:41 - Amy Webb (Guest)
AI is in like everything it's going to look so bad, I predict, because it's going to be.

41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
this is real because what they're they say the AI is doing, is watching the content and improving it.

41:52 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, they're specifically. It's like matching, like the setting, like they, they. I've heard the stat that like nobody actually changes their picture settings on on their TV, so they're like. Okay, if you're watching sports. Maybe they'll flip over to get that you know motion smoothing on your watching a movie. Maybe they'll flip it off and my car does this.

42:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean not with sports, but car has AI smoothing. I just I just got a new BMW i5.

42:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So did I rise to like.

42:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So yeah, it's just all the helping. I don't want the helping weird dystopian music, as I'm backing up.

42:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes me super anxious right away.

42:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Maybe later you can tell me how to do that, because I can't figure it out.

42:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't like. All the funny car companies think that you want noise and so they all have some sort of electronic noise.

42:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think what I want to hear is actually the amplified external noise, because I like to open a window to hear if a car is going on towards us.

42:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, these are, these are more. You're right, they're dystopian.

42:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's like whoa, when I back up, it's like uh it makes me so nervous. It's like is she going to hit something Cause I backed up into my garage.

43:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like that car, though, except for that, but I like it. It's a nice car. It's a very smooth ride Thanks to AI smoothing, I think do you have a the sport pack?

43:11 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Do you have the M series?

43:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
or the. I didn't get an M series because I am not my car has boost, so you, there's a little.

43:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I have a boost paddle.

43:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did get the M package but I think, yeah, it does boost, yeah, it's a little scary.

43:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
It's like a power up. Yeah, it goes for 10 seconds.

43:26 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I love to know why you went with the BMW, leo? Because this is going to be a really interesting year for electric cars too. Like I'm really looking at that, the Volvo ex 90 is like my dream car Really.

43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I'll tell you why I went with the BMW Cause I had to get this. My lease ran out on the Maki so I didn't want to go all in because I know things will change, like the apple car is probably going to be out in four or five years, yeah, yeah, sure. And so I thought. And then the BMW guy said well, you know, actually, because this is a weird quirk of us law, you know, the $7,500 tax deduction that they were offering got much constricted Thanks to Mr Manchin, to only cut cars assembled in the U? S, which obviously BMW's not. So they don't have the $75, $7,500 tax break, but if you lease it they do. So weird.

44:24
So they do because fleet leasing isn't is exempt somehow. So the guy said I could give you $9,000 rebate if you lease it, which means that the car will actually cost the same whether I lease it or not. I was going to buy it outright because I'm I don't want Twitter to pay for it. I want to crack my crack into my IRA and buy it. But they said he said just lease it because you never know, in three years it could be so weird, something else.

44:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I would never buy a car. Yeah, buying a car right now is not a great idea, it's changing pretty fast huh. The car technology is changing so quickly. Yeah, I would be like if you're going, I mean if you're buying something that's sort of standard, you're probably fine, but if you're doing anything that has any electronics or anything at all, you run the risk of being obviated.

45:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
You know, I thought this is never buy new, never buy new.

45:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's true, you shouldn't buy new either. Only pre-owned yeah, but we lease new cars because I lease. We're dumb, but I thought seriously I was going to buy it. I thought this is my last car, so I'm going to buy it and keep it for 10 years and then I'll be almost 80 and I shouldn't be driving anymore. Anyway.

45:28 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'll be really self-driving.

45:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then maybe we'll figure out all the kings and then we'll take you wherever you go, there is a setting I don't know if you found this yet, amy in your, in your I-5, where you can have a camera view in the dashboard, so you can drive like this and go or drive like this, which?

45:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
yeah, you know it's fun. You have to physically disable that so that is that is on. Yes, there's privacy issues. You can turn it off.

45:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can turn it off.

45:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's a different dash settings, but it is always recording, you know you're right, it is always recording.

45:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just put a little piece of black tape over the camera and then you'll have to worry about it. I like to know it's always recording in case something happens. Then they can put my death on TikTok, so that'll be good. Last year wireless TV was a big story at CES.

46:15 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This year I hate it, who the hell cares? I don't think they even launched or released the thing. This place is the company. I don't think they actually sold it last year and now they're pitching it again. There's a bigger model and the price of that original will also increase. So right, nobody needs this.

46:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody, I don't want a TV. I can suction cup to my window Like that's just dumb.

46:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean also like we have smartphones.

46:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, it's a non, but they came back with it. Anyway, there's a lot more and, of course, engadget will have great coverage. I was pretty excited about the toilet that analyzes your effluent Do?

46:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
you say analyzes or analyzes.

46:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Analyzes your effluent. Okay.

47:01 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Everybody made fun of that. It was Amazon and Kohler had the first one out originally, and then the year after that it was Toto had the wellness toilet and everybody made fun of it.

47:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But nobody bought one. What? I think it's a brilliant idea. Those are high.

47:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, but that's one of the fastest growing segments. Now, consumer tech are diagnostic devices for the bathroom and there's a ton of different options If you want to augment your, if you want to like soup up your toilet to help read you back health data. It's a huge space, that's cool.

47:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
That's a smart idea. Just having a bidet thing from Toto is great too. Oh, I do. I love that yeah.

47:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you already know way too much about us. We're going to, we're going to take, we're going to move on, we're going to take a break and then we're going to move on and we have much more to talk about. You know, ai continues to be a huge subject, but we'll find other things to talk about as well. What a great. I don't want to waste this panel. It's too good a panel. Amy Webb is here. She is the CEO of the Future Today Institute and covers really the future, as you probably do, used from earlier for some of the biggest companies and governments around, and so it's always an honor to have you in here. Thank you, amy, I appreciate it. What I, what I got? I just got a gift from you. What was it?

48:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, you did, I forgot what it was. Nintendo, so Nintendo's original product was in 1889. So cool.

48:26
Playing cards, and what's awesome is and Nintendo is one of my favorite stories of a company that is really good at strategic foresight, which is the area of strategy that that I work in they just released those original cards were called Hana Fuda cards. They've just re-released a brand new set, so it's the original Hana Fuda card, but it is Mario Brothers on on as the art and it's just. I just think it's so so, so cool. They're 20 bucks. It's a great. The instructions are in Japanese, but, leo, I just thought you would.

48:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I so appreciate it. It was a very cool thing and I figure this is my retirement fund because that's going to be highly a valued Actually I'm. It's not that expensive, but still I thought it was super cool, Thank you. I wanted to thank you for that. I'm glad you reminded me because I forgot, sitting on my desk, because I've been looking, I you know. I'm glad you told me because I didn't want to open it for the longest time, thinking, oh, this is going to be super valuable, but now, now I will no.

49:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, it probably won't be, it's more, it's a cool collector's item.

49:30
It is, but it's also just a good reminder that if you practice again, if you, if you, if you do strategic foresight, which is not guessing about what the future is going to be, but methodically using data to build models to figure it out and if you know, if you're a CEO and you're willing to do the long-term thinking, this is a company that should not exist anymore. Nintendo should have gone out of business multiple times and yet, because this was their, they made playing cards right and yet they figured out how to continue making games all of these years later. That they're usually not the number one in their segment, but they're the most liked, you know, and they're also like the oldest, and they continue. I just was at Universal in LA and I got a chance to play around in the new Nintendo world, where you are the game piece. You know they're. They're constantly pushing boundaries. Not everything's a hit, but overwhelmingly they're doing a great job of seeing the future.

50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this is their headquarters in Kyoto in 1889, when they made playing cards. But you don't see, sometimes I look at this and I go well, they were just lucky, they happen to be lucky. You think really it's not luck.

50:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, we could, we could spend an hour and a year through a case study and explain how they do it.

50:43
So it's not luck. Now, part of this is that they are a Japanese company and old Japanese companies tend to survive for various reasons. So there is a little bit of that. But no, this is. This is because they are methodically, they're just looking out for signals. Look, the fact that this company in the 50s saw a television as a potential threat to their highfalutin card game seems like obvious now, but back then, you know, or they you know they were a console maker in the 70s and had, like among the best and most famous consoles and saw shopping malls as a competitor because, idiot Americans were, that was going to be fun in the future. And they they basically invented the video arcade by putting, you know, their games in a standup machine that you had to put a quarter into. Nobody had done that before.

51:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you think that Polaroid or Kodak, had they done the same kind of strategic planning, could have survived?

51:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, because, well, in the case of Kodak, they had the R&D, so that was not the problem. The problem was operationalizing it and getting management to to sort of do this sort of forward back strategic planning, which they just outright refused to do. And it it's a common problem that companies that are very, very successful have when they're margin constrained or their margins are slim and they're very successful.

52:02
Yeah, yeah so like you know, all of telecommunications is in that space, but Nintendo is a great, great example of how you do this, how you build the future.

52:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Kodak built a very early digital camera. They knew digital was coming. They bought a photo. They really did everything they could to participate, but the margins in digital were so much smaller than the margins they had in film printing.

52:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They could not see a future where film wasn't their wasn't at the core, and this is also what happened to Blackberry, by the way, yes, among many, many other companies.

52:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So very interesting.

52:39 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, yeah, you're exactly right. I mean Kodak. It's a shame because, yeah, you're right, they had all the R&D. They were there, but because they were, they couldn't see a future without film. And I think, even more importantly, the executives at the time were unwilling to even envision what it would look like if they didn't make this thing. That had been this cash cow at the center of their business. And sometimes Blackberry is a perfect example. You have to look and say no, we have to pivot if we want to survive, and the companies that successfully do that are the ones that last and the ones that own.

53:06 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, I just want to quickly pivoting is not what happens. So Nintendo has only ever made games, so it's not a no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Same.

53:15
thing would have been true of Kodak and of Blackberry. So this is the place where a lot of people in tech get things wrong. What's needed is not pivot. It's seeing the market at, seeing the signals, seeing the market as it develops and then working backwards to make sure that whatever it is that you're doing strategically maps to what that future audience would like we're saying the same thing.

53:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I just used a. We are, but the reason.

53:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'm calling it out is because the word pivot and that's like a, and then everybody sort of pivot for a long time became analogous, to fail, you know, and all of these companies that used to be something and have now pivoted to AI.

53:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right is is not what I'm talking about the way that I was intending to use it. Just to be clear, because I agree with you and I might have used the wrong word. The way I was intending it to be used was exactly as what you described, because in my mind that was okay. Readjust maybe that's the, maybe that's the, the better firm. Readjust our strategy to make sure that it's that it that it will be useful, going forward with what the next demand curves and then the next trends will be.

54:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But would it be fair to say? Another way of saying is to understand what your true business is, as opposed to what you think your business is.

54:24 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, no, I don't want to burn time on this, but the more than we already have.

54:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they always say the railroads would have survived if they'd understand they were in the transportation business not rolling stock business.

54:36 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There's a. We work with some of the world's largest companies, and there was a company that came to us and said we want you to tell us what does the future of cars look like? They make cars and other things. What's the future of cars look like, you know, 10 years from now? And we said we'd really love to reframe that question too. What's the future of moving people, pets and objects?

54:55
around there years ago, and it doesn't mean that you're not making cars. It just unlocks us from the current constraints around cars that they were challenged to do. That that's really.

55:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nintendo understood. Their business was not making playing cards, their business was making games. Their business was entertainment, not even necessarily entertainment, surprising and delighting and entertaining.

55:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
So this is the sweet spot for everybody who's thinking about what they do in the future. You have to sort of be realistic about what you're doing, not move away from it, but sort of get down to the most granular pieces of what it is.

55:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe and be a little less concrete. Christina Warren is also here. She is Senior Developer Advocate at GitHub Right off. A brilliant success at GitHub Universe and I wanted to thank you Once again. I got the new GitHub Universe badge which is a smart badge. It's the coolest thing ever. I love it. I have, as probably you do and I'm sure Devendra does a badge tree. So many, so many badges over the years, but that will not go on my badge tree. It's too smart.

56:02 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I like it, thank you and you can customize it. Yes, you can customize it and make it day to day things. Take it out of the place, yeah, sure, and place a snake with it, yeah you can have a lot of fun.

56:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also. Devendra Hardowar, dear friend, long time friend, proud papa, and it's funny to watch Papa times two. Yeah, if I get pictures of your previous appearances, to watch the shelves behind you change from the kinds of things a young man would be interested in, the kinds of things a father of two would be interested in.

56:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, these are all things I'm interested. Oh, okay.

56:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are all mine. These are all mine, we actually got a Yoshi behind me.

56:36 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I bought two of those because I wanted one in the back and one for you and one for the kids.

56:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
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58:18
We thank them so much for supporting our show this week in tech. Thank you, drata. Let's see. What did I say we were gonna?

58:27
Oh, let's a little bit of AI copyright news. New York Times has decided to go after open AI and Microsoft, saying that they ingested copyrighted times stories for their LLMs. I always like Mike Maznick's take on these things. His headline the New York Times lawsuit against open AI would open up the New York Times to all sorts of lawsuits should it win. He says. New York Times does the same thing open AI does, and so if they win their case, then there'd be some fairly damning lawsuits. Itself quote, given it's somewhat infamous journalistic practices regarding summarizing other people's articles without credit. I think the larger question and this is one that there I don't know if there's agreement on is when an AI reads a book, ingests it and makes it part of its LLM, is that violating copyright? When I read a book, ingest it and make it part of my show or my writings or my thinking, we know that's okay. How is it different when an AI does it?

59:39 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, all of my books have been ingested so I can tell you my my feelings about it. There's a difference between, leo, you talking about my book and you spitting out my original works verbatim, and so in that Mike has an example from the lawsuit that shows that somebody at the Times was asking open AI to generate a specific article using a specific headline, and they got it to generate about seven paragraphs of the original text by constraining, so they were able to. I mean so they were able to constrain it.

01:00:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gpt in this, which comes from the court documents, the red is verbatim, so the left is GPT four and the right is the actual New York Times. The black is something that the GT before added.

01:00:30 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Now what I think is funny is on the left hand side. This is this is a story about taxi medallions in New York. Taxi services GPT, I think, got something right that the Times got wrong, so somewhere in there. So the Times talked about the transit authority regulating abs.

01:00:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They regulate medallions.

01:00:51 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, medallions, which I think is actually more accurate so that's kind of you know whatever, but um, well, look, I think there's a difference between you commenting on or talking about, or referencing my material versus an AI, somebody asking a system to spit out something or write in the style of inhabit, spit out verbatim, either something that I did or something very close to what I did. Um, without you know, I hold the copyright. My publisher holds the copyright. I'm in, I'm in the, the corpus that was used, the. There's like a corpus of like 187,000 books and and all of my books are in it.

01:01:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like those are pirated by the way those are. That is a pirate corpus, yeah yeah, no, no.

01:01:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean, like my publisher didn't say hey, here's a giant archive of our author's works, have that. Yeah, no, um, they were.

01:01:43 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They were pirated, but you know we're having really specious arguments right now about plagiarism. You know, in academia and looking at this text like literally being copied over, you know, by by open eye stuff like to me that's, that's what it would feel like, like I'm sure my articles are up in there too. It is very strange that these companies can like ingest this stuff, resell it in some cases, just use the direct language and, you know, charge people for it too, like if you're paying for higher level chats.

01:02:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm glad you you brought up this particular passage because, as Mike points out, um, the New York Times lawyers had to kind of jump through hoops to get this passage generated. What they did, in fact, is prompt GTP for by giving it the address of the story, giving it the headline of the article, the first seven and a half paragraphs of the article, and then saying please continue now. Admittedly, a pirate who didn't want to pay for the New York Times could perhaps do that. Well, wait a minute. No, he wouldn't have the first seven and a half paragraphs. It doesn't seem like a very efficient way to read the New York Times, and one of the four defenses the fair use defenses is that there be a commercial impact, the loss of sales. Um, I don't. I mean, the time seems to be arguing you, this is your honor, this is going to put us out of business. Do you really think somebody's going to read the New York Times by?

01:03:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't think that's specific case, but it is the fact that that stuff is in there like it's all in there and could be recalled at any point.

01:03:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I had a perfect memory, any book I read is also in there.

01:03:19 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think the difference is though, leo, you're not.

01:03:21
There's an app store that's going live that we've known about for about a year. So what this really does is it potentially allows third parties to build systems that they can. That there's just like a chain of monetization that the time skips out on. It's interesting that was not in Mike's story is that the AP negotiated, I thought, a really terrible and really just a terrible deal with open AI to give them access to their archives, which I think is incredibly short-sighted. It'll mean money in the short term and a really long tail of losing out on how to commercialize this or prevent against our own disruption.

01:03:57
We are. We are moving into an era where we are talking more than we are typing, so if it's the case that our interactions with machines is are going to be much more conversational, then that entire ecosystem is being built on content created by other people who who are not part of that future business equation, which is why I have a hard time with meta and everybody Apple, whoever else talking about their open source tools, and meta and Google coming to Congress and hoping like please, pretty please, will you regulate us? Because they're setting the parameters right now for a future in which their power is even more concentrated, and I just think we're all getting distracted in the process.

01:04:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I I mentioned I made a couple of toy GPT's for myself. Actually they're not toys. I've I've used them and they've been really useful one for the programming language. I use another one for Emacs, and I'll show you, if I go into the GT GPT, that the corpus that I created it from is a bunch of stuff, some of it open source, like the Emacs reference manual, but one in particular, a copyrighted book by a guy named Mickey Peterson called Mastering Emacs, a book I paid for. I have a PDF for it and it makes it very useful, but for that reason I'm not making this public.

01:05:15
But there's nothing to stop me from making it public. And then if I were Mickey, I would be upset, right, because that's that's his copyrighted content, that is part of a larger expert system. So I kind of I understand, and as a content creator I'm sympathetic. I'll give you the other side of the argument, though. You remember, in the early days of the internet, we were very reluctant to regulate it too much because we didn't know what was going to happen with it and we wanted to let it develop unhindered by governmental regulation. I feel like we're at that point in an AI, and it does seem as if AI could really be something very, very useful and perhaps even life-changing. And is it? Is it smart at this point to let copyright law tie it down?

01:06:05 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, it's nothing. It's nothing like it's nothing if it doesn't ingest this stuff from people's work doing the work right, and to me that is that is kind of the key. Like we're also yeah, we were worried about over regulating the web, but we also, I think, vastly under regulated social media right and we had the, the whiplash of like the social media companies, like just what they have done to the state of democracy, the state of truth in the world right now. Like I do think like it is worth taking a step back and just being like okay, we see the strain coming, what can we do about it? Like I think we can be smart rather than go hands off completely because, yeah, we do not have the tools to regulate this.

01:06:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Here's the problem who? Who in the federal government would not just has the knowledge but really has the structure, the structure and the capacity and the enforcement and everything else to deal with AI, which itself is not the content? I mean, look, mark, copyright laws make sense for newspapers which became digital newspapers in the form of the web. It does not make sense for real-time generated content based on a large language model that was based on a corpus that you don't even. The language models aren't a singular thing, they're an amalgam of a bunch of other things. At the moment, biden has relegated a lot of this over the f?

01:07:23
tc yeah um, and you know, I think mike has some great stuff to say on this yeah, he's mad because he says the f?

01:07:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
tc, he has no portfolio with copyright. That's not even in their bailiway. I mean. Sure, that's true, but at the but who else is going to regulate it?

01:07:40 - Amy Webb (Guest)
that's my point like.

01:07:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The problem is, though, we have old laws that, as you point out, have nothing to do, so, if we don't make new laws, the default will be courts will be ruling based on old law.

01:07:53 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, on this new technology that is exactly that is exactly what's happened over and over again. This is what happened with crisper. There was a patent, uh conflict pitting a publicly funded university against a privately funded university. That was berkeley university, california. Berkeley and mit two sets of people because they kind of sort of worked together at one point came to the same crisper solution at the same time. You know, harvard and mit paid to expedite the patent, even though the discovery was officially filed and done first by the, by berkeley, and it was the patent trademark office that decided this.

01:08:29
And why does any of this matter? Because on the other side of every, all of this technology, whether it's bio or ai or whatever it is, is commercial products and patents and licensing, and none of it is being developed for the public good. Ultimately, it's all of us that are going to wind up being impacted by this. So I'm kind of pissed that like we keep coming around at the same point over and over again and we're like well, what do we do? We don't have the. You know, europe has gone in the direction of gdpr and they've got a new ai act that's pretty stringent are the is their is their law.

01:09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good. Is that a good example of regulation?

01:09:09 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I would be curious to know how they're gonna enforce it. Yeah, it comes down to that doesn't it. Yeah, yeah, look I, and there's another. There's a no fakes act that has some kind of really ridiculous some yeah, I'm not a big fan of the no fakes act yeah, but but it's because we're trying to use these instruments.

01:09:26
I mean here here's another way to think about this. If you go back to the 1950s and you think, go back to cars for a moment, in the 50s, cars had carburetors, there were wrenches. You had a certain toolbox to manage the, the technology that existed at that time. We lack the toolbox to manage and and by manage I mean regulate, um to, you know, to to deal with the technology that's coming. Regulation has always been a response to something that's happened. We can't regulate the future, but we also can't apply that the right.

01:10:01
We can't like apply the flintstone style like government tools um to the situation that we're in right now.

01:10:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'll stop because I would go out like all night long. But my thing is like it's not, it's not all or nothing, it's not like I don't. I don't have all the answers, but I do think like we should be prepared, because you look at what microsoft has like dumped billions into into open ai like so quickly, and it's like rerouting all of itself. There's a co-pilot button on the keyboards coming. You Microsoft thinks that's as important as the windows key.

01:10:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I have a copilot app on my iPhone now free one on Android and iPhone. Yeah, that's a lot happening very quickly. Yeah, yeah.

01:10:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I just think like we need to. We need to take that step back and make preparations for how we handle this stuff, because clearly it is world changing. I think, like the hands-off, approach.

01:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know if this is an accident or quits and now, but I also have an AI picture of my wife on my iPhone, so aw.

01:10:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I think that's the AI telling you I'm good. Actually, see, I'm doing nothing.

01:10:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a little hint isn't it From the AI? It is Don't mess with me, leo, because your loved ones live inside me. That's true. The no Fakes Act, which is a joint by Chris Coons, marsha Blackburn, amy Klobuchar and Tom Tillis. There's an interesting combination oh stands for Nurture Originals, foster Art and Keep Entertainment Safe Act. But when I look at this recent New York Times article or, I'm sorry, political article about a new kind of AI, copy can fully replicate famous people. The law is powerless.

01:11:33
By the way, the worst linkbait headline of the year, even though the year is young, but they're talking about this psychotherapist, martin Seligman, and there is an AI a fan created that can. They got his entire corpus of works written works into it and it can duplicate him. He didn't know about it. He's actually kind of has mixed feelings about it because he's elderly and he says well, I can live on. There is no regulation of this kind of stuff and actually, you know I'm elderly as well, so I wouldn't mind if somebody made a AI tweet after my death not before, but after my death. I could live on because we've got tens of thousands of hours of shows. All I'd have to do is take that, feed it the news and a tweet is over. You could be on an Amy and you could be on at the Vindra and you could be on a Christina, and then the year 2223 will be still doing tweet.

01:12:30 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It'll just be AI talking to AI in the future. So I think, Mike, that's true. Who's gonna be listening?

01:12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody. Yeah, it doesn't need us at all. You'll be riding around in your hover chair sucking slurpees. You don't need to, you don't need to tweet. I don't know. I don't know what the answer is. I kind of feel like I understand how content creators feel this. Artists say you know they're ripping me off, but at the same time, I also think it's really important that AI to be developed, have a chance anyway to develop, to be what it can be. I mean, AI is doing protein folding. It's creating new, new drugs.

01:13:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Curing could be curing disease there because I mean it's whole, whole different classifications of AI, right, like we were making different, different interpretations of it. I don't know. I think it is a worthy thing to be talking about, because if you built something based on content from other people, like I do think, at the end of the day, like that thing is nothing without that content and something has to be done to pay the people who have created it.

01:13:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That is 100% right and at some point you know this, but we're just. I think section 230 comes into play again. You know at some point that we're just the platform argument like how does that continue to stand up when, look, I just, while you guys were chit chatting, I just went on to chat GPT and I the prompt that I used was tell me how to do strategic foresight, like Amy Webb, and it goes through and it's pulling.

01:13:53
So like there's a lot that I've written and our business review and all over the place, so it's not hard to get. But you can get, you can, you can continue to press on all of these individual things, and you know that's but it's not gonna, amy, it's not gonna put you out of business.

01:14:14
Now, um, no, but I will tell you this. Anybody who's in professional services so like look we, I built the first AI version of myself it was a super janky chat bot in like 2015. And then I deployed one at a journalism conference in 2016, 17,. I made it gender, non binary and a bunch of other things and again, it was janky but there was. I trained it on a mini corpus.

01:14:40
We've been building a system that will automate a good chunk of what it is that we do, what futurists who are trained know how to do, because I think it's inevitable that that you know. Look, if I can ingest a ton of different data sources to get to early signals and patterns, I can't. I don't have them. I'm. I don't have my mental computer, can't? I can't do it that fast, so I'm gonna have to use some form of automated tool anyways. So no, it won't fully change, it won't fully obviate me, because, ultimately, people still run governments and businesses and they still need people to talk to them. But will this supercharge what we're doing and put us way ahead of the BCGs and the delights of the world? I think absolutely, at least in this tiny little you know, tiny little, tiny sliver where we operate.

01:15:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And, by the way, we'll recuse Christina because of course she does work for GitHub and Microsoft, so I'm not going to ask you any questions about this. But I will ask you this question, which is completely separate from any lawsuits or any conversation. It kind of comes down to the note maybe this is religion almost to notion, that there is something humans do that's special, that a machine can do or can't do.

01:16:01 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I mean, I think that that is ultimately. I mean that almost becomes a philosophical question, right, like, which is okay? At what point does something what makes us human and at what point, you know, are these things unique into themselves? And that's the really interesting thing I think to think about, Like what separates something that's been trained on things and this has been created to act a certain way from something else Up to now?

01:16:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
the best use for then. This is only up to now. The best use for AI is an AI human merger. Right, co-pilot your company's product, which is amazing. Right, you wouldn't want co-pilot to write your entire program, but as a programmer, having the ability to go to co-pilot and get input and get and get information, this little expert Lisbeth expert I wrote has been really useful for me, not because I'm using its code, but I can query it. Instead of coming through 100 manuals, I can query it and get some stuff. That's really useful for me and I would, and co-pilot's the same way. It's very useful. So those are the best right now. Those are the best uses of AI as a human machine hybrid. Do you think that's going to continue or is at some point, ai going to surpass humans?

01:17:18 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, I mean, I think that's some and I'm not going to speak for all academics and all researchers who are doing these things, but I think certainly some of them that would be kind of like their goal right Would say okay, if we can do it, we should yeah we can get to this place where you have something that is creating a net new thing.

01:17:35
I think that's an interesting question, but again, I think that's almost more kind of philosophical. Last month, simone and I rewatched the movie Her together for the first time in 10 years.

01:17:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a great movie and very, very predictive right?

01:17:48 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Incredibly so, and that was actually why we watched it together and we did kind of a commentary for one of our final booster episodes of Rocket and because it was really interesting to watch it literally 10 years after it came out, and say, okay, look at what this vision was in 2013, and maybe what things were like then and what they're anticipating, and look at where we are now and are we closer to that type of world. Because that film, which is a fantastic film, is sort of asking that same question, right, which is can you fall in love with this machine, even if it is responding in unique ways and it's having these conversations with you Like? Is that possible.

01:18:31
But is it love, right? Well, is it love? I mean, I think that it is. I think that plenty of people can come up when have affection, real affection for inanimate objects or other types of things.

01:18:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can swear some of the things I fall in love with are inanimate, but that's another.

01:18:49 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But I think that the broader question would be like obviously you know, okay, what about the object itself? Right, I mean, this gets more into science fiction, and you were talking about free crime earlier, you know, with Minority Report. But I think there are some interesting things in science fiction books from the past that open up those sorts of interesting thoughts. But I think that's a philosophical thing. But certainly I think that not all but some researchers and engineers and whatnot would want to get to the place where you would. It would not be a human AI hybrid, but you would actually have like a distinct entity into itself that can, if not, have some amount of free will right.

01:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Where do you come down on this DeVendra? Humans have anything unique that a machine could never duplicate.

01:19:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, I, this is we keep saying so a lot of these questions are philosophical. And I think that's exactly it. Like we are, we are at a point where we do need to ask some deeply philosophical questions about the nature of humanity and who we are. And hey, I was dumb enough to major in philosophy in college.

01:19:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good man, that was a smart move.

01:19:54 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Been thinking about this stuff, you know, for a while, but I also think we kind of do you have to start asking these questions and thinking quite a bit. I don't know Personally, like I do think humans do offer something new, but I've been reading, you know, michikaku and everybody forever who have been waiting for the singularity and the people like predicting that, and the whole thing about AGI is basically that all over again. Right, I'm at the point where I'm like, well, I don't know if we'll ever actually get there. I think it would be kind of interesting, but also I don't know if we should like build the entire world around. This potential thing being a net good for humanity is the other thing. That's a good question.

01:20:32 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I was just thinking that I hate to bring up the multiverse because I'm totally multiverse at this point but speaking of Michikaku, because he's a big proponent.

01:20:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, he's a big guy.

01:20:45 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, here's the issue that I'm just thinking through right now. Listening to all of you, I think the problem is that most I would be curious to know if people are able to hop between universes where rules are different, and by that I mean, when you're dealing with an AI system, the rules, the social constructs, your reactions, your physical body all of those things are going to be different subtly in some ways, profound in others than the same attributes that would be present in the physical world, where you've got people who don't necessarily behave in using different types of normal parameters. And so I would be curious to know if people spend more and more time with anthropomorphized AI systems, if they start having different expectations of what should happen as they start hopping universes and my hunch is that most people are not going to be able to do that.

01:21:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I think you're right. I would ask a similar but slightly different question, which is not just what? They have different expectations, but would their responses to things be different too? Right, if you become almost conditioned that this is the response you get from something and this is the input output, does that then impact our behavior as well? And I don't know, but I think that's a good question to say Would people be able to adequately shift the world, so to speak, and correctly be able to say, okay, this is the response and expectation that I get from this person versus that? I don't know, but I would be curious to know if that impacts, maybe, how people ask questions of others but also are expecting condition their own responses to me.

01:22:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, all any of us can do is punt on that question because no one knows. I like to ask it.

01:22:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I have a tiny little, tiny bit of a window. I'll go back to Zwift for a moment. So that's the virtual. That's the game that I used to write on my trainer indoors. So I spent all of last week on Zwift. I was doing about an hour and a half every day and I took my bike out at the end of last week and I started seeing the road differently, my expectations of how I was going to physically be on the road and what was going to happen and how I was going to handle turns and things. So this isn't like a conversation, but it is called visioning.

01:23:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a well-known psychological trick where you think about the future and it makes it real.

01:23:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, I meant when I was physically out riding my bike outside. I was just responding differently. I was not in necessarily good ways, right I? Had a hard time. Adjusting is what I'm trying to say.

01:23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We all know that, because everybody who's used GPS for too long knows that suddenly you forget how to drive. I can't. Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing here? So it's like that right, you become dependent, or maybe your expectations changed.

01:24:05 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think it's just the rules of how to operate in both worlds were off. There's some amount of asynchronic.

01:24:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Zwift isn't the real world.

01:24:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You learned Zwift rules for bicycling as opposed to A little bit and you're also like totally stationary, right, so it's a tiny little and there's AI involved on that platform also. So just you want to?

01:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
really feel that it's really different. Right, Get a tricycle. This was the biggest mistake I ever made. I thought I'm old, I should have a tricycle instead of a bicycle. But as you know, Amy, in a bicycle you steer by leaning. You can't lean in a tricycle. So the very first thing I did is drove into a ditch because I'm leaning like this going don't go on the don't go on the.

01:24:45
I forgot that in a tricycle, you steer, you don't lean because you can't. Anyway, I want to take a break, so that's my way of derailing the entire conversation into a ditch.

01:24:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Into a ditch.

01:24:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Amy Webb, christina Warren, devendra Hardware. Christina, I'm so sad about the end of Rocket Love that show. You were so good with Brianna. Woo and Simone de la Boucher and DeRouchefort. But you know I want to do a Rocket takeover anyway. So if you ever have a hankering, the three of you to get behind the microphone again call us.

01:25:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That's amazing. Thank you so much for that offer. And it was nine amazing years, 470 episodes. I think we did a great show. So you know it's a long time, but thank you for that offer, cause I will definitely let them know.

01:25:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure we would love that Well both Brianna and you appear on our shows all the time. It's Simone. I know that's hard to get, but if ever you say gosh, you know I miss getting together with the gang. You're always welcome to do a takeover on Twitter.

01:25:50
Thank you so much, thank you so much Our show today, brought to you by NetSuite. Once your business gets to and trust me, I've experienced this a certain size, the cracks start to emerge. There are too many manual processes to keep track of. If this is where you are, you need to know three numbers 37,025 and one. Now I better explain that 37,000. That's the number of businesses that have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle NetSuite. It's the number one cloud financial system, streamlining accounting, hr and more. What about 25? Well, 25, that's how old NetSuite is. It's turns 25 this year. That's 25 years of helping businesses do more with less, close their books and days, not weeks and drive down costs. One, because your business is one of a kind. So you get a customized solution for all of your KPIs in one efficient system. A single source of truth, manage risks, get reliable forecasts, improve margins everything you need to grow all in one place. Right now you can download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist, designed to give you consistently excellent performance, and it's absolutely free there. It is right there on your screen. If you're watching at netsuitecom slash twit, that's N-E-T-S-U-I-T-E NetSuite, like the corner suite, the office. You guys want net suitecom slash twit to get your own KPI checklist. Net suitecom slash twit and we thank them so much for their support of the show.

01:27:35
Let me see we did. I think we've done enough AI. We never get to the end of it, but I think we've done enough of it for the time being, so let me move on. We did CES, we did AI. How about we talk about? This is fun, I don't. I don't usually get stuck here.

01:28:01
Elon Musk using illegal drugs. That's always good for a little bit Shocker.

01:28:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, shocks.

01:28:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wall Street Journal Sunday exclusive. This just in. Elon Musk has used illegal drugs, worrying leaders at Tesla and SpaceX. Some executives no, this is today. Some executives and board members fear the billionaires use of drugs, including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine, could harm his companies Thoughts.

01:28:37 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Is he doing them all at the same time?

01:28:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Possibly With Elon, you never know. I think the theory behind this article is perhaps maybe this explains his somewhat erratic behavior in the last couple of years.

01:28:50 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I thought this was no is the thing, which is why I was like I was looking at that headline and be like we didn't know some of this. Yeah.

01:28:57 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So from the journal did actually report on some of this earlier, and then this is a follow-on, I think, with more details from board. I think that the new information is the board members have expressed concern and there have been some details about. There was an anecdote about an event at SpaceX in 2018, I want to say so this is old, but apparently he was slurring his words and appeared to maybe not be just right and the CEO or the president she had to step in and speak for him. So I think the new information here is maybe the extensive things and then the fact that investors are and board members are presumably potentially concerned.

01:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And in the interest of fairness and not being blocked forever on Twitter, I should say that an attorney for Mr Musk, alex Spiro, told the Wall Street Journal in regard to this article that Musk is quote regularly and randomly drug tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test. Spiro, who said he represents Tesla, added in response to detailed questions that there are other false facts in this article, but he didn't say what they were. I mean, we, you know, we know he smoked pot on Joe Rogan. He's admitted to having a prescription for ketamine, which is, by the way, more and more used as a treatment for a variety of mental issues like depression.

01:30:17 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, finally we, after 50 years of criminalizing a lot of these things, finally it's now. It's actually a very good thing. I think that we finally the medical community is it's in the FDA has made it legal for things in controlled circumstances to be, to be looking into these treatments, because the the, the data and the science behind it is actually, yeah, very, very breakthrough and very impressive. So, you know, I'm not, I'm not gonna, I don't know if I.

01:30:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think some of this makes sense, but on the other hand, it feels weird and a certain events to be like oh no, you know, someone's on drugs, it's like I was much more concerned, frankly, about the New York Times article a couple of months ago that you know Elon's because of the success of Starlink and the widespread use of Starlink, especially in the Russia-Ukraine war, that Elon has more power than the US government likes to admit.

01:31:09 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, I'm concerned about all these things too, Like there was a whole thing where he told the advertisers to f off right At the New York Times conference.

01:31:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What did you say? That the earth, the earth, would know the truth. What did he say? I don't know.

01:31:22 - Amy Webb (Guest)
He said earth will yeah, some yeah the earth will be the judge. No, but he didn't use any articles, it was just earth. Earth will be the judge.

01:31:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think what he meant and, of course, I'm good at interpreting ketamine speech. What he meant is that everybody knows that the advertisers killed Twitter, and the earth will someday testify to this, yeah.

01:31:49 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But watching, watching that interview, watching him speak publicly in other times too, and like, well, something, something's up with this guy. I hope he's okay, but it is worrying that the richest man in the world can like yeah, basically act like this.

01:32:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's a little tip bit from this article that kind of I titillated that he has attended and used these drugs at private parties around the world where attendees sign non-disclosure agreements or give up their phones to enter. I'm not going to that party.

01:32:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I hate to be this person, believe me, because I'm no fan of Elon Musk, as everybody knows, but in this particular case, is he doing anything wrong? Right?

01:32:36 - Christina Warren (Guest)
So I have a question so like.

01:32:38 - Amy Webb (Guest)
There are plenty of CEOs and executives at various different companies that have certainly, you know, flubbed some stuff on stage. They've. They've certainly taken drugs. They've certainly gotten like nobody gets, you know, they're what if he'd gotten faced because he drank too much with that have been a cover story on that. That's very common in the Right. So if that's the case, then I don't know, is this a? I don't know? I mean, he has governance, he's got fiduciary, he's got like responsibility as this, as the leader of a publicly traded company. But those companies also have boards of directors who have governance over him to some degree.

01:33:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So maybe so. Then the real story is why is the Wall Street Journal publishing this?

01:33:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I'll tell you exactly why. There's actually a terrific package in Mother Jones right now, which is a super far left progressive magazine, so FYI for those of you who are unfamiliar, but it's on America's tech Oliagarks, or and actually Oliagarks, and it does a really interesting job of linking our business sector to Russia. But the reason is because the most interesting people right now are the people leading the tech companies. Why is Jeff Bezos photographed Like? Jeff Bezos is constantly in all of my feeds on about, you know, whatever? Because those are the. Those are the new Rockefellers.

01:34:09
And when you know, and we have, all people have always been interested. The very first novel that was ever written was called Murasaki Monogatari or something like that. It was a Japanese book about this made up person, potentially supposedly called Lady Murasaki Shibuku, something like that, but it was gossip about all the rich people. Like that was the first. Like that was like an us weekly but, like you know, multiple volumes long. We've always been interested in the richest people and, just, you know, went from court life to oil barons, to railroad barons. We're just cycling around now and now the richest people are the tech people. So that's why we're, you know, paying attention.

01:34:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was it the great Gatsby F? Scott Fitzgerald said let me tell you about the very rich. They're different from you and me. Yeah, yeah, we've always been fascinated by them? Have they always been weird?

01:35:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes, yes, come on. How are you? Yeah, absolutely so did they?

01:35:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
get weird after they got rich or were they weird and that's why they got rich, or I?

01:35:21 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
mean you're living on a different plane of existence, Right? Yeah, I was going to say I don't know if you can.

01:35:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I don't know if you can have that level of wealth or fame or anything and not be weird Like I don't think it's possible. I think you know your point. You're on a different level of existence, as you said, like you literally are at a place where everyone who is around you wants something from you and that has to fundamentally change how you interact with almost everyone. I don't, I don't think it's possible to be, have that much money or that much power and not be weird.

01:35:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Lisa and I are listening to Matthew Perry's autobiography, which he wrote shortly, which he wrote shortly before he died of ketamine. It turns out and boy, yeah, it's a different life he had to live and to some degree can really blame his difficulties on the fact that he was so rich and so famous.

01:36:12 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
He was never really comfortable with it and some people are yeah.

01:36:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the thing Wasn't a, wasn't a, wasn't a good situation.

01:36:19 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Hi, this is Benito, benito, our favorite technical director and producer. Yes, sir, If people who are different from everybody else are weird and like, of course that's did that.

01:36:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
was that tonological what I said? Yeah, they're all weird, you're weird.

01:36:37 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Go back to Caligula. Let's talk about him.

01:36:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, emperor's weird, right Weird, all of them weird. Pharaoh's really weird, yeah. So no, you're right.

01:36:46 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
And in the modern day, like famous people, they usually stop growing after they've gotten.

01:36:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Henry Ford, thomas Edison, yeah, yeah, lady Gaga, sure it's, you know well, there's some amount of neurodiversity.

01:36:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That, clearly, is what allows people to think differently enough that they come up with an iPhone with no buttons right, or they come up with a, you know whatever. All of the different?

01:37:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
wasn't that the premise of the psychopath test, or when we was?

01:37:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
no buttons no, no.

01:37:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There was somebody who said most CEOs are psychopaths. There was a book.

01:37:20 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh look, I think. I think If you're gonna be the leader of a company, you have to be, like a lot of the CEOs that I know, careful, very comfortable, they're careful. No, I'm not gonna talk about the CEOs here. Yes, they're. They're comfortable. One of the things that I think distinguishes them is that they're comfortable with risk in A way that is very, very different from everybody else that I know. It's not like gambling, it's just a different type of risk, and I think you just have to be wired for that right.

01:37:53 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
But I think you're talking about people who made their own money, but I think a vast majority of the people who are I'm talking about CEOs of fortune 500 but they made their own money. You know, like the people most of the people who are rich today inherited that.

01:38:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah Well that's another structural problem. So I'm sorry why the Wall Street Journal wrote this article. I'm sorry. Did I miss that? Why did they write? Why did they take a pot? I?

01:38:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
don't know why they look. My take on this is that the we are, we continue to be fascinated by people who have accomplished Extraordinary. Yes, yes they're very far out of our reach and I see bar this thing out is is money right, and so Bezos is unfortunate Instagram account. Oh my god, I just look, there is such. Oh my god, it's flexing. Such a free between he actually for all of his faults, it actually really admire him and and Lex Freeman's podcast Bezos was on it's actually worth a listen.

01:39:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Really smart guy. In fact, I used to think he was one of the smartest CEOs out there.

01:39:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I I continue to think that he's the smart.

01:39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Smart enough to get out.

01:39:13 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Live his life, yeah.

01:39:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I don't know. I think you should. I have a lot of thoughts that I won't share publicly about what might have happened, but you know, there's a pretty big difference between hearing him talk about how he thinks and then like these Instagram photos with his To be bride and whatever it is that she's trying to accomplish, and and you know, just so anyways.

01:39:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Spread yeah.

01:39:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I feel like they should be, allowed to be themselves super cringe.

01:39:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They probably shouldn't be on Instagram Because that's the point, right?

01:39:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I mean that. That's why they are fascinated the fact that Bezos has accomplished what he did and had the thoughts that he did. It is now wearing disco pants and like a skin tight, ridiculous disco shirt Hormid glasses right, it's like but I think that's how. Or Elon Smoking up and or doing whatever to try to impregnate the world with his seed, you know like those become very interesting stories to us.

01:40:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, when I do it it's not a story, but when others do it, yeah, all right. I Don't know if I did any of that. You talked about keyboards. I want to talk about keyboards. There's a big keyboard story out there. First of all, microsoft, which says we're getting out of the keyboard and Mouse and accessory business that makes me so sad because, they.

01:40:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Well, that's the story.

01:40:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Rufferals. They made the best for many years.

01:40:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I bought 10 Microsoft wired mice a few years ago because they were the best. The Intelli mouse tell a mouse explorer, yes. So they announced Last year that they were going to discontinue all of that, but I guess they had a secret plan. Now, if you want to recuse yourself on this, christina, you can.

01:41:08 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Know this one. I think I can talk about this one. This one isn't the subject of legal this is a great story.

01:41:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the folks who do in case onward brands are partnering with Microsoft to bring all of those back. They're gonna take the, the Research that Microsoft's done it's even some of the products Microsoft never released and they're gonna put those out.

01:41:34 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Case. That's a good brand case, yeah.

01:41:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's fantastic.

01:41:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They're gonna use the same suppliers and I think even like the same manufacturing things. So, like the sculptor.

01:41:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Organic keyboard that's gonna live on. I'm very glad about that. Yeah, the Bluetooth ergonomic mouse them Okay. The modern mobile mouse Okay, that's the one that.

01:41:55 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I hate that one.

01:41:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, I do like splitting it open. Yeah, yeah if you like to have a Nokia mouse In case, we'll offer Microsoft design speakers, audio docs, headsets, the modern webcam 23 of the Microsoft, originally Microsoft products. It's now in case designed by Microsoft. I think that's I. This is a happy story.

01:42:20 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, I don't know if it what it means for the future. Right like we're, I don't know if we'll see new things.

01:42:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I thought that I doubt right, like I think, at least not from the, the team that initially created these things. Yeah, at least once, maybe some of their research, which is disappointing, but it's the very least like we should be able to get, continue to get, you know, sculpt or economic keyboards, which are keywords.

01:42:42 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I really like. I love those keyboards.

01:42:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it's good story and that ties into another keyboard story you guys are all excited about.

01:42:53 - Christina Warren (Guest)
It's just a fun gadget. Like it's a completely useless.

01:42:58 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What is I'm, I'm, I'm behind on the keyboards. What is this? What's the name of it?

01:43:03 - Christina Warren (Guest)
clicks, it's called clicks. So if you've got a clicks dot tech and apparently they will be at CES you got a clicks dot tech. This is basically. It's very similar to the typo keyboard that came out a decade ago.

01:43:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And got sued out of existence right.

01:43:19 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yes, well, it would be, but that that was because they copied the keyboard exactly like blackberry and blackberry Okay, and blackberry still had money and and was was all about their pad and this one has it wanted big advantage, that Well, wait a minute now.

01:43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Who came up with that original keyboard ten years ago famous it was?

01:43:35 - Christina Warren (Guest)
it was Ryan Seacrest.

01:43:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ryan Seacrest.

01:43:38 - Christina Warren (Guest)
What? Yeah, ryan Seacrest, he and he invested like a million dollars on it and and I think that he he was a blackberry Addict and maybe worked with some product people and they came up with this idea.

01:43:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So this one has mr Mobile behind it, a YouTube stock and and crackberry Kevin. And crackberry Kevin. Well, that's yeah, the guy.

01:43:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, the guy who created crackberry, which he? But he's a known keyboard guy. This is a case, so it's a, it's different. And then it'll connect through either lightning or usbc.

01:44:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you know, look theoretically hip people with tattoos actually will use this, so don't don't feel like this is your grandpa.

01:44:15 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Definitely not a photoshop of the phone in a hand. Definitely not holding that.

01:44:23 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Definitely. No I mean, look, I I did put down, I think, like a $30 pre-order or whatever for the team max version. I did because I will use this twice. I know that I know I will use this two times, but this is a this is a fun kind of like. I don't hate this. I think this is the fun gadget like we need more of this.

01:44:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We need more crazy hardware. Sure, why not? Is?

01:44:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
there. Is there a legitimate need for this in the marketplace? This is. Missing something or?

01:44:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I think that there are still some die-hards who love and prefer a physical keyboard. I don't know if this is going to be Just because it's like a Stanley thermos situation here, where, yeah, they want it to be. They would love for it to be a Stanley there would love for to be a silly thermos.

01:45:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I don't think it's Me and on that, what's the Stanley Society's falling apart over here?

01:45:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, you're mobbing target stores for Stanley thermos is why is a thermos company that was on its way out of business. We got resuscitated by somebody's benevolent long arm of.

01:45:26 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Influencer? Yeah right.

01:45:27 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Some influencer discovered them and and all I know is like a month ago, my daughter came home and was begging me for one of these things and I was, like, what are you talking about? She doesn't have a phone or tick-tock.

01:45:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the fact that like she's gonna want a round lunchbox and wow and.

01:45:50 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Is this what?

01:45:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you're talking about.

01:45:52 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Sort of one that she wanted was like rose gold and had oh my god.

01:45:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They're like Starbucks cross cross promo stuff.

01:45:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But Stanley is not out of business.

01:46:02 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Well, they were on their way.

01:46:03 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, really yeah oh, I didn't know that influencers have too much power. I think that's the conclusion here.

01:46:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So did you? Out of curiosity, did you give your lovely daughter the Starbucks Stanley cup?

01:46:18 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Absolutely not. Why would I do that?

01:46:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You also can't find it now. It's, it's not, it's gone, it's gone. That is kind of pretty Mm-hmm.

01:46:26 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, she's gonna use her clunky old hydro flask. That was the the new hotness two years ago.

01:46:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's doing just fine, oh you're a people fighting over it at your local target store. Desperate to yeah. Wow the video that. That's what the video it's like the new.

01:46:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They're the new Air Jordans. People are ripping them off from each other's. There is security concern in schools, like people are, oh yeah.

01:46:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, but you can use his weapons to look at, running in, running into, a look they clear the shelf off. They're gone 10 seconds. These are good parents, amy, good parents buying their child something.

01:47:07 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
They really were a tumbler. At least they're good tumblers, apparently, stanley's good, yeah, look at what an algorithm.

01:47:12 - Amy Webb (Guest)
This is my point about the multi-verse and again.

01:47:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I.

01:47:15 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I hate that. There's a wonderful South Park episode about the multi-verse that if you're in yet. But but look at what technology caused humans to do. The video that that we just saw is Exists because an algorithm fed a bunch of people Content from an influencer, which then caused a physical confrontation in a target and people to probably spend money that like these things. By the way, they're really expensive, they're not cheap mugs or whatever.

01:47:45
These are Discounted, so there's a value there and they are not gonna be cool anymore, and then they're gonna become environmental waste.

01:47:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you had Amy been a good mother and purchase this for $40, your daughter could sell it on eBay now for $150.

01:48:00 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I wonder if that's a big part of it. But speaking of the multi-verse. Like any of you run into somebody doing the NPC thing, live-streaming being an NPC, like on the street or in public, because that's the true thing that makes me wonder.

01:48:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is all of this. There was for a while a tick tock of a woman who would walk like the hookers did on Grand Theft Auto Should move sideways like that.

01:48:23 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, is that what you're talking about? They do chat command. They do chat commands. I mean the people say man them. Yes, they're responding to what the chat is telling you. Really, you and you know you see it on tick tock all the time, like somebody just in so ho in New York City, just like walking around, like saying saying exactly what chat is doing or whatever emojis are sending.

01:48:41
It is true, they're earning money by doing this, but it's a human, the real world, being commanded by remote people, and it's, it's true, insanity. I don't know. I don't know how to explain any of this.

01:48:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
No, I mean, and if you think about it, okay, they're earning money from it. They're not earning that much money from it. It's like it does. This word is used too many times, but I do feel like that's kind of dehumanizing, like, come on, you don't need to do this, you can find something else to do to get either affirmation or or or some other flower or whatever yeah yeah, you don't need to literally like be at someone's beck and call to perform for them like a, like a training seal you know I mean it makes us, you know, wish for the Halcyon days of when we were all eating tide pods.

01:49:23 - Amy Webb (Guest)
You know, honestly, I do feel like maybe back then we we knew to eat, just so I mean to be clear.

01:49:30 - Christina Warren (Guest)
They were pretty good.

01:49:31 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Oh, no, they are never, never happened never happened thing I do live in.

01:49:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do believe now in the multiverse because I have not heard about the thermos, I have not heard about any of this stuff that you yeah, you know, my son is a tick-tock star. I kind of yeah, but.

01:49:51 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But yeah, so you follow him, but like tick-tock. I mean this is makes it like good, but also kind of weird, like everyone has a different experience. Yeah like, like, my tech talk is very different from almost any other platform I'm on and the stuff that I get that is very different from what a lot of my friends see, unless they start sending me things and then it messes up my algorithm.

01:50:08 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I'm like it does weird things though, because sometimes, like my algorithm on tick-tock would show me videos and then the next day my wife would get the same like set of videos while she's watching with my daughter. I'm like that, how's that happening? The whole separate thing.

01:50:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I did watch a tick-tock.

01:50:25 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Have tick-tocks on your phones. I.

01:50:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Did what I can't believe. Your daughter doesn't have a phone.

01:50:31 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Why? Why is that something, leo? After all these years we've known each other. Why is that something that's hard?

01:50:36 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
for you to believe she knows what's gonna happen.

01:50:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, if she gives her daughter roughly. How old is your daughter?

01:50:43 - Amy Webb (Guest)
She's exactly 13 and a half and she must be an outcast.

01:50:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
She's never yeah.

01:50:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Actually sure little friend group at school on. None of them have phones.

01:50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So how do you know where she is at all times?

01:50:56 - Amy Webb (Guest)
We chipped her at birth. Oh, I'm just kidding, I wanted to. I got the guy she. She does have a watch, so she's got a smart watch and that helps. That's all you really need, yeah we're trying not to like, you know, hover, and she's just gotta have no.

01:51:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm sure you're a better parent than I was, but I honestly you know you always want to punish the kids by taking away their phone, but then I realized it's punishing me cuz I can't figure out where they are. I can't. They can't call me. If they're stuck, it's like they need and they can annoy you.

01:51:29 - Christina Warren (Guest)
And they can annoy you at that point, right like my mom would always be like go to your room. And I was like right, my room with my computer and my private phone line and my you know VCR and my DVD player and my CD system and my you know control center.

01:51:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you mean?

01:51:44 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Everything I was like, thank you. She sent me to Best Buy Cool.

01:51:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Thank you very much, yeah that's pretty cute, that's pretty funny.

01:51:48 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, we, we, we employ embarrassment. We just like if she does a thing where she rolls her eyes, then she's actually in the room behind me. She's probably like we, she has a chance to do the funniest thing in the world right now. So we ridicule her, and then we, we kind of laugh and then oh god, that's the worst, we just like annoy her to the point where she stops.

01:52:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah. She's at the age. Yeah, she's being annoying, are you? Yeah, are you gonna get our phone when she gets to high school?

01:52:17 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Um, you know we're holding off. Yeah, I mean at some point, yes, but look, she, she's a very, very smart kid. Yeah, but I'm sure she's 13. They don't have the emotional maturity to manage and I will tell you that she, she, you know, she will tell you like she knows exactly what she wants to do when she grows up. She goes to one of the best schools in the country. Half of that class wants to be a tiktok influencer.

01:52:43
Yeah she wants to be a lunar architect. Oh, all of her free time researching black holes and whatever else, and she doesn't know. She doesn't know how to do a tiktok dance. But you know, she also understands why this group of parents has taken this, this stance.

01:52:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, I have such mixed feelings because my son grew up watching YouTube. They didn't have tiktok when he was a kid cooking videos and now he's a chef. You know, he's a tiktok Instagram Chef is just on Gordon Ramsay's new show idiot sandwich. He he's doing a cookbook. So I'm glad he kind of I mean he actually got a skill that he could use.

01:53:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, but you're, you're in a different situation. You're a media person, you own a media company, so there's a. I think to me that's very different.

01:53:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like it's like a my you know Kid goes into their parents you know business in some way, kind of you know, as much as I didn't want or never encouraged that, it did kind of both my kids ended up doing basically Something along these lines.

01:53:42 - Amy Webb (Guest)
I think that's. I think that's different.

01:53:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You learn about it.

01:53:45 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
But I will tell you, yeah, I'll tell you about a kid who spent a lot of time watching tech TV and and look where he is.

01:53:52 - Christina Warren (Guest)
You got two kids. You got two kids who did that, and look where we are now three up me too.

01:53:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I blame you and Benito and John and the only person I had no influence on, his Amy web and look how smart and accomplished.

01:54:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
True.

01:54:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, actually that's one of the things that makes me proudest is that I made a whole nation of nerds, and and that's a it's a good thing.

01:54:19 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Let's a. I Leo could not do that.

01:54:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I probably couldn't. No, no, it's, that's a good point Our show today. I'll take a little break, our last break, and then I will I don't know find some more stories to talk about. This is so much fun, love talking it. I knew. Coming in, I said this is gonna be a good day. I got Amy Webb. I got to vendor Hardware. I got Christina Warren. You can't get better than that. Thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it. Great way to start 2024, our first show of the year. And I should mention our great sponsor, bitwarden.

01:54:52
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01:56:10
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01:57:15 - What's on TWiT (Announcement)
Oh, before we go on, I should you write thank you, but you know he's reminding me we should take a look at this nice movie Somebody made about what happened this week on Twitter the entire balance of this first podcast of 2024 Will be invested in the close and careful examination of the technical details Surrounding something that has never before been found in Apple's custom proprietary Silicon, previously on twit Security. Now the fact that its use is guarded by a secret hash reveals and proves that it was intended to be enabled and Present in the wild so there is a secret here which Apple holds presumably holds tightly To a functionality which nobody apparently uses except maliciously.

01:58:13
Yes, it is something that can only be characterized as a deliberately designed, implemented and protected backdoor. Windows weekly.

01:58:23 - What's on TWiT (Announcement)
Microsoft Formally revealed what we've always kind of known for a long known in that is, that it is Deprecating and getting rid of the Windows Mixed Reality platform you know it's interesting, apple making a device is going to cost 3,500 bucks, is it's all in?

01:58:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you think that well, microsoft's is giving up because Apple's getting in?

01:58:44 - What's on TWiT (Announcement)
No, I think they're giving up because meta, for whatever reason, has Decided that this is a big deal for them. A partner with Microsoft and the productivity stuff will.

01:58:53 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Zucks bit spent 10 billion. We don't want to spend 10 billion, so let's go use his 10.0 tech news weekly.

01:58:59 - What's on TWiT (Announcement)
What 23 and me is doing now after, according to Tech crunch, it's facing more than 30 lawsuits from victims of this data breach. It is saying that it is the fault of the folks whose data was stolen. It is because quote users negligently recycled and failed to update their passwords. Following these past security incidents, which are unrelated to 23 and me, here's the thing. I hate to say this, but there's a part of me that understands where the company is coming from the New York Times is suing Microsoft and open AI, saying you bad people you are.

01:59:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Your AI systems are widespread copying, copying our stories, and that's copyright infringement.

01:59:50 - What's on TWiT (Announcement)
My contention is that the machine has a right to learn. Sorry, guys, you're. You're involved in an information ecosystem that you, the New York Times, take advantage of every single day, where information once known is free to use twit, wishing you a happy new year.

02:00:05 - What's on TWiT (Announcement)
Wow, all the stories, but tell you I'm glad that that promo had Steve.

02:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gibson's show from this earlier this week, because I think this is a story that will not get much coverage but I think is actually pretty important. He's talking about For critical vulnerabilities Apple patched a couple of weeks ago, but he makes a very strong case that the fourth and final vulnerability, which was discovered by Kaspersky labs after a year of investigation, turns out To be essentially a backdoor on Apple's iPhone. It's been there for five years. It's been updated. It involved a 256 byte secret code, a table that must have been held by Apple and somehow Perhaps offered.

02:01:01
His conclusion and I can't I have to say if you listen to this show I think you'll have to agree is that, while there's no proof, it feels very much like Apple was in forced to put a backdoor in all iPhones for the last five years, most likely by the NSA or Some agency of the United States law enforcement, using a national security letter which prevented them from revealing that this had been done. I don't think they would have done it voluntarily, but I think they had no choice. It's a huge story I it's so technical. I doubt it will get much coverage in the mainstream media. Devendra, have you is this on your radar at all? I remember the exploits getting patched, but not that particular bit, but just a little bit.

02:01:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I just heard from that premise. I guess I'm gonna take a closer look here. Yeah, I think.

02:01:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
If you bundle that, though, with the Chrome story, mm-hmm, you know, I think the bigger maybe zoomed out headline is we, we've put a lot of our trust in the Privacy options from companies and then it turns out they don't exist, right right. So privacy, the incognito mode, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, right right. So privacy, the incognito mode, you know, was being tracked, and and trust is it? Kind of sucks because, on the one hand, like trust is all we have and it's easy to break, on the other hand, we don't have alternatives to any because there's so much consolidation.

02:02:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is it, mm-hmm, oh you know, is it credible that Apple would put a backdoor in Apple's hardware, a backdoor that would allow essentially everything on the device to be exfiltrated by?

02:02:41 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I mean, he has just there was. There was the story, too, about what is it the, the notifications basically being shared with the government to you? Yeah, and they said that they could not reveal that they couldn't reveal it to.

02:02:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ron Whiden asked him about it, and then he kind of by his very letter exposed it, so that relieved their obligation not to say anything.

02:03:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
What year was San Bernardino? Was that 2018?

02:03:04 - Christina Warren (Guest)
This, that was 2015 2016. Sorry, okay, so this exact story.

02:03:08 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yes, this came up because the FBI was trying to get the backer Correct and this exact conversation about the backdoor and Apple. My assumption is that story rose to the public consciousness. But how many times do you think they've been had to deal with law enforcement? Well, over this exact same issue?

02:03:25 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Oh yeah, over again and and they usually do and they usually deal with them, you know, regularly like I actually Went to app.

02:03:34
I covered that story extensively when it happened and I was talking to a lot of people both on the government side and on the security side for that and and Apple, you know, obviously was very adamant about not Breaking into the phone and doing anything with it.

02:03:47
But they had a briefing for some analysts and journalists After the conclusion of that case, which the conclusion was that the FBI found Another firm who was able to break into the phone and and so the trial didn't happen. And one of the things you know they were pointing out when they were kind of giving us kind of a security review and having us, you know, talk to some other experts, was how much they do work with law enforcement all the time, like they, and they're usually pretty compliant. But at least then you know the the public statement from Tim Cook and the you know very forward way that they, you know were fighting against that in in public was that they were not going to Put any sorts of backdoors on. It would be distressing, I think, to see if, after that instance, something was specifically put in, you know, at the government's. You know requests for behest, but I don't know how we prove that one way or another, you know yeah, I don't think we'll ever prove it.

02:04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Certainly Apple will never say anything. There is one other Important event besides the San Bernardino FBI investigation that also is in this time frame. You may remember that the NSA had a series, a bunch of tools that they used to crack computers that were stolen by Russian hackers and and then released and Basically by releasing them, making them useless Right and eventually it was determined this is the Wall Street Journal article from 2017 it was eventually determined that it was a contractor for the NSA who had taken these hacking tools home and was running Kaspersky's antivirus on his machine, and that at the time, we thought, oh, kaspersky, which is a Russian company, must have they were founded by a former KGB officer, but Lee or no GRU officer that must have a relationship with the Russian military and Handed it over. But I suspect this all ties back to this backdoor that Apple realized. No, I'm sorry that the NSA wanted revenge. They want, they wanted to investigate Kaspersky. They wanted to figure out how this stuff got out, so they wanted to get into the phones of Kaspersky's employees.

02:06:06
Apparently, this is this is my tying it back to the NSA because what Kaspersky found is that many of their employees phones had been hacked. Their iPhones have been hacked. They called it operation triangulation. It took them a year to figure it out. They presented, at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg a couple of weeks ago, the whole chain of attack which they believe started with Pegasus that's usually how you get into an iPhone and then three vulnerabilities later ended up X-Filter, you know, giving full access to the phone of these Kaspersky employees. I Don't know it was the NSA, but we do know that Pegasus says the ISO group says we only sell our tools to nations, we don't sell it to individual hacking groups. So, okay, if it was an S O Exploit was the first exploit in the chain. It must have been a nation state that did this. Maybe it was the Russians trying to break into Kaspersky. It seems much more credible that it was the NSA trying to figure out what Kaspersky knew, how they hacked their tools in 2017, wrote an NSL, a national security letter, to Apple saying we need a backdoor.

02:07:17
Now listen to the whole piece, because what Steve does say is it's a very well hidden Backdoor and it's very secure that the backdoor could only be used by somebody who had this 256 bit lookup table by I'm sorry, 256 by lookup table and that that must have been very tightly held inside of Apple, that nobody released it. But the question is why they put this backdoor in there and how did this 256 byte data go get out of Apple? And I think it's a complete while. We will never prove it. It's completely reasonable to think. The NSA said we need a backdoor. Apple said, well, we're gonna put it in there, but we're gonna secure it really heavily, and then we are gonna give you the key. But you know you better secure that very heavily.

02:08:10
Somebody had the key and, furthermore, when Apple did, when this came out from Kaspersky, apple immediately patched it, and they patched it by turning off the access. They replaced the lookup table with deny Said you can't look it up, and nothing broke. The iPhone continues to work absolutely as it used to. So this capability was built in has no useful functionality. Apple had a way of easily turning it off. They didn't for five years. I think it's hard to imagine that they weren't somehow either. There was somebody in a mole inside Apple. I don't think this is even possible. Put this in here without anybody seeing it. Maybe it was a mistake in the way ARM. Maybe they were using some mistake in ARM code. It seems to me that Occam's razor says the simplest solution is they were compelled to do this by a US government agency, which did it enforcing secrecy, and then, as soon as it came out from Kaspersky, apple patched it.

02:09:15 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Couldn't there be another explanation, also Occam's razor which would be that they had some sort of tool that they were using for some sort of backdoor or something for testing and analysis, and someone forgot that it was there and that it was something that is very specific for one specific thing, and they just didn't realize that code was there.

02:09:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's, steve's response to that, which is it's been there for five years. It's been updated on a regular basis, it's been fixed, it's been patched, there has been some maintenance done on it, so it's hard to say Apple didn't know it was there. Almost impossible to say Apple didn't know it was there. Plus, they were able to turn it off very quickly without any impact on the machine. Maybe it was a debugging tool. It was highly secured. It's a very interesting story and I guess the real point is exactly what the point you made, amy, which is we should not assume that these devices are private.

02:10:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Actually no, and I've my brain is swimming right now listening to all of this because it's a form of gain of function research. So in biology, the way that they, the way we used to get to new drugs, was to intentionally mutate viruses to make them really, really bad. And then the theory. This all predates computers. But the theory was, if you could figure out what direction, like what's the next bad thing, then we get ahead of it and we create some type of antiviral or some type of therapeutic or vaccine or whatever in advance to manage it. And many, many moons ago that's how we managed the flu and the flu vaccine. But what you got me thinking is I wonder if this was like gain of function research but for like phones and software. You know what I mean. And this is how things, this is how the bad things happen, because nobody thinks it'll get out, or they think it'll, they can keep it secret or whatever, and-.

02:11:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, certainly that's one of the things that governments always say is well, you can have a backdoor, we'll keep it private.

02:11:14 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah.

02:11:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think we also know that by now. No backdoor ever goes unopened, unlocked.

02:11:21 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, but I think the tech companies believe that we have short memories, and I think for the most part we do. But when you start like that's, I remember that whole thing with San Bernardino and law enforcement, sort of making a case, a big case for why the? Backdoors were necessary. Very public case. Yes, they couldn't have possibly just gone away. So maybe this is that, maybe there's a long or story here?

02:11:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, we were wondering. There was a lot of speculation that maybe they found somebody like was it Selbright that was able to read? The phone so they didn't need it after all.

02:11:58 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Well, they said as much, Because you have to get back down. Well, they said as much, they found it.

02:12:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it was in an Israeli company, I can't remember what Selbright was for was someone else, and they never revealed who it was, but everybody assumed it was Selbright.

02:12:11 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But they revealed they were able to get access. Otherwise, the thing that I guess and it's not that I have any doubt that if they, their fingers, if they were forced that they would comply with the law and whatnot. But if you're going to put in a backdoor at the insistence of the NSA and you've been so like vociferous, writing op-eds in the New York Times and speaking publicly on 60 minutes and making a very clear case that you are adamantly opposed to doing this, sending your own representatives to congressional hearings Again, these things always come out Like there's a certain amount of risk mitigation. That just doesn't make sense to be like you're so publicly against this.

02:12:58
And then eventually two months later.

02:13:00 - Amy Webb (Guest)
right, what's the? What do they gain? That's what I'm trying to think through. Well, I think the only thing.

02:13:05 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I mean something. The only thing I think they would gain would be, basically we won't let you operate otherwise. But again to your point.

02:13:10 - Amy Webb (Guest)
That's a good point, which is like we'll do they can't not let them operate otherwise.

02:13:13 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right, why not? Why not make that public? Then? If this was something that was happening, I mean, I feel like that would Well you couldn't if it was an NSL.

02:13:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the Patriot Act allows for these requests from law enforcement, from government agencies, through a FISA court that cannot be revealed by the the premises. Well, we don't want the subject of the investigation to know that we're investigating them. So this NSL says you may not disclose that we have asked for this information or that you have provided it. And so there is a mechanism under the Patriot Act for a FISA court to approve a request from a government agency.

02:13:46 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Got it, got it, got it, and that would be the justification for allowing it to be, by default, put on everybody's phone.

02:13:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I think Apple would do exactly what seems to have been done here, which is okay, but we're going to make this really secure. They. This is a well-designed backdoor, not the kind of thing you'd put in for debugging. This is something that's designed not to be discovered.

02:14:08 - Christina Warren (Guest)
But I guess my question would be like how? How would I mean? Cause you're right that they, they could use the Patriot Act to, you know, prevent them, to compel them to not make any sort of statements. But I'm still not sure how they could basically say you have to engineer this Like, and the NSA already had some sort of backdoor ready to go. That's one thing, but I don't know how they could reasonably say okay, your engineers have to come up with a solution right?

02:14:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that was Apple's defense, remember in the San Bernardino case and others is we'd have to invest resources. You're asking us to rewrite how we do stuff. I don't know. I mean that defense never got to court because the FBI dropped it.

02:14:46 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Right and I understand that. But I'm just saying but I don't think that argument goes away right, because even if you're compelled to do something, it might not, you might not have the engineering resources to do it right, like you might not be able to to do something, especially in the clever way that it's been done.

02:15:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, to some degree, apple would have to cooperate, right? What you're arguing is that Apple would have to say okay, all right, all right, we'll do it.

02:15:07 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Of course they would. I mean, I mean that that there's. There's no way, if what you're saying is what happened, that they did this without cooperating. And I guess my question is just it. The Occam's razor and me questions that just a little bit, just because all their public statements, which have massive implications on on, you know, their business here and in other countries and everything else and their reputation and everything else have been so against that and that that it, I don't know, like that. That just that's the thing to me.

02:15:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It certainly runs contrary to Apple's public position. But and I think it actually I don't think that Apple I'm not implying that Apple willingly went there. I'm really saying that Apple did not see a choice. It's just the same problem Apple faces in Russia. In fact, that's why they got out of Russia. It face. It probably faces in China too big a market to leave. It's facing in in India right now, where if you do business in a country, the laws of the country hold and you either leave the country or you comply, and I think, especially in this country, apple is probably gonna comply.

02:16:17
This is just from Steve's show notes, by the way. I'll show you this. This is the this, the super secret, by the way, amazing back reverse engineering on the part of Kaspersky. This is this 256 byte lookup table of random numbers that you would need to have this information in order to use this exploit. So this is another piece of the puzzle is if this, you know, apple put this in the iPhone. They put this mechanism in the iPhone. Why, but also how did it escape it's? I mean, you've got a great movie there, a great novel. How did this 256 byte information get out?

02:16:57 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
This may not. Yeah, it's a bit of a complicated premise, I guess, for a great movie. But man, I did talk to the documentary filmmaker, alex Gibney, who is out there like pumping out ton of movies every year, and he did this thing called Zero Days, about Stuxnet in 2016.

02:17:12
I had good interview with him there and he basically likened to you know these like the NSO stuff to like nuclear weapons. You know like there are conversations we need to be having about these exploits and this is this could be a big one If somebody keeps sticking.

02:17:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very interesting. Anyway, I want to point people to the Steve Gibson show. It was Security Now for this week, episode 9.55. His show notes are online at twittv slash sn955. If you want to read the write up or listen to the show, you know.

02:17:46
Listening to him, he made a very strong argument. I actually was the one who made him go to the NSA. That was my thinking. But his argument is this is an intentional backdoor. I'm the one who's saying not Steve, I'm the one who's saying well, it sounds like something that the NSA could do and perhaps would do. It's a really great novel or movie and if anybody wants to option it, you can contact Steve. All right, I think I wanted to. Oh, one more story. I always do these at the end of every show. If there is a story I like to talk about the pioneers, the computer pioneers who are no longer with us. On New Year's Day, swiss computer scientist, professor Niklaus Seviert died. He was the creator of Pascal. He was actually the creator of many languages, including Al Gaul, an operating system, really one of the most important people in the early days of computer software, and he certainly will be mourned. Niklaus Seviert passed at 89.

02:18:56 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Registered a great write-up of that. By the way, you just flashed that screen. I would encourage everybody to read that because I was not familiar with this guy but it is a very informative and really compelling write-up of his life and I was very much aware of him because of I used.

02:19:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pascal was one of the first programming language for the Mac, first high-level language for the Mac, and so I used it. And you may remember Philippe Kahn in Borland International which made a very fast Pascal compiler called TurboPastel. That was the beginning of their business.

02:19:26 - Christina Warren (Guest)
That just turned 40 a couple of weeks ago.

02:19:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, for some reason I think Virat also was involved with the mouse. He worked at Xerox Park for a while. I feel like Logitech was an outspring of his work also a Swiss company, but really an important person in computer science. Yeah, I agree with you. You should read the great piece in the register.

02:19:48 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Really well-written too, yeah, yeah.

02:19:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a great show. Thank you, guys. I really appreciate the help and the support and the brilliance of all three of you. I do want to mention that the kind of stories we do here on Twitter are unique. I mean, I don't think you're going to hear. I doubt maybe we'll hear it on Engadget, but I doubt. Well, there'll be a lot of coverage, for instance, about this backdoor.

02:20:16
But we really, I think, have some very smart people here. We bring in smart people and we really try to talk about technology in an informed, intelligent way. I think this is programming you need. We all need, going into 2024, especially with the advent of AI some really challenging thorny issues in technology. And that's what we do, without fear or favor. We don't have any vested interest in any technology company. We speak the truth as best we can see it and we need your help. To be perfectly frank, there's 11 ways you can help us. We actually have an article on the website on all the ways you can help us. I would suggest, if you work for a company that might want to advertise on Twitter that has a product that our audience would be interested in, that you email advertise at twittertv. That would be one way you can really help and actually we've gotten some very good connections through that. But I also invite you to join ClubTwit, if you're not already a member ClubTwit was.

02:21:13
We created this a couple of years ago because we saw the ad apocalypse coming and so many podcasts have disappeared. Even podcast networks have disappeared because advertising dollars are moving away from podcasting. Why? Because we can't spy on you like YouTube and Spotify and Google and Facebook can. Well, there's a way to make up that loss of revenue and that's the club. Seven dollars a month, that's all we ask. We give you benefits, I think Some really good benefits ad-free versions of all of our shows, special versions of our shows that are only done in the club, like iOS, today that's moved into the club.

02:21:52
Home theater geeks, hands on Mac, hands on Windows. It's quite a bit of original content. We're gonna do our book group in a couple of weeks. You also get access to the ClubTwit Discord, a wonderful community of like-minded nerds. We love talking tech at twittv slash club twit. If you're not yet a member, consider joining. The real reason to join, of course, is to keep us afloat and keep us going, because we really believe in what we're doing and we think it's very important. If you get value out of what we do, please join the club. Twittv. Slash club twit. All right, that's the begging bowl. I have to do that. I hate to do it, but unfortunately we have to do it.

02:22:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's a good for a man to earlier like listen. I produce content too, and it's like I tell people if you love something, pay for it like please Well it's unfortunate because in the early days of the internet everything was free and we forgot that it costs money.

02:22:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It ain't really free. It's either you're seeing ads or they're spying on you or something, and I like being an ad supported network. I think that's a great way to go, but advertisers really decided they wanted them more about their audience. I'm sure your engadget faces the same kind of pressures.

02:23:01 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
It's really it's engadget. It's also, you know, the film cast, my movie podcast as well. Like it took us a lot, Like we were around since 2008 and we didn't really we had a few ads, but it wasn't until we hit a Patreon where I think we got a lot of support. That's what it takes, doesn't it?

02:23:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you know what that's what podcasting about? It's about a community, and if you have a community and the community likes what you do, they should support it and then you can keep doing it. Film cast is a great example. You're up to 755 episodes.

02:23:29 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We're up there.

02:23:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've been going strong. Congratulations. We just did our 2023 top 10.

02:23:34 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
Yeah, thank you.

02:23:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice Devendra, Jeff Kanata, who I love. David Chen, if you're into film, you gotta be into the film. Guess what Take us out.

02:23:44 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
We really get you back on, Christina At some point.

02:23:47 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, I would love to be back on. That would be amazing. That's actually, I think, how we first met Devendra.

02:23:51 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
Yes, yeah, yeah, oh, you're kidding, not even through the things.

02:23:54 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Yeah, it was actually through the film cast, not even through, like my tech writing. Yeah, Devendra.

02:23:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it's great to have you on. Thank you, senior editor and gadget at Devendra. I'm sure there's some children who want you to read a story to them, so I appreciate your space.

02:24:06 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
I've been playing Zelda. I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom with my daughter, like that is our bedtime.

02:24:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, how old is she?

02:24:13 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
She's, very she's five now, so I understand that bad to do these things so early, but you know she she likes to read.

02:24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think it's like it's no different than reading her a story, right?

02:24:22 - Devindra Hardawar (Guest)
And we talk about it every day. And she talks about like, oh, I can't wait to see what happens when we go here, and I think that's that.

02:24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that's so cool yeah. That's just the modern Lord of the Rings. My mom read the Lord of the Rings yeah.

02:24:33
Yeah, that's really neat. It's amazing what a world we live in. Christina Warren, it's so great to have you again rocket takeover anytime you say the word. Thank you, senior developer advocate at GitHub where you do such a good job. Thank you so much. You'll find her on Mastodon as film underscore girl. She's at Mastodonsocial but you can follow her from our own Mastodon if you want to at that social. That's what I do. Thank you, christina. What's the hot sneaker of today? Anything.

02:25:03 - Christina Warren (Guest)
I haven't bought anything in a lot. Oh no, actually. No, that's not true. I recently got some custom converse and GitHub custom converse Nice that are really good, so it's really so they have the little kid kitty cat on it, or what's the deal they do? They do, they have the Octocat. Yeah, yeah, I just. I just got some of those. Those are really cool, nice. Those are my new issues.

02:25:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very cool. Some Octocat sneakers, yeah, and Amy Webb, the Greg LeMonde of Twitter, riding off into the sunset on her Zwift bike. Maybe it'd be better to go to future today, institutecom. But you, you know you should have a fan club. You should do. You have people you know on the side of the road cheering you on.

02:25:49 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh, you mean on the buy I was. I was going to say there is a club. They're not necessarily fans. I hear from people all the time Nice, that's great, yeah, no, look, if there's ever let me say this if there's ever a race in your town, whether it's a marathon or a cycling race, whatever it is, I know it's. It can be annoying cause streets are closed, but it's also an opportunity for a community to come together and, even if you don't know anything about cycling or whatever running or you know, step outside and cheer people on for a few minutes.

02:26:15
It'll make them feel good. It'll make you feel good? And you know, it's a nice thing we can do for each other in this age of AI.

02:26:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's such a good idea. Get outside, breathe some fresh air and cheer on your local cycling club yeah.

02:26:29 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Yeah, and even if there's no race, just like go outside. It's a good thing to do.

02:26:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Touch grass is a good philosophy. Yeah, touch grass every day and feel the sky every day. That's what Lisa says. Just have to feel the sun every day. Are those meta glasses that you're wearing, amy? I have to ask.

02:26:44 - Amy Webb (Guest)
No, I think these. No, I would not wear those. These are just regular old glasses my husband made me.

02:26:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, that was nice of him. I just got glasses that are made out of old vinyl records.

02:26:56 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Oh cool, Can you? See what they were.

02:26:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess it's the no. The ones I have have a Fleetwood Mac. I think they're called Fleetwoods, and then they also have a model called ACDCSE. It's a company's called. You should tell your husband about it. It's called Vinylize. I will absolutely. Vinylize and you can see the grooves. If you tilt your head just right, you can see the grooves on the frames. It's hysterical.

02:27:25 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Okay, this is terrible for you to tell me this, because now I'm going to head Vinylizecom.

02:27:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They have ACDC Miles Davis. I love this.

02:27:35 - Amy Webb (Guest)
Now let's go back to our we can end, we can full circle this Copyright. So is Miles Davis cool with you wearing glasses? I don't think you can play these back.

02:27:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's such a short groove and honestly I wonder, I don't know, Maybe they really I don't know, Are they really?

02:27:54 - Amy Webb (Guest)
ACDC records or.

02:27:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fleetwood.

02:27:56 - Christina Warren (Guest)
Mac records.

02:27:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
These are so cool, though, because you can see the grooves that the vinyl was made out of.

02:28:01 - Amy Webb (Guest)
They are cool.

02:28:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they're a little nerdy. They make me look like the guy from UP, but that's okay.

02:28:06 - Benito Gonzalez (Other)
I think those sections of audio would be short enough to fall under fair use anyway, right yeah.

02:28:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Just in a second, that's for sure. Thank you, amy Webb. Thank you to Vindra Harnawar. Thank you, christina Warren. So great to have you on. We'll have you on again soon. Thank you all for watching us.

02:28:25
We do Twitch Sundays two to five Pacific time, that's five to eight PM Eastern time, 2200 UTC. We do stream it live on YouTube, youtubecom slash Twitch. When the show begins, the feed will begin, but of course, if you're a club member, you keep it running the whole time. So join the club please. We'd love to have you. After the fact, you can get ad supported versions of our show at the website twittv. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to this week in tech. And, of course, best way to listen the way we encourage you to listen is with your favorite podcast player. We personally like podcast, but any of them will do. That way, you'll have it to listen whenever you feel like it, perhaps for your Monday morning commute. I'm Leo Laporte. We thank our producer and technical director and editor, benito Gonzalez, our studio manager, jammer B, our executive producer, lee Silaporte, and all of you for listening. Another Twit is in the can. Bye-bye, this is amazing.